New Haven Independent

This week two blocks greened up, one on Chatham Street, the other on Blatchley.

This week the Chatham Square Community Greenspace Project planted what hard core gardeners estimated to be its nearly 100th tree. The white oak, supplied by Urban Resources Initiative, was dropped into a hole on the western lawn of the eponymous park by a half-dozen longtime volunteers. They stake a claim to being the city’s oldest continually functioning Greenspace project.

“Every street within two or three blocks of the park,” said one of the founders, David Zakur, “from Lombard to Grand, from Atwater to Front, has had some trees, plantings, mulchings, or improvement over the 15 years we’ve been functioning.”

Zakur (pictured with Barbara Melloto) expressed some disappointment that their ranks have thinned since the mid-1990s, when they rescued the park from dereliction and drug addicts. Still, he said, “what we do is a kind of grassroots philanthropy. You want to make a difference, but we do it because we love getting our hands dirty. We can’t force people to join us.”

The Municipal Landscapers

Meanwhile, over on Blatchley Avenue, the block between Chapel and River got neater and greener thanks to the ongoing implementation of the city’s River Street Municipal Development Plan.

Recent street improvements on Blatchley, in front of Fair Haven Furniture, show a nifty new bump-out, freshly minted sidewalks, and a green lawn rapidly thickening into its own.

Flowering pear trees planted by Fair Haven Furniture owner Kerry Triffin 20 years ago had to be taken down for the new sidewalk and lawns. “They’re going to replace the pears, which they told me were just giant weeds, with a good biological mix of shade trees and a good canopy,” Triffin said. “It’ll be just fine.”

Triffin said the bumpout had originally decreased the number of parking spots, which he needed for customers, but he was pleased with the way the city restored them on consultation with him. “I think the city likes to point to us and say, ‘Here is a successful business in Fair Haven.’ So we collaborate very well.”

He added that as a businessman he can understand why the city couldn’t wait to find another buyer for the riverine lot where Blatchley meets the sea. Colony Hardware is coming there soon. “Still Blatchley is so grand, it would have been better if the avenue itself ran down to the water and became a destination.”

Another happy customer just down the block and with its own new green lawn and fresh sidewalks is New Haven Awning. The company is relocating from its rented quarters on James and Chapel into the hangar-like Chapel and Blatchley Street building within months.

“Eighteen months ago I honestly thought we would have to leave New Haven,” said Dan Barnick, one of the principals of the 70-year-old family business. They needed a building with high ceilings and specially vaulting spaces to construct and sew their awning products. New Haven had few such spaces.

Then the Chapel Street building became available from its California owner, and the city also sold Barnick the adjacent lot it owned running from Fair Haven Furniture to the corner. That enabled New Haven Awning to make the move, which it hopes to complete in the next month or two.

Barnick said he’s excited not just about the building and its barrel ceilings, but also the newly growing grass.

Barnick said his firm is going to landscape the lot and light it and, good neighbor that he is, allow parishioners from nearby St. Rose of Lima to park for free in the lot for Sunday mass. That should relieve the Sunday morning double parking that has irked neighbors.

Greenspace Emeritus?

Over at Chatham Square Park, in the meantime, John Haire had to lug five-gallon cans of water from Barbara Melloto’s house kitty korner from the park in order to water the newly planted white oak. Why? Because in the wisdom of the park’s re-designer in the 1990s, there is no spigot for water.

So lo for these last 15 years, when water was needed, people shlepped to Mellotto’s home. As a handful of young men on the nearby central concrete slab of the park set off firecrackers, Melloto, Haire, and Zucker bemoaned that people didn’t join their gardening work in the numbers they hoped.

Melloto said that in weeding and planting the park and the neighborhood she’d ignored her own lawn. Zackur suggested that after this year, the longest running Greenspace program was seriously considering becoming a Greenspace Emeritus.

“We’re going to meet on Wednesdays probably and exchange plants and tips,” he said, “and tend to our own yards. We’ll also help other groups.” The group would be more centered on the diehard gardeners and less on continuing to beautify the neighborhood.

“Still,” Melloto and the others suggested this emeritus business might be premature or just an expression of temporary dissatisfaction with the firecrackers going off nearby and the fact that the white oak didn’t look too happy. “It’s not the first time, we’ve quit,” she said.