State Street Median Becomes ​“Innovation Park”

The next time you’re driving to Union Station, a spray of knock out roses and catmint in the median might get you to slow down — and that’s by design.

It’s the idea behind ​“Innovation Park,” a public garden and greenspace slowly taking shape in the State Street median between Chapel and Crown Streets. With bright flowers and a shade garden at its center, the park is intended to get drivers on State Street to slow down a little as they pass — and bring community members together.

Supported by the Urban Resources Initiative​‘s (URI) Greenspace program, the project is now technically in its fourth summer. But it has taken that long for it to fully catch on, said Christina Kane, who originally proposed the park in 2014. Now, she holds regular work hours each Friday from 4 to 6 p.m., stretching from early June to late July.

How the garden started is ​“really a story of neighbors,” Kane said last Friday, surrounded by shovels and soil-ready plants as she spoke. The Director of Culture at The Grove on Chapel Street, Kane moved to New Haven 15 years ago after teaching sex education in Estcourt, South Africa. She worked odd jobs — bank teller, corporate vender, wedding coordinator — until 2014, when she started working for Grove designer Slate Ballard, whose wedding she had helped plan a few years before.

On her first day working for Ballard, SeeClickFix founder Ben Berkowitz (a Chapel Street neighbor to The Grove) offered to take her on a tour of the neighborhood. When the two hit State Street, Kane noticed several empty tree wells and a leafy, fat median in need of a little sprucing up.

Kane headed back to her home in Fair Haven Heights still thinking about what she could do about the median and those empty tree wells. When she mentioned it to her next-door neighbor — who happens to be URI Associate Director Chris Ozyck — he asked if she knew about URI’s Greenspace program. She didn’t, she said. If she could get three or more participants to commit to an urban gardening project, Ozyck told her, URI would cover the costs of plants, supplies, and know-how. It also would provide an intern from the Yale School of Forestry each year.

Kane signed The Grove up immediately, proposing weekly workdays for a phase one that included a shade garden close to the intersection of State and Crown Streets, where there is an existing grove of trees. But she found that ​“entrepreneurs are busy people.” The park garnered huge enthusiasm among her colleagues, but they didn’t always show up. In the second year, Kane brought on a group of kids from the High School in the Community, working with Grove-based The Future Project mentor Christian Shaboo to facilitate that neighborly collaboration. More plants went into the ground.

Operating only in the summertime, Innovation Park was still a little slow going. In year three, she found a group of unlikely collaborators: eight kids from Killingworth who had taken the bus into the city and were smoking marijuana on The Grove’s roof.

“They weren’t angry; they were just bored,” Kane recalled. So she cut a deal with them. She would give them ping-pong privileges in exchange for a few hours of shoveling, raking, and planting every week. They became the extra hands she needed. 

That’s largely how the park’s steady progress evolved, Kane said last Friday, surrounded by shovels and bags of fertilizer as dark clouds rolled in overhead. The evolution continues. State Street neighbor Ecoworks yarnbombed trees lining the median. Nearby beauty salon Angel Hair provides water for the plants. Town Green has also partnered with the project, using their watering truck in the height of the season.

This summer, Kane and her team are adding bright roses and lavender catmint to a large portion of the median. URI has provided those plants because they’re particularly hardy. The median’s soil is dry, rocky, and unwelcoming to a lot of plants Kane has tried in years past (a suite of lilies didn’t make it last year). It’s just part of the vision she has for the park, she said. She can imagine outdoor sculpture dotting the median, wind chimes in the trees, a pop-up art wall, and benches all going in before the median feels done. The benches may not be too far off, she added; the local chapter of the Audubon Society has said it may be able to donate some logs later this summer.

Kane’s motivation is rooted partly in a love of gardening. Growing up in Greensburg, Penn., she recalled ​“living off the yard in the summertime … you’d pick the grapes from the vine, you’d eat the apples and peaches from the trees.” She has a garden at home and grows much of what she eats in it.

But the park has more to do with the fact that ​“I’m a doer. I don’t sit still well,” she said. She wanted a community greenspace outside where she worked, and realized that she’d have to make it.

Working with URI Intern Caroline Scanlon, SeeClickFixers Caroline Smith, Margaret Lee, and Max Antonucci, and community member Kevin McCarthy, Kane hustled Friday to get the plants in the ground. As she positioned a pink rose plant, McCarthy and Scanlon debated the merits of mixing concentrated fertilizer with the parched, rocky soil. 

“Hey, if it can grow here, it can grow anywhere,” Kane said.