New Haven Independent

There were bounteous gift bags for the kids, a pretty genuine-looking Mr. Claus, aka Robert Erff (see red-suited and bearded guy in photo below), palate-pleasing food, and music. There were seasonally appropriate activities, as well, such as kids flinging cup-fulls of biodegradable snow upon the heads of Santa, the mayor, lead organizer Kris Sainsbury, and lead benefactor David McCoart, owner of Sage. Together, after a dramatic countdown, they lit the nine trees on Sage’s porch overlooking the harbor.

The point of all this, the true spirit of the event, according to Sainsbury, who is a founder of the Hill/City Point Neighborhood Action Group: community-building.

“We began in 2001,” she said, “in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center,. about two dozen of us here asked what we could do bring ourselves together a bit. We felt really fractured. I went to Dave McCoart and asked him if he might help us set up a tree and an event, and he said, ‘Why don’t we do it in the restaurant?’ And it was wonderful. If we had done it outside, many couldn’t come, old people wouldn’t tolerate the cold, and here, it’s so festive and so elegant. So we had about two dozen people then, and lots of kids and we sang then as we’ll do later here, and the kids voices especially just lifted us up.”

“I’m a profound believer,” she said, “that good things will always emerge out of horrible things.”

Sainsbury was at pains to say that the lighting of City Point’s tree in no way is meant to claim firsties and upstage the lighting of the official city tree on the Green later this week. She said that McCoart and Sage always light theirs the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and so the event follows that schedule. Nevertheless, she added, City Point is nevertheless very much its own enclave within the larger city, and the kids who live there and the families in the south Hill in general probably won’t go to the Green, so “we have our own wonderful event here.”

McCoart was overheard being told by a parent she was distressed her son would not wear a “Santa’s My Home Boy” T-shirt to the SAGE. He said he owns two houses in City Point, and had worked many years at the Chart House, the restaurant that preceded Sage on the site, before he bought it in 2000.

He expressed a love for the neighborhood that was shared by many people in the room, such as the Romero family, who moved to City Point from Rhode Island in 1995. “It’s like a real extended family down here,” said Carmen Romero (on the far right in the photo). She, her husband Jose, and their boys third-grader Anthony and eighth-grader Luis (their oldest is off at college) wave to people they know every morning on the way to school.

The boys attend school in Cheshire and Milford respectively through Project Choice. “It’s just fantastic this neighborhood and Project Choice. Anthony’s learning about bar mitzvahs this week and kids in his school in Chester are learning about Latino culture. I can’t say enough about the program or this part of the city, where the same kind of thing goes on in the neighborhood.”

What did Anthony think of the night’s event? “Well, Santa asked me why I wasn’t smiling, and so I smiled, and then he gave me a bag full of nice stuff.” With Anthony’s permission, a reporter did a quick inventory and found a Slinky, pencils and crayons, snow-making paraphernalia, white gloves, a doll, a book, and much else. All of the gift bags, for the several dozens kids who lined up, were provided by a grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

Sainsbury describes her group as a local advocacy organization. Among the issues they have taken up in recent years: making sure city bus service reaches City Point, boosting City Point as an historic district, and, most recently, lobbying for sound barriers around nearby Bayview Park to buffer the vehicular racket from I-95.

Sainsbury said the lights and gifts and even the stockings with raffle tickets in them handed out to all comers — except the mayor, who gracefully declined his raffle ticket, suggesting that someone else can have a double chance — were all aspects of building a “strong matrix” here.

She and her group are also helping to build another ‘matrix” in Kimberly Square, in the re-facaded business triangle just off Howard, where, on Thursday,there will be the third annual lighting of the Kimberly Square Christmas tree. “We hope to have Santa arrive in a fire engine for that one. And then, over time,” she said, “you have these matrixes, these different anchors and they begin to spread out and join each other.”

Thursday’s event takes places at 5:30. For further information on it and Hill/City Point Neighborhood Action Group activities. For information email here.