When Joseph Ambruso and his family moved to Colonial Street in the early 1920s, the little block was part of a Hartford neighborhood of crowded apartment buildings and multifamily houses.

"It used to be a beautiful street," Ambruso said one recent day, as he scattered salt and sand outside the two-family brick house that his parents bought more than 75 years ago.

There was no place to park a car. But back then, nobody had a car. People used trolleys and buses to get around the city.

After his wife died, Ambruso moved back to his parents' house, where he lives with his 87-year-old brother. Even in 1990, Colonial Street, which runs a single block between Washington and Broad streets near Trinity College, was lined cheek by jowl with brick and wood-frame apartments full of people.

But in the early 1990s, Ambruso watched the apartments begin to empty out. By mid-decade, many buildings stood derelict. A few years later, wrecking crews began knocking them down.

"The change now, those people must be rolling over in their grave," said Ambruso, 81, remembering the neighborhood of his youth.

Of the 53 addresses listed for Colonial Street on the 1990 Hartford street directory, the wrecking ball or blight has expunged 21.

Colonial Street is far from an anomaly. Private apartment buildings have been falling fast across Hartford in recent years. Since Hartford began an aggressive demolition campaign in 1995, the city has demolished more than 250 vacant buildings, many of them large apartment blocks, city officials say.

Meanwhile, the Hartford Housing Authority has erased the city's largest public housing projects, tearing down about 2,000 apartments since 1990. Once-crowded complexes such as Charter Oak Terrace, Stowe Village and Rice Heights no longer exist.

City officials say their deconstruction projects did not cause the 13 percent population drop Hartford suffered during the last decade, as measured by Census 2000 numbers released Monday.

They say that, in an effort to remake a poor city for a more hopeful future, they were merely seizing on overarching demographic trends that had already emptied Hartford's public housing and large apartment blocks.

"The whole purpose behind that, of course, had to do with the elimination of the concentration of poor people that was impacting on the social ills of the whole city," said John Wardlaw, executive director of the authority.

The changes are embraced by some residents.

The way Luis Rodriguez views it, Colonial Street is quieter and feels a little safer since it emptied out. It's peaceful as he works on the engine of his truck outside one of the surviving buildings, which is owned by his family.

"As you can see," Rodriguez said, looking out toward the vacant lot that now runs more than half the length of the northern side of the street, "they've torn all the buildings down."

In making such changes, city officials have started to transform the look of Hartford, closer to a more suburban -- if still gritty -- character, where more and more homes have driveways and lawns instead of lobbies and elevators.

On the city's southwest flank, a wide swath of land that used to be Charter Oak Terrace and Rice Heights has been scraped bare of buildings. Tidy suburban-style houses, some with gas barbecue grills in their yards and garages, have sprouted on what was once Charter Oak Terrace.

In 1950, Hartford was the most densely populated place in Connecticut, the state's only city with more than 10,000 people per square mile. The 2000 Census recorded about 7,000 people per square mile.

All of Connecticut's large cities -- with the notable exception of Stamford -- suffered significant population losses during the 1990s, though none as large as Hartford. Even the state's more densely populated suburbs and small cities -- places such as Meriden, Bristol, Enfield, East Hartford and West Haven -- experienced population declines.

The state's three largest cities -- Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven, respectively -- suffered a collective population drop of more than 27,000 people between 1990 and 2000.

Stamford, which soared past Waterbury as the state's fourth-largest city with an 8 percent population jump, may soon challenge New Haven and Hartford as the state's second largest city after Bridgeport.

Stamford is one of the very few places in Connecticut where population growth in the '90s was urban, not suburban. Stamford's downtown housing boom in the 1990s shows no sign of slowing. About 1,200 units were built in the 1990s, and the city has about 2,500 more either under construction or on the drawing board.

"It's partly because our downtown has become an attractive place not only to work, but to live in," said Robin Stein, Stamford's planning director. "We've gotten the population that we've been trying to get for the last 25 years actually."

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said Stamford has benefited from the large amount of land it has, and its proximity to New York City, which hit a record population of 8 million people on the 2000 Census.

"Stamford is 40 square miles; it's twice the size of the other cities in Connecticut," DeStefano said. "It's functionally the sixth borough of New York."

Hartford officials say a less dense city will ultimately produce a better quality of life, allowing an increase of the city's rate of homeownership. But there is an ominous short-term problem to losing people -- federal grants are based partly on population.

City hall gets about $8 million a year in federal aid, and officials are concerned about the population drop's effect on programs such as Community Development Block Grants and housing for people with AIDS.

In other words, though thinning out buildings is intended to help a city such as Hartford reduce its social ills, the population drop could result in less federal money for programs addressing those ills.

That possibility worries Thomas Phillips, Hartford's director of development, policy and program administration.

"It's significant dollars because that money goes out to the community almost exclusively," Phillips said. "You could see how this whole thing could snowball, for a lot of different reasons."

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