Dwight Neighbors, Dream Big

A computer and tech hub for teens in the neighborhood. A new senior center. A package drop-off site to help prevent porch thefts. More traffic control for the congested intersection at Orchard and Chapel streets.

Those are just a few of the proposals at the top of the list as Dwight community members get ready to put together the neighborhood’s third plan in three decades.

Those ideas came to the fore Tuesday night during the latest monthly meeting of the Dwight Community Management Team.

In the towering gymnasium of Amistad Academy Middle School at 130 Edgewood Ave., Florita Gillespie had a request for the dozen or so attendees: Dream big.

Gillespie, who chairs the management team, made that request as the Dwight neighborhood is preparing for its third neighborhood plan. Neighbors will be putting together their ideas in the coming months. 

The very building the group of neighbors had all gathered in Tuesday night, she said, had been envisioned by the community in Dwight’s first neighborhood plan, way back in 1993. Nearly a decade and a half later, in 2007, the second neighborhood plan helped bring in a supermarket on Whalley Avenue — first Shaw’s, now Stop & Shop — where Comcast once had its offices.

“So, does a neighborhood plan work?” asked Gillespie. ​“Yes.”

This time around, the community already has a number of action items it plans to discuss in committee meetings over the next few months before convening at a charrette later in the fall or winter of this year to draw up designs and finalize the plan. Among them are proposals for a teen tech hub, senior center, porch-theft prevention, and traffic calming. 

“These are things that we want to happen,” Gillespie said. ​“And these are things that will be happening in the neighborhood, because we do what we say we’re going to do. It might take us a minute, but we do.”

Continuing to monitor and improve air quality is another key piece of the new neighborhood plan. Gillespie said that federal grants issued when President Joe Biden was in office had helped the Dwight area install PurpleAir monitors to track pollutants in the neighborhood, which the previous administration had earmarked as a ​“hot topic.” Now, she said, the neighborhood has to ​“convince our new administration in Washington that it is still a hot topic” and that they are ​“just hoping that our funds come through.”

Even with the uncertainty in Washington, Linda Townsend Maier, the executive director of the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, told the Independent that the neighborhood plan is set to be financed through a federal Health and Human Services grant that the corporation received in recent years for community economic development projects. ​“We’re very happy that we’re able to do a plan, and happy to be able to provide the funding for it,” she said. 

Per Townsend Maier, the neighborhood advisory board will be working in conjunction with Yale’s Urban Design Workshop and consult with New Haven’s City Plan Department to keep the city apprised of developments in the Dwight area as it moves forward with its Vision 2034 priorities. 

The first meeting to hash out the details of Dwight’s third neighborhood plan will take place in the first week of April, followed by more meetings through June and an additional meeting during the community management team’s usual summer off-season.