Night Market Grows The Party

Throngs of New Haveners descended on the Ninth Square for hours on end for the latest Night Market, an ​“evening bazaar” that saw people of all ages fill the streets, stalls, and shops, dance on the sidewalk, and generally pass the time outdoors together.

The Friday evening event was hosted by the Town Green District (a.k.a. DowntownNHV).

The Night Market was billed beforehand as ​“downtown NHV’s evening bazaar, taking place in different downtown locations and gathering all to celebrate the vibrant New Haven and Greater New Haven community’s entrepreneurs, art, music, food, drink, culture and more.” Friday’s event more than lived up to that promise.

Kreative — fronted by Stephen Gritz King on saxophone, Jeremiah Fuller on keys, Bet Angelo Calix on bass, and Albear Sheffield on drums — was the first of five live bands to perform, and set the tone for the evening with jams full of heavy bass, deep grooves, rich harmonies, and lilting melodies. Vendors had set up their booths up and down Orange Street, from George Street to Pitkin Plaza, and along Crown Street from State Street halfway to Church Street.

Among them were several vendors who drew their art and craft from recycling, upcycling, and finding and repurposing objects, fashioning them into clothes, jewelry, accessories, furniture, and decorative pieces.

Ali Greenberg of The Junk Drawer was selling jewelry and other accessories made from plastic toys. The idea came to her when she was helping a friend move out of her house. ​“She was going to throw out all of her toys,” Greenberg said. ​“So I said, ​‘no, I’m going to take them. I don’t know what I’m doing with them yet.’ But then I started doing this, and now I thrift and meet people at markets that say ​‘come clean my house out.’ ”

Part of the goal of The Junk Drawer is environmental, to try to keep plastic out of landfills. ​“Ninety percent of children’s toys are made from non-recyclable plastic that takes centuries to even begin to decompose,” her Instagram page explains. ​“We do what we do because we are committed to conserving the environment. By purchasing one of our pieces you are making a difference.… What could have ended up in a landfill is now a valuable accessory.”

When Greenberg started The Junk Drawer, ​“I was working for a sustainability company at the time,” Two Owls Sustainability, in Branford, ​“that was doing trash audits,” she said. Carrying out those audits on the waste streams of big corporations brought her to parts of the Midwest, ​“because that’s where all our trash goes.” 

“I would go and dig through trash,” she said, and give clients feedback about it. ​“My life just became really about that,” she said. ​“It was all serendipitous.”

Her eye for which pieces of trash to refashion gravitates toward ​“mostly toys,” she said. Through thrifting, she has amassed a collection of material and ​“I’m looking for specific things now,” she said. Most of that is stuff from her childhood from the 1990s and early 2000s (she’s 29). ​“It was just during the pandemic” and ​“I was being super-nostalgic,” she said. She goes to Goodwill outlets and looks for estate sales. ​“Sometimes I meet people at events” who see what she’s using and have collections of their own to sell to her. In addition to reusing plastic pieces for the jewelry and accessories, she recycles materials for her displays. Her uncle gave her a stack of floppy disks that she used to make earring backs.

“We are going to continue to educate ourselves and our customers about the necessity of upcycling for our planet,” her Instagram page states. ​“Change begins with each of us.”

Nova Terre is a collective of four artists — Katya Vetrov, Kim Braun, Alison Grieveson, and Kara Wevers — two of whom, Grieveson and Wevers, were staffing their booth on Friday when this reporter visited.

“It’s all about the environment, so everything is refurbished, repurposed, or it’s locally made,” Grieveson said. Their pieces range from ​“Connecticut artists doing printmaking or oil painting. We’ve got accessories made from recycled materials, and we’ve got found treasures.” They get the materials for their pieces from ​“all over,” Grieveson said — estate sales, consignment shops, and ​“the side of the road,” Wevers said. 

“Not against a little dumpster diving if need be,” Grieveson said. ​“I’ve always got my eyes open, especially on bulk pickup days.”

Grieveson looks mostly for design; ​“if I feel like it’s something that I would like in my house, and I feel like it’s got potential,” she collects it. Wevers likes to find ​“something that’s a little rough around the edges, and with a little bit of love and care could be beautiful. Someone sees it as trash, but with a little bit of effort and energy it can be really useful, and pretty. That’s what moves me.”

Wevers pointed to a small dresser; when she found it, ​“the drawer didn’t work. It didn’t have any handles on it. It needed to be repainted, sanded, primed, everything. It just needed a little love.” Grieveson, meanwhile, has an eye for accessories like vases and cocktail shakers, old phones. She also repurposes old pieces of art to use as decorative frames for blackboards or dry erase boards.

Nova Terre began four months ago, and their appearance at the Night Market was their first time showing their goods in public. They formed at first because there was a retail space in Hamden they might have been interested in. But then they decided to try markets first, to ​“see what prices are out there” for their goods, ​“get our feet wet, see if people respond to this,” Grieveson said. ​“That’s what today is, an experiment to see if people like it.”

“We’re using it as a learning experience,” Wevers said. ​“What does it take to start a small business with an artist collaborative that’s really focused on vintage goods and the environment?… Can it be profitable? Can it be a side hustle? What will it be?” She added, of course, that it’s also fun.

Xiomin Hu of Radiant Art was selling cyanotypes she made using plants as her subject. She learned how to do it from watching videos online and reading articles (and after figuring it out, made a video of her own to show others the process). She’s been making cyanotypes for about a year from home.

“It’s my new art,” she said.

She gets the plants for the cyanotypes on walks she takes around town, looking for those that others may regard as weeds. ​“If I see something I like, I just take it,” she said. Making the pieces involves experimentation. ​“Every flower or plant, I just try it,” she said. If the plant yields an image she likes, she can use it again. She pointed to a particular piece she had for sale. ​“This one, I liked it, so I did more,” she said.

Friday marked Hu’s second time selling at the Night Market, the first time being last October. She got the idea from visiting other markets and seeing that people were selling their art there. One of the vendors sent her the information about how to apply, ​“so I just applied,” she said. She heard that the Night Market was ​“a big one, with a lot of people.… So I applied to this one, and it was good for me.”

Nu Haven Kapelye, led by bassist David Chevan, who tongue-in-cheek refers to the ensemble as ​“New England’s largest klezmer band,” swung through a set of klezmer classics as the crowd continued to grow.

The event had officially started at 5 p.m. and the streets filled quickly, as if many had come directly from work.

At previous Night Markets, businesses on nearby blocks outside of Ninth Square, like Strange Ways, had scheduled events to run concurrent to the event to take advantage of the crowds. This time the Town Green District made that official, closing Orange Street between Chapel and Court Street. This created a car-free zone that also encompassed Pitkin Plaza, which the crowd eagerly filled. Strange Ways was ready with a Flair Fair Pop-up. Trinity’s outdoor patio was jammed. Showoff Ink Artistry had set up a booth doing small tattoos on the spot.

The empty lot on the corner of Orange and Chapel wasn’t empty on Friday. Billed as The Yard, it featured booths from several local organizations as well as yard games and picnic tables, making it a particularly family-friendly spot.

As time passed and O.K. Company took over for the Nu Haven Kapelye at the performance area on the corner of Orange and Crown, the crowd got even bigger. Along a row of booths set up for local nonprofits including the Shubert and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen raised some funds by giving passersby the chance to throw a ball ($5 for two balls, $10 for five balls) and dunk a city luminary. When this reporter passed, in the dunk tank, gamely wearing a wetsuit and full of cheer, was mayoral candidate Tom Goldenberg.

Model Decoy took the stage at 8 p.m., and the crowd was still enormous. In previous Night Markets, some businesses along Orange Street had stayed closed. Now many of them were open, and were full of potential customers. Somos and Tacos Los Gordos had lines out the door. Bark & Vine, the plant shop on the corner of Orange and Crown, had a line that snaked through the store. Artspace, which had a pop-up exhibition of historical paintings by Mark Breslin, had a steady stream of visitors through its gallery.

The Night Market, which started strong at the end of 2018 and came roaring back in the fall of 2021 after the pandemic shutdown, only continues to grow as a business, development, and community event, as the masses of people easily filled its expansion up Orange Street across the Chapel Street intersection. Though they take much organization and effort, the ingredients are simple: street closures, live music, and plenty of food, art, and craft vendors. With the market now firmly established, Friday’s event suggested that there may be room to expand even further. Perhaps future iterations might cover more streets, or perhaps it might happen more often. Even as it stands, however, the droves of New Haveners who showed up to enjoy the warm weather and see what vendors and businesses had to offer made the Night Market feel, in the middle of May, like an essential start to summer.