Parks Commission OKs Homicide Memorial

Plans to build a new memorial park dedicated to New Haven victims of gun violence are one big step closer to becoming a reality now that the city’s Parks Commission has officially signed off on the project concept and location.

During Wednesday night’s regular monthly meeting of the Parks Commission at the city Parks Department’s headquarters at 720 Edgewood Ave., commissioners unanimously approved the project concept for The Lost Generation Memorial Garden.

The commissioners agreed to let the project’s originator and motivating force, Marlene Miller Pratt, build the memorial park on a half-acre plot of city park land on Valley Street just west of Blake Street in the shadow of West Rock.

The commission’s approval is contingent on whether or not Pratt and her supporters can raise by themselves all of the money that they need to make the park a reality. On Wednesday night, Pratt said that the park as currently envisioned will cost upwards of $600,000 to build. The Urban Resources Initiative (URI), a local community forestry nonprofit affiliated with the Yale School of Forestry, is serving as the project’s fiduciary.

Pratt, who lost her son to gun violence in West Hills back in 1998, presented the commissioners with a pitch that she has been honing for nearly two years. She also showed off a sleek, professional design put together by the local architecture firm Svigals + Partners that recently wowed Westville neighbors at last week’s Westville/West Hills Community Management Team meeting.

“We wanted to develop an area that was going to be beautiful,” she said about her and her partners’ goals for the Valley Street memorial, ​“so that we wouldn’t have to go to the cemetery to visit our children. Because when you go to the cemetery, it’s so desolate. You’re looking at all the stones and it reminds you of that tragedy.”

This memorial park, she said, will balance the heartbreak of losing a family member or friend to gun violence with the serenity of birds, trees, flowers, and a view of West Rock Park.

Click here to download the brochure for the proposed memorial garden.

As at last week’s Westville management team meeting, Pratt described the various elements of the new park as including wind chimes to mask the sound of traffic, a ​“magnitude path” with bricks engraved with the names and dates of city victims of gun violence, and ​“memory tiles” engraved with images or memories of those lost.

She also introduced the parks commissioners to her idea for a statue at the center of the park that, inspired by the monument to Nelson Mandela located in the area of South Africa where he was first arrested in 1962, will use negative space and tricks of perspective to present different visions of parent and children figures depending on where the viewer is standing.

The family will appear intact when one enters the garden, she said. Then the children will disappear as one approaches the statue, and then reappear alongside their parents again the further the viewer gets from the park’s center.

Fair Haven Alder and Parks Commissioner Ernie Santiago asked Pratt if she already had a list of names in mind for the memorial.

Pratt said she did. She discussed that very subject with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Tuesday.

“When I met with the governor,” she said, ​“he asked how far I wanted to go back.” Initially she said she wanted the names of city victims recognized at the memorial to reach back to 1980.

Malloy, she said, encouraged her to reach even further back to 1968, to coincide with the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. fifty years ago this year.

She said that Malloy also asked if the memorial could include the names of Bridgeport and Hartford victims of gun violence.

“My response was,” she said, ​“let New Haven be the model for them.”

Pratt said told the commissioners that she has gotten signatures of approval for the project from both the Westville management team and from Valley Street neighbors.

“They flyered every house in the neighborhood for that meeting,” city Parks Director Becky Bombero said about one of the community conversations that Pratt and her supporters hosted this summer.

Santiago asked Pratt who would clean up the memorial in case of vandalism.

Pratt said that she and fellow mothers of victims of gun violence are currently signing up groups of volunteers to tend to do basic clean up at the park every Saturday. She said that part of the $600,000 she’s looking to raise will be dedicated to paying for graffiti clean up in the case of vandalism.

“I’ve lost family members to city violence,” said Hill North Community Management Team member Howard Boyd. who was in attendance at Wednesday night’s meeting. ​“The project is beautiful. I think we’re at that point where our city now is a little bit more mature.”

He said that local families and friends will know that a memorial to victims of gun violence is not to be tampered with. And to those who don’t recognize the seriousness of the garden, he said, advocates for the park need to go into their communities and educate.

“I think we have to do it,” he said. ​“We have to police ourselves and our community and our projects that we’re working on here today.”

An earlier version of this story follows:

Homicide Memorial Takes Shape

The last time Marlene Miller Pratt was before the Westville-West Hills Community Management Team about a memorial for homicide victims, she had a new location and new partners to share. This time she brought a new vision of what the memorial could look like — and it drew oohs and aahs.

Previously, Pratt had shown just a rough sketch drawn in pencil by an amateur’s hand. But once local architectural firm Svigals + Partners got involved on a pro bono basis, the vision got taken up a notch.

Pratt unveiled that reimagined sketch at the most recent management team meeting last week at Mauro Sheridan School, complete with the tree of life that she had always envisioned at the center. She pointed to wind chimes that will mask the sound of traffic from Valley Street, and memory tiles and path of pavers that feature the names of those lost in the city to gun violence since the 1980s.

She also showed off the connections to West Rock looming above and the nearby West River meandering near the outskirts of what is being called the Lost Generation Memorial.

“The garden represents something the city has lost,” she said. ​“All of these children represent a lost generation.”

The memorial, which would be located on Valley Street on city-owned property, would offer a place beyond the cemetery where families who lost their children to gun violence can continue to mourn but also channel their grief, according to Pratt, who lost her son, Gary, to gun violence in 1998.

With the new design, it would also be a beautiful reflection garden, a showpiece for the whole neighborhood, she said. Pratt started the conversation about the garden almost two years ago.

She made the rounds to several management teams, initially pitching the memorial garden as part of Edgewood Park. When neighbors near the park objected, she and the other mothers searched for other sites in the city with the help of the city parks department before landing on Valley Street.

Since that time they’ve garnered support from U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and Mayor Toni Harp. They’ve developed a partnership with the Urban Resources Initiative and Svigals + Partners.

Pratt said Svigals came up with five different designs to pick from, and this one jumped off the page. Now she and the mothers have to figure out how to fund the building of the memorial garden to make it a reality. Pratt said they’re looking to raise an estimated $300,000 to cover the cost of building out the memorial.

“I still have a hard time saying it,” she said of the amount. But she said ultimately getting the memorial garden done will be worth it.

“It will be a reminder to the city that losing children to gun violence is not OK,” she said.