nothin 2 Neighborhoods’ Legacies Persevere | New Haven Independent

2 Neighborhoods’ Legacies Persevere

Paul Bass Photos

Neal-Sanjurjo (above) and Greenberg (below) in the WNHH studio.

As a child, Serena Neal-Sanjurjo watched from inside while New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood burned. She has returned decades later to help rebuild Dixwell — after doing the same in Baltimore and post-Katrina New Orleans.

Robert Greenberg’s grandfather watched New Haven’s Ninth Square blossom as a furniture, clothing, factory district. Then Greenberg and his father watched it succumb to urban renewal. Now he’s trying to help make sure the neighborhood’s revival doesn’t obliterate its past.

Neal-Sanjurjo and Greenberg discussed their family histories in the two neighborhoods, and current efforts to rebuild them, on an episode of WNHH radio’s Dateline New Haven.” Click on the sound file above to listen to the program.

The Nation Drill Squad outside the shuttered Q after this May’s Freddie Fixer Parade.

Neal-Sanjurjo serves as director of New Haven’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), which tackles neighborhood blight and plots neighborhood renewal. She spoke of growing up in Dixwell’s Florence Virtue Homes, one of a number of mixed-race and mixed-income coops established around town in the 1960s with the help of the federal government. It was a place where the Dixwell Community Q” House was a neighborhood anchor, where kids could walk to school, where parents could walk to jobs at the Winchester rifle factory, where you could walk to all the stores you needed, where adults felt comfortable calling out other people’s kids for misbehavior. The four nights in 1967 when riots swept New Haven, Neal-Sanjurjo’s father, a truck driver, kept everyone safely at home; she could still see what was happening outside the window.

We got to see all that. It was right across the parking lot for us,” she recalled. It was an eerie feeling. You had a curfew — you couldn’t go out after dusk. We remember the noise” and marching” during the day.

By the time Neal-Sanjurjo grew up, those riots had destroyed some of the neighborhood, urban renewal sent more of it into decline.

And by the time she took the city job last year — after community-development post rebuilding neighborhoods in New Orleans and Baltimore (she appeared as a walk-on for two scenes of The Wire) — the old Elm Haven housing projects where some of her relatives lived had long been razed, replaced by the Monterey Homes. Dixwell Plaza was continuing to struggle as a business center; the rifle plant was gone, replaced by Science Park.

ZARED ENTERPRISES LLC

Design for part of the new Q.

Now, she said, the city is deep into rebuilding the Q House with state help. And it hopes to play a guiding role in plans by the ascendant Varick AME Zion Church to build new housing in the neighborhood.

Greenberg recalled how his grandfather Joseph came to New Haven from the Russian-Poland border in 1912, then established the American moving and storage company on State Street near Crown. He branched out to Acme Office Furniture, eventually opening stores on Crown Street near State and in the old Chamberlain Building at Orange and Crown.

New Haven’s urban renewal drive in the mid-20th century eliminated the stretch of State Street buildings that included the original family store. The Greenbergs hung on as other mainstays — Hallock’s, Horowitz Bros., SZ Field printing, Munimaker cigars — fell one by one, in the Ninth Square, one of New Haven’s original nine planned squares bounded by Chapel, State, Church Streets and MLK Boulevard.

Then in the 1980s the city readied a new version of urban renewal, aiming to rebuild (rather than destroy) beautiful old buildings still standing, but reviving the housing market and seeking arts and dining venues. A private developer, with the help of government millions, built 335 new apartments for tenants of a wide rang of income groups, along with 49,000 square feet of stores and restaurants and galleries. The Greeenbergs were told that their business, while successful, was the wrong fit, at least for the Chamberlain Building, and they lost a battle to keep it.

However, Acme is holding on at the old Crown Street location, mixing vintage merchandise with the used furniture. On the same block Greenberg has seen an old firehouse become a jazz club and recording studio, a top-flight Italian restaurant open, an architect remake an old space with flair, and Cafe Nine host some of the city’s most interesting live music on the corner. He’s a regular at nightspots …

David Sepulveda Photo

… where he is known to create frame-worthy croctail” caricatures on napkins (pictured). He also has become one of the area’s most knowledgeable, and vocal, historians, seeking to preserve what can still be preserved.

Greenberg remains bitter about some of how city planners and out-of-town developers changed the Ninth Square at the expense of family businesses like his own. However, he and Neal-Sanjurjo both cheered the plans for a $400 million-plus new development by a Montreal builder, LiveWorkLearnPlay, on the grave of the old New Haven Coliseum at the Ninth Square’s southern edge. Buttressed by local small business, not chains, the project has the potential to build on the neighborhood’s vibrant history rather than build over it. Click on the show to hear why.

The new 9th Square.

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