When Erna Caron told Ying-Ying Ma about living in Chatham Square, a lasting story was born — about a meat freezer, about a family named Finnegan, about a river and oysters, about a multiracial urban “village,” about community most of all.
The pleasure and efficacy of photography and reminiscence as means to build neighborhood and relationships, especially inter-generational ones, were on moving display in “Chatham Square: Portrait of a Neighborhood,” an exhibition of local oral histories and photographs at the Mary Wade Home. The exhibition, on public display Wednesday night, featured the work of seven Yale undergraduates, such as senior anthropology major Ma. During the winter and spring they were paired with seven people, young and, well, not so young, such as Caron, who live around the Chatham Square neighborhood around Clinton Avenue in Fair Haven.
The students, many anthropology majors interested in ethnographic studies, would record the residents about their lives in the neighborhood. In turn the residents would convey their perspectives on Fair Haven through photographs they took reflecting what they particularly loved about the area. It would also be an opportunity for residents to express their passionate regard for their historic “village,” and in so doing help counter the reputation this quiet and close knit patch of Fair Haven still has among those who mistakenly continue to think it riddled by drugs and crime.
“It’s strange. I didn’t expect it, but all I wanted to talk to Ying about were the local stores I remember,” said Caron. “She tried to get me talk about other things, but those old stores kept coming back. I was born around Chatham Square and I raised my children here. I loved the mom and pop stores, the first one on Chatham and Downing that served, you know, bread, milk, the staples. But then the owner got a freezer and began to sell meat, and when business picked up he hired a helper named Finnegan. I grew up with Finnegan’s children; one became a dentist, and one married the local milkman. Finnegan used to take the meat you bought and grind it up right in front of you. Now those stores are houses, but it’s still beautiful here. I love it, and I’m proud to stand up for Chatham Square no matter what some people might think.”
The event, collaboratively organized by the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association, the Yale-New Haven Ethnography Project, the New Haven Oral History Project, and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, turned out to be a living history eye-opener for the students as well. Many, though sophisticated in the ways of far-off cultures, had not ventured all that far from Yale’s downtown enclave. Many had not, until the beginning of the project, even heard of Chatham Square. Nor had many of the young interviewers experienced where they grew up quite the same passionate attachment to the Quinnipiac River and its views, the oystering history, and the generally deep sense of place evoked by the interviewees. That appeared to be one of the big surprises.
For example, Austin Woerner said that he had no idea his talks with local wood carver John Bontatibus (in the photograph beside Woerner) would be so moving to hear. “The Fair Haven John remembered was one where he went crabbing and eeling, where he sat at a certain spot in the morning watching the clam boats go out, and then in a different, but always same spot, for the clam boats to return. He talked about going with his friends up into Fair Haven heights and looking through the Indian caves. And it’s funny, it made me think about my own neighborhood. It was only a physical environment, without the kind of depth John talked about, the significance of every space, the accretions where different things happened in the same locale. By comparison, where I grew up began to feel like a stage set.”
Perhaps this hard-to-capture sense of ever-changingness yet ever-the-sameness that everyone seemed to touch upon had to do with water. The Quinnipiac River kept winding through in significance to both older and relatively new Fair Haveners alike, such as David Zakur and Heather Findlay (pictured below). Both scientists doing research at Yale Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, they came to the area five years ago and now live in a quietly stately 19th century house on the corner of Front Street and Pine.
“I grew up in Wallingford,” Findlay said, as she stood beside her photograph of the fishing boats of the Fair Haven Lobster Company moored on pristine river in early March twilight, “and David is from Branford. We both grew up in neighborhoods, but the intensity of ‘neighborhood’ here is like nothing we’ve ever known. A walk that should take 15 minutes takes 30 because you stop and talk to your neighbors. It is a village. We’re all proud of the buildings, the history, the oystering heritage, and we’re almost obsessive about protecting it.”
Findlay and Zakur are among the leaders in the fight to keep out development inappropriate to the village. “We’ve fought the city when we’ve had to,” she said. “We’ve kept Gateway Terminals away too. It is industrially zoned here still, but only businesses that understand the neighborhood and are appropriate to it are right for us,” she added. “I mean all we want is to keep our fishermen here and to get our bridges back to working.”
In her remarks Findlay was echoing Erna Caron, who had also spoken with pride about having fought in the 1980s to keep the city and state authorities from running a six-lane highway across the river where the Grand Avenue Bridge has been standing as a two-lane gateway since 1797, when George Washington commissioned it.
For her part, Yale freshman Angie Jaimez, who hails from Palo Alto, California, heard of Fair Haven from the moment she arrived in New Haven. “My mentor at Yale said, ‘You have to go to Fair Haven. It’s terrific out there.’ So I’d been volunteering at the Clinton Avenue School when I heard about this ethnographic project, and I jumped at it.”
Jaimez’s interview subject was Gerde Genece (in the photograph beside Jaimez). “She was so welcoming, so outgoing. She had me come into her home on Lombard Street, introduced me to her children, her grandfather, her three dogs, her chickens. And then she took me around to meet all her neighbors.” Genece said (in selections of the recorded interviews that were played as part of the exhibition) that she particularly loved the area because it was a melting pot. “Haitian, Italian, Irish, the color of your skin, it makes no difference around here. We all want the same thing,” she told Jaimez, “to work hard, to watch out for each other, and to keep our houses and neighborhood safe.”
“Gerde was really very inspiring to me,” Jaimez said. “When I returned home for spring break, I began talking to my neighbors who I’d known for years in a way I hadn’t before. I remembered Gerde’s ease and openness, and I tried to emulate it. It was really wonderful. One neighbor told me her story, how she was in college and majoring in deaf studies. I know Chinese and another language, but I’m thinking of learning sign language next year.”
And so it goes, how a word, a picture, a single human interaction alters a life in ways we may not even be aware of. Maybe some of these students will stay in New Haven when they graduate, maybe move to Chatham Square. New Haven Oral History Project Director Andy Horowitz (pictured on the right, with Jaimez and Chatham Square Neighborhood Association community organizer Kevin Ewing) said all the interviews will be deposited with the New Haven Oral History Project. The photographs may be exhibited at another venue as well.
That would be a good idea, for as he prepared to return to his beautifully restored house on the river, David Zakur said, “I got a call from friends we’re having over on Saturday night. When I told them where we lived, they said, ‘You live in Fair Haven! Is it safe? Can we park our car there and find it when we return? How far is it from Orange Street?’”
For other stories about the area and the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association, click here and here.