by Paul Bass The New Haven independent
Frances “Bitsie” Clark, the gravel-voiced open-hearted people person and unshakeable optimist who led New Haven’s late 20th century cultural revival and the development of the Audubon Arts District, died Friday surrounded by loved ones in her apartment at the Whitney Center retirement community.
Loving life and inspiring people to the end: Bitsie Clark at the Whitney Center. BARBARA LAMB PHOTO
She was three weeks shy of her 95th birthday. She died of natural causes.
Clark leaves behind a city’s worth of artists and decision-makers and dreamers who benefited from her guidance, counsel, and indefatigable optimism. Many of them stopped by her room in the past month to say good-bye as the end neared. The day before she died she rewatched her favorite movie, Blazing Saddles, with her close friend Maryann Ott, quoting her favorite lines.
“She was always more enthusiastic about what you were doing than you were,” people repeatedly told her daughter, Mary Vines.
Mary Frances “Bitsie” Thompson was born on Oct. 30, 1931. She grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. She attended the Berkeley Institute for Girls (now the Berkeley Carroll School), where as junior class president she was invited to a gathering of fellow school officers hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt told the assembled teens they had been chosen to pursue leadership roles so they would not leave “politics to the hacks,” daughter Mary recalled. Frances decided she would become the nation’s first female president.
She brought that goal to Vassar College. She enrolled in political science courses. An adviser insisted she take art and music courses in order to be a “well-rounded” president. She discovered she loved the arts, too.
In 1954 she married John Phelps Clark. The couple raised a family in Branford. Bitsie later moved to New Haven after the couple divorced.
After honing her managerial skills working for the Girls Scouts of the USA, Clark took the helm of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven in 1983. New Haven was emerging from the post-urban renewal hangover of the 1970s with revival visions built around the city’s combination of grassroots and elite (read: Yale) theatrical, visual arts, and musical chops.
Clark remained at the job for the next 19 years, patiently guiding plans to build an arts-centered residential and commercial district on Audubon Street. She got to know — and was able to relate to — every important player on the scene from community theater promoters to politicians to benefactors to academic bigwigs. She negotiated with them, prodded them, hit them up for support, socialized with them, settled their disputes. And laughed with them at every step. She was equally at home in City Hall and the concert hall, the back room, the board room, the ballroom, and anyone’s living room.
Clark was just getting started in civic life: After handing control over a transformed arts council, she served eight years as a downtown alder, returning to her first love of politics. As in the arts job, she was the underestimated grown-up in the room. She never took people’s histrionics personally. And she could be blunt: When one constituent complained about noisy early-morning trucks, she responded: “You live in a city!”
Babz Rawls-Ivy, who served with Clark on the Board of Alders and later as arts council chair encountered her often in cultural circles, remembered her as a “remarkable woman way ahead of her time. She was talking about equity and inclusion 25-plus years before it became a growing ground breaking policy shift.”
Rawls-Ivy recalled a community issues-oriented meeting attended mostly by white people. “If you look around the tables you sit at and you don’t see diversity,” she recalled Clark saying, “then you better get to the business of changing who’s at the table making decisions about communities you serve and have your table look like that!”
Clark followed that stint at 79 years old with a six-year run building the Home Haven nonprofit into a network of 250 seniors able to stay in their homes while connected to needed help and social activity. She also continued to help artists pursue their dreams, linking, say, an emerging playwright like Steve Driffin with people who could help him stage his first productions.
A group of mentees and lifelong friends calling themselves the “Bitsie Chicks” established a fund in her name in 2018 to fund the work of local artists who otherwise lack access to grants.
Clark’s survivors include daughter Mary and son-in-law Jimmy Vines, son Jonathan Clark and daughter-in-law Amy, and grandchildren Clark, Tommy, Ethan, Taylor, and Jordan. A public celebration of her life is planned for November (details to come).
Technically, Clark retired in 2017, eventually moving into the Whitney Center retiree complex. Even there she organized events that brought in people from the community to enrich her neighbors’ souls.
Stuck in her room when the Covid pandemic hit, Clark refused to surrender her optimism. She read voraciously. She maintained hope. In an interview (in the below video) from that time, she discussed how she remained grateful for the blessings of her life amid a time of so much despair. “Even if things look absolutely awful,” she advised, “try to look at the bright side.”