After a fire, a Victorian skeleton rises again on Elm Street. A cat corpse fares worse.
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We’ve been living in our rented apartment for about a year and a half. Our Edgewood neighborhood is mixed — many lower-income families living in rented apartments, religious Jews residing in proximity to their yeshivas (schools) and synagogues and Yale students and faculty. If you spend some time in the area, what you’ll notice are the numerous, mostly Victorian houses painted in a green/ beige/ burgundy color theme. These homes are owned by the Gan School, a group of Orthodox Jews who run a yeshiva in the neighborhood (not to be confused, though, with the Lubavitch Hasidim, who live on the other side of Whalley Avenue and have their own yeshiva and synagogue). You’ll also notice rows of gorgeous Victorians lining Edgewood Avenue and a bunch of grand mansions sprinkled here and there on Elm Street, Norton Street and Ellsworth Avenue, relics of a past era that have been converted into apartments and have mostly been kept clean and painted.
There are also many, many two- and three-family houses that don’t fit into those categories. Some have been purchased and renovated by Yale employees; some are quietly decaying. A small number scream out their neglected state to passers-by.
The people who live in these houses are as varied as the structures. This is truly an integrated neighborhood, with a multitude of ethnic and socio-economic categories. Wealth and abject poverty frequently live around the corner or the next block down from one another. Sometimes they’re next-door neighbors. But it seems to work, at least most of the time.
Last Saturday, it didn’t work at all. As my family and some friends walked home from synagogue on a gloriously rain-free Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath) day, we approached a trio of boys, probably about 10 or 11 years old, jumping around and hollering. One of the boys, wearing only a pair of shorts on a New England October day, had a long, slender metal rod in his hand and was using it to bash the hell out of something.
We assumed, due to the kids’ joyful demeanor, that they were beating on an old couch or a pile of bulk trash. Garbage has been collecting on the sides of the road and has posed an ongoing problem.
But no, the boys were smashing up a dead cat.
When we approached, the shirtless-and-shoeless-with-the-rod kid casually strolled across the street and made small-talk with a couple who were washing their car. The other two boys just looked at us. I asked them in my best grown-up authoritative tone to explain to me just-what-in-the-hell-they-were-doing, and did anyone know they were here doing it.
One boy, the largest, bit his lip and looked like he might start crying. I glared at him. All he told me was that the cat had been dead when they found it.
My husband told them to get away from it and they quietly slunk off.
About 20 years ago, this part of town was a disaster. What had been, at the turn of the 20th century, a grand and picturesque section of the city, had turned into a slum. The Jews, wealthy merchants and tradesmen had moved out, leaving the streets to fester and breed drugs, prostitution and any other kind of illicit activity you can imagine. The once-dignified houses rotted and burned. You can find this story in any of a thousand American cities; nothing new or notable here.
But this area got a second chance. In the early 1980s, the Gan School purchased a vacant, former public school building on Elm Street and began taking out the trash. The drug dealers, prostitutes and their customers were given notice; if that wasn’t enough, their pictures were taken, their license plates were noted, and they were “outed” on fliers tacked to utility poles. Houses were bought up, often for pitifully low sums, and security fences and lighting were the first improvements added. The neighborhood started to breathe again, and ultimately it blossomed.
Last week, I was asked to put together a story for the New Haven Independent about how a stretch of Elm Street has been making a comeback. About a year ago, one of the houses nearby had caught fire at around lunchtime. There was a napping woman inside. A bicyclist saw smoke coming from the building and ran in to make sure that no one was inside. He woke her up and probably saved her life. The house has been renovated and is all nice and shiny. A block away, a young couple bought a ramshackle house for a song and turned it into a natural cedar-shingled beauty that could’ve been transplanted here from Cape Cod. A few more houses have pretty gardens, artistic handmade fences; most of the houses still have gorgeous original stained-glass windows that were all the rage in the 1920’s, back when most of the area was developed.
On Monday morning, I drove by the scene of the cat’s demise, directly across the street from the house that had burned last year. At 10:45 a.m., nearly two full days later, the remains were still there in the stretch of grass between the sidewalk and the street. So were the old sofas and some boxes from someone’s bathroom renovation that have been there for at least three consecutive Saturdays; my Shabbat walks have become a way to keep track of the timeline of the street’s decline.
When I got home I called the neighborhood alderwoman, Liz McCormack, and the Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist, Elaine Braffman, and discussed the dead cat in both specific and farther-reaching terms. As a result, the cat was taken away sometime on Monday and much of the trash has since been removed. But the neighborhood’s collective apathy that allowed this situation to exist will probably be with us for a while. I’m hesitant to write the latest chapter in a story about a neighborhood on the rebound. Like the hypothetical cat with nine lives (not the one in this story), will Elm Street make a comeback? The jury’s still out.