Blue Hills, CT

Blue Hills is a Hartford-area community that crosses the city’s northwest side and the southeast corner of Bloomfield. The Bloomfield census-designated place counted 2,762 residents in 2020, while the broader Blue Hills area includes the Hartford section as well. Granby Street, Blue Hills Avenue, Bloomfield Avenue, Albany Avenue, and Plainfield Street do most of the day-to-day carrying, with CTtransit routes connecting the neighborhood to the surrounding area. It reads less like a separate suburb than a residential part of the Hartford-Bloomfield edge, where city streets, school campuses, and bus routes overlap. Schools are a big part of the local map: Annie Fisher, Mark Twain, Weaver High, Watkinson, and the University of Hartford all sit in or near the Blue Hills footprint.

ATTRJohn Phelan / CC BY 4.0

The First Cathedral is another familiar landmark, and the Hartford Circus Fire Memorial gives the Keney Park side of the neighborhood a place for remembrance. The mix is distinctly metropolitan without needing a downtown of its own—houses and apartment blocks, major north-south roads, students, buses, and the everyday traffic between Hartford and Bloomfield. Blue Hills is best understood as a lived-in neighborhood with a name that covers a boundary, not a tidy little town with one center.