Harvey Koizim Photo
Don’t look now, but money will soon start changing hands on the New Haven Green — legally.
Starting in June, a weekly downtown farmers market run by the not-for-profit CitySeed organization will move from its sidewalk location in front of City Hall to an open space on the lower Green.
That will mark the first time in three centuries that commerce will be permitted on New Haven’s central two-block park.
Thomas MacMillan Photo
Proprietor Days.
The Committee of the Proprietors of Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven—a little-known, self-perpetuating private quintet that controls the park—has decided to allow CitySeed to set up shop from June through November as a trial, according to Proprietor Drew Days, a Yale professor and former U.S. solicitor general.
“There will be a CitySeed Farmers’ Market on the Lower Green from June to November 2013,” Days wrote in an email message to the Independent. “It will be on a one-time, experimental basis. Further details will be forthcoming in the next several weeks.”
The decision follows public discussions about how to imagine the Green’s future. The Proprietors and the city convened the discussions with the help of a group called The Project For Public Spaces as a run-up to New Haven’s 375th anniversary. The goal is to turn the historic and civic landmark into more of a true destination for the whole range of New Haveners. Participants in break-out sessions suggested allowing some commerce on the Green — for instance, food carts like those outside Yale-New Haven Hospital. Click here to read all about that.
“This is exciting,” said CitySeed Executive Director Nicole Berube. She said the move from the sidewalk will allow the farmers market to grow beyond the eight to ten stalls it has been able to accommodate. Also, she said, the lower Green will offer enough room for more school and summer camp trips. The new location also brings the market and its farmers closer to downtown restaurants.
“This opens the door for a lot of people to experience the farmers market,” she said.
While the Proprietors and CitySeed (as well as the city parks department, which manages the Green for the Proprietors) have agreed to the 2013 trial run in principle, details remain to be worked out, according to Berube.
Mayor John DeStefano called the plan “beneficial for both the Green and people to patronize the market.” He said it introduces an appropriate, healthy and good use of the Green.”
The Proprietors, who meet out of the public eye, have officially owned the Green and chosen their own successors since the early 17th century. The group began with the original settlers of New Haven Colony. The state legislature affirmed their descendants’ legal right to control the Green in 1683, then again in 1723. (Read more about that history here.) And to some extent control has stayed in the family: One of today’s five proprietors, Anne Tyler Calabresi, descends from the original proprietor Theophilus Eaton, who founded the colony along with John Davenport. (Click here to read a story about her favorite, rebellious ancestor from that period: Theophilus’s wife Anne.)
Melissa Bailey contributed reporting to this story.
Congratulations to CitySeed!!