Daniel Velazquez wasn’t sure what to do with himself after high school. The Bridgeport, Connecticut, native loved football and basketball, but a sports career wasn’t in the cards. He had heard about welding programs nearby and he liked to work with his hands, so he signed up for a nine-month certificate at the University of Bridgeport. Two weeks after graduation, the 19-year-old was hired full-time to build boating equipment at RowAmerica, an elite rowing accessory manufacturer.
Daniel Velazquez wasn’t sure what to do with himself after high school. The Bridgeport, Connecticut, native loved football and basketball, but a sports career wasn’t in the cards. He had heard about welding programs nearby and he liked to work with his hands, so he signed up for a nine-month certificate at the University of Bridgeport. Two weeks after graduation, the 19-year-old was hired full-time to build boating equipment at RowAmerica, an elite rowing accessory manufacturer.
“If you had told me a few months ago that I would be getting hired two weeks after finishing the program, I would never have believed you,” Velazquez says. He is the first of his peer group to complete his education and enter the workforce, and, at $25 an hour, the job is a welcome boost from his previous role making just above Connecticut’s $16.35 minimum wage at a local recycling plant.
And he loves the work because it requires focus: “Aluminum can be brittle. It’s easy to screw up what you’re doing and make it unusable, so you really have to be paying attention.”
Velazquez is one of 50 graduates in 2025 of Goodwin University’s welding program, which started in 2018 with just four students in East Hartford and expanded its program to the University of Bridgeport campus in 2023. The program helps businesses find welders, machinists, mechatronics technicians, engineering technicians and robotics technicians, among other workers. Even with the program’s rapid growth, it’s still not enough to meet the need for skilled-trades workers, says Clifford Thermer, dean of the School of Business, Management and Advanced Manufacturing at Goodwin.
“The jobs are there, but the people are not,” Thermer says.
In fact, Connecticut has 5,000 manufacturing jobs to fill, according to the state Department of Labor. Eighty percent of manufacturers said in a recent survey that finding skilled workers was challenging, with one-third saying the workforce issue is their main hindrance to expansion. Recently, Goodwin piloted a program to offer a welding certificate in Bridgeport free and waive the requirement that students have a high school diploma.
Bridgeport is Connecticut’s most populous city, one associated with a gritty industrial past. It was home to Remington, a firearms manufacturer, in the 19th century and divisions of General Electric and Westinghouse during the first half of the 20th century. Bryant Electric produced dozens of electrical components there, including the push-pull switch. Bridgeport Brass made lamps and clocks, and then shell casings during World War II. In all, the city manufactured nearly half a million Thompson submachine guns for the Allied war effort.
The deindustrialization of the 1970s and ’80s hit the city hard as large employers moved out of state or offshore, despite financial incentives from the state intended to bolster employment. Industrial properties, many doused with the toxic effluent of former tenants, sat vacant. Falling population numbers coincided with the crack epidemic to devastate entire neighborhoods; in its worst years, Bridgeport saw 50 or 60 murders annually. By 2000, the population had bottomed out. But at the same time, the city’s spaces began to pique the interest of technical and manufacturing companies.
Today, the city’s downtown is a medley of 1960s office blocks, art deco office buildings and Federal brick, giving way to low-slung industrial facades that line Housatonic Avenue along the Pequonnock River. Beyond the iron bridge carrying Metro-North commuters across the river, the concrete pilings supporting eight lanes of Interstate 95, the billowing white roof of the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater and the smokestack of a recently demolished coal plant, the dark waters of the Long Island Sound glitter. New apartments, covered in the green siding indicating construction in progress, rise on a freshly cleared parcel overlooking the water.
The average home price hovers around $355,000, according to Zillow, compared with $700,000 in the New York City metro area and $650,000 in nearby Stamford. One of Daniel Velazquez’s instructors, a chauffeur who switched to welding, says he was able to buy two homes with his upgraded income. Bridgeport has become an overflow market for New Yorkers in recent years, complete with a 1 hour, 40 minute Metro-North commute to Grand Central Terminal. Nearly two-thirds of homes sell above asking price, according to Connecticut Real Estate Brokerage.
The manufacturing sector is once again growing here, benefiting in part from the state’s efforts to bolster high-tech employment. With many former industrial sites torn down or repurposed, today’s businesses give an impression many don’t typically associate with manufacturing: They are smaller, cleaner, specialized and generally more expensive to operate.
“We are a low-volume, high-value manufacturer,” says Paul Lavoie, vice president of innovation and applied technology at the University of New Haven, who before that was the chief manufacturing officer for the state. “We have an expensive labor force but an incredibly talented labor force.”
Lavoie cites two recent arrivals to the state — a modular housing manufacturer and a robotics company — as examples. While each employ 70 to 100 people, those jobs would demand high skills and offer high salaries.
He calls this “the Connecticut model.”
When Jai Singh was looking for a place to move his company, in 2010, he chose Bridgeport.
“There was this empty space just lying there with a whole lot of electrical utility, lying idle,” says Singh, whose company, Nano Solutions, makes advanced ceramics for use in semiconductor manufacturing. “To build something like that [from the ground up] would require hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was just sitting here.”
A well-educated workforce and an enterprise zone that can cut company tax rates by 80 percent for five years sealed the deal. Most Nano Solutions employees come from nearby Connecticut State Community College Housatonic, which offers a manufacturing certificate; another staffer teaches there. A new graduate, hired at roughly $20 an hour and trained over months, can progress to earn in the high $30s, Singh says. Business has been so good, he says, he’s preparing to move to a larger building, three miles across town.
Bridgeport’s surrounding Fairfield County saw its manufacturing employment rise 6 percent between 2020 and 2023 while the number of manufacturing firms grew 12 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2023, 1,700 more people worked in manufacturing than four years earlier, with the average employee earning $110,000 per year.
New firms here have a technical bent, influenced by the state’s high-tech workforce and the heavy defense industry presence, but there’s plenty of activity in older trades, too. Cabinetmakers and ironworkers abound on the city’s west side. Yankee Metals, here for nearly two decades, operates a 15-employee shop making everything from decorative steel railings to stairs and platforms for Metro-North stations across Connecticut.
Started as Strocchia Iron Works in 1922 in Brooklyn, the facility moved to Bridgeport with a new name in 2007, driven out by Brooklyn’s skyrocketing property values. Leonard Strocchia, a co-owner and grandson of the founder, followed a supplier who had made the same move. The business moved into a building once occupied by P.T. Barnum, the showman who founded Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
“It’s right off I-95, it’s easy access to New York City, and you have industry here — you have machine shops, hardware stores, a lot of things at your fingertips,” Strocchia says.
The city’s spaces have attracted plenty of transplants from New York and from other parts of Connecticut. Fordham Marble, a high-end countertop manufacturer, moved its production facility from the Bronx to Bridgeport in 2018 when it needed more space, nearly doubling its facility to 27,000 square feet.
North Sails, a manufacturer and servicer of high-end sails, moved its manufacturing and sales hub from nearby Milford in 2021, joining a burgeoning mixed-use development on 52 acres overlooking Long Island Sound.
The site, once home to the Bridgeport Steel Works, has been rechristened Steelpointe Harbor by developer RCI Group, whose résumé includes high-end waterfront properties like Miami Beach Marina. Steelpointe Harbor is slated to have 1,500 new housing units and more than 2 million square feet of retail and commercial space. But the beating heart of the operation is the shipyard, where tradespeople clean, refinish and service yachts, catamarans, commercial fishing boats and more.
“This is the first deep harbor north of Manhattan,” says Robert Christoph Jr., president of RCI Group. “We knew because of its location, it would become a destination for larger yachts. The crew can take their time, relax, go to the city, see a concert.”
Indeed, concerts here are more frequent since the 2021 opening of the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, a 5,705-seat music venue. Its owners have floated plans for a second location while the Connecticut Sports Group is pushing for a soccer stadium in the city, although the state has been resistant to fund it.
Since Hornblower Marine, part of Hornblower Group maritime transport and maintenance company, opened in 2021, it has tripled in size, according to Tim O’Brien, the company’s senior vice president of ferries and transportation. The New York City ferry, which Hornblower operates with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, travels here for special maintenance or in-depth inspections.
O’Brien says he has leaned on Goodwin University to flag candidates for entry-level welding jobs or internships — and to upskill his existing workforce. Hornblower now has certified faculty in aluminum and steel welding on-site and is taking steps to have a certified welding inspector by the end of the year. The company has also funded six scholarships for the maritime program at Porter and Chester Institute, a trade school with a Bridgeport campus.
Increasing the local workforce “is one of our overarching goals,” O’Brien said. “You can’t get skills in operating companies without training in-house, and the people who know most about a location are the ones who’ve lived there their whole lives.”
Irina Ivanova is a New York-based writer who covers economics, work and consumer issues. She has previously reported for Fortune, CBS News, the HuffPost, Crain’s New York Business and other outlets.
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