Patricia Bellamy-Mathis. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Beneath a rain-soaked tent, author Patricia Bellamy-Mathis was somehow still completely dry, and ready to break out the color monster. Beside one leg, her daughters Aspenne and Nova sat at the ready, their hands suspended in midair for a clap they knew was coming. Beside the other, the monster was still, covered in neat, bright steps of crepe paper.
“Color monster! Color monster! Chomp-chomp-chomp!” Bellamy-Mathis exclaimed, and a half-moon of pint-sized humans sprang to life around her, ready to pick up the call and response.
Sunday afternoon, Bellamy-Mathis brought that magic to the inaugural Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills (W.E.B) Neighborhood Festival, a project of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and a dedicated neighborhood planning committee. Held in the parking lot across from Bethel A.M.E. Church on Goffe Street, the event sought to bridge three distinct neighborhoods that share a community management team, with activities that ranged from architectural talks and tours to capoeira tutorials.
By the end of a rainy afternoon, it had brought dozens out to the space and Armory Community Garden across the street. Committee members do not yet know if it will become an annual event.
Top: Mike Brown of Third Space New Haven. Bottom: Attendees included Elihu Rubin, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Yale School of Architecture, who spoke about the past, present and future of the Armory.
“It really has been a very big community effort from the committee,” said Rebecca Cramer, shouting out fellow organizers Nadine Horton, Raymond Hagan, Chris Peralta, Alexandra Taylor Mendez, James and Candice Dorman, and others. “It’s been good. We were trying to start small, and I think this ended up being slightly bigger than our original small, but still small enough.”
The festival has been years in the making. For a long while, Cramer said, members of the W.E.B. Community Management Team tossed around the idea of a festival, putting it on the back burner when inquiries to Arts & Ideas went unanswered. Horton and Peralta, in particular, have been working towards an event for a decade, often without enough help to get a full-fledged fest off the ground.
Plenty of events took place in the meantime: weekly farm days at the Armory Community Garden, a summer block party in Beaver Hills and another in Edgewood, vibrant new basketball courts on DeGale Field, with tournaments that filled the space with joyful noise. There were community conversations (and at least one afternoon spent in song) around everything from tensions between neighbors to the future of the Armory, a massive, city-owned property that is falling into disrepair. There were public art projects launched into being and arts incubators that began to take shape.
Then last summer, the late Alder Tom Ficklin reached out to the Festival of Arts & Ideas, warm but persistent in that way that was so very him. He wrote the director. He copied everyone on the board. He made a case for the neighborhood, a mix of old hippies, new transplants, and generations of Black and Caribbean American and Jewish families that together can sometimes feel like a spread out version of Crown Heights. He rallied neighbors who jumped in, happy to help. The Festival, meanwhile, at last stepped up to help with financial and logistical support.
“It’s been fun,” Cramer said. “I hope we get to do it again. You know, it depends on money and all those questions, but I want to keep doing it.”
Sunday, the diversity that makes W.E.B so unique was fully on display, from neighbors making soapy, prismatic giant bubbles to seedling workshops to an impromptu dance party that continued despite the rain. On one end of the parking lot, a bright orange bench beckoned, the work of the collective Bench Haven. Beside it, a tent from the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop drew people in with huge bubbles, a soapy residue slick on the asphalt. Elihu Rubin, who has spearheaded efforts to save the Goffe Street Armory, stopped to schmooze with one of the vendors.
The Friendship Bench project, which started two years ago, seeks to create community connection through the built environment, including benches printed with messages from the community. They are inspired by Zimbabwe’s friendship benches, on which “grannies” provide peer-to-peer support and counseling in which they are trained.
Top: Candice Dorman, a Beaver Hills resident and the founder of Ekow Body, leads a dance party in the rain. Bottom: Poet and writer Sun Queen, who works with U-Act, talks to attendees about the work of Elm City Compass. She sits on the community advisory board.
Two tents away, Mike Brown, who runs the gaming lounge and creative hub Third Space in Westville, said he was excited to see the festival take shape. When he opened his storefront on Blake Street in 2023, it was precisely to create and foster a diverse, supportive community. Over two years, he’s helped that grow, with everything from fashion shows to open mic nights.
So when the chance to come to the festival arose, he jumped at it. Sunday, he chatted as he played chess with neighborhood kids, the chess pieces decorated with tiny, intricate details that made the game feel lifelike.
“I’m losing badly, but he’s being a gentleman about it though,” he said of his opponent.
“I feel good, I feel welcomed, honored even to be considered to be someone who is able to come down and represent some of the local businesses in the community,” he added. As musician-turned-DJ Gammy Moses turned up the volume and put on the “Cha-Cha Slide,” Brown turned back to the chess game, watching as an impromptu dance party kept dancing through a drizzle.
Students in the Peabody's Evolutions Program were among those helping out Sunday.
Across the parking lot, Bellamy-Mathis welcomed some of the day’s tiniest attendees to her tent, where she sat with Possible Futures owner Lauren Anderson and her daughters, Aspenne and Nova. The founder and creator of Aspenne’s Library, Bellamy-Mathis has used her voice to create more space for Black stories, from Down South for the Summer to Aspenne Colors The Neighborhood and Nova Knows Numbers/Nova Sabe Los Números.
She’s done several readings in New Haven, from the Dixwell Neighborhood Festival to Black Children’s Book Week. But Sunday held special significance for her: she grew up in the neighborhood, attending Wexler-Grant and Augusta Lewis Troup Schools before James Hillhouse High School. She still has family in the neighborhood, including people just blocks away on Goffe Street.
“It’s always nice to return with my girls, and to tell them, to show them, where I grew up,” she said. “Where I went to the park and played basketball and the community that we hung out in. And so to be right here, next to Goffe Street Park, is like, very sentimental … I love it. I love returning.”
Top: Dishaun “Farmer D” Harris and Nadine Horton. Bottom: One of Bench Haven's benches.
As the “Cha-Cha Slide” faded into another track, longtime Beaver Hills neighbor and Ekow Body founder Candice Dorman moved through the song effortlessly. Twelve years ago, she and her husband moved to Beaver Hills, watching the neighborhood grow and shift around them. Since, it has become home, the place where she’s raising her sons and has nurtured a small skincare business. For her, any chance to connect with neighbors is one that she’s excited to take.
“It’s nice for individual communities to have their own time and space, and then it’s also imperative that we cross-pollinate for all the reasons that we know,” she said, praising the committee for taking the time to gather the neighborhoods under a single W.E.B. umbrella. “So that we’re not isolated and siloed as much as I think we all know we can be in New Haven.”
Across the street at the Armory Community Garden, that message echoed for both Horton and Dishaun “Farmer D” Harris, who had just finished teaching a seedling workshop. When the two started in the garden several years ago, the ground was so sapped of nutrients that nothing grew in it, not even flowers and grasses.
Now, it is home to rows of raised beds and neat hoop houses, early-season strawberries, flowering collard greens, scallion and garlic plants, and logs for mushroom cultivation. Lemon balm and mullein, which eases respiratory symptoms, springs from the soil nearby. Lush, tall grasses give it a wild feel, as if it is miles from the postindustrial city it calls home.
“I mean, it’s a very long time coming,” said Horton, who lives on Winthrop Avenue and worked for years with Peralta to try to get a festival off the ground. “To see it finally come to fruition is wonderful. Knowing the environment we’re in now—that something like this is actually frowned upon—the fact that we could pull this off is just a really good feeling.”