Naiyanna White Photos.
Under the late afternoon sun, a line of eager customers wrapped around Mitchell Library to buy a slice of pie. The scent of wet earth, rising from the lawn of Beecher Park, flowed into the peachy, floral aroma of stone fruit pies scraped clean from their pans. Near the library’s back entrance, a table heavy with over two dozen pies waited eagerly.
Within minutes, volunteers had quickly cut, sliced, and boxed slices from over 30 pies, now ready to serve the dozens of hungry festival goers.This was the scene last Monday at the fourth installment of the annual Beecher Park Summer Concert Series and Hi-Fi Pie festival at Mitchell Library. Organized by the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA), the event is a five week outdoor music festival and pie baking competition that takes place every Monday night in July and August. The festival ends on Monday, Aug. 17 with “freestyle pies,” a category that is as open-ended as the name suggests.
Neighbors and community members are invited to submit pies based on a weekly rotating theme. Last week's theme of stone fruit pies received 17 different pie submissions with fruits like peaches, plums, and cherries, according to WVRA Executive Director Elizabeth (Lizzy) Donius. The event also featured Connecticut-based blues band, the Chicago Dawgs.
The contest is separated into youth and adults categories. Bakers 13 and younger compete in the "kids" category, while bakers 14 and older compete as adults. Experienced bakers are required to bring two pies, but junior bakers or people of any age who have never baked before can compete with one.
Event organizers also highlighted the growth of the event. When it started in 2012, the Hi Fi Pie Festival had only five or six bakers each week, according to Naomi Senzer, a teacher at Neighborhood Music School who says the festival is like a pet project for her. The festival didn’t happen in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but since resuming, the number of bakers has grown yearly, even reaching 20 bakers one year, she said.
Senzer helped Chris Heitmann, the former Executive Director of WVRA, start the program. When Heitmann left in 2016, Donius took over planning the festival, and has continued ever since.
Standing amongst dozens of Westville families, Senzer and Donius reminisced on past festivals. They said the crowd of close to 100 people was light—there can be up to 200 or 300 people, and WVRA sells 200 slices of pie at each concert (this reporter, tragically, left pie-less because of how quickly it sold). Senzer said the festival has always been at the Mitchell Branch Library, calling it “the heart of Westville.”
Donius, who spent most of the night greeting and helping festival goers, said the location is perfect for families. Since the library closes at 8 p.m. on Mondays, Donius said her hope is that people inside the library can come outside and enjoy the company of their neighbors.
“If the kids get bored out here, they can always go inside the library and have fun in there,” she said.
Near the park’s entrance to the library were children throwing fallen walnuts at each other. Some of those children were a group of junior bakers that have participated in every pie category this year.
The girls, who dub themselves “The Geek Girls Club,” do science experiments and engineering projects together alongside their parents. One parent, Dr. Shawna Reed, has participated in the Hi-Fi Pie contest before. She said her daughter, Laurel Nixon, begged her to do the competition this year. The group of eight girls, minus one member who had to leave early, are all 8 to 9 years old and know each other from school and a summer camp they all attended.
Repeat winner Kate Bradley was sitting on the lawn next to her husband, Robert. Her journey with baking began when the pie festival started 14 years ago. When she started out, there weren’t many participants, but the number has grown steadily over time.
Bradley said she looks for recipes in the magazine Food & Wine, and in a pie and tart recipe book from the kitchenware brand Williams-Sonoma. She grew up eating her mother's baked goods and said baking was something all mothers used to do when she was growing up.
Before the pies were even taken out to the crowd, the judges for the night were deep in discussion with each other, trying to pick the winners.
Tucked into the library’s community room were security guards Anquille Wright and Kim Baker. The duo, who served as the event's judges, stared at the table in front of them covered with plates of pie and water bottles to cleanse their palettes.
Baker was a first time attendee and judge. He has been working at the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library for a year. Wright and Baker both said getting to interact with members of their community is their favorite thing about their jobs.
Wright has been working at the Mitchell Library Branch for three and a half years. He said he most likes attending the pie festival yearly. Last year, he was a judge during the freestyle week which he said was his favorite theme because “you never know what to expect.”
Wright said anyone who wants to get involved with the festival should ask the library staff for more information, or visit the Hi Fi Pie Fest website.
“They’re [the library staff are] pretty friendly people, so it’s not too hard to get connected with them,” he said.
As night fell, The Chicago Dawgz continued to set the good vibes. Harmonicist Mark Zaretsky and guitarist Tom Crivellone performed a number of blues songs including “Let the Good Times Roll” by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. The group maintains that despite where they’re based, they are an authentic Chicago blues band.
Wright and Baker announced the winners after the band was finished playing. Alka’s Summer Mango Pie was the adult winner, and Evelyn Berner’s Bullseye Chocolate Cherry Pie was the winner among the younger bakers.
The Hi Fi Pie Festival ends on Monday, August 17 at Beecher Park behind the Mitchell Library with the freestyle category. Read more about the performance from the Chicago Dawgs from our friends at Midbrow here.
This article comes from the ninth and current cohort of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). From June 29 through August 21, YAJI students pitch, report, write and edit stories with Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman, Program Assistants Abiba Biao and Grayce Howe and Mentor Ruby Szekeres. Naiyanna White is a rising senior at the New Haven Adult & Continuing Education Center.