Co-Op High School | Culture & Community | Dance | Arts & Culture | Newhallville
Candles and photos at a vigil for Gayle in 2021, following her death. Contributed Photo.
Camryn Gayle never got a chance to walk across the stage at high school graduation. She didn’t get to step into a future that was supposed to be bright and expansive. Now, those who held her close are making sure her memory lives on.
Gayle, who many knew and loved as “Mooka,” was killed in a car accident in November 2021, just three months after her 17th birthday. Three years and several municipal hurdles later, her friends, family, and dance community are leading a charge to rename “Camryn’s Corner” in her honor.
It is slated for the intersection of Sherman Parkway and Harding Place, where friends and family have gathered annually to remember and honor her life.
That news came to the New Haven Board of Alders’ City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) committee last month, after Gayle’s former dance department at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School paid a $250 fee that had held the application up. This month, the committee expects to hear it again, sending it on to the New Haven City Plan Commission for a recommendation and then to the full New Haven Board of Alders for a final vote.
“It would just mean everything to me,” said her mother, Elizabeth Robinson, in a phone call last month. “I want it to be done so bad. I told the girls, Camryn’s friends, ‘We have to get this done.’ I need it done for some closure. I feel like her death wasn’t in vain. Before I leave this earth, I’m determined. I have to have it done. That’s my goal.”
Elizabeth Robinson accepts her daughter's diploma in June 2022, during Co-Op's graduation at the Shubert Theatre. Maya McFadden for the New Haven Independent File Photo.
The proposal, which Robinson first submitted in November 2023, is a testament to both how meaningful a single life can be and how alienated a person can feel from local government, even in a small city like New Haven. During her 17 years on this earth, Gayle was a dancer at Co-Op and cheerleader at James Hillhouse High School, recognized for the power and grace she brought to the studio, the stage, the court.
At school, she was goofy and headstrong, a jokester who was also whip smart and didn’t mince her words. Outside of the classroom—and sometimes in it too—she was a fiercely loyal friend, who became more like a sister to many of her peers. On Sundays, she belonged to Thomas Chapel Church, where she was a praise dancer. By her senior year, she had dreams of running a childcare business while finishing high school.
When she died suddenly in November 2021, it devastated multiple communities that she was a part of. Robinson, who was still reeling from the loss of Gayle’s father to cancer in August 2021, was engulfed in a sea of grief “I don’t even know how I’m still here,” she said candidly in a phone call last month. Before her daughter died, she had lost five other family members back to back. She pushed forward, mothering Gayle’s siblings through unimaginable loss.
Gayle’s friends and classmates, including fellow dancers from Co-Op and cheerleaders, basketball players and peers from Hillhouse, came out by the hundreds for a vigil in her honor. Her teachers mourned alongside their students; a signed collage with Gayle’s photo and messages from her classmates still hangs in the second floor dance studio at Co-Op. In the months and years that followed, many of them have also worked to keep her memory alive.
That’s where, in early 2022, the idea for a corner renaming initially came from. The site, off a highway-like section of Sherman Avenue, was and is informally Camryn’s Corner already: friends gather there each year for a block party on her birthday, filling the street with joyful noise in honor of their friend. They hold balloon releases there to remember her. They’ve returned to the spot with candles and mementos, so that passers-by know that something happened there.
“As long as I am alive, her legacy will never die,” said Ny’Asia Davis, a fellow dancer and classmate who described Gayle as her best friend and confidant, so close she felt more like a sister. Last August, Davis helped arrange a basketball tournament for Gayle at Mill Rock Park, and went out with friends to commemorate her birthday. “She will forever be with me.”
Nyasia Davis and Daniya Cox at Co-Op's 2022 graduation. Maya McFadden for the New Haven Independent File Photo.
So when Robinson began gathering materials for a proposed corner renaming in 2022, she didn’t expect an uphill battle. She knew other people who had gone through the process (here, here, and here are just a few examples). She reached out to Newhallville Alder Troy Streater. She worked with her daughter’s friends to collect signatures in and beyond the neighborhood.
The only thing she didn’t submit was the $250 fee—that money is used for the street sign itself—which she asked the city to waive. At the time, Robinson was stretched as a newly single parent. Her daughter had died on a city road. She didn’t feel like she should have to pay for it. For months, and then over a year, the proposal languished in municipal limbo. By then, Robinson said, she’d stopped hearing from the city.
Then last month, when Co-Op staff learned that $250 was standing between the proposal and the approval process, the school’s dance department stepped forward to pay the fee. Those funds come from dance performances and ticket sales. When asked, department chair Stephen Hankey said it was a no-brainer.
“It’s in the name of the school,” said Hankey of the decision. “It’s about humanity. We show empathy to one another. Getting older, you start to think, it doesn’t matter how long one lives on earth. Camryn, within the short span of her life, she impacted our community. I remember going to that funeral, and the cross-section of families I saw … for someone to bring the community out like that meant that there was something in her spirit.”
Now, friends and family are hoping to see alders approve the measure. Co-Op senior Jordyn Thomas, who described Gayle as family, stressed how meaningful it would be to see Gayle’s name officially recognized by the city, in a place that now holds hundreds of bittersweet memories. Before it was submitted to City Hall, she helped Robinson collect signatures for the petition.
“To get what we have been asking for means a lot,” Thomas said. Before Gayle died in 2021, the two were close: they would spend the night over at each other’s houses, and toss water at whoever was the first to fall asleep. Gayle loved to cheer Thomas on at basketball games, then stuck around, inevitably, with a good-natured joke (or many) and a penchant for dance battles. Thomas still has a vivid memory of her friend on the cusp of the holiday season, singing “Jingle Bells” joyfully after a basketball game.
After she passed away, Thomas found it hard to move forward. “She was just a good person to be around,” she said. “She knew how to brighten up your mood if she was around. She was very smart, very intelligent.”
Dance educator Lindsey Bauer, who taught at Co-Op through June 2024, remembered that same bright spirit, and hoped aloud that the renaming would move forward. From the moment she met Gayle, she could feel her energy, crackling and fiery when she walked into a room.
When she received an early morning phone call that Gayle had died, she nearly collapsed on the floor, she remembered. For over a week, her seniors spent their class periods walking around New Haven, because they felt incapable of dancing.
“She was spirited and quick-tongued and strong and assertive, and always really in charge,” recalled Bauer, who now works in the Department of Dance Education at Towson University in Maryland. “She was so powerful. She was a wonderful spirit, energetic, and impassioned. People were intimidated by her because she was so strong, but she was also so loyal, and a really good friend. All she did was do right by other people.”
Weeks before Gayle died, she gave Bauer permission to call her Mooka. Bauer still holds onto that memory, which she carries with her wherever she goes. Her office is adorned with yellow ribbons, to commemorate the color in which Gayle looked most dazzling.
“Camryn had this beautiful smile that would light up a room, and if you ever got that smile, it was truly a gift,” she said. “She was so bright and smart and fun and funny … Her personality was huge and if she thought you were wrong, she would be the first to tell you. There’s not a day that goes by and I don’t think of her and her energy.”