“Night Out” Comes To Forgotten Square

“National Night Out” drew a local dignitaries, cops and neighborhood crime-fighting heroes to Jocelyn Square. It didn’t draw any crime-fighters from Jocelyn Square itself—which was part of the point.

The Jocelyn Square gathering was the biggest of a series of events held around New Haven Tuesday night. Similar events took place around the country to highlight and encourage citizens to take back their streets.

By holding New Haven’s main event in Jocelyn Square, officials sought to showcase and perhaps spark new activity in an often overlooked, isolated neighborhood centered around a park and among I-91 overpasses and industrial zones. (It’s named after 19th century abolitionist and neighborhood planner Simeon Jocelyn.)

Scattered groups of neighbors enjoyed the last rays of a warm summer day in the square Tuesday evening. Yet they stuck to the south side along Walnut Street as the festivities began at 6 p.m. on the north side. Only the children headed toward the white tents, folding chairs and microphones to pat the K-9 squad and throw water balloons.

That left the mayor, the police chief, police brass, honored guests, and vote-hunting politicians to wander around after the ceremonies, talking amongst themselves rather than interacting with the community.
 

Lenora Moore-Turner
“The park should be full,” Lenora Moore-Turner muttered to no one in particular. “There should be more people here.”

Moore-Turner was being honored for her service to National Night Out and the block watch program in her own Orchard Street neighborhood, The Orchard Street National Night Out Celebration, which Moore-Turner has organized for the last 15 years, draws a huge crowd with a fish fry and children’s activities, she said. Moore-Turner, a retired Head Start worker, had to pass on organizing Orchard Street’s celebration this year because she and her husband were leaving early Wednesday morning for a family reunion in Mississippi.

Police Capt. Joann Peterson, who organized the event, acknowledged that “we expected a little bit more of a crowd” as she packed leftover sandwich wraps to send to the National Night Out celebrations at Bassett Street and Wooster Square.

Lots of leftovers
“It’s a little sad that’s it not better attended,” echoed Stephanie Campbell, who lives in Fair Haven and was at the Jocelyn Square night out with her police officer husband. “Because of the violence people don’t want to get anywhere near the cops for fear of being taken for a snitch.”

Police spokesman Officer Joe Avery noted that it was “six o’clock on a Tuesday night,” and that this is the first year the police chose Jocelyn Square as the event’s main venue.

The topography of Jocelyn Square itself has added to the area’s isolation, not just on National Night Out. The neighborhood embodies what famed urbanist Jane Jacobs described as “the curse of border vacuums.” Jacobs wrote in her classic, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”:  “Frequent borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or any other massive uses of special land, can ... tear a city to tatters.” I-91 tore into Jocelyn Square when the highway was built in the 1950s and the neighborhood has never quite recovered. An industrial zone rose along the southern border once connecting the neighborhood to Wooster Square.

Neighbors to the west don’t tend to cross the Humphrey Street highway underpass off State Street to get to the square, despite recent efforts to spruce up the pass with newly-planted cherry trees.

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