There’s a little-known park in New Haven, a tranquil, flat rectangle of grass with a mural of the world at one end and young fruit trees at the other, most of a city block long, between Grand and Saint John’s Street on Jefferson. If you’re not looking for it, it’s likely you’ll not find it. Yet on Memorial Day, 2007, when the flag that hangs from the pole at the park’s center was at a limp half staff in the heat, this quiet urban green space merited a visit and the nearby plaque at its base a reading. For the park was named in memory of Joseph W. Lenzi, who was born across the street in 1922 and died, killed in action, on the sands of Iwo Jima in 1945.
A reporter paused an hour or so to pay his respects to Private Lenzi and also to see if passers-by spent much time here, had heard of the young man who died at age 23 fighting for democracy on a far-away volcanic atoll, and what in general they thought about Memorial Day. Also, if they cared to venture an opinion of the war in Iraq.
The first visitors, Richard Tortora, on the left in the photo, and Adam Schiller, on the right, stood by Private Lenzi’s plaque. Here’s what it says:
On this ground where once he tread
A vow was made, here’s what he said
“I’ll never shirk nor desert the fight
Till I know my Lord that all is right.”
Tortora, himself a Navy veteran, who spent two years mainly teaching English in Saigon, had only vaguely heard of Joseph Lenzi. But he knew the site of the park very well, in another incarnation. “Right where we’re standing,” he said, “my grandfather Arcangelo Pacelli, who came to this country in 1898, had his chicken market. It was here until the early 1970s, I think. My brother worked here a little, but not me, although I remember visiting and seeing them pluck the chickens right in front of you. I think they even had a rabbi come in and kill them kosher for the Jewish customers. I really don’t know why the park is named after Lenzi,” he said. “So many people died.”
Remembering his own experience in the Vietnam War, Tortora added, “When I came home, the only person glad to see me was my mother. Still I was obviously very fortunate. The war I was in was unpopular, too, but not like this one. I mean we more or less knew who the enemy was. The soldiers over there don’t know who’s with them and who’s against them. I feel very bad about this. It’s time to put it to rest.”
And Memorial Day’s meaning? “Look,” he answered, “I believe in respect for the dead, the dead of all the wars. I don’t do much special except every year I search for this T‑shirt, which says, ‘Celebrating America.’ I’m really glad everything’s closed today. I only wish they’d do away with the sales; those don’t seem like they belong at all.”
Tortora, a local landlord, was showing Schiller, his tenant for the summer, the local sights. It was not clear that Lenzi Park was going to be among them until a reporter asked them to pause and join him by the young soldier’s memorial. Schiller’s Memorial Day memory had to do with the death of his grandfather this last December. “Not long before I brought him a photograph that caught my interest, a World War II. He had never talked about it, but he did then, his experiences as a mechanic on Army Air Force planes operating out of India.”
Self-described surrealist artist Kirk Bacon (he shows at the White Space Gallery on Chapel Street) strolled by next carrying a bag of groceries. He loved the neighborhood he said, and, no, he had never heard of Private Lenzi, and, alas, almost never paused in this park. Why?
“Well, look, I grew up in Westville, and I really like it here. But that said, you see those benches?” He pointed to the shaded concrete tables and chairs, under the copse of trees over his right shoulder. “Every day there’s a real bad element there. I mean people drinking and smoking crack out in the open every day. It’s bad, and no one bothers these guys. Not the cops. They just sit there and make visiting the park, well, not inviting. I don’t know. I mean there’s a package store on each side of the park, and across the street on Grand there’s the shelter. I guess I understand that the benches there are a kind of place to get away, still… But, yes, I see the neighbors sweeping up around the park. I should come by more often.”
And what do surrealists think of Memorial Day? “I don’t know. I support the troops, of course, and what people are giving there and have given on our behalf. But, no, there have got to be different ways of achieving it.”
Jasmine Munoz, who lives on Grand near Franklin, would not have been walking by Private Lenzi’s at all had it not been for the closing of the Grand Avenue bridge across the railroad tracks at State Street. “So now we need to find different ways to walk downtown,” she said. “It’s nice around here, but the rents are way too expensive for me to be thinking about… No, but the truth is I barely notice the park.”
Munoz nevertheless seemed eager to talk more, but at just the moment she was going to be asked about her sense of Memorial Day 2007, the door in the well-kept house directly across the street from the park on Jefferson opened up.
And this older man stepped out into his beautiful flower garden. Tony Valentine, age 79, having lived on the block for 25 years, seemed the most likely candidate so far to know of Joseph Lenzi.
Pay dirt! Not only did he, of course, know of the young soldier. Valentine said that Private Lenzi’s sister is still alive and she comes by occasionally to help clean up the park and of course to pay her respects to her brother. Was she by recently? “Oh I don’t know,” he said, his accent still thick with the sounds of the Naples he emigrated from at age 31, “but they lived over there on the corner.”
Another neighbor, from nearby Olive Street, Rose Amendola dropped by (unpictured). The two of them confirmed that the park was created in the 1970s, but it did not have its pleasant green aspect until its renewal a few years ago. “I believe, although I’m not sure,” Amendola said, “that Lenzi’s dad worked for the New Haven police department.”
As he stood among his geraniums, Tony Valentine’s recollections of Memorial Day included his being drafted into the army, and in training at the time the war ended. “I also remember the soldier’s father,” Valentine said, “but he’s gone, of course. But the sister, there were two sisters,” he recalled. “They are still around, at the park, they fix things up. It’s nice.”
Indeed, when the park was dedicated, at least one of Private Lenzi’s sisters was present at the ceremonies.
At the south end of the park, on Saint John’s Street, the afternoon’s first bicyclists gathered by the Friends of Lenzi Park sign. Not only was it Memorial Day, it was also Ian Applegate’s birthday. He and his friend Jennifer Hurley, were celebrating with a ride down to Long Wharf.
Applegate, who is the mastermind of townofnewhaven.org, took this route because he knew it from when he worked with LEAP, the youth leadership training organizationheadquartered on Jefferson, across Grand. “Oh, the park is used occasionally by LEAP,” he recalled. “Absolutely. There was more use before these trees were put in, which interfered, you know, with football. Still it’s used. And that mural too has some special significance,” he said. “Some of the continents of the world are larger, or get a different kind of visual treatment.”
What did Applegate and Hurley know of Memorial Day? Although neither was aware of the holiday’s origins as Decoration Day for the Union dead of the Civil War and its expansion and renaming to embrace all war dead after World War I, these two young people were quite thoughtful about Memorial Day 2007.
“In previous wars there was real sacrifice,” Hurley said. “That I know. Some people just don’t realize the sacrifices being made over there. If they did, they wouldn’t continue to drive these tank cars.”
“Let’s not be too righteous,” said Applegate. “There are the barbecues and because it’s my birthday I always look forward to the time.”
“You don’t mean Memorial Day is about barbecues,” Hurley challenged him.
“Yes, I do, ” Applegate said. “It’s about people who die so that we can have all the things that barbecues symbolize. Freedom to barbecue, and all that you can do in a democracy. You know exactly what I mean.”
When told the origins of Memorial Day, Applegate said, “I don’t think we’ve fought a worthwhile war, one for real freedom, since World War II. All the wars since then have been caused,” he said, “by the influence of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. I mean in Iraq today we’re not doing anything to make that place safer…..I mean it’s like spending money on prisons. If we took the money we spend on prisons in Connecticut and the whole country and used it to build social institutions.”
“Does this Memorial Day,” asked Hurley, “include the civilians who died in the wars?”
“Yes,” Applegate added, “and what about the people who were killed in the twin towers on 9 – 11? Are we memorializing them today too? Well, those are my Memorial Day thoughts.”
Last Memorial Day Applegate rode his bike to Lake Wintergreen. Then he rode up West Rock and then went, of course to a birthday party, for himself.
And this year?
After their ride down to Long Wharf they weren’t sure what they were going to do.
What had Hurley, a K‑6 art teacher at the Clinton Avenue School, gotten Applegate for his birthday?
“Next week I’m taking him white water rafting. The trip is the gift.”
And what birthday was Applegate celebrating? He was turning 27; Hurley is 25. A reporter could not help but note that Private Lenzi was only 23 when he died.
At the temporary cemetery on Iwo Jima, where Lenzi and hundreds of others from the Fifth Marine Division were buried, there was a ceremony after the island was secured. Of the many eulogies, here’s an excerpt from one of the most touching, full of echoes of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and made by one of the Jewish chaplains from the division, Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn of New York City: ” … Our power of speech can add nothing more to what these men and the other dead of our division have already done …We dedicate ourselves, first, to live together in peace the way we fought and are buried in this war. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding … Here (also) lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich and poor together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many men from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination, no prejudices, no hatred. Theirs is the highest and the purest Democracy.”
It was a beautiful Memorial Day 2007 afternoon at Joseph Lenzi Memorial Park.