It’s “sad” to Jonathan Scott, chairman of the New Britain Industrial Museum. It’s a “gut punch” for former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart. For retired Stanley worker Steve Cambria, it’s “yet another tumbleweed blowing across the dust bowl that used to be New Britain manufacturing.”
They’re talking about the impending closure of the Stanley Black & Decker tape measure manufacturing plant on Myrtle Street in New Britain, Connecticut. Stanley says they make nearly 30 million tape measures a year; come May, none of those will come from New Britain. About 300 employees are expected to lose their jobs.
The facility is Stanley’s last remaining manufacturing plant in New Britain, a city where thousands of Stanley employees once churned out tools and hardware. The black and yellow labels were – and are – a familiar sight around the city, the state, the United States and the world. The factory’s shuttering will mark the first time in New Britain’s 155-year history as a city that Stanley won’t be manufacturing anything there.
Cambria, who spent nearly three decades with the company, said he and his fellow Stanley alumni “are walking around in a fugue state” after the news of the plant closure.
“We bleed black and yellow,” Cambria said.
“I relate very well to that,” said Scott, the museum chairman, who worked at Stanley in the 1990s as an archivist and consultant.
“Stanley was a very special place,” Scott said.
Stanley shapes a city
“The Stanley name is really ingrained in New Britain’s history,” said Dr. Leah Glaser, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, a campus located, fittingly, on Stanley Street.
Frederick Trent Stanley opened Stanley’s Bolt Manufactory, later to become the Stanley Works, in 1843.
“By 1850, New Britain has about 3,000 people, and Stanley is among the community leaders who are not only the economic leaders, but very much the political leaders,” Glaser said. “They really want New Britain to be kind of put on the map. So they really lobby, not just for the railroad… but for cultural prominence.”
Glaser said Stanley helped plant the seeds for the New Britain Institute, the New Britain Normal School (which would become CCSU), the public library and the city’s art museum.
Stanley was also behind several parks, including Walnut Hill Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect behind Manhattan’s Central Park. Glaser called that a “really big coup.”
“Even Hartford didn’t get Olmsted to design their park, and he was born in Hartford,” she said.
In addition to Stanley’s cultural contributions to New Britain, of course, was its status as the city’s preeminent employer. The output of the employees of Stanley and other companies made New Britain “the hardware capital of the world,” Glaser said, leading to its “Hardware City” nickname.
But the availability and attractiveness of jobs, too, played a role in the creation of a local culture.
“Manufacturing companies in the industrial era completely depended on immigrant labor,” Glaser said. “Because of those labor needs, New Britain became this place that immigrant communities could build and thrive.”
“We have the whole Polish section of New Britain that remains one of the strongest Polish areas, probably, in the United States,” she said. “The immigrants came because of the work, and the immigrants were able to thrive in New Britain for years.”
Later, the city would attract residents from Latin America and Puerto Rico who remain in New Britain today.
“I think that’s really something that New Britain can be proud of,” Glaser said.
Still, Glaser said, the closure of the last Stanley manufacturing facility is a big symbolic loss.
“It’s pretty profound, this closure, what this means… as New Britain tries to reassess its identity,” she said.
Stanley Black & Decker did not respond to a request for an interview for this story. In a statement, union leadership from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents the closing plant’s employees, said they were “deeply disappointed” in “a move that will devastate hundreds of hardworking [union] members and the broader community that has supported this company for generations.”
Stanley pride
Scott, the Industrial Museum chairman, was born and raised in New Britain.
“I remember the Stanley whistle blowing every day at noon,” Scott said. “You’d see the Stanley trucks driving around. You knew where the factory was.”
“They had the Industrial League – we had sports teams,” Scott said. “All the companies had sports teams that competed. There was Stanley Hardware, Stanley Tools, Stanley Steel.”
“You’d go in the store and see the stuff that was the yellow ‘Stanley,’ and you’re always kind of proud of that,” Scott said. “People take pride in that. You travel around the world and you see ‘Stanley, New Britain, Connecticut.’”
Scott remembers a television ad campaign for Stanley from the 1990s that highlighted New Britain. He pulled out his phone and played one of the ads on Youtube.
“New Britain, Connecticut, is 119 miles from New York City,” a narrator says, as bucolic scenes flash across the screen. “It only seems farther than that.”
“People here live in the same houses their parents lived in, worship in churches where their grandparents worshipped, and work for the company their great-grandparents built: the Stanley Works,” the voiceover continues. “So it’s not surprising Stanley tools are built to last. It would only be surprising if they weren’t.”
Scott said that intergenerational aspect of Stanley history is still felt in New Britain. In one of the city’s since-razed Stanley plants, he said, he came upon a wooden beam with someone’s name carved into it. Below was another carved name dated 40 years later with the note, “HIS SON.”
Scott said he’s among the many New Britainites with Stanley memorabilia in his home.
“I’ve got probably half a garage of stuff,” he said. “When I was 12, my grandfather bought me a Stanley tool set, I think at Kolodney’s Hardware downtown. I still have that. When I was a kid, I was always building stuff. My father bought me my first Stanley hammer. So I just collected a lot, so much stuff throughout the years.”
Scott said the Industrial Museum is temporarily closed as it moves into the former New Britain Youth Museum site, next to the public library on High Street. He’s looking forward to reopening to the public to once again tell New Britain’s “great story.”
“There’s really no good reason for New Britain to be the hardware city of the world,” Scott said. “Think how important it was 150 years ago to be near a river for power, or to be near iron ore, and we didn’t have any of that. What is inspiring is through technology and just innovation and creativity, they worked around all of those things they didn’t have. They were able to become the hardware city of the world in what essentially was a swamp.”
City and company ‘synonymous’
“It sucks” to see the Myrtle Street factory close, said Stewart, who was born and raised in New Britain and served as mayor from 2013 to 2025. “Is there any other way to say it than that? It sucks. You’re watching history disappear.”
Growing up in the city, Stewart said, meant Stanley was a part of life.
“You’re born into it,” Stewart said. “It was part of your history lessons growing up and going to public school here.”
“We are the ‘Hardware City’ because of Stanley Works,” she said. “New Britain and Stanley Works are just synonymous.”
Stewart’s forebears did not work for Stanley – her grandparents worked for Fafnir Bearing, another major player in the city’s industrial scene – but she shares something in common with Frederick T. Stanley.
“He was the first mayor of New Britain,” she said, when the city was incorporated in 1871.Stewart said she was glad Stanley Black & Decker has kept its corporate headquarters in the town, where they employ around 400 people, but the loss of its last manufacturing facility hits hard.
“Now we’ve got a bunch of corporate jobs that are here instead of the people that are getting their hands dirty and covered in grease,” Stewart said. “When you think about New Britain, you think blue collar, you think working class. You’re not thinking about Fortune 500 people in their office. That’s just not our identity as a community, and I don’t think it ever will be.”
The future
Glaser said New Britain’s identity in 2026 is in flux, but its industrial past can be leveraged for a successful future.
“I think it’s a city that’s continuing to be in transition,” she said. “I think more than other communities, it has done a decent job of really celebrating and embracing that industrial identity, but also using that to build on, to build upon the cultural identity that companies like Stanley gave it and the civic identity that those companies gave it and invest in what’s left.”
“This idea of embracing that identity to create a destination for people, whether it’s restaurants, whether it’s cultural attractions, festivals – the Polish American Festival is a big attraction for New Britain,” Glaser said. “Because of things like Stanley, New Britain’s got one of the largest Polish communities in the country. There’s a lot of rich, rich culture that, again, is still a vestige of that industrial era. Just because the companies are gone doesn’t mean that all of that identity needs to be.”
Stewart, the former mayor, said the future can be bright.
“It is never going to be what it once was,” Stewart said, “because our economy and the world that we live in is never going to be the same as what it once was.”
“How do we create a new New Britain?” Stewart said. “Look at the new ‘Hardware City’ – what does that hardware look like? No, it’s not the nuts and bolts. It’s not the screwdrivers and the wrenches and the hammers that once was, but, for me, it’s taking that turn with aerospace. It’s making parts for Sikorsky, for Pratt [& Whitney], for all these Department of Defense contracts.”
“They are not massive conglomerates like Stanley Works, but they do make up a lot of skilled labor in town, and they’re growing, and they’re hiring, and they’re looking for that workforce,” Stewart said.
Part of the New Britain Industrial Museum’s mission, according to Scott, the chairman, is to “inspire future industrial accomplishment.”
“The next generation of entrepreneurs,” Scott said. “We still have manufacturing here. Not to the scale, obviously, that we once did, but we do have manufacturing in New Britain.”
Scott is hopeful New Britain remains the “Hardware City” for generations to come.
“I think we’ll hold onto that moniker for a while,” he said.
