Forgotten Neighborhood’s History Springs To Life

“Anybody have a guess?” Laura Parisi asked, brandishing a a metal artifiact of the old Grand Avenue.

Parisi, president of the Italian-American Historical Society, brandished the artifact — a ​“cutter” — and challenged members of the crowd to identify its use as she joined heads of four other local historical societies in Lenzi Park on Jefferson Street Monday to mark the completion of a new ​“Walk New Haven” tour book and online guide through the surrounding neighborhood’s history.

It is the fifth such neighborhood walking tour and book created by the New Haven’s Ethnic Heritage Center. The center grew out of a coalition of African-American, Ukrainian-American, Jewish, Italian-American, and Irish-American historical societies that worked together on the city’s 350th birthday celebration in 1988. They have created great projects and collections ever since, serving as a rejoinder to the forces that seek to divide society along ethnic or racial or religious lines.

The new ​“Walk New Haven” tour covers the western end of Grand Avenue, from State Street downtown to East Street and the Mill River.

That area has often been seen as an appendage of other areas, most often Wooster Square. More recently it has served as half of an emerging ​“Mill River” district. It has had its own identity, though, since 1830. First-generation free Blacks (including William ​“King” Lanson, in a subsection called New Liberia), Eastern European Jews, and Irish and Italian immigrants, and first-generation Puerto Rican transplants settled there to build homes, places of worship, and businesses. Urban renewal’s bulldozer tore much of it down in the 1960s and 1970s, including making room for a highway that tore it in half. But it’s coming back.

For the purposes of the new tour, the historical societies have branded the area ​“inner Grand Avenue.”

“Even though a lot of these buildings are no longer standing, these stories are still with us. We want to keep them alive,” said Rhoda Zahler Samuel (pictured above), the project’s coordinator.

At the Lenzi Park gathering Monday, Mayor Justin Elicker joined organizers in cutting a ribbon to mark the completion of the tour materials. You can buy the book here or take the walk yourself with the help of this interactive map and guide. (Click here to read a previous article about the planning stages of this tour.)

The tour focuses on the history of buildings, some still standing, many not, along Grand.

Monday’s event brought to life the stories of the human beings connected to those buildings, the people who made it a community. Speakers from each participating society brought personal stories to the event. Some, like Parisi, also brought props.

The cutter, at center above, was used to make ​“torrone” — square candies — at Marzullo’s pastry shop at 654 – 6 Grand. Pictured beside it: tongs used by deliverers of ice along Grand. Parisi also spoke of her great-aunt Terese Falcigno, who started a furniture store on Grand at a time when few women owned businesses.

Architect Ed Cherry (pictured) told the story of Sally Wilson, who operated a schoolhouse out of her home on Artizan Street at a time when Black students were not allowed in New Haven public schools. She was one of two Black schoolteachers (the other was Elizabeth Price in the Hill) who between them taught 120 kids a day in their homes. One of Wilson’s students was Edward Bouchet, who lived in the neighborhood. Bouchet went on to attend Hopkins Grammar School, then Yale, and became the sixth person in the world to earn a physics PhD.

Carolyn Baker (pictured above at right), co-president of the Greater New Haven African-American Historical Society, told the story of Lillian Benford Lumpkin, who moved to the neighborhood from Alabama to pursue her own dreams. Benford Lumpkin opened Lillian’s Paradise, a storied 200-seat restaurant and nightclub by the old clock factory on Wallace Street that hosted jazz greats from Billie Holiday and Lionel Hampton to Artie Shaw. ​“She wanted to be her own boss, keep the faith, and run her own race,” Baker noted. And she succeeded.

John Raggozino (above at right) remembered growing up in the neighborhood, being baptized at St. Patrick’s Church, sneaking in to Lillian’s, and learning woodworking at the old Boys Club (now LEAP) on Jefferson Street, where the school truancy officer worked out of the third floor and kept watch on the kids. 

Harold Miller (above) recalled working in the clothing store his grandfather Isadore (“Izzy”) operated at 751 Grand. One day a man came in needing a suit but lacked the money. He asked for credit. ​“Pop-pop,” Harold’s uncle Mack told Izzy, ​“you can’t sell to that man. He just out of of jail 10 days ago.” To which Izzy responded: ​“Then he needs a new set of clothes!”

Harold remembered another conversation in the store, in the early 1960s. Two men had come in from the state government. ​“Mr. Miller,” they told Izzy, ​“we have good news and bad news.” Izzy asked for the bad news first. A new highway, Interstate 91, was going to be built, ​“and go right through your store,” they told him. ​“Perelmutter’s [Department Store] across the street can stay. Your store has to come down.” (The good news? The state offered to buy the inventory. Izzy held his own liquidation sale.)

Tamar Szabo Gendler (pictured) moved with her family to New Haven in 2006, not knowing she had her own connection to what we’re now calling Inner Grand. When her mother’s sister died in 2015, Gendler (who is Yale’s dean of arts and sciences) went through her papers. Gendler discovered she descended from Jacob Heller and Louis Mandelbaum, first cousins who left the Bavarian town of Dennenlohe and started a dry good store at the corner of Grand and State around 1840. Above the store, they housed Congregation Mishkan Israel, the state’s first Jewish religious society. Gendler’s family had already joined Mishkan Israel, which is now located on Ridge Road in Hamden.

The Goode Place

Following are remarks that Aaron Goode, the project historian, prepared for Monday’s event to offer a broad perspective:

The saga of Grand Avenue is a tapestry of stories, compelling stories that intersect with other stories, layered on and woven into yet other stories, sometimes in the history of a single unassuming building.

Grand Avenue is the story of immigrants and dreamers. It’s the story of faith and family. It’s the story of food, a veritable United Nations of cuisine.

It’s the story of entrepreneurship — not just in business but civic, cultural and spiritual entrepreneurship.

It’s the story of strong self-made women like Lillian Lumpkin and Teresa Falcigno. It is the story of music and melody, of jazz at Lillian’s Paradise and Neapolitan song at the San Carlino. It’s the story of vaudeville and movies and cosmopolitan spaces like the Dreamland Theater where people of all backgrounds encountered each other through the medium of culture.

It’s the story of pioneers, some of the earliest Jewish and Puerto Rican settlers in New Haven. It’s the enduring story of the oldest synagogue in Connecticut, the oldest hat store in New Haven, both still going strong well into their 2nd centuries.

It’s the story of celebrities like Artie Shaw, once one of the most famous and highest-paid men in America, who got his start here.

But it’s also the story of ordinary people, of butchers and bakers and clockmakers and nuns at St. Patrick’s and Torah scholars and kids playing pool at the Boy’s Club and everything above and below and in between.

It’s the story of William Lanson and Irish canal workers and the Grand Avenue Jews, the story of the Great Migration of African-Americans from south to north in the 20th century.

It’s the story of good government policy — the New Deal, the Wagner-Steagall act, the creation of the New Haven Housing Authority and Farnam Courts out of the aspiration for quality affordable housing that we are still seeking to fulfill.

And it’s also, tragically, the story of bad government policy in the form of racially segregated schools, in the form of highways and urban renewal tearing apart neighborhoods, unleashing a spiral of disruption and disinvestment.

Grand Avenue is the story of success and failure, continuity and tradition, the story of transformation and decline and rebirth. In our book you will find all these stories and more.

Geographically our book covers a mere six or seven square blocks — but contained in those blocks is the dynamic, ever-evolving story of New Haven, and a microcosm of urban history in America writ large. As with all our cultural heritage tours, the neighborhood, the hyperlocal, is the portal through which the particular passes to become the universal.

There is no formal dedication in our book — but like all of our books, it is dedicated to the people of New Haven, past and present, in all their complexity and diversity, people whose rich and resonant humanity bursts forth from every page. We celebrate these neighbors from the past whose tapestry of stories is unfailingly a privilege to share.