A new couple on a gem of a one-block street have joined with neighbors to bring about a turnaround in Beaver Hills.
The gem is Ruby Street. Michael Doran and Douglas Knapp bought a house there in January — and went right to work taking on trash and crime.
Saturday they helped organize a party that put the results of all their work on display.
Michael Doran (pictured) said that he and his fellow block watchers were proud and wanted to celebrate how they were keeping the neighborhood safe — doing so, he added pointedly, without recourse to guns.
Their weapons, said Doran, are vigilant neighbors and a good relationship with Sgt. Stephen Shea (pictured below on the left) and the Whalley Edgewood Beaver Hill (WEB) management team, in which they participate.
Doran and Douglas Knapp (on the far right in the picture at the top of this story, along with long-time clean-up organizer Jim Travers and the block watch’s representative to the management team, Laurie Hillson) lived in a Hamden condo before coming to Ruby Street. “I’m a New Yorker,” said Doran, “and our realtor said this neighborhood was more like New York, tight, people watching out for each other. That appealed to me. And it was true.
“This house was a mess. We acquired it through foreclosure, but it’s a beauty, 1896, and we rehabbed it, put in the flowers, and all, but immediately saw we had to get to know our neighbors and work together.”
Doran’s idea of helping to keep the neighborhood safe has included, one month ago, videotaping a drug deal of serious proportion occurring right in front of his house. “Douglas and I,” he said, “videotaped the whole thing right from our sunroom there. We contacted the NHPD, who were helpful, sort of, and then it went to the FBI, and those dealers don’t appear here any more.”
On another occasion, he said, he noticed something else unsavory, which also aroused a New York chutzpah-inspired response: “Prostitution, a man and a boy, right in a car down the street. So, I took our very serious pit bull, and the two of us went for a walk. Those guys disappeared too.”
Between the clean-up, and this kind of proactive new neighbor inviting him to Ruby Street, it’s no wonder the mayor showed up. “However,” said Elaine Braffman, the area’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) specialist (holding step-grandkid Anna), “you should be a little more careful, Michael, whether you’re a New Yorker or not.” They were showing off, proudly, some of the dozens of bags of refuse they and fellow Beaver Hills Southwest block watchers had picked up. “This corner was the worst,” Doran said, speaking of Osborne and Blake. “You should have seen the needles and the condoms and the junk. You can’t imagine the drug paraphernalia we picked up. Sure there’s drugs and crime, but the neighborhood and the house we have with all its charm…
“Look,” he said, gazing down the slanting street with many 1950s-era homes, some graced by little copses of pine trees, “we can be part of the important changes here. A lot of action in New Haven is downtown, but it’s happening here too and we’re part of it. Hey, I might even think about running for alderman.”
“Hey, Michael, no comment,” said Braffman, who before working at LCI served a long stint as Ward 28’s alderwoman. “I mean take it easy… If you’re going to run, don’t do it for the heck of it. Have a good reason.”
In general, members of this association, which combines block watches not only from Ruby and Blake streets, but Osborne, Roydon, Diamond, Pelham, Dyer, and Wellington streets as well, were well satisfied with the local community policing and the leadership of Sgt. Shea in that regard. Newcomer Doran called it amazing. Laurie Hillson, one of the old-timers, and Jim Travers, who lives on Diamond Street, and had organized successful tree and planting collaborations several years ago with Yale and the city’s green space programs, both said the relationship goes way back.
“Years ago, they wanted to put a topless bar on the corner of Fitch and Blake,” said Hillson, “where Cohen’s Key Shop is today. The city helped us keep that out. And that’s what it’s about. You have a partnership. They help you, you help them. That’s what you do when you’re part of a community.”
That was evident when the block’s newest family, the Antoines, moved in a month ago, right across from Doran and Knapp. It’s the first house for this young family, and they love it, and the block.
“Michael came over and introduced himself,” said Patrice Antoine, holding her one-month old Nia, as husband John and year-and-a-half-old Khalil looked on. “And then Laurie, and all the others. We discovered we had friends at the other end of the block, but had no idea the association was so strong and friendly. We’ve lucked out.”
Six Degrees
The mayor came to charming, one-block-long Ruby Street on Saturday afternoon, one of the few streets in New Haven, he said, where he’s never set foot. He came to mingle and politic, of course, but also to meet some of the new movers and shakers of the Beaver Hills Southwest Association, one of the most active of Elm City’s block watches, who had invited him to party after a major clean-up of the Blake Street area. He also found himself right in the middle of a six-degrees-of-separation moment, New Haven style. Chatting with this woman, Pat McCardle, he discovered that both their dads had served as city cops at the same time. And both their dads had brought home bagels and lox from the late-night shift guarding the Jewish delis and other stores on Legion Avenue, before the area was wiped out in the dubious urban renewal of the 1960s.
“I was probably the only kid,” the mayor reminisced, “on the [Italian] East Shore who had bagels and lox every Sunday morning. My dad used to walk Meyer, from the old M & T Deli, to his car, because Meyer [the M of M & T, T being his wife Thelma] had the day’s receipts, and in exchange Meyer gave him the bagels. Mmm, they were really good.”
“I used to hang out at Haddad’s market. It became Maglio’s,” said McCardle. “Not far from Howard Avenue, where I grew up.”
“Really! In those days we didn’t have police substations the way we do now, but my dad was more or less stationed right there, at the corner of Howard and Minor.”
“No kidding.”
“You remember Catapano’s Auto Body on Kimberly?” asked the mayor. McCardle wasn’t quite sure. “My dad dragged me there a lot. I spent a lot of time on Kimberly.”
“Well,” said McCardle, “I think you’re doing a great job.”
Sgt. Shea and the mayor chatted about how the deployment of police shifts was different in the mayor’s father’s day. Behind them, barely visible, Maurice Levy, age 93, who had built his house in 1951 for $18,000, and Bernice Estes, neighbors on the street for decades, were eating corn on the cob that Doran and Knapp had prepared.
They reminisced about when trucks and even horse-drawn wagons had come down quiet Ruby Street bearing blocks of ice in the summertime.
Laurie Hillson did them one better. She was born a Houser, and she proved it with an album of photographs of the West Rock Wagon and Auto Works, which her family had established on nearby Diamond Street and on Ruby back in the 1880s. (According to Doris Townshend’s wonderful book on New Haven street names, Diamond is named for the Diamond Match Company, established in Westville in 1881; fancy dictated, she surmises, that a nearby street, Ruby, must be called after another gem.)
On the site of the house over Hillson’s left shoulder stood her family’s business, photographs in the album she proudly displayed. “They built trucks for the West Haven Trucking Company, Ballantine Beer, and Frisbee Pie. And before that, look at these carriages. This was one of the centers of the carriage industry in New Haven. My family built them for the old Clark’s Dairy, for the Union Pacific Tea Company, and, look, Dixwell Hand Laundry.”
While many of the old streets of New Haven are gone, as the mayor said, ironically, “thanks to Dick Lee,” many are left, where not only the future beckons but history also lives, and where the two nourish each other in the present tense. Like on quiet one-block Ruby Street. No wonder he paid a visit.