Top: Matthew Watson and his son, Tobias, with Tanisha Hill. Bottom: The scene around noon, before any raindrops fell.
Tanisha Hill soaked in the scene unfolding on Glen Road, where neighbors had replaced the hum and trundle of traffic for the afternoon. Behind her, burgers, fish and just-blackened corn sizzled away on a trio of grills, unaware of a midday drizzle that had started around them. Across the street, neighbors sat down and tucked into sandwiches, slices of watermelon, fresh-baked cookies and banana pudding cups.
Down the block, a handful of kids hopped onto bikes for the first time, and wove in between a series of traffic cones. Hill’s hands hovered for a moment over gallon-sized tubs of blue raspberry, lemon and cherry Italian ice. She smiled to herself. She was, she thought, exactly where she wanted to be—which was home.
Hill, a small business owner who lives on Ellsworth Avenue, was one of dozens to come out for the fourth annual Beaver Hills Block Party, a celebration of community that has continued to grow since its launch in 2021. Organized by Beaver Hills resident (and physicist, author, and self-described science evangelist) Ainissa Ramirez and Ward 29 Alder Brian Wingate, the party brought together the neighborhood’s vibrant multiracial and multigenerational community, with attendees that lingered happily past the 5 p.m. end time.
It marked a joyful return for the event, which took a hiatus last year, and comes on the heels of a Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills festival in May. In the interest of full transparency, this reporter is also a resident of the neighborhood, and can objectively add that every person interviewed for this article called it some version of a good time.
Top: Bellevue Road neighbor Nancy Yedlin chats with Ronald Hill, box office manager for Long Wharf Theatre, and LWT board member Nancy Alexander. Bottom: Carmen Rodriguez and Audrey Tyson, who live on separate ends of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.
“Beaver Hills is such a great community, but people don’t interface with each other,” said Ramirez, who moved into the neighborhood in 2005. In 2021, after almost two decades, she still felt like she didn’t know her neighbors. “We wanted to find a fun way for people to interact with each other,” and the block party seemed like a logical answer. “I said, ‘Let’s build something.’”
“In all my years, I have never seen such an engaged and lively collection of neighbors,” she added in an email afterwards. “Personally, my hope is that better and stronger connections have been forged during this festivity … Please know that you’ve made our corner of New Haven shine a bit brighter than the day before.”
Sunday, that sparkle seemed to be everywhere, from food pop-ups and an always-bumping DJ booth to craft stations, games of cornhole and giant jenga, shared lunch tables, a chess challenge and Connect Four board from Third Space and a bike clinic that was never not busy. As volunteers from the New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation (NCAT) fitted helmets and seats on one end of the road, chefs fired up the grills and fried fish and french fries on the other.
Top: Kelsey Mastroianni and Rebecca Lequire, both of whom are educators, spent the day catching up with former students and delighting kids with face painting. Bottom: Sandra Gibson, who lives on Colony Road with her husband, retired Hillhouse educator Robert Gibson. Both cycled in and out of manning a table for NXTHVN, the Dixwell neighborhood arts incubator that sits close to Beaver Hills on Henry Street. "I think it's awesome!" she said of the block party. It's a wonderful community."
Between them, there was a show of the diversity that makes the neighborhood so special—and at times, also complicated. Nestled behind Whalley Avenue and Crescent Street on one side and Sherman and Fitch on the other, Beaver Hills is a sort of little universe within New Haven, a blocks-wide radius that includes generations-deep Black and Caribbean American families, a growing Chabad-Lubavicher community, retired peaceniks and old hippies who garden like their lives depend on it (and maybe they do), and young folks who are still just moving in.
It is, in some ways, a more spread out version of Crown Heights, with many of the same historic pain points that a text like Fires In The Mirror seized on three decades ago. Within under a mile, there are distinct histories of diaspora, of trauma, of oppression. There are also neighbors who are effusively nice to each other, and neighbors who hardly exchange a word at all. In New Haven, it’s one of the only racially and socioeconomically diverse holdouts left after years of failed urban renewal and de facto segregation.
Sunday, nobody was interested in teasing out the finer points of that history, because they were too busy saying hello to each other, exchanging addresses and names and the ages of their kids, neighborhood stories, and occasionally cell phone numbers for a play date or hang some time in the future. Hill, who runs an Italian ice cart out of her Ellsworth Avenue home, took in everything around her, eyes sparkling.
Top: Craft stations from the Ely Whitney Museum & Workshop and the Yale Peabody Museum were a hit with kids. Bottom: Mike Brown, who opened Third Space in Westville two years ago this summer, with Alder Brian Wingate.
“I love it,” she said of living in Beaver Hills, where she moved two years ago after a lifetime bouncing around the Whalley/Edgewood neighborhood. After settling in on Ellsworth, she found her own rhythm, making time to sit out on her porch each Saturday morning so she could greet her Orthodox Jewish neighbors as they walked to synagogue. She loves that about the neighborhood, she said.
“It’s different. You get to experience different cultures,” she said.
That was her hope in opening an Italian ice cart too, she added. As a kid, Hill got excited for any excuse to go to Wooster Square, where she knew she could pick up a confection from Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop. At the time, the neighborhood might as well have been another country; “it would make you feel like you were in Italy,” she said. When she got older, “I wanted everyone to experience Libby’s.”
“It was everything,” she added, pausing the interview to scoop a cup of melty, butter-yellow lemon ice for Jamie Watson and a second of blue raspberry for her son, Tobias. After finding the cart on Facebook Marketplace last week, she decided to pick up Italian ice from Libby’s, so the neighborhood could taste it too. After getting a call from the party’s organizers, Sunday marked her first outing.
Mechico Mood with his sons Amari and Elijah.
She was far from the only one making the afternoon feel sweet, indulgent even. Just beyond Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, Mechico Mood and his son Amari tossed beanbags back and forth, the sound making a steady rhythm as the bags landed with a thwack on the wood. Across the street, Mood’s young son Elijah bounced in the bright inflated castle, his Crocs neatly dangling from one of his dad’s hands.
A transplant from New York, Mood moved with his family to Beaver Hills in 2021, in part to escape how loud and overwhelming the city could feel. Despite a house fire that displaced their family last year, the Moods stayed in the neighborhood, moving to a property on Wellington Street that they’ve made their home. When he heard about the block party, he was excited to check it out.
“It’s good! It’s good!” he said. Most days, Mood savors how peaceful Beaver Hills is, particularly the section of streets tucked away between Diamond and Osborn. On days that he drives through the neighborhood on his commute to New York, he often sees neighbors out walking, whether they’re sprinting for the Goffe Street bus or coming home from one of the nearby public schools or out with their dogs.
Sunday, it was nice to learn a little more about who those neighbors are, he said. Between games of cornhole and stops to explore the food options, he and his sons walked down the street hand in hand, greeting neighbors with big, wide smiles.
Top: Angie Covington. Bottom: Mike Brown and Sydney Williams-Brown with a newborn-sized zucchini at a table for Third Space New Haven. In addition to the space, which turns two this year, they are neighbors: the two live on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. In that way, Williams-Brown said, Sunday was a nice opportunity to get to know people—and for people to learn about Third Space
Around them, Glen Road was in full bloom: neighbors fussed over babies, exchanged ebullient and impromptu hugs, went back for seconds on salmon sandwiches and fried fish. Every so often, someone pulled out a cell phone to snap a selfie.
“It feels like family,” said Angie Covington, a lifelong New Havener who moved to Roydon Road from Sherman Avenue almost 12 years ago. Just over a decade ago, Covington knew that she wanted a safe neighborhood where she could raise her daughters, 17-year-old Adja and 15-year-old Alana. What she didn’t bargain for was how kind many of her neighbors would be.
When she’s out walking, she said, they’re quick to say hello and check in. So when Wingate asked her to help out with the block party this year, she was quick to say yes.
“It feels really good,” she said, gesturing to the action unfolding around her. At one end of the road, waves of laughter rose and fell from inside a bounce house. At the other, David Joyner made sure a kid’s helmet was snug, and sent him off to bike through the cones. “Last year, it was very missed.”
Ibrahim Diallo with Jad. Bottom: Nir Bongart, who kept cooking as rain started to fall, and neighbors rushed to get a tent up around him. Mendy Katz, who was cutting fish as Bongart grilled, credited Ladle & Loaf's Ephrat and Benny Lieblich for making sure there was Kosher food available.
That was true for Ibrahim Diallo, a native of Flatbush, New York, who bounced his 7-month-old Jad gently in a carrier as he spoke. Initially, he and his wife never planned to stay in New Haven, he said: they were just here for her residency while he finished law school in New York.
But then Covid-19 hit New Haven, and they found themselves staying a little longer. They had their first child, a four and a half year old who Sunday delighted in crafts from the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop. Covid eased, and they didn’t leave. Then two years ago, they made the move from Wooster Square to Beaver Hills. Diallo is now serving as the 2024-25 Curtis-Liman Fellow at Yale Law School.
“We’re trying to build community here,” he said. Sometimes, he and his wife will get to know “pockets” of the neighborhood—but it can be hard without events that organically bring people together. “Building community is important to us.”
Sunday, that vision came to life as Kulturally LIT Founder IfeMichelle Gardin fussed over Jad, bringing a bottle of water to his dainty, drool-covered mouth as she beamed and cooed.
“It’s wonderful to see the neighborhood coming together,” she said later in the afternoon. For years, she lived on Carmel Street, in a house that passed from her mother to her. While she’s since moved, she still thinks of herself as a resident of the neighborhood, she said.
Chana Robinson, who grew up in Beaver Hills, framed the block party as a sort of return to a time-honored tradition. When she was growing up on Ellsworth Avenue, Beaver Hills hosted an annual block party on Moreland Road, which now sits in Alder Gary Hogan’s ward. At some point—she doesn’t know when—it stopped.
Meanwhile, she moved away for school, then lived in New York for over a decade. Two years ago, she and her husband moved back with their growing family. For her, the block party was a chance to get to know neighbors who don’t always make time to talk to each other.
“You can live your life next to someone and never meet them,” she said, watching as one of her daughters settled into Kelsey Mastroianni’s creative chair, and morphed into a cat with the help of some face paint.
Around them, the party showed no sign of stopping. Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” bounced over the street, and a block away a couple rose and began to dance. Beneath his tent, DJ Tootskee shrugged off a few drops of rain and kept the tunes coming. Across the road from him, fish done two different ways cooked beneath tents from Betty Alford and Nir Bongart and Mendy Katz.
“It’s very nice!” said Bongart as he flipped over cuts of fish, the skin crisp. Three decades ago, he moved to Beaver Hills for his studies at the University of New Haven. Staying wasn’t initially part of the plan, he said. But he never left.
“I’m still here, so it’s a good time,” he said with a smile as Tootskee jogged through the rain, now no longer a drizzle, to get a salmon sandwich. He lifted a cut of fish onto Tootskee’s plate. “I got you, my man.”