Park Benches Arrive — & Provoke Backlash

Neighbors succeeded in getting two wooden benches installed in a Wooster Square mini-park — and now in some cases are expressing second thoughts, because of who sits on them.

The benches arrived this summer in Lenzi Park, which sits at the corner of Jefferson and St. John Streets. The space is tended by the Friends of Lenzi Park and the Urban Resources Initiative.

The two wooden benches constitute the only seats in the park aside from a small, backless stone bench.

At a monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team on Tuesday night, Frank D’Amore, the deputy director of neighborhood and property services at the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative, reported receiving complaints from residents across the street from Lenzi Park that the benches attract undesirable behavior.

D’Amore, who lives in the area, said he drives by the park three to four times a day.

“I do see, from time to time, there’s homeless folks sitting on the bench,” he said, adding that he has noticed liquor bottles near the benches. He did not elaborate further on the neighbors’ complaints. He said he had invited the residents who expressed concerns about the benches to the management team meeting, but that they did not show up.

In the absence of the complainants, other neighbors defended the benches.

“Yes, we have found liquor bottles. Yes, we have found condoms. Yes, we have found syringes. Over the past ten years we have found fewer and fewer,” said Jerry Morin, a co-leader of the Friends of Lenzi Park. ​“These are also found at Wooster Square, they’re also found at the Green, and I don’t hear of any benches being removed as a solution.”

On Monday morning, Jenny Berkett, a co-leader of the Friends of Lenzi Park who lives a block away on Grand Avenue, said she hasn’t seen any illegal activity on the benches.

Since retiring eight years ago, she has become a steward of the park. An avid gardener, she tends to tomatoes, grape vines, and a wide range of flowers. She kneeled by a flower garden on Monday, cutting grass.

“A park without benches — it doesn’t make sense,” Berkett said. She and Morin advocated for benches in Lenzi Park for years. They collected 40 signatures from passersby in favor of the benches and worked with the city’s chief landscape architect, Katherine Jacobs to secure the seats for free.

Since then, she said, she has seen people picnicking on the benches. Once, someone celebrated a birthday there. Recently, volunteers from Emerge Connecticut planted a tree in honor of Ibrahim Shareef, who was shot and killed in July; according to Morin, they took respites on the benches as they worked.

An Issue Nationwide

Public benches have been the casualties of efforts to deter homeless individuals from utilizing public space in other cities across the country.

New York and Los Angeles have employed a controversial strategy known as ​“hostile architecture,” including removing the backs of benches, inserting seat dividers, roping off ledges, and replacing seats with ​“leaning benches” in order to discourage people from sleeping or lingering for a while. In D.C., benches have been removed from some public areas altogether.

When the city installed new benches in Wooster Square decades ago, it included armrests in the middle to discourage sleeping.

Housing advocates have criticized these measures, calling them targeted efforts to restrict public areas from the homeless which fail to address the root causes of housing insecurity.

“To simply have someone in the park who is not like you is not an affront,” Morin declared at the management team meeting.

“It’s really not landscaping for the people across the street,” Wooster Square neighbor Michael Davidson said of Lenzi Park.

“Not All Birds And Squirrels”

Gail Kuziel has owned the house at 4 Jefferson St. across from Lenzi Park for six years. She is one of the neighbors who complained about the benches. She said she never received the link for the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team meeting on Tuesday.

“Homeless people are in the park almost daily,” she said on Wednesday morning. ​“Now you put the benches, they’re going to sleep there.”

Kuziel sat on the steps to her front porch beneath a bright flag printed with butterflies, in between pots of carefully-tended flowers.

She loves her home, she said. She takes good care of her garden, and she puts out seeds in a stone bowl for squirrels and sparrows to regularly munch on. Her family visits her regularly, including her young grandson. Particularly since the pandemic began, she spends most of every day there, working from home as a real estate agent.

Kuziel said she likes the idea of park benches across the street, ​“but realistically, it’s not all birds and squirrels.”

She complained of groups of people she believes are homeless congregating at the benches and making noise as she tries to work. ​“They yell and shout at each other. It’s just not a normal situation,” she said.

Kuziel said that the groups of people stare at her when she comes out to garden. She added that she doesn’t want to have to close her shades ​“on a beautiful summer’s day.”

Over the six years that she has lived in her house, she said, she has picked up littered alcohol bottles and seen people defecate, smoke crack, and occasionally pass out on her block. She expressed concern that with the new benches, those activities will increase.

She added that she lives in New Haven ​“because I enjoy a variety of people, including homeless people” — just not sitting directly across the street from her bedroom window.

“I pay a lot of taxes here,” she said.

As she spoke, a pair of teenagers briefly sat on the benches to make out. Another individual walked by without sitting, scratching a lottery ticket.

She isn’t advocating for the park benches to be removed from the park entirely, Kuziel said. She just wants them to be a bit farther away from the sidewalk, and from her house.

“I just want it to be a little easier to be here,” Kuziel said. ​“It shouldn’t be so difficult to live in New Haven.”

Not A Bed

At the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team meeting, Lt. Sean Maher, the neighborhood’s top cop, said that the police haven’t received calls about the park since 2016, although they have heard complaints from community members. He added that the police officer who regularly patrols that area, Officer Ralph Consiglio, ​“has not seen behavior at the level that something needed to be done.”

As the group discussed the Lenzi Park benches, the management team’s chair, Caroline Smith, said she was confused about the concrete nature of the complaint.

“What I’ve heard so far is the perception of housing insecure folks [using the bench] — which is irrelevant,” she said.

“Everybody is welcome here,” Smith added later. She called for the group to consider ​“how perceptions around race and class affect our feelings of safety.”

In the Zoom meeting’s chat function, Andrew Giering was more blunt.

“Nobody wants to sleep on a park bench. Nobody wants to be addicted to drugs,” he wrote. ​“This group could use a dose of empathy.”

Throughout the management team meeting on Zoom, neighbors raised other quality-of-life concerns to the police and city officials present. Miriam Grossman brought up a loud downtown motorcycler who blasts Taylor Swift late at night. Mona Berman spoke of a person who kept walking back and forth along the sidewalk. Francesca Vignola of the Town Green Special Services District said she has noticed increasing ​“aggressive panhandling” late at night, and has asked her organization’s ambassadors to increase their presence at outdoor dining venues.

The concerns aired throughout the evening hinged, implicitly, on questions of what constitutes a ​“nuisance” that authorities need to curb. To what extent are noise and the presence of other people an inevitable part of living in a city? How should police or other public agents go about regulating non-violent uses of public space? And who gets to decide what is permissible in the Downtown and Wooster Square neighborhoods?

Over the course of the meeting, Smith interjected to explicitly raise those questions. ​“It keeps coming up to me, the difference between a nuisance and a crime,” she said in response to the motorcycle music complaint. ​“It makes me concerned, the idea that that experience could be criminalized in that way.”

Morin suggested that one way to regulate behavior in the park would be to shut it down at night. ​“There could be some signage: ​‘Parks closed after sundown,’” he said. ​“That’s something that I think could help us police the park.”

Lt. Maher hinted at another approach for encouraging respectful usage of Lenzi Park. ​“In my policing philosophy, positive activation of space is good,” he said. ​“If it’s full of people and life, you’re not gonna want to put a condom on.”