Alder Lauds Armory Advocacy In Annual Address

by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent

A picture of Edwards’ late son Ben, on the Armory. Credit: Mona Mahadevan file photo

When Alder Kim Edwards goes by the Goffe Street Armory, she sees a picture of her son — and a model for what persistent community activism can accomplish.

Edwards pointed to the Armory’s past and future Monday night as she delivered the annual Board of Alders Black & Hispanic Caucus State of the City address in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.

Edwards represents Newhallville/Prospect Hill’s Ward 19 on the Board of Alders and serves as the chair of the Black & Hispanic Caucus. She dedicated much of her address to exhorting the values of civic volunteerism at the local level — particularly in a country that is “chaotic, messy, and in disarray.”

“I challenge you all to tell a friend to tell a friend to get involved,” she said to her local legislative colleagues.

Urge your neighbor to join a board or commission. To become math tutor with the New Haven Tutoring Initiative or a literacy tutor with New Haven Reads. To do something to make New Haven that much better of a place to call home.

She pointed to the Armory as a success story in-the-making of that type of dedicated community engagement, persistence, and perseverenace.

Built in 1930, the building is a “gem,” Edwards said, having hosted concerts by Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra as well as the state’s Black Expo. The building sits on the National Register of Historic Places and the Connecticut Freedom Trail. It’s located right across the street from Goffe Street Park; it’s a short walk away from Hillhouse High School.

“It’s just a little more personal for me,” she added, because a picture of her late son Ben is on the Armory, installed in January 2019 as part of the city’s iMatter photography project. Ben died of brain cancer in March 2019 at the age of 16.

“For years and years and years,” Edwards said, New Haveners have spoken up about what this building means to them — and to ask, “How can it be saved? How can it be restored? … Why [hasn’t] more been done to repurpose and save this gem?”

If the Armory were located downtown or on Whitney Avenue or Orange Street, Edwards said, “it would have been a different conversation.” This vacant and dilapidated building would have been saved long ago.

But now, she said, “we have some movement.”

Namely, the city has secured $6.75 million in state funding to help repair the building and begin its conversion into a new community space, affordable housing, and “a much-needed vo-tech school.”

Edwards credited the Armory’s neighbors, city and state officials, and New Haven’s state delegation for working to save this long-vacant building. She singled out for praise the Armory Community Advisory Committee, which for years has done “a lot of hard work organizing” and pushing for the building to be saved.

Those same neighbors have also converted the space around the Armory into a community garden. “They beautified a space that was just dilapidated” and getting worse, she said.

When others had given up on the building, Edwards said, these dedicated community advocates did not. “They kept up the pressure,” and their work is now beginning to bear fruit.

At Monday’s Board of Alders meeting.

Alder Troy Streater with Alder Edwards after Monday’s meeting.

The Armory on Monday night.