New Haven Independent

Daisy Abreu, who will be acting director of the district while a search goes on to fill Healy’s impressive shoes, was among 50 downtown movers and shakers who gathered at the Blue Pearl on Court Street for Thursday night’s farewell.

The mood was irreverent, to say the least. Abreu praised Healy for, among other talents, his love of words and, in her editing of the district’sTea Leaves newsletter, “encouraging me to attempt alliteration at all available avenues.” (No mention was made of assonance.)

As designated hitters or speakers one after an another, such as Alderwoman and Town District Founder, Bitsie Clark roasted away, they spun a story of how Healy rose from a minor post to master the entire district operation. They spoke of how he transformed an organization whose original focus, ten years ago, was on the more limited goal of keeping downtown “safe and clean” to focus as well on business development and preservation .

Whine Dine Resign was a play on Wine, Dine, Design — one of Healy’s most recent successful programs promoting the city’s food and architecture talents.

Mary Lou Aleskie (right in photo), the executive director of the Arts and Ideas Festival, said no one could give a better tour of New Haven than Healy, of its history, architecture, its current talent, its potential.

Her table-mate at the Healy roast, Market New Haven’s Anne Worcester, said she was proud to write one of the two letters of recommendation to get Healy into the University of Chicago graduate school. She said she was more nervous about it than he was.

Healy, who’d returned to New Haven from Chicago at 4 a.m. Thursday after having secured an apartment, said he was going to be studying public policy and finance. He did not rule out a future return to New Haven, which he described as a place where an enormous number of people have a sense of mission not only to do well, but to do good, to add something that was not here before.

In what capacity might he return? Healy said he wasn’t sure, but he made this point: “Developers like Becker and Becker, in bringing together private resources and public resources, can often accomplish as much good for the public as someone who, say, serves in city government.”

His program in Chicago will last three years. It will teach him, fhe said, how to take a risky parcel of land and bring together the financing, the pensions, the elements to make a development work. He is keeping his house on Dwight Street; friends will help take care of his tenants in his absence.

Anstress Farwell, head of the Urban Design League, remembered vividly a young Healy who sat in front of a bulldozer in protest of the destruction of classic architect A.J. Davis’s Maple Cottage on Trumbull Street. “Amidst managing the Ambassadors,” she said, “and the schedules and the business side, Scott always kept his eye on the vision of what makes New Haven unique.”

Architect Robert Orr concurred. “Healy turned the Town Green into a visionary organization. “There are some forces in the city,” he said, sounding a cautionary note among the affectionate jokes, “who would like Town Green to return to the ‘clean and safe’-only mode.”

He said he hopes Healy’s successor will resist that.

In the meantime, Healy was turned on the rotisserie. One admire said Healy earned a reputation, from running late to so many meetings, for having his own time zone. Other items on Healy’s “I Really Dislike” List, were noted: strip malls, arrogant people, kids racing crazily on bicycles, and people who vilify buildings.

What precisely does it mean, someone asked, to vilify a building?

Other admirers of Healy included Barbara Lamb, Brian McGrath, Chip Croft, and Chrissy Bonanno, Rob Smuts, the two latter texting their admiration of Scott Healy on into the festive night.

Abreu said the formal posting of Scott’s job will appear shortly. She said the Town District’s board would like to have a successor in place at the latest by the beginning of 2009.