Michael Melford Photo
Every New England Green is a civic platform, a respite from hubbub. But it’s also a blank canvass for social, cultural, and political event.
Just think about it. Greens are the void that let the Meeting house project both religious presence and governmental focus. Town meetings, Sunday services all had to get across a Green to happen in the 17th century.
But that was then. Now, an eight-year recession has meant it was occupied in protest and offered up as an economic engine by the city, and now increasingly become a fair-weather haven for those who have fallen thru the social safety net into drugs, poverty dementia and crime.
Maybe that’s appropriate: the centrality of God and self-governance were reflected in the generation of the Green when those freedoms were the most important things in New Haven’s populace. Now the undeniable changes in urban culture are presented full-on in the newly chaotic and criminal space, central to New Haven’s original nine-square layout. But it also begs the question: where exactly in the Green going?
Join me in this episode of “Design Czar” as I take a look. You can listen to the episode by clicking on the audio above.