Thomas Breen file photo
Mr. Dye, holding court at the Hill South CMT.
Johnny Dye, a community activist known to many as the “Mayor of the Hill,” died early on Monday morning in his home. He was 84 years old.
He died of progressive supranuclear palsy and dementia after spending the Thanksgiving holiday with family, according to Sarah McIver, a long-time friend and fellow Hill South Community Management Team leader.
Dye was born in Batesville, Mississippi, and spent much of his childhood in Memphis, Tennessee. He moved to New Haven as a teenager in 1959, and he lived in the Hill for nearly the rest of his life.
About two years ago, when he could no longer climb the stairs of his periwinkle Arthur Street house, he and his wife Martha moved to a more accessible home out of town, in Hamden. “He moved out of the city,” said Hill resident Angela Hatley, “but he couldn’t stay out of the neighborhood.” Mr. Dye continued to show up to community meetings and celebrations. The Hill was inextricable from his life.
And of course, Dye was inextricable from the Hill. His name joins the name of his late dear friend Vincent DiLauro at the base of a newly-installed clock in Kimberly Square, in honor of their teamwork in making the Hill better.
Over the course of his life, he held many official titles: he served for over two decades as a Democratic Party co-chair for Ward 5, chaired the Hill Community Management Team, founded a neighborhood block watch, and filled in as an alder for nine months in 2015.
But he was perhaps best known for his commitment to grassroots community building — which took the form of field trips for local kids, neighborhood cleanups, and backyard cookouts organized with his wife Martha. In recent years he donated, unprompted, to the management team’s annual party. He would gather a group of neighborhood children to hand out water bottles to runners in the New Haven Road Race — a simple act of kindness with the underlying lesson that neighbors take care of one another, even if they are strangers.
That ethos may have motivated Mr. Dye to knock on Sarah McIver’s front door 26 years ago. McIver had just moved into the Hill when Dye and his co-chair at the time knocked on her Arbor Street door. “They welcomed me to the neighborhood, and sat in my living room as if they had been there the whole time,” said McIver.
It was the pair’s warm welcome that prompted McIver, now the Hill South Community Management Team chair, to first get involved in community advocacy.
Dye loved to door-knock. He loved to meet his neighbors. He could be gentle, but he also had fire. He once dumped a pile of garbage outside the house of former Board of Alders President Tomas Reyes, in protest of trash pickup lags. And Democratic Town Chair Vin Mauro could count on Dye for the occasional threat of a cane whack when needed. Both politicians recounted these stories to a reporter with affection in 2020.
Dye was a husband and a father. He built a career as a mechanic and engineer at the aerospace company Pratt and Whitney.
By the end of his life, Dye had a quiet, warbly voice. When he spoke, the people around him tended to hush so they could hear each word. “When he spoke, you listened,” Hatley said. “He didn’t waste words.”
One of the last things I heard him say was at the unveiling of Kimberly Square clock named after him. “God bless everyone,” he said, keeping his remarks short and sweet. “My neighbors, and my future neighbors.”