Triangle Parks Come Into Focus

Sarah Adams walked between Elm Street and Broadway hundreds of times before she first realized that the unassuming triangular plot of grassy lawns and brick walkways between the two streets is a park.

She soon found that the Broadway Triangle is just one of many small and irregularly shaped greenspaces in this city that, through their form and their history, tell a larger story of how public space is put to use.

Adams, 21, is a Yale College senior majoring in environmental studies.

She recently created a walking tour of six New Haven ​“green triangle parks” as her final project for Yale School of Architecture Associate Professor Elihu Rubin​‘s ​“Urban Field Geography” seminar last fall.

On a crisp morning bike ride along the curated route in the Hill, Edgewood, East Rock, and Downtown, Adams explained that she decided to focus her academic attention on these oddly shaped urban spaces because, well, she loves parks.

Born and raised in rural northern Georgia, Adams said she has acclimated herself to city life over the past four years by spending as much time as she can in verdant urban spaces, whether they be in East Rock or West Rock or Wooster Square or the New Haven Green.

She stumbled upon her first triangle park last fall while on a field trip with her ​“Urban Field Geography” class.

The Broadway Triangle just west of where Elm Street and Broadway intersect at first blush struck her as just a small pedestrian buffer between the main drags of the Yale Properties-dominated commercial district.

When Adams started looking more closely, she noticed the trappings of a park: a brick path intentionally laid for pedestrian travelers, a wrought iron fence enclosing and separating the space from the surrounding sidewalks and streets, trees planted along the perimeter to further define the space’s leafy form, and grassy lawns surrounding a 20-plus-foot Civil War monument as well as a small stone-pile memorial to the tens of thousands of victims of the War on Terror (more on that below). All wedged into a triangular plot created as Broadway and Elm Street make their respective routes downtown.

“I was shocked,” she said. ​“I had never noticed it before. I began to wonder how I could have missed this park that I walked by every day.”

Then a question popped into her mind. ​“Despite the fact that this park is well maintained, why aren’t people using it?”

When she got back to her computer, she opened Google Maps and started scanning the city for other small triangular or trapezoidal green spaces formed when multiple streets intersect. There were plenty to view, thanks in large part to the oblique intersections required by streets twisting and turning their way from the city’s neighborhoods to the orthogonal street grid of the downtown’s nine squares. She visited six of those parks for her tour, and studied closely how they were shaped, how they fit into the surrounding neighborhood, and how, if at all, they were being used.

“New Haven is known for its large green spaces: The Green, Wooster Square, and East Rock Park are among the most recognizable,” she writes in the introduction to her tour. ​“But there is a collection of secondary green spaces that are embedded in the urban’s form. Many of these spaces are called ​‘triangles,’ but they include a range of shapes formed when two or three streets meet at an angle. These triangular parks are a window into three central elements of the city: public memory, social life, and urban form.”

Click here to read Adams’s full tour.

Defenders’ Square

Adams began her tour at Defenders’ Park, a trapezoidal plot near the West Haven border tucked between two cemeteries (St. Bernard’s and Evergreen) and formed as Davenport Avenue, Congress Avenue, and Columbus Avenue converge at Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.

“It’s a focal point of this area because there are so many large streets” at this very corner, Adams said about why she wanted to make sure to include this park in her triangle park overview.

“Buildings are not present in the area to shape the urban form — rather, it is the streets that channel into the area and intersect to create the park.”

“Columbus Avenue provides a powerful flow of traffic entering and exiting New Haven. Slightly slower-paced and sandwiched between two neighborhoods is Congress Ave. It joins into a relatively calm Davenport Ave, which runs along the edge of Evergreen Cemetery. The streets provide three very different atmospheres that converge at the park.”

In the middle of the triangular greenspace is a dramatic monument depicting three tricorn-hat-wearing men surrounding a cannon.

Entitled ​“Defenders of New Haven” and first dedicated in 1910, the monument commemorates a Revolutionary War battle in 1779 between ​“150 local militia and students and British forces who attempted to capture a powder mill in Westville,” Adams writes. The three figures are a merchant citizen-soldier, a Yale student, and a ​“prosperous farmer.”

“It feels like an entrance to the city,” Adams said about the park. And yet, from her observations, the park is not too frequently used — as evidenced by the scant passerby on that sunny but freezing Friday morning.

Josiah Triumph (pictured) filled Adams and this reporter in on one of the most common uses he sees this park put to.

“I walk with my dog here all the time,” he said.

He added that ​“there are a couple homeless people who sleep here in the park.” Beyond that, ​“you don’t really see much going on here.” It’s not quite big enough to host summer barbecues, he said, and there aren’t any benches about that would invite people to sit and spend more time than just walking through.

Triumph was at the park that morning to pick up the 265 bus on Congress Avenue. He said he lives in that area of the Hill and works as a waiter at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown.

He said he appreciates Defenders’ Park as a green space for city dwellers ​“who don’t want to go to a state park” but still want relatively easy access to a carved-out plot of grass, trees, and pedestrian walkways.

“It’s kind of weird to have these spikes,” he added about the sharp points at the top of the wrought iron fence that surrounds the park. Adams didn’t have any specific explanation for why the fence looked quite like that. She surmised that the park has been around for at least 100 years, considering when the war monument at its center was dedicated.

Monitor Square

Adams then hopped on her bike and headed up Davenport and across Winthrop Avenue to the next stop on the tour: Monitor Square.

Sitting on the border of Edgewood and West River where Derby Avenue meets Chapel Street and Winthrop, Monitor is a bit more of a true triangle than Defenders’ Park, and in a more residential neighborhood.

“The park is surrounded by apartment buildings with neoclassical detailing and a monumental Omega Seventh-Day Adventist Church with tall white columns and palladian arched windows,” Adams writes. ​“Though the area is generally calm, on a Sunday morning, the street might be full of parked cars and people walking to and from the church. Recently-planted trees were set in place by the Friends of Monitor Square Park, an Urban Resources Initiative (URI) group that maintains stewardship of the park.”

At the center of Monitor Square is another war-related monument — this one commemorating New Haven’s Civil War history.

Built in 1906 by Herbert Adams, the monument commemorates Cornelius S. Bushnell, a ​“shipping and railroad investor who lived in New Haven and helped develop the USS Monitor — the first steam-powered ironclad warship built for the Union Navy during the Civil War.”

A large and ferocious-looking eagle is perched adopt a bronze sphere above a relief of Bushnell’s bushy-bearded face.

Adams said that what most interested her about this park was the way that visitors have forged a path by habit and by use where there is no dedicated brick or concrete walkway.

The wrought iron fence that surrounds the park has sections missing — whether intention or no, Adams said she’s not sure.

But what is evident based on the well-worn tread from the sidewalk through those openings to the monument and around it is that passerby use that openings as entrances to the park.

“People clearly do have a route they take.”

David Player (pictured), who lives in one of the apartment buildings facing the north side of the park, confirmed that his neighbors do use the park frequently — much in the way that Triumph uses Defenders’ Park.

“I thought it was a doggie park” because of how many people walk their pups there on a regular basis, Player said.

He said he also sees a husband-and-wife couple regularly cleaning up trash in the park and tending to the flowers and bushes. ​“They keeps it up,” he said. ​“It’s nice.”

Player said he ​“works a hell of a lot,” pulling 12-hour night shifts at a rehab clinic in Stamford, and doesn’t often have time to enjoy the park — let alone sit and reflect upon how it fits into the surrounding neighborhood.

He did single out as a highlight of the year every fall when a band sets up in the park and plays music during the annual Faxon Road Race as well as during the annual bicycle Grand Prix.

He said he’s not bothered by the fact that the park has no benches.

“You’d have trash cluttered about,” he said, ​“and people doing all kinds of things. They wouldn’t know how to treat it. You’d have people drinking and smoking in the vicinity of where kids play.”

Broadway Triangle

Heading back towards downtown, Adams made her next triangle park stop at the one that inspired her to put together this tour in the first place: Broadway Triangle, formed by the intersections of Broadway, Park Street, and Elm Street.

The park is located at the heart of the Yale-centric Broadway Commercial District. Adams noted that for her — as for just about every other passerby she observed — the park was a place to walk through in between stops, and not necessarily a place to stop and ponder.

“As well manicured as the park is — relatively free of trash, oak leaves blown from the side of the path — the park lacks benches,” she writes. ​“It could be an intentional decision to keep a flow of people moving to the next businesses across the street, rather than make it into a place with stationary possibility. Those who do pass through the park may not register that there is even the possibility of a slower pace in the park from the rest of the area.”

Like Defenders’ Park and Monitor Square, the Broadway Triangle is also anchored by a heroically triumphant war monument. Dedicated in 1905 to members of the First Connecticut Light Battery and the 6th, 7th, and 10th Connecticut Volunteers, this Civil War monument shows a handful of war-ready soldiers standing around a column, again topped by a soaring eagle.

Just a few paces away from this monument is a very different military commemoration — a war memorial for the soldiers and civilians who have died over the past two decades during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The memorial consists of a pile of stones, each bearing a written record of the number of deaths reported the month the stone was added.

“The memorial is much less elaborate compared to the eagle on a globe sculptures featured in the war monument in the same park,” Adams writes. ​“The juxtaposition of the monument and the memorial is a combination of heroic celebration, honoring service, and remembering loss.”

“Memorials frame the broader aspects of war where people’s lives are lost,” Adams added during the Friday bike tour. ​“And that’s not something to be celebrated.”

Jennifer Williams and Germaine Thompson (pictured) said their eyes are always drawn to the towering Civil War monument when they cut through the small triangle park on their way to the Green downtown.

“I love the man with his hand in the air,” Thompson said. ​“I always salute him” while walking by him.

Much like Player at Monitor Square, Williams said she’s OK with this small park not having any benches. ​“It’s a good thing,” she said. ​“It’s the business district. You don’t want to attract” any illicit behavior.

They both said they had never noticed the War on Terror memorial tucked away at the corner of the park in the shadow of the Civil War monument. ​“I think that’s awesome,” Williams said. One more aspect of the park to look at and think about while passing by to get to somewhere else.

Cafe Nine-State Street Triangle

Running short on time, Adams and this reporter decided to pass on the next two stops in her tour, the Phelps Triangle at Temple Street, Trumbull Street, and Whitney Avenue and the dog park at State Street, Mechanic Street, and Lawrence Street, and headed over instead to perhaps the most unassuming ​“park” in her overview: the Cafe Nine-State Street triangle at the intersection of State Street, State Street North, and Crown Street in the Ninth Square.

Now a designated community greenspace site maintained by URI, this triangle park is only as old as mid-20th Century Urban Renewal, when the city demolished buildings west of the train tracks and east of downtown to make way for the construction of a new roadway: State Street North.

“The park helps to act as a buffer between the downtown area and the train tracks approaching Union Station,” Adams writes.

The park doesn’t have a memorial at its center. It doesn’t have benches. It doesn’t have a fence that surrounds its perimeter. There isn’t even a sidewalk that goes directly to it, requiring visitors to hop across the busy traffic of State Street to enjoy its tree shade and small stone patio.

And yet, it’s one of Adams’s favorite small parks.

“I was struck by the beauty of this park,” she said, particularly when the foliage is bright yellow in the autumn. ​“I noticed it much more easily than with the other parks.”

The dense planting of trees on a slightly raised bed at the park’s center plays a large role in creating that landscaped beauty, she said.

“Seeing them concentrated here unexpectedly is a surprise. Trees are something I love to see,” particularly in an area of the city otherwise built up and paved over.

“The lack of fencing in this park, as opposed to all others featured in this series, creates a larger sense of space,” she writes. ​“In some ways, the park feels more visible in its permeability with the rest of the area — it can be actively crossed into at any point along the street.”