Rainbow Park Shines Anew

Dwight neighbors have transformed a ​“tiny sample of paradise” — which had fallen on hard times — into a vibrant, lush, open-air space for gardening and cookouts and peaceful meditation.

The spot of city greenery in question is Rainbow Park, New Haven’s smallest public park, located on a vacant house lot just 0.05 acres large at 72 Edgewood Ave. between Dwight Street and Howe Street.

Founded in the 1960s by the late Dwight Alder Helen Leber, Rainbow Park, tucked between two houses, has seen a renaissance in recent months thanks in large part to the tending of neighboring landlord Pat Wallace, urban forestry nonprofit Urban Resources Initiative (URI) and volunteer gardeners from the local mental illness housing and support agency, Fellowship Place.

Although the park has been around for decades, Wallace said while visiting the greenspace on sunny Wednesday afternoon, Rainbow Park has seen a wealth of TLC recently in the wake of a wind storm a year and a half ago that split apart two tall, flowering, longstanding pear trees.

“What had been a shady park became something more like this,” she said, gesturing towards the sun-baked, open-air flower gardens. While a Japanese maple still provides shade in a brick courtyard at the back of the park, she said, the open space towards the area closer to the street provided an opportunity for new plantings of perennial flowers, evergreen bushes, and three small crab apple and red maple trees along the park’s figure eight walking path.

Plus, the clear sightlines at the front of the fenced-in park have deterred any drug activity that took place from time to time under cover of the pear trees’ foliage.

“This is a little tiny sample of paradise,” said New Jersey native David Firestone, a former president of the membership governing council at Fellowship Place. ​“It’s a little contrast to life at its most unpleasant.” Whenever the world outside gets to be too tumultuous, too unsteady, he said, he comes to Rainbow Park to sit and think and immerse himself in the colors.

He’s come to the park to help pull weeds and clear poison ivy with URI during the latter’s regular Saturday morning landscaping sessions, he said. He also once wrote a musical while sitting on one of the park’s three benches.

“I like beautifying places,” said lifelong New Havener Marion Frazier, who also attends Fellowship Place for therapeutic services. Frazier said he helped plant the three new maple trees, digging the holes in the ground, tipping the trees in, and covering them in dirty and mulch.

“It’s nice to be able to plant something and see it actually grow,” he said. He said he routinely comes to the park, not just to garden, but to sit and think and meditate.

Ken Grimes, another Fellowship House client, said Rainbow Park was one of the few places he could come and sit and soothe his mind after both of his parents died within a month of one another several years ago. ​“I used to come here and collect my thoughts and be at peace with myself,” he said. The sun shining and birds singing helped him feel at one with nature, and out, at least for a few minutes, of his day to day troubles.

Walking the parks figure eight path around two islands of hosta plants and cone flowers and sunflowers, Mike Tenney said he first visited Rainbow Park 22 years ago after moving into his apartment on Howe Street. He was walking by the verdant lot, saw Wallace planting some flowers, and decided to stop and help. Over two decades later, he still comes by to help water the plants and pull some weeds.

“The park just explodes in the spring,” he said about the rainbow of colors. ​“It’s really quite a blessing to have this here.”

Logan Howard, a rising junior at Yale and an intern with URI, said the past two months’ worth of Saturdays have seen a lot of weed pulling, mulch spreading, and perennial planting at the park.

“I honestly was shocked to walk in here,” she said, remembering her first time walking off the sidewalk and into the park in early June. One minute she was in a dense residential and commercial neighborhood, she said, the next she was in, well, a rainbow of a park.

Wallace said the park has transformed from a relatively plain spaces to a kaleidoscopic garden since she first started coming to Rainbow Park in the early 1980s. When Leber died, she said, she and neighbors Betty Thompson and Maria Labuthie tended to the park. These nearly four decades later the park is as vibrant, both in terms its plants and its community of support, as its ever been.

“This is a community space where we can meet each other,” she said, ​“be creative together, and get to know our neighbors.”

For the two remaining Saturdays in July, URI will be planting and tending to the gardens in Rainbow Park starting at 8 a.m. Click here to learn more about their schedule.