Work crews crushed to bits a piece of the Hill’s and New Haven’s controversial past — and possibly a promising future. Activists Jackie James and Maurice “Blest” Peters said a developer double-crossed the neighborhood.
James, the neighborhood’s alderwoman, and Peters, a youth worker and co-chair of a community group called CORD, are mourning the demolition this week of the house at 35 Sylvan Ave. The house served as one of the headquarters in the early ’70s for New Haven’s Black Panther Party chapter. Neighbors like James and Peters were planning to revive the spot as a home for a renewed free breakfast program for kids, and an after-school hangout for kids and parents. (Click here for an earlier story detailing the idea.)
And they thought Will Smith of Boston-based Intercontinental Developers Inc. — who bought up blocks near the new Yale cancer hospital with plans to remake the Hill — was going to help them.
After meeting with Smith, they said, they decided not to protest his plans for the larger neighborhood or take other steps to pressure him or the city to preserve the house at 35 Sylvan.
Peters said Smith even came to a youth program Peters ran last summer at Career High School and promised to save the building.
Then this week Smith’s crews began tearing down nine houses along two sides of the block of Sylvan directly across from Career. 35 Sylvan was history — destroyed history, not preserved.
Now, vowed Jackie James, Smith’s path to receiving public approvals for some of his pending plans won’t go so smoothly.
“If you’ll lie to kids, you’ll lie to anybody,” James said Thursday. “We weren’t asking for a million dollars. We were asking them to give us back what was ours. It was part of our history. Part of our culture. Part of our community.”
Reached on his cellphone, Will Smith (pictured) refused to answer a question about whether he made that promise.
Instead, he promised to call back with an answer. Then he hung up. By press time he hadn’t called back. Nor did he respond to subsequent phone messages seeking comment. Two city officials said Smith did everything by the book. They said he took out the proper permits for demolition, made sure the buildings weren’t listed on any historical registries, and has maintained good lines of communications with the city about his brewing plans.
Smith and partners have bought up 17 parcels of land in the area bounded by Howard, Legion, Sylvan, and Ward streets, as well as “Lot E,” a block away across Legion Avenue. He’s building a garage, stores and lab space on Lot E. His plans for the now-demolished stretch of Sylvan Avenue are less certain; he hasn’t revealed them. He convinced the city to rezone the area so he has the option of building a dense mix of stores, residences and offices. Once he has a solid plan, he’ll need to get another approval, and neighbors will have a chance to weigh in. Relations have at times been tense between Intercontinental and neighbors wary of gentrification around the hospital.
A Symbol
The Panthers, a black-led revolutionary group calling for armed self-defense by citizens in African-American neighborhoods, had several headquarters around New Haven during its brief life here in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The central event of the New Haven Panther era — the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a Panther falsely accused of being a spy — took place when the headquarters was on Orchard Street, before the move back to Sylvan. The FBI and local police closely monitored doings at the Panthers offices. The Panthers briefly ran free-breakfast programs for schoolchildren in Newhallville and the Hill, the latter at 35 Sylvan (shown in file photo circa 2007).
The period, and the house, symbolize the two poles of the ongoing historical debate about the Panthers. When fans burnish the group’s past, they inevitably bring up the breakfast program (and often only the breakfast program) as an example of positive community organizing. Or they cite the government’s suppression of the party: The New Haven chapter indeed crawled with government spies. The cops illegally eavesdropped on Panther doings in their various headquarters.
Opponents speak of the violence the group espoused and the violence that accompanied their presence in town.A local documentary about the period in New Haven, Next Question, included reminiscences of gunfire between cops and Panthers at 35 Sylvan, and adults keeping children in bathtubs to avoid the bullets.
“For the divisiveness the Panthers brought to the city during their brief stay, this house should be destroyed and no marker left,” one reader, Ralph Rechtenberg, commented in a debate on the Independent last year.
Opined another reader: “The Black Panther Party was a militant destructive party that preached violence against the police, government, and other black people who were not down with their program. A small minority of their work was related to helping the community. But anyway, I still believe the house should stay because whether you think their history is good, bad, or undecided, they played a major part in the turmoil of the 60’s, and 70’s in this city and the country. But historians should not glorify their work. Portray them as they were.”
Those divergent views are one reason to preserve the house, argued preservationist Anstress Farwell.
“Part of being engaged in the future is remembering the complexity of the debates,” Farwell said Thursday. “Any political movement has multiple meanings,” has its combination of “earnest” idealists working for the common good as well as “scam artists.”
The house “should have been preserved” as a “reminder of what it means when you commit to something,” said Farwell, who heads the Urban Design League. “It gave you an idea of the intimate and personal setting that shows this form of political engagement. You would look at that second floor and think, ‘People because of their commitment or effort had to live in dangerous circumstances. They had to dive into bathtubs with their children.” Farwell said such a site offered a “corrective” to the more prevalent image of the Panthers in New Haven: the mass rallies on the Green.
“I’m outraged. This didn’t have to happen,” Farwell said. “It’s so gratuitous and unnecessary, a slap in the face. The developer got everything he asked for [from the city]. The one thing the neighborhood asked for was to save the Panther house.”
Hill activists James and Peters, too, spoke of the house’s importance in terms of both the past and the future.
Whatever the truth about the events of the Panther era, and the activities of the party, the house, and the party itself, retain the power to inspire people in the Hill and elsewhere in black New Haven. Even black cops who probably would have been locking up Panthers even if they’d been around then. (Check out Malcolm Davis’s comments in this article.) For a new generation of activists like Maurice Peters, trying to address youth crime and inactivity, poverty, and the needs of working-class neighbors in the face of upscale development, the resonant message doesn’t involve the tactics of the Panther era. It involves the message of self-determination, black pride, and community organizing.
Three of Peters’ uncles, Harold and Daniel Peters and Mark Jones, were involved with the local party, contributing artwork for posters and the newspaper.
Maurice Peters himself, who’s now 41, was around 2 at the time. He tries to young people through efforts like “Uniting Our Youth,” the summer program Will Smith visited last summer; and the Street Outreach Worker team.
He also helped CORD push Yale-New Haven Hospital for “community benefits” during the approvals process for the Smilow cancer hospital.
“[Smith and Intercontinental] saw us organizing around the cancer center. They knew the community could come out,” Peters said. So, he argued, Smith offered the promise on the Panther house to defuse organizing efforts against his project. Peters said he now regrets taking the bait.
“This sets a precedent,” he said. “This is part of the gentrification [of the neighborhood]. This is historical to us.”
Jackie James said neighbors had already promised to volunteer at a new community center to be housed at 35 Sylvan: At the breakfast program, to help set up daycare and afterschool teen programs. She claimed Smith promised to move the house to one of the two vacant lots across the street if he decided he needed to remove it from its then-current sot.
James said she did receive word from Smith that demolition was going to begin on the block, but not that house. She said that because of previous promises, she assumed the Panther house was safe.
Good Relationship With City Hall
Smith took out the required permits to demolish nine buildings on that block, including four facing Sylvan, according to the city’s chief building official, Andy Rizzo.
Chrissy Bonanno, the deputy in charge of city government’s economic development department, said Smith has done a good job informing City Hall of developments with his various projects.
“Will came and did all the proper due diligence” before demolishing, Bonanno said. “He notified local official well in advance of his plans. We’ve been in constant discussions with him” about all his plans. She said Smith also made a point of checking the state and national historical registries to make sure no restrictions would have prevented him from demolishing the homes on the block. (The homes had been abandoned and were in some cases quite rundown.)
There’s official history, and other valid kinds of history, countered Jackie James.
“Just because it wasn’t listed, doesn’t mean it wasn’t important to us,” she said of 35 Sylvan. “This was blatant disrespect.”