A Dream Grows In An Armory Garden

Seven years ago and displaced from their long-time site on Carmel Street, Whalley/Beaver Hills community activist Nadine Horton and her gardening friends went looking for a new dirt-and-greens home.

When she came upon a narrow rectangular plot of overgrown grass, half a block long, tucked between the New Haven Correctional Center and the Armory, she fell in love — with a place, a symbol, and a possibility.

And that love is blooming today in one of the city’s most remarkable growing sites: the Armory Community Garden on County Street.

Well, maybe love’s not quite the right word. 

Here’s how Horton, a former long-time chair of the Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) Community Management Team, put it on a recent bright Saturday morning when in the shadow of the jail and the Armory. She and some of her eight to ten core gardening colleagues were weeding around the recently planted spinach and kale and preparing new beds for the lavender chamomile, bee balm, and other herbs.

“When he [Mayor Justin Elicker, then head of the New Haven Land Trust] showed us this space, I knew this was the spot. The armory and the jail, both places forgotten. The city has forgotten the armory, and those in jail are forgotten. Now we’re here and you can’t forget us. No demo by neglect.”

One of Horton’s long-time gardeners is Yale School of Architecture professor Elihu Rubin, who came by not only to turn the soil but also to pass out leaflets on the meeting he’s organizing for Wednesday night, for 6:00 p.m. at nearby James Hillhouse High School. 

Its aim: To goose the city into preserving and repurposing for economic and cultural uses the vast 1930s pile of bricks, formally known as the Goffe Street Armory, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places; and to do so before it all falls apart.

Beneath a brilliant, cerulean blue sky, accented by a small tree growing out from the Armory roof high above, Rubin said, ​“Nadine and I have used the garden in grassroots organizing” in order to drum up support to preserve the Armory. 

“In some sense the gardeners have become the de facto stewards of the Armory.”

Their work gained some traction after the city invested briefly in securing the roof (now leaking again) and spiffing up the cavernous drill hall to host Citywide Open Studios in 2014 and 2017, Rubin recalled. 

Then Covid hit, and now ​“The garden is the primary source of activity around the Armory.”

And busy it is. 

While the core gardening group, including Horton, Rubin, and Dishaun Harris, who is the organics guru in the team, make the decisions on what to grow and how to organize the work force and flow every Saturday morning till 2:00 p.m., the space is open and welcoming to all to come, to pitch in, to help to plant, and, in the months to come, to enjoy the harvest.

And those who come through the open gate at 97 County St. to work for an hour or a month of Saturdays range from neighbors to homeless folks to Yale Medical School (where Horton has been working for the past two years) faculty, staff, and students who use the garden as a kind of oasis to plant, to chill, to ​“gather” themselves.

Unlike many of the gardens under the Gather New Haven umbrella (Horton is also Gather’s supervising gardener for the Whalley/Beaver Hills district), there are no individual plots here. Everyone works together and all the plots are in common.

“This is a community,” Horton said. ​“We do the work together and harvest it. And it’s not just to grow food, but we help each other. We helped each other through Covid, and we help each other on entrepreneurial issues. There are senior gardeners here, and history. And so many medical students who come through. It’s a way to connect all New Haven residents in a collaborative way.”

Some of those students, and others, Horton added, are adept at writing grants — for tools, for seeds, for offering workshops. 

The results of those initiatives are now reflected not in their new greenhouse, which enables the gardeners to plant earlier and keep growing longer, with micro-greens, for example, late into the fall. They’re also reflected a whole range of other programs at the garden site.

They’ve done yoga and meditation programming for the gardeners and neighbors and the Armory Garden also is unique in having the city’s only gardening-based book club.

And there’s an entrepreneurial side as well. 

While most of the gardeners are volunteers, Horton and her crew have also been able to write some grants that underwrite gardeners with special skills and those launching their own ag-based business, like Harris, Horton’s right-hand man, known within the Armory precincts as Farmer D.

A young man who grew up in Newhallville, went to college in North Carolina, interned at Common Ground High School, Harris is now bringing his organic gardening training and skills not only to the Armory Garden but to launching Root Life, LLC. 

That’s his own garden-creation and consulting business based in a large plot that fills up the northwestern quadrant of the garden where it meets Goffe Street.

As he showed this reporter, the plots where the carrots, kale, and cilantro are already growing (and the peppers, eggplant, the Paul Robeson tomatoes and other varieties will also be put in soon), Harris talked about the many seedlings he has growing in tents and will be moving in soon.

He was particularly excited to describe the organic practices that include the raised beds, keeping the naturally occurring plants like dandelions in the ground as long as possible so their roots and soils can mix with the new soils in the bed, ​“so we have natural synergy.”

Harris is also supervising the new berry garden that is being planted near his plot and he has organized an ​“herb spiral,” at the far side of the garden where Horton and others were now weeding around the sage and the lemon balm, mint, thyme, and marjoram. 

The Armory garden has also been the site — and Harris the teacher — for people in the EMERGE program in tandem with the Yale School of Forestry’s Urban Resources Initiative (URI). That’s a green skills training intensive for people who have just left jail.

Which brought Horton back to what was her initial hope, goal, for the site seven years ago. ​“The plan is ultimately to connect with the jail and get folks who are near release” to become involved with the garden.

“As soon as you start working in a garden, you begin to connect with other residents, with nature,” and how critical that is, she emphasized, especially given the additional isolation prisoners underwent during Covid.

It’s an idea that’s out there, Horton said, and very much in play at the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice at the Yale Medical School, where Horton works.

“This [unlike the EMERGE program] is for those still incarcerated. As they are preparing to leave.”

She added: ​“They come out with a CO [Corrections Officer] and they pick up trash across the block. I’ve seen it. Why can’t we take those guys as a pilot? And we can show you how to plant beds, maintain an organic garden, green skills. It’s two purposes [fulfilled], connecting back to your fellow residents and helping with physical and mental health and behavioral health. There are lots of articles on this. It’s starting to get attention.”

Horton said there is a new warden at the jail but she hasn’t yet had an opportunity to make contact around the idea. Does anyone doubt but that she will?

In the meantime, Horton extends an invitation to all who are interested in learning, and helping out. The Armory Garden is open every Saturday through the good weather, from noon to 2:00 p.m. at 97 County St.

In the meantime, she, along with Rubin, as co-chairs of the Armory Advisory Committee, are inviting the public to a visioning/brainstorming meeting on the future of the Armory from 6 to 8:00 p.m. at the James Hillhouse High School cafeteria. 

Pizza will be provided, Rubin reported. 

At future meetings, given the season, there will likely also be organic salad, grown at the Armory Community Garden.

Have a favorite garden around town that you’d like this vegetable-flower correspondent to check out and write about? Send an email to [email protected] or leave a comment below with details.

And see below for other recent Independent articles about New Haven’s many gardens and gardeners.

• On Service Day, Albertus Tends Its Garden
• Farmer Savage Preps For Mushroom Season
• Kid Gardeners Grow On Clinton Ave
• Whitney Gardeners Dig In On Leek Landfall