Allan Appel Photo
Lead volunteer organizer Jesse Hardy lived at 185 Ashmun.
Shirlee Gray never called the old Elm Haven apartments, where she raised six kids, “the projects.” Nor did her neighbors. They identified where they lived by whether their buildings rose two or three stories — or eight to ten. Hence the name on the T‑shirts they all wore to Scantlebury Park: “Ashmun Street High Rise/Low Rise Reunion.”
The joyous reunion took place Saturday in the Dixwell neighborhood. Several hundred “brick babies,” as they called themselves, for the second annual picnic reuniting neighbors from the old Elm Haven public-housing complex, which came down two decades ago to make way for the modern Monterey Place development.
Streets like Southeast and Northeast Drive are gone.
A volunteer committee had been trying to put the reunion together for several years. Last year’s first effort suffered from a rain-out. It took Jesse Hardy and a half dozen stalwarts to use email and Facebook to get the word out this year. And it was successful. “Brick ‘Babies” from as far away as Florida, Virginia, and Louisiana came for the occasion.
They included Michael Gary, who drove down from New Hampshire, where he is director of admissions at the Phillips Exeter Academy. He recalled a place that may have looked terrible on the outside, “but it was my neighborhood.”
“He made us his family,” said Karen Draughn, a star point guard at Cross (‘76-‘80) whom Morrisey guided in the college admission process.
One person who spent a lot of time in that neighborhood from 1970 on was a white man, now-retired police officer Tom Morrisey (pictured). At the reunion he was giving and receiving hugs from people he hadn’t seen in decades, He remembered the clubs and the outings, the college advisement, how he brought kids to his West Haven home to meet his family.
“I was into slot-car racing, and he [Morrisey] saw I was passionate about it,” recalled Gary. It didn’t take long before Morrissey set aside a room in the police substation for the tracks.
Lillian Morrison (with Ireal Credle) moved to 16 Northeast Dr. in 1956 and raised 8 kids there. If the buildings were still there, “I’d be the first to move back,” she said.
When Gary was next into electric football, Morrisey helped the kids set up a league.
And that was the tip of the iceberg of a cop’s making a whole neighborhood of 3,000 people in a way like an extension of his own family.
“Tom was the first white person to care about inner-city kids,” said Derrick Miller, who grew up in a low-rise on now-gone Southeast Drive.
Gary and her son Michael, who’s “giving back” by establishing the Inner City Lacrosse League, now in season two.
The impulse for the reunion was more than nostalgic.
“Being older, I wanted to see people I hadn’t seen in 30 years,” said Jesse Hardy.
The gathering had an urgent other purpose. “When these kids see our huge love for each other, that shows them. These kids are our ‘nephews,’ They see our love for each other, it increases the peace,” Hardy said as he flipped dozens of burgers that the committee provided.