New Haven Independent

About eight months ago, Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) evacuated and relocated nearly 300 public-housing apartments on Brookside Avenue. Brookside is tucked away from the rest of the city, located on the outskirts of West Rock Ridge Park, near Common Ground Charter High School and Southern Connecticut State University; but it also is a stone’s throw from Job Corps, the National Guard, and the Hamden dump.

Friday night, Bess Jenkins Community Center was temporarily brought back to life at the West Rock Concerned Citizens fund-raiser for the second annual Community Pride march planned for this summer. Last summer’s march started with 25 people at Blake Street, Smith-Saunders said, and ended up with 250 by the time they were coming up Valley Street. Unlike political marches for or against issues, the Community Pride march is simply for the community, said Honda Smith-Saunders, a Democratic Party co-chair for Ward 30.

“I had an eye opening today,” said Lossie Gorham (pictured), of Newhallville. “There is not a home around here. And I remember this used to be a wonderful area.”
Gorham used to work at Katherine Brennan School. She attended baseball and softball little leagues on Brookside Avenue in the 1980s. She said the neighborhood was characterized by hardworking people with lawns they took pride in. In the 1990s, however, the neighborhood took a nosedive.

“You couldn’t get me to go down Brookside Ave — not on your life,” she said. “You can’t just put people out here because you want to get them out of certain other neighborhoods. They need jobs. This would be a wonderful place to live if it was working people again, who just appreciated the low rent.”

Fear of the tenants, what she described as rampant and open criminal activity, and horror stories about gun violence, kept her and the little leagues away from that community for ten years. To read Housing Authority director Jimmy Miller’s thoughts on these issues, click here.

“All I can say is when they do this redevelopment, to bring businesses out here,” Gorham said.

The evacuation of the Brookside Projects is the most recent step in the housing authority’s “West Rock Master Plan” details of which are still unclear. Click here to read about the most recent development in the Brookside revitalization.

Smith-Saunders (pictured) said she also has high hopes for what she described as the “forgotten neighborhood.” Last year, Concerned Citizens of West Rock, an organization she founded to bring back a sense of community to the disparate West Rock neighborhoods, raised enough money to rent a bus for a Community Pride March that united her entire ward, she said.

That was when there was a community on Brookside Avenue to mobilize. This year, there are no teenagers. The seniors who live at the end of the dead end street in Abraham Ribicoff Cottages are either too afraid, or too frail to walk down the long stretch of abandoned housing on their own in the day time, let alone at night.

Some of the Ribicoff residents who have cars drove down the street to the party. Mabel and Carrie, two residents who declined to give their last names, said they don’t miss their old neighbors, but that young people did serve a practical purpose, like shoveling the driveways when housing authority wouldn’t.

“I can barely walk,” Mabel said. “Hell no, I ain’t shoveling no damn driveway.”

Ribicoff is a 120-unit complex for the elderly and persons with disabilities (including addiction) that sits at the end of the abandoned Brookside projects. It is still occupied.

Smith-Saunders listened to the residents at Ribicoff express their opinions, and asked them about how to organize events so that the other people they live with will feel safe to come.

“I don’t think it’s right to have all these people that need a support system so far out here,” Smith-Saunders said Saturday, while giving a tour of the neighborhood.

At nearby Westville Manor, where some of the former Brookside residents have been relocated, there is Solar Youth, an after-school program. Funding is limited; the offices were not open on Saturday. Kids stood around in the sun; some teenagers cleaned their cars.

On the other side of West Rock, McConaughy Terrace is across the street from the West Rock Community Center, another fully functional recreation room, which according to Smith-Saunders, has been out of commission because it could not get funding to keep the lights on regularly. Unlike Bess Jenkins Community Center, however, the West Rock Community Center is in the center of a dense residential area with limited options for recreation and evening entertainment.

Ward 30 is a diverse mix of owner occupied, rental, and publicly assisted housing that surrounds West Rock Park. Even after the demolition or abandonment of nearly 500 units over the past four years, it still has the highest concentration of public housing in the whole city, according to Smith-Saunders. She also said the district has one of the lowest crime rates, which she credits to her group’s community organizing and the prevalence of parks, schools, and athletic fields in West Rock.