“When I was growing up on Dixwell,” Diane Brown-Petteway recalled, “I didn’t need someone like Obama. Back then we had doctors, dentists, architects, African-American business owners. They were my role models.”
Brown-Petteway (at right in photo) wants to be sure that such local heroes will remain visible to today’s kids in Dixwell. As manager of the neighborhood’s Stetson Branch Library, she’s part of a group putting together a public mural for the front of the Stetson Branch Library.
She expressed these sentiments during a planning meeting at Stetson Wednesday night presided over by her co-partners in the enterprise, Margaret Bodell of the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs and Mindy Lu, a Yale University paintings-and-politics-majoring senior.
Lu initiated the idea and has secured partial funding from the New Haven Action project at Yale.
Brown-Petteway and another longtime Dixwell activist, Ruth Henderson, played a kind of Dixwell nostalgia geography game, summoning up and prodding each other for the names of stores and people, sights and sounds of a Dixwell Avenue that was thriving in the immediate post-World War II years and is now long gone.
“There was Dr. Robert Taylor, and then the dentist, Dr. [Harold] Ince,” said Brown-Petteway. “You’d see him in the store buying a quart of milk and if you told him your tooth hurt, he’d whisk you to his office, give you some Novocain, and fix you up for five bucks.”
“What else should we have on this mural?” asked Lu, who got the initial idea for a mural as she jogged in the area, first by the Q House with immense and empty walls, then Wexler Grant School, and then, was finally directed to the library.
“There’s the Monterey Jazz Club,” said Henderson. “The biggest stars of the jazz worldwide came to perform there. Everyone! And you got dressed up back then. Formal wear, women with gloves. Not like today.”
“Right,” said Brown-Petteway, “but I don’t think the mural should have, you know, so many music things. People think that’s all black people did. We should include John Daniels, New Haven’s first African-American mayor, who grew up in the Elm Haven Projects. And there’s Mr. Twyman, New Haven’s first black school principal. You remember, Ruth, that so many of the city’s finest school teachers lived within a short walk from this library.”
“What about Ed Cherry, the architect?” said Henderson. “There are so many invisible, invincible people, from this neighborhood.”
“That’s right,” said Brown-Petteway. “How many kids today know this library was renovated by a black architect. He must be 70 years old. We’ve got to get him in to show his pictures and to talk.”
Brown-Petteway texted her 91-year-old mom on Shelton Avenue to get name of the movie theater that stood where C‑Town is now. Mom’s response: The Lyric.
“And don’t forget Unique Boutique.”
Ruing that too many people leave the neighborhood, Brown-Petteway, who has not, said, “After I show people the school and Monterey Place, then what?”
Lou Cox (he grew up on Dixwell, and is pictured with Brown-Petteway) and area artist Katro Storm (who lived near Admiral Street) will team up with neighborhood kids to help paint the actual mural.
Cox, who runs the “outsider art” boutique Channel One, and Storm recently led a group of area kids in creation of the “Experience” mural on the Acme Furniture building in the Ninth Square opposite Caf√© Nine.
“We really see this as the beginning of a whole trend of involving the community in mural-making,” said Bodell.
Assignments were made Wednesday to solicit photographs and perhaps, as a corollary project, to bring in people to give their oral histories of the neighborhood.
Another $2,000 is needed for the project, which is set to have final design in the spring. Those interested in contributing suggestions or funds should email Margaret Bodell here.