The fact that they still bothered to convert the thin strip of land between the highway and the river into decent parks feels pretty indicative of what people actually want for the area. It really sucks because you can see the underlying urban fabric that would allow Hartford to really flourish as a city, it's just buried by the highways. There are other parts of the US, especially in the south and the west, where the sprawl is so bad that you can't even see how they can begin to dig themselves out of the problem, but places like Hartford genuinely feel like they're only a few very big but achievable steps away from being much much better.