Laura Glesby Photo
Ethel Berger, Jeanette Sykes, and Robyn Porter divvy up streets.
Sadie Flowers has seen her block of Hazel Street address crime and grow more peaceful as community connections tightened.
“We don’t want to go back,” Flowers, who has lived on the street for 35 years, said as she signed a petition against the APT Foundation’s plans to move offices and a methadone clinic nearby on Dixwell Avenue.
Sadie Flowers, right, fills out a petition.
Flowers’ door was just on one of four streets’ worth of houses in Newhallville that six canvassers visited on Sunday afternoon to gather signatures against the APT Foundation’s plans.
Jeanette Sykes, a Hazel Street resident and a leader of the Newhallville-Hamden Stronger Together coalition that has organized against APT, knew Flowers as a neighbor so committed to election day that she keeps an “I Voted” sticker pasted on her front door.
When Sykes knocked on Flowers’ door on Sunday, Flowers revealed that she already knew about the APT Foundation’s plans.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said, reaching for a pen.
Sunday’s door-knocking spurt was part of a larger mobilization effort among Newhallville neighbors against the prospect of a methadone clinic. The APT Foundation purchased the former Elm City College Prep school building at 794 Dixwell Ave., between Cherry Ann and Elizabeth Streets, for $2.5 million in December, without prior neighborhood outreach. (The organization had called former Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn, who no longer lives in the area and whose voicemail was full, and did not attempt to reach other community members.)
Since neighbors found out about the sale through an article in the Independent, they have started community conversations, gathered signatures, and hosted rallies against the move. They’ve made a point of saying they support drug treatment in general and don’t seek to disparage people seeking help. Rather they cite the APT Foundation’s rocky relationship with neighbors of its Hill location, where residents have reported ongoing violence and drug dealing in the immediate surroundings and poor communication with the clinic.
APT Foundation CEO Lynn Madden has maintained in response that the organization provides critical services for patients living with addiction, and that it cannot be held responsible for everything that occurs outside of its doors. The organization has taken some efforts to bolster security in the past, although neighbors have argued that it could be doing more.
“We’ve done a lot of work there on our Congress Avenue location with the city, including the police department and the management team of Hill north,” Madden said in a comment for a previous Independent article on the issue. “There are significantly improved circumstances there… Many of the problems that are laid at the feet of the APT Foundation are probably shared by all of us in that neighborhood, not solely by APT Foundation or the persons that are.“
On Sunday, Sykes critiqued this response. “They only care about what’s going on inside their doors,” she said of APT in her pitch to neighbors. She cited a police report showing 49 arrests at APT’s Long Wharf and Congress Avenue locations between 2015 and 2020.
She argued moving a methadone clinic to Newhallville location would negatively affect both neighbors and clients. Newhallville is “residential,” she said, and the clinic should be somewhere “industrial.”
“We are pro-treatment,” she maintained at each door. She said she worries that a methadone clinic would attract opioid dealers seeking to prey on people seeking treatment for addiction. In a neighborhood that has historically worked to keep the drug trade at bay, Sykes argued, “there’s a lot of temptations here.“
As Sykes strolled past the corner of Hazel and Winchester with her clipboard of petitions, James Harvey called from across the street: “What are y’all selling?”
“Just giving out some information,” Sykes called back.
“I could use some information,” Harvey replied.
Sykes crossed the street to talk to him, maneuvering around ice from the previous week’s storm. When Harvey realized that Sykes was referring to the former school building, he raised other possible community uses for the space: “That’s the perfect building. You could have meetings, classes there.” He signed the petition.
Kamaz Williams and Arsemas Dent.
Steps away from him, Kamaz Williams and Arsemas Dent were chatting outside an apartment building, near a corner store.
Sykes got their signatures next. “They’re gonna cause more problems,” Dent said of APT, shaking his head. “I’m too old to be running.” He and Williams said they’ve been working to make the street safer.
“Things have calmed down a lot,” Sykes agreed.
Elsie Ramos, at right: younger siblings deserve to feel safe.
Another Hazel Street resident, Elsie Ramos, said she was motivated to sign the petition because of the three schools in the area. She has younger siblings, and feared that a clinic would lead them to encounter needles and substances lying around on the street.
Their signatures will eventually make their way to City Plan and the state’s Department of Public Health, both of which will be considering approvals for the project; and the mayor’s office, Sykes said. She estimated that about 1,500 people have signed so far.
As Sykes knocked on familiar doors, two of the other canvassers encountered a handful of new faces. State Rep. Robyn Porter, who lives in Newhallville, and former Ward 19 Co-Chair Ethel Berger, who lives in adjacent Prospect Hill, made their way up Winchester Avenue, where a number of new houses have popped up near Division Street.
Robyn Porter, left, with Georgette Assoumou, right.
Georgette Assoumou, who has lived in Newhallville for 10 years but recently moved to one of those new buildings, took a break from cooking to chat with Berger and Porter.
Berger made her pitch to Assoumou: APT is “not a good neighbor,” she said, and on Cherry Ann Street, near the proposed location, “that street has spent a lot of energy reclaiming the area.”
“This is a pressing issue,” Porter said. She encouraged Assoumou to come to weekly community meetings on the matter and “make your voice heard.”
“If it is keeping the neighborhood safer,” the petition is worth signing, Assoumou concluded. “A signature can change a lot of things.”
Typically, when someone is interested in purchasing a property and using that property for something that requires a land use or development approval, the potential buyer with contract for an option to buy the property pending the land use approval. That APT bought the property prior to gaining land use approvals, may have been a major mistake on their part. What kind of land use approval is APT seeking? A Special Exception from the Zoning Regulations?