Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Newhallville
Top: Rev. Bonita Grubbs (center) and community members celebrate the first phase of fundraising for the playground. Kathy Carroll's daughter, Kate Chivian, is pictured to Grubbs' left. Bottom: A rendering of the memorial playground. Lucy Gellman Photos.
On paper, the playground is already starting to take shape. To the right, a swing set will wait for pint sized visitors to grace its seats, and propel themselves toward the clouds. To the left, a maze of slides, bridges and tunnels will unfold over soft ground. A ramp, covered with an image of angel’s wings, will finish it off.
If Kathy Carroll were there to see it, she'd head right over, a big smile on her face, and start to play.
Friends and family conjured that scene Thursday, during a fundraising kickoff for the Kathy Carroll Community Playground at Christian Community Action (CCA) on 660 Winchester Ave. The playground pays tribute to Carroll, a trailblazer in the field of addiction medicine and research who was a longtime volunteer to CCA. She died unexpectedly in December 2020. Thursday would have been her 64th birthday.
At the time of Carroll’s death, she was a clinical scientist in the Yale Department of Psychiatry, the Albert E. Kent Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and the director of the Psychosocial Research in the Division on Addictions.
“I feel like she would be here today, saying ‘this is so great!’” said her stepdaughter, Natalie White, harnessing an ebullience for which her stepmother was known. “She would just be over the moon that kids are going to be playing here. Her favorite thing was spending time with kids, and it’s just such a wonderful tribute.”
CPEN Founder and Executive Director Doreen Abubakar, Newhallville Community Management Team Chair and Inspired Communities, Inc. Founder Kim Harris, and Charla Nich.
The playground is part of a plan for New H.O.P.E. (Housing, Opportunity, Purpose, Expectations), a transitional housing program that CCA is reviving with the Housing Authority of New Haven this year. Thursday, CCA Executive Director Rev. Bonita Grubbs praised the project, thanking state Senior Development Specialist Lindy Lee Gold for having the vision to make it a reality.
The idea for a memorial playground has been in the works for over a year. Behind 660 Winchester Ave., a playground already stands—but it has been unsafe to use for seven years, closed off from kids in the neighborhood with a gate and warning sign. When Carroll passed away in December 2020, her longtime friend and colleague Charla Nich formed a playground committee as a way to honor her memory. It was a natural fit, Nich said: Carroll loved children, she loved CCA, and believed in the power of play. CCA and the surrounding neighborhood, in turn, deserved a working playground.
Last year, committee members went door to door in the neighborhood, building momentum around the project. Carroll's family members, the Community Placemaking Engagement Network (CPEN), Newhallville Community Management Team, Newhallville Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith and State Rep. Robyn Porter all got on board. Nich reached out to Where Angels Play, a New Jersey based foundation that builds memorial playgrounds from Connecticut, New York and New Jersey to Mississippi to Ontario.
The playground in its current state.
The group, which formed in the wake of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, took on the project (the angels in the foundation’s name refer to the children and educators killed on that day). Of a total $280,000 for the project, Where Angels Play has donated $140,000 in kind, covering half of the labor and supply costs. Carroll’s friends and family have raised another 60 percent, or $84,000. That leaves $56,000 for the community to raise before funding is complete.
The project has also received support from United Way of Greater New Haven, First Church of God and Christ, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, Stop & Shop, and Jersey Mike’s Subs. Thursday, Jersey Mike’s provided free sandwiches and Stop & Shop covered cupcakes. As the party wound toward 6 p.m., frosting-kissed cheeks and noses appeared across the yard. A few attendees, including Carroll’s family members, wore plastic rings that adorned the sweet treats.
During his remarks, Where Angels Play Founder Bill Lavin thanked an “Angels Army” of volunteers, a construction team composed of retired firefighters, police officers, and dedicated community members. Lavin himself is a retired firefighter with the Elizabeth Fire Department; he was the president of the New Jersey State Firefighters’ Mutual Benevolent Association when Sandy Hook struck in 2012. To date, the foundation has cut the ribbon on 58 playgrounds.
“I think of Kathy not was, but is,” said Lavin, adding that he aims to complete the playground by May 19 of next year. “She very much is here. Happy birthday, Kathy … what a beautiful legacy.”
Dr. Ayana Jordan, who emceed Thursday's event.
As attendees fêted Carroll’s heavenly birthday with bubbles, hula-hooping, Jersey Mike’s Subs and bomba from Proyecto Cimarrón, committee members and former mentees remembered Carroll for her fierce drive, wit, warmth and a mischievous streak that remains unmatched (“She loved a good prank,” Kiluk said). In the parking lot behind them, peals of laughter rose from a parked fire truck, courtesy of the New Haven Fire Department. Before the afternoon was over, attendees had sung happy birthday twice, flowing from the standard “Happy Birthday” to Stevie Wonder’s bouncing 1980 jam.
Dr. Ayana Jordan, who served as the emcee for Thursday’s speaking program, remembered Carroll as a committed mentor, who looked out for her students as she guided them through the field of addiction medicine. When she arrived at the Yale School of Medicine for her residency a decade ago, Jordan “was so nervous, because Kathy is a legend in the field of addiction research.” As one of very few Black women there, she also felt isolated, and leaned on Carroll to guide her. Carroll was that pillar of support.
“I was looking for someone to help me navigate predominately white spaces,” Jordan remembered. She said ‘Ayana, I got you.’”
And she did. Jordan flourished under Carroll’s mentorship, becoming a leader in the field herself. She became chief resident, and then an assistant professor in addiction psychology, at the Yale School of Medicine. When she won her first award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), she credited Carroll for her constant guidance. She now runs her own lab, called the Jordan Wellness Collective, at NYU Langone Health.
That was also true for Brian Kiluk, now an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale. For 20 years, Kiluk worked alongside Carroll, from a wide-eyed college graduate interested in the field to a graduate student and later a professor. He lauded the project as one that will put the same kind of joy into the world that Carroll lived her life with each day. He is currently the director of Yale’s Psychotherapy Development Center.
“I like to say that she raised me in my science and my career,” he said. “She contributed to my career and to my life in so many ways, as she did for a lot of people that were touched by her. I don’t think words can really describe how much she meant.”
For Nich, who has been an engine on the project, it felt like a natural way to pay tribute to her friend and colleague. The two met in 1989, when Nich was a research assistant and Carroll was at Yale. In the 1990s, the two lived together for 15 years, becoming best friends in the process. Even after Nich got married and moved to Madison, there was an extra room in her house reserved for Carroll. Her husband joked that it came with the marriage.
Rev. Bonita Grubbs and Charla Nich.
As attendees caught up over subs and cupcakes, Nich remembered a day early in their time together, when the two were working closely with people using cocaine. A woman came into the office with her young daughter, who Nich said could not have been more than three or four years old. She had a trache, a tube attached to her windpipe that allowed her to breathe, and was carrying a bag of Barbie dolls. At some point, Nich was working with her mom, and “totally lost track of the kid.”
She didn’t have to look for long. Carroll, dressed in a pencil skirt, had gotten down on the floor and was talking calmly to the little girl. The girl played with Carroll’s necklace, mesmerized. That was just who she was, Nich said.
Joanne Corvino, a fellow member of the playground committee who worked with Carroll for 29 years and 11 months (“you can say 30,” she said with a smile) at the Yale School of Medicine, jumped into the conversation. Laughing with Nich, she remembered how, at the end of 2019, Carroll had brought a rocket-shaped piñata into the office and encouraged her colleagues “to beat it senseless.” It was, Corvino said, a way to bid farewell to the stresses and frustrations of 2019. At the time, they thought that 2020 was going to be their year. Carroll was the first to take a substantial whack at it.
“She was just a wonderful, warm human,” Corvino said.
Collins with Ashom Moore, La'Mani Collins, Tahaji McMillan and Davion Collins.
In the parking lot, kids climbed over the fire truck, squealing with delight. After posing with the group, New Haven Fire Capt. Christopher Brigham said that he, along with other members of the New Haven Fire Department, will be joining efforts to bring the playground to life.
Rachel Collins, who had come to the event with her children, said she is excited for the new playground, for which there is currently no equivalent in the neighborhood. Thursday, she found herself explaining over and over again to loud protestations that the playground wasn’t safe to climb on or use. She can’t wait until there’s a place for her kids, and other kids in the neighborhood, to play freely.
“I love it,” she said. “This is a great idea. It’s awesome. It means a lot. It’ll help them from getting in trouble, and it’s great for the community.”
Closer to the building, Grubbs caught up with members of the playground committee, all of whom wore matching red shirts emblazoned with Kathy Carroll CCA Playground and the year 2022. She said that the playground, alongside New H.O.P.E., will breathe new life into the community—and honor the service to others that Carroll took on so naturally during her lifetime. Grubbs does not yet have a date for the building’s reopening, but said that she is hoping for early July.
“This will be, again, a landmark,” she said. “A place of peace. A place of celebration.”
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