Portrait of America
Exhibit coming to the Green.
Michelle Liu Photo
Exhibit culled from the current Green.
Sam Sigg dumped the contents of a bag onto a table, revealing a year’s worth of used pipes, syringes and other drug paraphernalia that he’d collected around the Trinity Church on the Green.
This, he told a room full of neighbors filling a City Hall conference room, was a visual presentation of the New Haven Green.
Sigg, the head sexton of Trinity Church, was attending his first-ever Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team meeting.
“Watch your fingers there,” someone murmured, as Sigg sifted through the glass and metal clinking on the table.
Over the course of the meeting, two different images of the Green would emerge — one rooted in its present-day reality of homelessness and addiction, one a new picture to look forward to with an upcoming cutting-edge public-art exhibit with 25-foot-high images on the sides of the churches on the Green called “WE ARE: A Nation of Immigrants — New Haven.”
“The Wild, Wild West”
Paul Bass Photo
Michelle Liu Photo
Lt. O’Neill: Looking for new ways to combat crime on the Green.
The monthly meeting took place Tuesday night, on first official day of spring. As if on cue, the meeting bubbled with qualms over (certain) signs of life on the New Haven Green.
Though other crime has been constant or low on the Green, the police are coming up with some new strategies to combat persistent drinking and drug use there, said Lt. Mark O’Neill, the neighborhood’s district commander. Most recently, he has convinced the courts to begin upholding some of the arrests and tickets made on the Green.
“I don’t think it’s a secret anymore,” he said. “We’ve also had narcotics going in the Green.”
Sigg, along with other attendees of the meeting, proceeded to pepper the conversation with questions and complaints about panhandling, loitering, urinating and defecating, and other forms of disorderly behavior they have noticed recently.
How can the neighborhood make the Green more of a study spot for Yale students, and less of a hangout for drug dealers? some asked.
“Are people legally allowed to be on the Green, hanging out all day?” Sigg continued.
O’Neill outlined the fine line between whether determining whether a Yale student who studies on the Green for several hours is loitering (the answer: no) and someone who’s just “urinating on himself” is loitering (the answer: also no).
Sigg observed that a card for the APT Foundation’s Congress Avenue methadone clinic was mixed in with his year’s worth of collected paraphernalia. O’Neill noted that in one week, the police arrested 10 people for selling K2 on the green — and that eight out of those 10 were APT Foundation clients. O’Neill added that the city is not turning a blind eye to the matter and that the APT Foundation has recently been in meetings with cops and other city officials about concerns over management of the facility.
City and neighborhood officials alike sounded beleaguered notes. Matthew Griswold of the Town Green business improvement district said that when one of the Town Green “ambassadors” (uniformed employees who do safety and maintenance work) tried to break up a fight between two men on K2, they ended up jumping him. That’s a regular occurence in the “spillover from the wild, wild West which is the Green,” he said.
Gallery on the Green
Portrait of America, displayed at meeting.
Following this discussion, the photographer Joe Standart provided a different vision of the Green.
Or rather, different pictures. Standart gave the keynote presentation of the evening, announcing that his traveling project Portrait of America, which now aims to “explore the immigrant experience,” illustrating the imaginations and labors of immigrants in the current moment, would be exhibited on the Green beginning this summer.
Standart has taken portraits of refugees and immigrants he has encountered in New Haven, through local organizations like Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services and Unidad Latina en Acción, through walking about on the street and keeping his eyes open.
He printed these portraits onto large sheets of aluminum — think up to 25 feet high — to be hung up on the walls of the Green’s churches and posted as free-standing installations. He’s also interviewed his subjects, making videos of their stories as documentary material for a new website.
Attendee Kevin McCarthy said that he’d been involved in a similar initiative in East Rock a few years ago, but that project had been vandalized within a couple of weeks. How could they prevent that on the Green this time around, he asked?
“We have a secret weapon sitting at the front of the table,” Standart joked, gesturing to O’Neill.
Lucy McClure, presenting the project alongside Standart and Randi McCray, added that she hopes that the work would unite people. “This kind of work is needed in a time like this.”
The project may eventually go on tour in New England, Standart said.
“Doesn’t Bode Well”
Head Sexton Sigg.
As the meeting wound down, Sigg spoke to a reporter, acknowledging that many of the people who loiter downtown have “lives so broken” that they have no other options. He referenced recent efforts by Trinity Church in stymying the local opioid crisis.
Local artist Tony Kosloski chimed in, adding that “half of this country is living in poverty.”
“It just sounds very disrespectful to chase sick people away, make them disappear,” Kosloski added. “It doesn’t bode well for our vision of New Haven.”