nothin Man Of The Year | New Haven Independent

Man Of The Year

Paul Bass Photo

Ex-cop Spell sparked 2011’s top neighborhood grassroots revival.

Shoots have sprung from the orchid bulbs above Stacy Spell’s kitchen sink.

They’re not an easy flower,” Spell said. They’re just so gorgeous. You’ve got to be consistent tending them.”

In a cramped room in Spell’s home near Ella Grasso Boulevard in New Haven’s West River neighborhood, three dozen potted plant block the windows and climb the walls amid shelves and piles of books on philosophy and politics and motivation. These are dendrobrium,” he said. These are phalaenopsis.” Five pots had amaryllis. Not that you’d know; this time of year, none are flowering.

It will take months for them to bloom, he said. It took me years to learn how to grow them.”

This year, Spell has extended his passion for cultivation beyond the confines of his home and into the fabric of West River. He’s been growing community at the grassroots in the hard soil of one of New Haven’s more battered neighborhoods — and producing a cornucopia of new activist energy.

Over 100 pots have life growing in them scattered throughout the first floor of Spell’s house. Jasmines, spider plants, ficus claim the living room. In the kitchen, inside for the winter, pots of herb plants, jades, avocado, and yucca crowd by the glass door overlooking the West River. A lemon tree has grown taller, though not sturdier, than the gentle six-foot-two, 320-pound, 56-year-old retired New Haven detective who has nurtured it from seed.

The trick,” Spell said of the lemon tree, is getting her to blossom.”

He has mastered those tricks since he became a self-professed flower nut” back in his days at the police training academy. He found that nurturing flowers relieved the stress of the job.

Spell retired as a cop in 2006 and took over a year ago as president of the West River Neighborhood Services Corporation (WRNSC). He hasn’t stopped running … or planting … or nurturing a grassroots networks of volunteers and institutional partners to rebuild an area — squashed between Chapel Street and Legion Avenue, roughly between Orchard Street and the Boulevard — that in recent years has endured some of the worst streaks of murders and shootings.

In the process, the former cop discovered a more potent crime-fighting weapon than a gun: a rook.

If It Doesn’t Grow…”

That’s right. As in chess.

This April a rash of shootings took place near the juncture of Derby and Norton, a neighborhood crossroads that includes a Dunkin’ Donuts, the Berger senior housing apartments, and the Barnard school.

Spell decided it was time to bring out the chess board.

Allan Appel Photo

Spell teaches beginning Tyisha Walker some moves back in March.

He set up shop on Saturday mornings in the tiny public square at the crossroads. He offered to teach people how to play. Each Saturday up to 16 people came, mostly kids, some adults.

After chess, Spell handed them bags. They walked the neighborhood picking up used needles, drug bags, and general trash.

Spell taught them a credo he learning in the army: If it doesn’t grow, you pick it up.”

As for things that do grow, he got to work planting flowers at various mini-green spots in the neighborhood.

The point of the Saturday morning sessions: Be a physical presence to deter dealers or shooters from owning the turf, from brazenly committing crimes. And invite young people to get involved in the neighborhood.

When an international chess champion based in Texas read this Independent story about Spell’s project, she sent him seven new portable chess sets. (Read about that here.)

The weekly games continued all summer and into the fall. When the weather turned colder, Spell made them monthly. If it rained and no one showed up, he went around picking up the trash. Partly to clean up. Partly to be seen. So people would know that, rain or shine, he’d be out there from 10 a.m. to noon every Saturday.

As with tending flowers, he said, you have to be consistent.”

He grew up learning the importance of consistence while watching how New Haven works, and doesn’t work, he said.

People say, We’re going to change this. We’re going to do that. They they’re gone. Politicians weren’t consistent. Organizations weren’t consistent. If you’re going to be true, if you’re going to effect change, you have to be consistent.”

He took that same approach to building the WSRNC. He helped reconstitute a 10-member board and keep it busy. He held monthly board meetings. He also held monthly full membership meetings. He launched and hand-delivered a monthly newsletter; the current issue already has the dates of all of next year’s meetings set. He has become a link between neighbors and institutions ranging from the hospital and the local masjid to the Urban League and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Yale clinical scholars program.

He’s just thrown himself into the work. He seems to be doing everything and being everywhere and representing West River,” said John Fitzpatrick, one of the neighborhood’s most active volunteers and a member of the new board. He has approached the work with such passion, such determination, it’s just inspirational.”

Spell sought to inject a public-health theme to the group’s activities. At Easter, he and fellow volunteers ran a healthy” Easter egg hunt. No candy. They distributed stickers, temporary tattoos, toys, fruit, water.

Allan Appel Photo

They brought the second healthy corner store” to the area, part of a citywide effort to convince neighborhood bodegas to stock and prominently display fruit, granola bars, and other alternatives to junk food. (Read about that here.)

They convinced CitySeed to experiment with a satellite farmers market. They hosted free tai-chi classes.

Working with Barnard teachers and students, Spell & Co. created barrels of bounty” — filled with soil, fertilizer and plants — for neighbors without garden space to grow vegetables. (Read about that here.)

He’s pulling together people from very different groups who don’t normally work together,” observed Jimmy Jones, president of Masjid al-Islam on George Street. We need that.”

Starting At Home

Spell, a gentle bear of man who speaks in a radio-ready baritone, decided to become a full-time volunteer upon retiring as a detective in 2006 after 27 years on the police force. He has a pension; his wife Virginia works full-time as a vice-president for the Urban League.

At first Spell signed up with groups all over town: New Haven Reads, the Brotherhood Leadership Summit, groups in other cities.

Then Kevin Ewing, who had revived the West River group, and longtime neighborhood activist Jerry Poole pulled him aside.

You live here,” Spell remembers them telling him. And they roped him into getting active with WRNSC.

I’ve been here in this same little house,” on Miller Street for 33 years, Spell said. I’m not going anywhere.”

By last December Spell was succeeding Ewing as president, an unpaid post. He still keeps some other commitments outside the neighborhood: He has continued tutoring two boys at Dixwell-based New Haven Reads every Friday from 2 to 6 p.m. (“You can’t come into somebody’s life and be inconsistent,” he said.) He is in his 10th year chairing the deacon board at Pitts Chapel UFWB church in Newhallville.

But mostly he’s focusing on West River. He remembers the bustling commerce there when he lived at Legion and Orchard in the late 1950s, before the city bulldozed the heart of the neighborhood for a highway that never got built. He sees West River rising again.

If you’re going to effect change, effect it where you live,” Spell said during a conversation in his kitchen one recent morning. He was dressed in jeans and a fleece pullover, his long hair in a trademark ponytail, two gold earrings in his left ear, It’s great in the overall dream to effect change in all of New Haven. But let’s get started where we live.”

These days he’s working even longer hours in his volunteer mode — regular ten-hour shifts — than he did as a cop, Spell said.

And he plans only to ramp it up in 2012.

He doesn’t expect other volunteers to match his hours when they have eight-hour [a‑day] jobs and small children.” Five of Spell’s children are grown. One’s an L.A. cop. One’s an artist holding down a security job, another a Hillhouse teacher. Another works with ex-offenders at PROJECT MORE. One’s an NYU sophomore; the youngest is a junior at Co-op High.

But lots of people have been finding time to pour into the neighborhood. Spell plans to keep them busy.

Besides building on the projects launched this past year, he and his fellow volunteers have raised money to get started preparing a lot on Meade Street for a new community garden. Spell has his eye on the old senior center the city closed on Norton Street; he’d like to see WRNSC turn it into an office and neighborhood program center.

He has recruited a successful investor who’s moving back to town to lead a new club to teach kids about the stock market.

He has a pitch ready for the kids: If you’re willing to put $125 in a pair of sneakers, how about putting $25 in stock and see what that’ll do for you?” (He’s looking for more adult volunteer teachers; you can contact Spell at 203 – 777-2192.)

He knows he’s not yet reaching all the neighborhood’s kids. Specifically, he’s not reaching the toughest kids, the miniscule” percentage of teens responsible for most of the violence.

He’ll see them eying the chess games at Derby and Norton. He senses they’re dying” to participate, he said. They’ll walk by, glance at the board, and mutter, Bro, you shouldn’t make that move.” But they won’t stop and play. To them, Spell said, I’m still the po-po [police].”

I refuse to have someone who’s my baby boy’s age tell me how I can live, where I can walk. I have to engage them,” Spell said.

In addition to the stock market club and the chess, Spell’s WRNSC has teamed up with Masjid al-Islam on George Street and the Dwight management team to form a new group called ROCC, or Reclaiming Our Community Coalition.” They’ve drawn up a crime-fighting and youth-engagement strategy, Spell said. They’ll be rolling it out in coming weeks.

I want my grandchildren to have a better New Haven,” Spell said. I want my grandchildren to have a better West River.” He’s working on it, one rook, one bulb, at a time.

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