A Bright Day On Bright Street

Renee Crudup and Joseph Davis moved into their bright Bright Street apartment in Fair Haven across from the historic Fair Haven Union Cemetery a few months ago, and soon after celebrated a birthday in the new backyard.

It was so agreeable they decided to get to know their neighbors by planning a party for the whole block — and they chose July 4 as the date to host the shindig.

Late afternoon on Friday, as the barbecues were warming up and smoke was rising from the squealing kids’ firecrackers, Crudup and Davis and their Fair Haven neighbors marked not only Independence Day, but a red-letter local moment as well. 

For they were also staging the very first block party in recent memory on this block. Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller, who recently announced she will run for one more term to represent Ward 14, helped Crudup and Davis arrange for the street closing, and was also on hand to congratulate them and to meet the folks.

Bright Street is an unusual narrow arrow of a thoroughfare that runs uninterrupted straight from Grand Avenue to Pine Street as if without a breath. All the houses are facing the venerable monuments of the cemetery and the graves of their now quiet neighbors — sea captains, oystermen and women, among early 19th century predecessors in the area.

Having the dead for half your neighbors is not for everyone, but it’s been working out just fine for Crudup and Davis.

The couple said they had just lost the house they’d been renting for years on Blatchley Avenue and had been told by the landlord to move within 30 days.

They didn’t get angry — well, not too much — and instead moved into the Bright Street apartment to help themselves in effect by helping and getting to know others.

You could make the case, as Davis did, that this is the best way to celebrate the Fourth of July. That is, that taking the initiative and fully funding on their own nickel food and fun in a family spirit in order to meet each other on the block is precisely in line with the collective spirit of different communities coming together as one, which is at the heart of the 1776 Declaration. 

Community is a word that everyone uses. Davis, who hails from South Carolina (her mom came all the way up for the block party!), drilled deeper and said that you don’t get there — that is, to community — until you get ​“to know who the neighbors are as individuals.”

Among the folks they met were Gladys Idrovo, who was busy barbecuing pollo asada, carne asada, yucca asada, tripe asada, everything asada on her porch at the Grand Avenue end of Bright Street.

With the translation help of their Fair Haven School middle-schooler Marilyne and Alder Miller (who polished her Spanish initially at age 15 when she was an exchange student in Ecuador), this reporter learned that Idrovos came to New Haven nine years ago from eastern or Amazonian Ecuador.

The two Idrovo sons had recently both proudly graduated from Wilbur Cross High School, and both the sons and mom are connecting, with Miller’s assistance, with the Manufacturing and Technical Community Hub (MATCH) on Mill Street – the paid internship training program that teaches operations of drilling and other machinery along with what officials call manufacturing ​“pathways” into good-paying local industries.

Continuing to bring people together and cultivating new leaders like the folks on Bright Street is what Miller says she hopes to continue do in one more two-year stint as alder. 

That’s along with advancing the continuing revitalization of Grand Avenue and the completion of important infrastructure projects she’s nurtured over her previous two terms. These include improvements to Fair Haven’s beautiful waterfront at Quinnipiac River Park and cutting a blue ribbon, as soon as the end of next year, on the completion of the Strong School conversion to affordable and LGBTQ-friendly apartments.

But Friday was a day for food and fireworks and asking local folks if either the spicy adobo or the occasional booms of the fireworks might wake up the eternally sleeping neighbors.

The universal answer was no.

Long-time resident Michelle Sutton, who worked for a decade as a medical assistant at Clifford Beers, motioned to the cemetery and said, ​“We’re more afraid of the living than the dead. The graveyard is the least of the problems. Those committing the crimes are not there.”