Allan Appel Photo
A drab stretch of wall beneath the I‑91 overpass at Middletown Avenue and Front Street gives a grey, dull, cold concrete welcome — really a non-welcome — to Fair Haven. That may soon change with an artistic facelift.
Not from the state Department of Transportation, which owns the wall, but thanks to Fair Haveners who voted to spend $7,500 of public money to use art to improve the northern gateway to their neck of the city.
The project was the highest vote-getter in a ranked-choice voting process conducted by the Fair Haven Community Management Team’s executive board and announced at its Thursday night regular monthly meeting, which drew 40 neighbors to the community room of the branch library on Grand Avenue.
Seventeen out of 31 members were eligible to cast their ballots online, reported the group’s recording secretary, David Weinreb. They decided to five projects, with Susan Regan’s beautification of the underpass through painting, as being the most popular.
FHCMT board members David Weinreb and Diane Ecton
As community management teams are doing all over the city, the Fair Haveners were deciding how to spend $20,000 that city government’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) has granted each community management team this year to spend through the Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP).
Members at this particular management team were eligible to vote if they had documented attendance at a minimum of five monthly meetings over the last year.
The online voting followed a spirited in-person presentation by their proponents of the a total of 13 projects at last month’s meeting.
Susan Regan’s project description says, “Paint the underpass entry from Middletown Avenue onto Front Street to create a welcoming river representation to Fair Haven.”
The project is part of an ongoing nearly decade-long effort by persevering neighbors to enhance the whole entryway, including new sea wall, playgrounds, and splash pad at nearby Dover Beach Park. In recent years, neighbors have removed debris and replaced tossed out mattresses with stones of pink granite on the south side of Front Street.
They have also worked with the authorities to remove overgrowth of invasive species between the river and roadway, reduce midnight dumping in the area, and, in general to bring out the look and feel of Fair Haven as “fishing village” rather than a riverine dumping ground.
The most noticeable recent major beautification project has been the decoration of the stanchions on the south side of the road, facing the concrete wall, with large-scale portraits that photographer Ian Christmann has made of neighbors, birds, happy kayakers on the river. Read about all that, which was funded in part by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven’s Quinnipiac Fund, here.
Regan’s proposed riverine representation on the facing wall — details remain to be worked out — will complement all that.
The other projects voted to receive NPIP funding were:
• $4,125 for three summer job positions for Fair Haveners at New Haven Farms
• $3,000 to fund this summer’s edition of Quinnipiac Riverfest
• $2,500 for JoAnn Moran’s Lots of Fish group to create a series of crosswalk and storm drain art projects
• $3,000 to help subsidize a Saturday academy with cultural activities organized by ARTE, the local Latino heritage organization