Fair Haven Through Young People's Eyes

[Voytec Wacowski]

Internet is like giant landfill. Mostly garbage but sometimes I find a gem - check out some Web pages about Fair Haven buried within a redesigned website of Common Ground - a center for environmental learning and leadership in New Haven.

Fair Haven Through Young People's Eyes

DRAGON, FARMES, THE NECK, LITTLE PUERTO RICO, FAIRSIDE. These are just a few of the nicknames that have been given to today’s Fair Haven area in beautiful New Haven. Fair Haven is a neighborhood in the eastern part of New Haven, located between the Mill and Quinnipiac rivers. It is located about 2 miles east of Downtown. On the east and south it is surrounded by the Quinnipiac River, and on the west by the Mill River.The main streets that run through Fair Haven are Grand Avenue, Blatchley Avenue, and Ferry Street.

Walking through Fair Haven you can easily point out the diversity. Today Fair Haven’s population is mainly Hispanic and African American, but also consists of Asians and Caucasians. It was during the mid-1960s that Fair Haven’s population began to diversify. As of 2000, there were a total of 13,753 people living in Fair Haven, and approximitely 4,724 homes. Walking down Grand Avenue you can see where the nickname “Little Puerto Rico” comes from, with the Puerto Rican Flag plastered to the walls of many buildings and hanging from almost every store...

Click HERE to read more (http://www.nhep.com/passiton/fairhaven.htm)

Don't miss an essay "What’s Grand about Grand Avenue?"

In the 1865 Directory of Fair Haven, Connecticut, it was written: “Today no thoroughfare into the city is more thronged than Grand Street.” The two main arteries that have shaped Fair Haven are Grand Avenue and Ferry Street, both as old as the Fair Haven colony itself. Today Grand Avenue continues to be the heart and soul of Fair Haven. READ MORE.

Judging from pages design - it seems that a few years ago an interesting project was conducted. PASS IT ON is a collection of first-hand descriptions, histories, walking tours, and essays about New Haven's neighborhoods. To produce these neighborhood guides, students chose, researched, and wrote about the people, places, and things that they thought were most interesting and representative of their neighborhoods. They interviewed community members, conducted surveys, used secondary sources from the Web and New Haven 's libraries, and drew on their own experiences to craft these stories. They have covered Dixwell, Fair Haven, Dwight-Edgewood, The Hill, Newhallville.