Peace Gardeners: Let Water Flow

New Haven is proudly a United Nations Peace Messenger City — so says the beautiful gladioli-draped welcome sign that even many New Haveners may not know exists because they whiz by on speedy Ella T. Grasso Boulevard between Legion Avenue and North Frontage Road.

Yet New Haven is also a city that doesn’t always provide water hook-ups to all its public green areas, even a gateway location such as this one.

That means that Paul Bloom, Frank and Paula Panzarella, Aaron Goode, Millie Grenough, and other, dedicated, long-time members of the Friends of West River Peace Garden – the site in question — are ​“always carrying tons of water in our cars,” said Grenough.

Volunteers from the ​“friends” group along with those from the New Haven Peace Commission, the New Haven Peace Council, and local West River neighbors have for years now been the water bearers keeping the Peace Garden alive.

On Wednesday afternoon, they were spotted lugging large plastic bottles of water, having stashed them from home in their cars, then driven up and over a curb on Legion Avenue and onto the grass because no access to parking exists, alongside no access to water.

Then they determinedly set off to water by hand the growing, colorful, crescent-shaped garden, now lush with Echinacea, bee balm, common milkweed, and other natives the pollinators love.

Many Monarchs have already been spotted, but no water spigots.

While the volunteers are grateful for the city’s mowing the lawn and other basic upkeep, they’ve also been asking for years for a convenient water source (along with better access, signage, and parking), but that water source has not been forthcoming.

However, the Curtis Cofield II Estates, a 56-unit low-income townhouse-style development, will soon be rising just east and adjacent to the Peace Garden. The garden will function almost as a front yard buffering the Estates from the Boulevard, and this just may provide the relief the water-toters are searching for.

“We’re hoping the apartment development will have a water source,” said Paula Panzarella, and that the volunteer gardeners can tap into it.

And ideally before summer of next year. That’s when, said Goode, the expectation is that the first residents will move in and begin to appreciate the park; perhaps they’ll want to pitch in, and indeed offer up a spigot nearby, which currently doesn’t exist.

Well, it does and it doesn’t.

And on that hangs a tale of water-water-everywhere-but-not-a-drop-for-the-Peace-Garden, at least not yet.

“I got a frantic phone call,” recalled Goode, ​“that someone was digging up the the [peace] garden.”

Because the line where the development ends and the city land and Peace Garden begins is unclear, the construction guys, Goode discovered, were digging up the grass field on the east side of the Peace Garden. The location was well inside the garden/city property, but the intrusion was necessary in order to do some pipe work for the rising townhouses.

“We support the development,” he said, ​“but we weren’t happy to be blind-sided and have 25 percent of the land dug up.”

In the end, the builders did the right thing. They filled up the holes they’d excavated, they re-seeded, and they also put in a rotating sprinkler gizmo, on two tripods, to water the newly-sown grass.

The irony, Goode said, is that ​“we’ve been asking the city for this” for years.

The double irony is that the sprinkler cannot be turned on by the gardeners; its on/off spigot is within the construction site, behind the fence, and inaccessible to the gardeners.

Maybe there could be a way to access the spigot, or to pop in a small spigot or accessible connection near the Peace Garden. This way, volunteers could water from the hose, and not from three dozen old plastic bottles.

Muscle-weary volunteers call city; city calls Curtis Cofield developers; and voilà!

You’d think.

The volunteers expressed their gratitude for what the city already does do, and to other helpful organizations such as Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative, which provides many of the native plants, mulch, and expertise. But access to water remains a basic and unfulfilled requirement of what, volunteers point out, is a larger plan for the area.

That plan, while still in the vision stage, involves uniting the Peace Garden with areas of West River Memorial Park across the Boulevard in order to create some sort of regional destination. The Peace Garden, and all the history it represents for New Haven, would be one of its key attractions.

Simple access to water for the Peace Garden may be getting lost or back-burnered in this evolving grander design, but there is recent hope.

Goode reported that within the last two weeks there have been two meetings, one via Zoom and another an actual walk around the site. They were convened by yet another organization involved, the West River Watershed Coalition, which had received a planning / design grant through the National Park Service.

“We walked all around West River Memorial Park,” Goode said, and the Peace Garden site, touring and exploring how to make connections.

“It’s a spectacular park, unfortunately surrounded on three sides by state roads,” so the aim was to explore ​“how to develop the two spaces.”

Meetings are ongoing, and the hope is that plans can move forward, and water flow.

In the meantime, with the Peace Garden so lovely, Goode said the New Haven Peace Commission is considering moving its annual August 6 Hiroshima and Nagasaki vigils, usually convened on the New Haven Green, to the Peace Garden.

It’d be most appropriate as one of the features of the garden is a ginkgo tree, a sapling growing from a descendant of one of the few trees that survived the atomic blasts that ended World War II.

It would be nice if, by that occasion, not only peace but also water flowed in the Peace Garden.