Cherry Blossom Festival | Food & Drink | Music | Wooster Square | Arts, Culture & Community
Cherry blossoms in bloom on Hughes Place next to Wooster Square Park. Photos Kapp Singer.
A flurry of white and pink floated over Wooster Square. Some triangular petals, jostled free by the wind, dotted the grass beneath. On any other day, the blossoms’ faint, sweet almond scent would fill the air, but pizza, kielbasa, tacos, and donuts proved too strong.
Sunday was the first time in several years that the park’s Yoshino cherry trees reached peak bloom just in time for the annual Wooster Square Cherry Blossom Festival. Now in its 51st year, the festival drew thousands to celebrate the neighborhood’s Italian heritage, enjoy food and music, and welcome in the spring.
“They absolutely look beautiful this year,” said Bill Iovanne, a member of the Historic Wooster Square Association’s Cherry Blossom Festival Committee, in his opening remarks.
Top: Long lines for food trucks. Bottom: Bill Iovanne offers opening remarks.
In 1973, the New Haven Historic Commission, in partnership with the New Haven Parks Department, planted 72 cherry trees around the park and along Hughes Place. Last fall, the Parks Department and the Yale Urban Resources Initiative pruned all the trees and removed those that were dying (the trees have a lifespan of roughly 40 years). They also planted five young Yoshinos in the place of those which were removed, each marked with a pink ribbon.
“It’s like I live in a storybook,” said Ally Hammer, who lives on St John Street and was stunned by the crowds admiring the blossoms.
“As soon as we left our apartment building we saw masses of people,” said Byany Vazquez, who also lives nearby and recently moved to New Haven from Long Island. “This is nice—definitely more of a community feel than where we came from.”
“It’s a beautiful spring day,” said Rebecca Kohan, who drove from Southington to attend the festival. “I definitely get seasonal depression and don’t like to leave my house, so when it starts to be nice outside, I’m like ‘I’m going, I don’t care if the parking’s rough.”
Children watercolor at the Creative Arts Workshop table.
Alexander Maxwell sketches.
Josue Minaya and Byany Vasquez.
The festival also gave artist Marc-Anthony Massaro the opportunity to show off a model of his design for the statue which will soon be installed in place of the Christopher Columbus monument that the city removed from the park in June 2020. Entitled Indicando la via al futuro (Pointing the Way to the Future), the piece features a family of four Italian immigrants. A young boy, held by his father, outstretches his right arm, pointing upwards. His older sister stands next to him, wearing a headscarf and holding a book. Behind them is their mother, gazing upwards with left hand on the shoulder of her daughter and her right on the arm of her husband.
“She’s the glue holding her whole family together,” Massaro said.
Massaro based the sculpture on his own family, who arrived in New Haven from Amalfi in 1910. “I like to think that’s a microcosm of everybody’s family who came here, no matter where they came from,” the artist said. “That’s what I wanted it to represent—that initial courage taken by people to come to this country and start a new life.”
Massaro with his model for the sculpture.
After his proposal was chosen through an extensive selection process by the Wooster Square Monument Committee, Massaro spent 14 months creating the full-size clay sculpture. In October 2023, he sent the sculpture to Skylight Studios, a foundry in Woburn, Mass., where a mold was created and shipped to the foundry’s pouring facility in Utah. Just recently, Skylight Studios filled the mold with one and a half tons of molten bronze and applied the final patina.
“It looks absolutely magnificent,” said Massaro, who has seen photographs of the finished monument. Soon, Indicando will be installed atop a six ton stone base in the park, right in front of the empty Columbus pedestal (which will remain).
“There are always going to be people that have difficulty accepting change,” Massaro said. “We can’t just leave it bare—something has to be done. This is a positive reaction. We came up with something that was more harmonious with everybody’s culture, everybody’s background.”
Also on display at the Wooster Square Italian Immigrant Historical Society’s table was an original copy of Antonio Canelli’s 1921 book La Colonia Italiana di New Haven. The book begins with the story of the New Haven colony, which Canelli translated into Italian, and then goes on to catalog the impact Italian immigrants were making on New Haven at the time. In the front and back, the book also features ads for dozens of Italian businesses, some of which are still around today.
Carrano shows off a reprinted copy of La Colonia Italiana di New Haven.
“We think it’s a very important piece of historical documentation for the neighborhood,” said Frank Carrano, a founding member of the Historical Society. Carrano worked to get copies of the book reprinted—serendipitously, by West Haven’s Cannelli Printing, which is run by the author’s grandson—which were on sale on Sunday. Carrano’s son is currently working on an English translation of the book, which will be available soon.
“We’re trying to preserve and promote the immigrant history of Wooster Square,” Carrano said. “It’s the history of Italian immigration, but it’s really the history of every immigrant story.”