Kian Ahmadi photo
Digging holes and planting flowers in the peanut on Friday.
Crackling thunder and a downpour of rain didn’t stop roughly 15 Westville neighbors from venturing outside Friday morning on a traffic-calming-infrastructure-beautification effort.
West side neighbors and green thumb enthusiasts planted flowers in the soil at the peanut-shaped roundabout at Chapel Street and Yale Avenue, with plants and equipment provided by the Urban Resources Initiative (URI).
The volunteers began by carrying plastic pots of flowers into the center of the peanut and digging holes for them. Their work was soon cut short — albeit temporarily — as the grey sky opened up and doused the crew in rain.
The group waited out the rain and snacked on peanut granola bars under the covered patio of Chapel Street resident Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, who helped organize the event.
Ostfeld-Johns lives directly adjacent to the intersection and said her young son developed an interest in cars from how often he’d go out into the street and pick up parts and license plates from accidents.
Ostfeld-Johns emphasized the importance of maintaining the space, and said neighbors undertook Friday’s work because “people want their city looking beautiful.”
The worried mother instigated the process of changing the once dangerous intersection by submitting a Complete Streets application to the city with the support of her neighbors and Westville Alder Adam Marchand.
Now the peanut-shaped roundabout is successfully slowing down traffic, Ostfeld-Johns said, and the new route “makes perfect sense.”
Although the rain didn’t fully stop, neighbors returned to the planting. URI intern Roan Hollander said she picked native plants like purple echinacea and butterfly milkweed that are hardy and good for pollination for this project.
“I like things looking nice” says Kate Bradley as she bent down to place a cluster of Black-eyed Susans in a hole on the peanut.
Black-eyed Susan flowers inside the "peanut."
Bradley said she’s been working on neighborhood planting projects for almost 30 years. Nearby, rising Amity High School senior David Ke pushed soil into a hole for some Purple Echinacea. Ke said he heard about the event on the Yale School of the Environment’s website and made the trip from Orange to help out.
Hollander said that if the plants hold up well, URI plans to come back to plant even more flowers in the peanut in the months to come.
Yale graduate student Ben Webster digging beside Hollander.