Problem-Solver Walks The (Side)Walk

Hector Miranda has an encyclopedic knowledge of every busted sidewalk and precarious tree limb in the upper Hill.

The loquacious apolitical Stevens Street resident has embarked on a new campaign to pressure City Hall to fix up his neighborhood — not by running for office, but by knocking doors and exhorting his neighbors to make their voices heard.

Miranda, 68, has lived in a two-family house at 18 Stevens St., a block east of Evergreen Cemetery and a block south of Casa Otonal, for upwards of 30 years.

Since retiring in 2011 from his job as a middle school art teacher at Cesar Batalla School in Bridgeport, Miranda has spent his time advocating for basic quality of life improvements in the Hill.

He regularly attends the monthly Hill North Community Management Team meetings at Career High School, where he often sits next to his friend and neighbor Dora Lee Brown and peppers any city official who will listen with impassioned pleas for smooth sidewalks, fixed street lights, striped speed humps, tree trimmings, and more school crossing street signs.

For years, he has walked door to door in the Hill, handing out flyers about the community management team, registering neighbors to vote, and learning the names and backstories of seemingly every man, woman, child, and dog within a 10-block radius of his home.

Then, just a few months ago, he attended a Traffic Authority meeting at which Downtown Alder Abby Roth and a cohort of two dozen East Rock neighbors successfully pitched the commissioners on installing two stop signs at a Lincoln Street intersection where a Yale business school student was recently hit by a car.

Why can’t the Hill do the same thing? he asked himself. Why can’t we fill city meetings, demand improvements, and see our streets made safer?

So on Saturday afternoon, as the temperatures climbed into the high 90s, Miranda donned a white tank top, blue baseball cap, cargo shorts and closed-toe sandals knocked on doors in his neighborhood again.

Handing out plastic bottles of cold water to random passerby and pausing to play with every dog that crossed his path, Miranda didn’t ask his neighbors to vote for any particular candidate for alder or mayor. He didn’t ask them to give money to any particular organization.

He simply asked them, in rapid-fire English and Spanish, to talk about what they think would help the Hill. He asked them to show up to management team meetings, to Board of Alders meetings, to Police Commission meetings and to Traffic Authority meetings to make sure that city officials and elected leaders hear their stories too.

“I feel in the Hill there’s a lot of good, hard-working families,” he said, punctuating every other word with a different exuberant hand gesture. ​“If [politicians and city officials] come and say they’re gonna do something and nothing gets done, that really bothers me. I just want things done in the Hill. The game needs to stop.”

His rounds were a one-man version of the interdepartmental neighborhood sweep that city housing inspectors and building officials and police and firefighters and health code inspectors walked through the neighborhood to identify and address a variety of code violations. Miranda praises the city for doing that walk last year, but said time and again that there there is still plenty of work left waiting to be done.

The first stop of his walking tour was at the corner of Stevens Street and Davenport Avenue, where 66-year-old neighbor Paula Pouncey sat in the shade on a particularly bumpy stretch of sidewalk.

Miranda and her late husband Roberto, she said, spent nearly two decades trying to get the sidewalk outside of her house fixed up.

“The curbs are horrendous,” she said. ​“I always trip over the curb because it’s so uneven.”

And for nearly seven years, she said, the streetlight outside of her driveway hasn’t worked.

She said smooth sidewalks, better lighting, and more police officers on bicycles or foot patrols would make a world of difference to her experience of the neighborhood she has spent the past 30-plus years living in.

“We used to have a lot of police on bicycles in this neighborhood,” she said, and she and her husband had personal relationships with nearly every one of them. But now they just drive by, she said, and instead of spending a minute to say hello and chat, they mostly stare at her as she runs her regular tag sales on the sidewalk in front of her home on Davenport.

Walking towards Sylvan Avenue, Miranda pointed to one of three speed humps the city installed on Stevens Street last year. Initially, he said, the city put in the speed humps but no street signs, and so cars would still speed up the block and just go flying over the bumps. After he called Hill Alder Dave Reyes, he said, the city installed the signs, but has yet to stripe the humps. Cars and buses still careen over those humps, he said, and will do so until the striping is on the pavement.

“If you’re gonna do something,” he said, ​“do it right.”

Walking past two Neighborhood Housing Services-rehabbed homes on the block and a recently installed bioswale, Miranda ran into Angel Martinez, Gravio Martinez, and their hulking pit bull Bronco, whom Gravio was keeping cool with the help of a garden hose.

“Hey beautiful,” Miranda cooed at the panting pup. ​“Hey beautiful!”

Angel Martinez said he learned street smarts and survival skills on the ​“rough” block, but was always close with his neighbors. Now an employee at a Woodbridge-based cleaning company that contracts with Yale, he said he returns to Stevens Street regularly to visit his parents and siblings who still live in his childhood home. ​“I am who I am today because of this street,” he said.

Past Sylvan Avenue and onto Greenwood Street, Miranda pointed out the even, unworn sidewalks outside Casa Otonal. Miranda said he met mayoral Chief of Staff Tomas Reyes at City Hall by chance several years ago, cajoled him into doing a four-hour walk through the neighborhood, and showed him exactly how in need of TLC the Sylvan Avenue sidewalls were. Now the sidewalks are smooth and easy to navigate. Miranda praised Reyes, Hill Alder Dave Reyes, and former city Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter as always listening to his concerns whenever he needed to bend an ear. These public servants didn’t pay him mind because he had any past relationships, Miranda said. They listened just because they cared, and then followed through on what they promised.

On Greenwood Street, Miranda spoke with an elderly Jamaican man he affectionately called ​“Grandpa.” The roots of a large tree on the sidewalk outside of his house had extended into his basement, Grandpa said, and blocked the sewer system to such an extent that his house routinely flooded. That tree also had a precarious limb towering above his roof, threatening to come crashing down at the next storm. 

But besides that tree, he said, ​“We’re comfortable living how we are. We don’t have no problems.”

Up on Vine Street, Mohamed Conde, sitting on the curb in the shade across from his house.

A native of the West African country of Guinea, Conde said the biggest problem he has faced since moving to New Haven 20 years ago is racial profiling. He can’t walk into a corner store without clerks following him with their eyes, and sometimes on their feet.

“If I no steal something,” he said, ​“let them leave me alone. I don’t have no peace.”

When he told Miranda that he is a permanent resident and is interested in applying for U.S. citizenship, Miranda recommended he visit La Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos on Crown Street to get information and study prep for a citizenship test. And he recommended Conde attend the city’s adult education program on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard to improve his English.

Conde broke into a grateful smile as Miranda got up off the curb and promised to check back in later in the month.

“Thank you,” he said. ​“Thank you very much.”

Working southeast on Asylum Street, down Davenport Avenue and across Kossuth Street, Miranda made his next stop at the corner of Kossuth and Ann Street. There he found a tree stump and a toppled trunk that he said has been lying on the sidewalk for months.

He said city tree trimmers simply never came back to dispose of the last of the tree after they had cut it down. ​“If you’re gonna do something,” he repeated, ​“get it done right.”

A half block down Ann Street, sitting on the porch of her white and blue-trimmed house was one of Miranda’s fellow community management team allies, Almeta Hudson. A native of South Carolina who has been living on Ann Street for over 40 years, Hudson easily recalled the names and occupations of her past and present neighbors as she described the tight-knit community of her block.

There was Lula the postal clerk. Amos the bus driver. Ozzy and Mr. Brown and Mr. Henderson and Amanda.

Some of those neighbors, with whom she helped found a block watch and she served on the city’s PTO, have passed on. But Ann Street remains a place where neighbor looks after neighbor, she said.

As she spoke, one young woman from a few houses down came over to give Hudson a Betty Boop-shaped keychain ornament. Just because she knows her granddaughter is really into the Popeye cartoon heroine.

She said she would like to see three speed humps on the block, and fixes to some of the broken playground equipment at the nearby splash pad. She would like to see a street sign noticing that a blind child lives on the block, and another noticing the residence of her deaf grandchild.

Miranda promised to come by her house three days before the next Traffic Authority meeting, and then to pick her up the day of so that they could go over together.

“The squeaky wheel gets the oil,” Hudson said in affirming her interest in speaking out for her neighborhood in order to, as Miranda said, ​“get things done.”

Miranda rounded out his walking tour at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Washington Avenue by Roberto Clemente Academy. He pointed up and down Columbus in disbelief that there are no yellow school crossing street signs at the intersection.

“If you’re gonna have schools here,” he said, ​“you need to have those signs.” This stretch of the Hill near Clemente and Hill Academy needs to be as well signed as Audubon Street, he said, and needs to have similar intersections with crosswalks and flashing lights indicating pedestrian crossings. When asked why East Rock/Downtown has those traffic calming features and the Hill doesn’t, Miranda said, ​“Because we don’t complain.” His mission is to change that.

“I feel the city could be doing a lot more for the neighborhood,”’he said. ​“As long as I live in this neighborhood, I will be watching.”