Allan Appel Photo
The DCCP’s new banner at Dixwell Plaza.
When George Clarke often drives down busy, vibrant State Street, he thinks back to the Dixwell Avenue of his youth — when anyone who purchased a new car showed it off with a promenade down the heart of the African-American community all the way to Webster Street.
Clarke and fellow Dixwell business people, churches, other not-for-profits, and neighbors have formed a new organization, the Dixwell Corridor Community Partnership (DCCP), to try to bring some of that magic back.
George Clarke and city small business economic development officer Clay Williams.
They gathered Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge on Webster Street Tuesday night for a “community progress meeting.
Several of the member organizations such as St. Luke’s Development Corporation had been working with students and professors from the Ludwig Center for Community and Economic Development at the Yale Law School on their own housing development projects and on legal and organization-building matters.
Another participant in the DCCP, the Beulah Land Development Corporation, like St. Luke’s, has built senior housing in the neighborhood.
It made sense for all of them to come together into a single facilitating body, the DCCP, in order to connect with each other and to keep people informed as an overall vision emerges for a kind of Dixwell renaissance.
The group’s steering committee meets twice a month
Working with volunteers and a shoestring budget, the group has planted trees along Webster, repaired homes on Dickerman Street, and conducted a survey that mapped property conditions in the corridor, which runs roughly from the beginning of Dixwell to the Shelton/Munson/Orchard triangle.
Tuesday night’s meeting focused on a new survey that another participating group, Neighborhood Housing Works.
“Do people want free WiFi, a coffee shop, a bigger Elks Lodge?” Hogan asked rhetorically. He said the responses will be used as a basis to form a “think tank” that will inform the DCCP’s next steps.
Alderwoman-elect Jeanette Morrison.
The meeting’s speakers included Dixwell Alderwoman-elect Jeanette Morrison. She said her vision of a reborn Dixwell absolutely must include if not the building, then the concept of the old QHouse and its wide array of programs for young people. She recalled her own formative years taking free gymnastics classes at the Q.
“This community is where your black middle class was started, and the Q House was where the kids were while the parents worked,” she said.
George Clarke’s family started a janitorial company in 1918. He remains active in the Dixwell Plaza Merchants Association. He suggested that maybe the Board of Education has the money to take over the Q House and open it up to the community.
Told of George Clarke’s vision of making Dixwell a vehicular destination again, Gary Hogan said, “We don’t only want people to drive down Dixwell, but walk, bike, shop — - a viable and sustainable” place.