New Haven Land Trust photo / Thomas Breen photo
The late Ida Ruth Wells in 2011. Her family, including daughters Jacqueline Frazer (second from left) and Stephanie Wells-Gary (second from right) outside of the newly renamed corner on Friday (below.)
Dozens of friends, family, neighbors, and admirers came out to the corner of County Street and Henry Street in Dixwell Friday afternoon to celebrate the life of the late Ida Ruth Wells.The intersection, right outside of the Prescott Bush senior apartment complex where Wells lived, gardened, and advocated for public housing tenants rights for over a decade, will forever be known as Ida Ruth Wells Corner.
The corner renaming ceremony felt more like a family reunion than a formal event, with Wells’s children, grandchildren, and great-children sharing hugs and stories with Wells’ former neighbors and supporters, including Mayor Toni Harp and former New Haven Land Trust Executive Director (and current mayoral candidate) Justin Elicker.
A crowd of friends, family, and neighbors at Friday’s corner renaming.
Wells’s family came from as close as Newhallville and as far as the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens for the event. A cousin even hired a Brooklyn-based filmmaker to shoot a documentary about the ceremony, leading a camera and boom-mic crew to pull aside attendees every few minutes for interviews about Wells’s impact on her adopted home.
“She was strong-willed, straightforward, kind-hearted,” Wells’s daughter Stephanie Wells-Gary said while fighting back tears, “and she never shied away from any big moment that came her way.”
“This is black history in the making,” her other daughter Jacqueline Frazer said, looking up at the new street sign with admiration.
Earlier this year, Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winters worked with Wells’s former neighbors and friends to gather hundreds of community signatures in support of the corner renaming.
Born in 1921 in Newark, N.J., Wells moved to New Haven in 1986. She died in 2016, at the age of 95.
Friends and family remembered her as a tireless advocate for public housing tenants and as a fixture of the George Crawford Manor complex at 90 Park St., where she lived for decades before moving to Dixwell’s Prescott Bush apartments around 2008.
She served as the vice chair of the board of the city’s housing authority from 1991 to 2001, and as the president of Prescott Bush’s Tenant Rights Council for many years.
Wells-Gary at her mom’s former garden bed behind the Prescott Bush apartments.
She was also active with the city’s land trust, helping set up a community garden behind the senior apartment complex. Wells-Gary said her mom was particularly fond of growing tomatoes, cabbage, and collard greens, and taught her neighbors and fellow tenants by example that one need only learn to garden to harvest a lifetime’s worth of fresh fruits and vegetables.
“She was so terribly blunt,” Wells-Gary said with a smile about her mom. If she felt strongly about something, she would let you know with no equivocations. And what she cared most about in the world, she said, was making sure that people had enough to eat, especially seniors.
Prescott Bush tenant Percy Penn.
That’s how fellow Prescott Bush tenant and former TRC president Percy Penn remembered Wells, too. He said, if Mother Wells was holding a cookout at the apartment complex, no one was getting away without donating something to the cause.
“I don’t care if you were the FedEx man,” he said, everyone had to pitch in a little money or a little gardening time to help make the cookout happen.
Nearly every day, he said, people would need only look out back to find Wells pitched over the garden beds, plucking tomatoes and making sure the collard greens were just right.
Mayor Toni Harp (right).
The ceremony even brought together the two frontrunners in this year’s mayoral election, current Mayor Toni Harp and challenger Justin Elicker, who spoke on Friday not about their campaigns but about their mutual respect and love for the late community stalwart.
Harp said she had known Wells for over 25 years.
“One of the things that I remember about her is that at Thanksgiving and other holidays,” Harp said, “she would raise money from the community to make sure that no one went without.”
As a public housing tenant and TRC leader, she said, Wells was always pushing her neighbors to treat their homes with respect and to demand respect from those who worked at and visited the public housing complexes.
“She is someone that was a mentor to me,” the mayor said. “Someone that I greatly respected. Someone who understood the power of her voice, a power that could create change.”
Justin Elicker.
Elicker agreed. He referenced a video made by the New Haven Land Trust (available to watch above) in which Wells speaks about why she gardens.
“She describes a tomato,” Elicker said, “and why that single tomato is so important because it gives people nutrients. Because it teaches people about the land. It teaches people about where they came from. And it helps people have the nourishment to have a broader impact on so much more in everyone’s lives.”
Ida Ruth Wells corner.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full corner renaming ceremony.