On an early Monday autumn morning, with leaves changing colors and dropping across the city of New Haven, I found myself driving through The Hill neighborhood in the Urban Resources Initiative (URI) delivery truck, the bed full of 300-pound trees ready to be planted by the Greenskills/EMERGE planting crew. I pulled over to the side […]
A mosaic path winds its way through the Bassett Street Park, past the bushes on the edges and the donated sculpture memorial in the lot’s center. The summer the path was made, every volunteer from the neighborhood designed a square. They used marbles, broken glass, and whatever other flashy baubles they could find. Over a […]
Jody K. is quick to say she’s not a leader. “I’m more of a really good follower,” she protests. But while Jody may not have captained the initial push to transform the vacant lot at 93 Shepard Street into a Greenspace, she has been the site’s most committed caretaker for over a decade. If Jody […]
It started because of a shared problem: the drug activity and prostitution in the abandoned double lot on Saltonstall and Lloyd. Adeli D. lived next door at the time, and remembers having to yell at the dealers who wandered through her driveway past her playing toddler to the empty house beside hers. Eventually, the young […]
Have you ever judged a neighborhood by its trees? I have. Without even realizing it, I’ve felt happy walking down an alley of green trees in the summer, in the filtered light of their giant canopies. I’ve also felt that a block is gloomy or deserted before noticing what makes it that way: the dead, […]