Crossing Mill River (District) By Foot

The four-block stretch of Grand Avenue between Olive Street and Wallace Street is scattered with empty lots, storefront churches, social service nonprofits, and Italian eateries, all overshadowed by a towering highway overpass and a rich working-class history.

It’s Carina Gormley’s favorite walk in New Haven. She sees the city’s past and present in each step.

Gormley, a 22-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants, is a Yale undergraduate majoring in architecture and urbanism.

She’s a frequent volunteer at the Grand Avenue men’s homeless shelter, which is also the subject of her senior thesis.

For her final project for Yale School of Architecture Associate Professor Elihu Rubin​‘s ​“Urban Field Geography” seminar last fall, Gormley put together a walking tour of an area of New Haven she has come to know well over the past four years through both personal experience and archival research: that very stretch of Grand that skirts along the northern edge of Wooster Square between Downtown and the Mill River.

“I wanted to look at this stretch of four blocks as a corridor, as the first part of a branch of an important node between Downtown and Fair Haven,” she said on a recent walk through this patch of the Mill River District. ​“I wanted to focus on what connects the shelter and the people that it serves to Downtown services.”

She concluded that this stretch of Grand can be viewed as a microcosm of New Haven history: a once densely populated Italian-American and Polish-American immigrant enclave; a mixed-use commercial-residential-industrial hub torn asunder by the interstate highway; a series of churches and restaurants and apartments laid low by Urban Renewal and reborn with the influx of primarily African-American and Hispanic residents and business owners; a gap-toothed streetscape dotted with empty lots and decades-old landmarks, liquor stores and law offices, homeless support services and furniture wholesalers.

There’s an unassuming resilience and diversity to this stretch that she associates with her adopted city.

“This has been my favorite walk,” she said.

Click here to download a copy of Gormley’s full tour.

“The Severing Point Of The Street”

The first stop on her walking tour is one of the defining features of the neighborhood: the I‑91 highway underpass. Built in 1966, the placement of the highway at its current location was the result of a successful push by Wooster Square residents to the south to protect their neighborhood from the bulldozer.

“The city listened,” Gormley wrote in her walking tour, ​“and even engineers conceded that shifting the highway’s position to the eastern side of Wooster Square would be less costly. It was also thought that the highway position would more logically separate the residential west from the industrial east.”

But the imposition of this towering transportation infrastructure between Jefferson Street and Franklin Street meant that the neighborhood’s eastern part suffered the demolition and isolation that their southern neighbors were spared.

“It’s the severing point of the street,” Gormley said.

A man in a blue windbreaker with a cellphone held tightly to his right ear declined to share his name or be photographed while passing east under the highway. He said he was walking from Bible study at the 180 Center to get to the bus stop on the other side of the underpass.

“It’s definitely colder under here,” he said about how he feels the highway affects his near-daily walk along this block.

Gormley also pointed out the freshly painted gray and brown squares pockmarking the highway’s concerete walls. The city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative has been working to cover up graffiti under the highway, she said. New tags had already been sprayed where previous tags had been recently removed.

Farnam Courts / Mill River Crossing

The second stop was the two new public housing apartment buildings that make up Mill River Crossing.

That name is only as old as the buildings, which were built in 2018. Dating back to the 1940s, this site was home to the Farnam Courts public housing complex.

“It was in its heyday primarily Italian, racially integrated and lacking stigma,” Gormley wrote in her tour guide. ​“Many families moving in saw access to in-house toilets and gas stoves as luxuries. There was strong community.”

“Farnam Courts in its onset was a really modernizing, positive place to live,” she continued on the in-person tour.

After the construction of the highway and the decline of industry in the 1950s and 1960s, the public housing complex and its Grand Avenue-facing playground and park became a hotspot for violent and illegal activity.

“The New Haven Housing Authority has decided to slowly redevelop the complex, with commercial and office space available on the ground floor,” she wrote. ​“The modern new buildings of the new Mill River Crossing, despite housing fewer units than Farnam Courts, purports to elevate the experience of residence.”

Gormley said she wanted to include Farnam Courts/Mill River Crossing on the tour because, for the past 70 years, this has been one of the biggest and densest residential complexes in this area of the city. The new Mill River Crossing buildings’ modern design and ground-level commercial spaces (still empty) also reflect to her the contemporary urban planning mindset that prioritizes density, walkability, and designs that seek to instill comfort by feeling so ​“new.”

Hanging out in a group of eight on the sidewalk in between the two new Mill River Crossing buildings, Clarence Dixon (pictured) said he misses the old more than he appreciates the new.

“I’m mad because they took away my park,” he said about the former DeLauro Park that used to be the street-facing front of Farnam Courts. ​“It was beautiful,” he said.

He added that he and his friends had been standing outside the liquor store across the street when a nearby police officer told them to move. ​“It seems like what they’re doing is giving us nowhere to go,” he said.

Another member of the group, that same man who had been walking from Bible study to the bus stop, said he for one appreciates the look of the new public housing buildings. ​“It makes the community look better,” he said.

“It’s A Community”

The walking tour’s next stop stands right across the street from the public housing complex, and has been in that spot four nearly five decades. That’s Ferraro’s Market.

“Stocked with meats and pastas, produce and more, it’s loved by the community for its variety and pricing,” Gormley wrote in her tour guide. ​“Built in its modernist style by Carlin and Pozzi Architects in 1973, the building was purchased by Ferraro’s and two other then-State street shops as a joint venture to compete against the emerging super stores of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The land was bought at $1 per square foot from the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, a cheap price that might have been an effort to encourage occupation of their urban renewal improvements on the segment of Grand Avenue and Wooster Square.”

Gormley said she wanted to include Ferraro’s on her walking tour because it embodies so many different historical and demographic and architectural elements of this stretch of Mill River: its Italian immigrant heritage, its connections to the history of urban renewal, its status as a large-scale food hub, not far from Palmieri’s spaghetti sauce factory and Something Sweet bakery.

As well as its modernist design, capacious parking lot, and the barricade-like bars that separates the shopping cart storage area and front entrance from the rest of the street.

“What might these design or decorative measures suggest or reinforce about notions of the public?” Gormley asks in her guide.

Ferraro’s employee Jerome Beckford (pictured) was more sanguine about the metal bars as he took a break from his job collecting shopping carts from the parking lot and restoring them to their place by the sliding glass door entrance. He returned them not by squeezing through the bars, but by using a staff door on the Grand Avenue side of the building.

“I guess people used to steal the shopping carts,” he said. The bars are a pretty effective deterrent to that.

He said he really enjoys working at Ferraro’s. ​“It’s a community,” he said. ​“It’s very family-orientated.” His favorite part about the store? ​“It’s great when they open the grill” outside by the shopping carts and cook up some of the store’s famous meats as a sort of outdoor barbecue.

As for his thoughts on the surrounding blocks? ​“Ain’t nothing special about it,” he said, surveying the street. ​“It’s a place like any other.”

“Can’t Compete With Stop & Shop”

Walking west back under the bridge and towards downtown, the next stop on the tour was one of the few extant structures dating back to the neighborhood’s dense, mixed-use past: the cluster of two-story brick buildings that house AIPJ Iglesia Pentecostal, Connecticut Aikikai Aikido, Vinnie’s Italia Importing, and Adriana’s Restaurant at 783, 779, 777 and 771 Grand Ave.

“This block is one of the best remnants of density and mixed use from the turn of the 20th century,” Gormley writes. ​“The three buildings are tightly packed, almost continuous, with diverse materials, window sizes, and bracket ornaments to distinguish one from the other.”

The upper floors of these buildings are mostly apartments, while the ground floor are host to a martial arts studio, a church, a grocer, and a restaurant. ​“This mixed-use typology has been ever-present on this street, but was lost in places during urban renewal.”

Inside Vinnie’s Italia Importing, Mike DiVirgilio (pictured) lamented the loss of that mixed-use density on this stretch of Grand.

Vinnie’s has been in that spot since the early 1970s, he said. He’s been working there since 1976.

“When I came over there was a lot less drugs and prostitutes on the street,” he said. He remembered there being a tightly-knit mix of furniture stores, soda distributors, groceries, and pharmacies.

He said that Vinnie’s focus has not changed much in its five decades on the block. ​“We’ve always specialized in veal, pork, beef, and chicken,” he said.

The company does much of its business through wholesale, he said, with 70 different restaurant clients around the country. The store has two trucks and a handful of full-time employees.

“You can’t compete with a Stop & Shop” when it comes to being a small all-purpose grocery store, he said. Thus the need to specialize.

A must-try from Vinnie’s? ​“The pancetta,” DiVirgilio said immediately. (Side note: This reporter is a vegetarian, so, alas, no meat was sampled).

“Very Hard Edges”

Back on the northern side of Grand Avenue, Gormley pointed out one of the defining and most persistent use types on this stretch of Mill River, past and present: churches.

The former neo-Gothic St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church that used to stand near the intersection of Wallace Street and Grand Avenue has long since succumbed to the urban renewal wrecking ball. The single-story, mid-century modern rectangular buildings closer to Jefferson Street are filled with primarily Hispanic and African American congregations. Those newer churches and faith-based institutions include Upon This Rock Ministries, Igelsia Centro Misionero de Restauracio, Asamblea de Iglesias Pentecostales de Jesucristo Inc., the 180 Centre, and (AIPJ) Iglesia Pentecostal.

“Many of these congregations are painted a bright color,” Gormley writes, ​“but have selected to cover, darken, paint over, or board up their street-facing windows. None of the organizations offer front landscaping, entry details, or street furniture. The value of openness and accessibility among congregations, as compared to the closed-off design details of their retrofitted commercial fronts, presents a sort of irony around how these storefront churches contribute to the vitality and warmth of the street.”

Gormley described these storefront churches as having ​“very hard edges” — meaning that people walking along the street are not necessarily encouraged to stop and poke around and see what’s happening inside, but instead to keep making a beeline right by.

Alex Perlman (pictured) was doing just that. Walking briskly west on Grand, he said he was on his way to favorite grocery store. ​“Just going to Ferraro’s,” he said.

A mother and son walking past the churches east in the direction of downtown kept their focus on what was ahead as well. They were on their way to the chiropractor’s office closer to Olive Street. ​“I’ve lived near here for 15 years and I’ve never walked on this block,” the mother said with a smile. And how does it feel? ​“Feels safe,” she said.

The Hollywood Package Store right next to the two churches was getting much more foot traffic, meanwhile.

Kassi Young said she had never been to the store before, but her sister lives nearby and had recommended the spot as an affordable place to pick up some wine.

“The prices are good,” said Young (pictured).

She said she would actually like to see Grand Avenue be a bit wider to accommodate more cars: driving along this single-lane-each-way stretch can get pretty congested, she said, especially when there’s roadwork or construction happening.

Gormley identified in her tour what, from an architectural and design perspective, makes Hollywood and the Co-Op liquor store on the other side of the highway such hotspots for visitors. ​“Both of these small storefronts have a large street presence for their size,” she writes, ​“their storefront windows plastered in advertising and obstructing views into the business. These stores bring in spontaneous drop-ins from the street.”

The in-person tour ended with a stop at a street mural painted on a wall behind Unger’s Flooring Store at 915 Grand Ave.

Gormley admitted to not knowing much about the history of the artwork itself. But, she said, it’s one of her favorite spots on this stretch of Grand to just pause, look, think, and enjoy.

“The presence of street art along both the front edge and recessed part of the building also may hint at more modern trends for the urban ideals, claimed through public art,” Gormley wrote in her tour. ​“How might these types of efforts influence the streetscape? The question also prompts the notion of what legacy today’s urban trends may have on future dwellers.”