Here’s a memory —

It’s late summer on Upper State Street in New Haven, 1978. Rents have plummeted, buildings sell for a dollar, residents call the neighborhood “a real battlezone” in local newspapers. 

The sidewalks are empty — save for dozens of antique shops dispensing all evidence of a once-booming neighborhood onto the street. Dozens of chairs spill across the sidewalk, collecting the sun on their wooden backs. No two look alike: there are desk chairs, lounging chairs, child chairs, adult chairs, sleeping chairs, and eating chairs. Four men sort through the mess. It is a hot day: the colors blend.

A city dispenses and digests itself.

—

The 70s were the “wasteland years” of Upper State Street.  In the 50s, a six-lane elevated freeway was built a few steps off the street’s east end, cutting it off from residential Fair Haven and the gentle banks of the Mill River. In the 60s, the neighborhood’s large Marlinworks firearms factory closed, moved north, and brought much of the neighborhood with it. Much of what made State Street was lost in those decades — but some have stayed, in the brick and the concrete, in the things left behind. 

I met Klugman in Spruce Coffee, on 952 State Street, on a chilly spring morning in 2025. Back in the 70s, she was a graduate student living in Goatville, a neighborhood of State Street. More than forty years later, she still remembers Spruce Coffee as Satan’s Parlor — a pool parlor that she was “almost afraid” to come to most days.

As the community dwindled on State Street and former residents vacated their businesses and homes, antique shops started booming in the area, selling bits and bobs of the neighborhood’s past. 

To Klugman, these antique shops — and the people who manned them — felt like home. “People would inhabit their shops like they were homes. So you’d go in and there’d be a couple of guys sitting on chairs and they’d have a hot plate,” she said. “Sometimes they would put their chairs outside, and people would come and just sit, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t buying anything.”

She liked the challenge of photographing people who were just “doing their thing” — but over time, she became close with the antique shop owners. They were people of character, of stature, she said, people who stayed when the rest of the community fled. There was Penny, of her husband’s Anthony’s Antiques (“it’s funny ’cause she always seemed like the dominant one,” laughed Klugman). Then there was Charles and John of Charles’ and John’s, whom she’s stayed in contact with most. “They trusted me, you know. There was no barrier, and that’s part of the culture of the street.”

In 2020, she self-published photographs of the stores in a Shutterfly book titled Upper State Street, New Haven 1978: At the Height of Its Decline. The book is split down the middle — on one side are black and white photographs of a stilled city, of people enveloped by trashed memories and old dolls and broken chairs and news clippings — and on the other side are snippets of notes that Klugman scribbled down 47 years ago. 

In one of the photos, Rhea, of Rhea’s Antiques, sits in the dark back office of her State Street store. She’s older, 70 maybe, clutching a curly-haired dog in a bow tie. The stuff on her desk threatens to eat her. She gazes at the camera with her chin lifted. She’s looking up, beyond the place. The note reads:

I ask about the yellowed news clippings that cover the wall behind her desk. “Lots of famous people grew up in this area. I know because I’ve been here for sixty years. I was born in the house that is now in the back of this shop… There was a head of the FBI, a Supreme Court Justice, and a Mayor. These clippings tell a whole story. 

When she was a graduate student, Klugman furnished her cramped apartment with the things she found in these stores. Then she finished school, bought a house up in Guilford, and did the same. She still lives alongside those memories she kept — including an eight-foot-long wooden butcher block and three stained glass windows pulled from the wreckage of a funeral home. 

“Back then, large, amazing things would be salvaged from wrecked places and given away,” she said. “I look through them and feel some connection to all the emotions, about God and sadness, and human feelings that went around them.” 

These days, she gets the same feeling from the bricks on the buildings of Upper State Street. “It all looks the same. I can tell what antique stores were where by the pattern of the bricks, or by the structure of the doorway. It’s, of course, completely different now.” 

Klugman didn’t know it then, but her memories, photographs, notes, butcher board, and stained-glass windows would become proof of a lost time on Upper State Street. And proof, too, of a rare success story in neighborhood redevelopment — one that would, 47 years later, give itself back over to a sidewalk democracy of salvaged things. 

—

But here, for now, is another memory —

It’s late summer on State Street, 1993. Steam rises from the pavement; the air is thick with the sound of insects. Trees color the scene green. Out, down the center of the street, dozens of tents flutter; from their shade spills out piles and piles of produce, carrots, radishes, fresh cheese, and bread. People move slowly, muffled by the heat. There’s laughter, there’s chalk, there are kids soaked by the succulence of the day. 

A city renews. 

—

In the 1960s, Mayor Richard Lee dreamt up a new New Haven; one he called a “Model City,” free of “urban slums.” To clear the foundation for this city, 5,000 homes were destroyed across Wooster Square, The Hill, and Dixwell, displacing 8,000 people, and bankrupting 2,200 businesses. Streets once clustered with families, markets, and parks were ground to dust. The wasted years of Upper State Street were in part an outcome of Lee’s Model City; the highway that ran above the street was built to deepen access between the suburbs and commercial city center.  

By the 1980s, governmental, top-down renewal in New Haven meant a neighborhood death sentence. In the dim light of J.D. Dewell & Co Antiques on Upper State Street, dozens of other antique shop owners met and formed the Upper State Street Association. In February of 1983, they met with the city’s Mayor, Frank Loguwhich, to conceive of the Neighborhood Commercial Revitalization Program. This program prioritized a more bottom-up, rather than top-down renewal future for the city; less large-scale demolition, more salvaging of wrecked things. The first target of this plan was Upper State Street. “It’s up to developers to take the risk and invest in rebuilding communities piece by piece, neighborhood by neighborhood,” Zane Yost, a Yale School of Architecture graduate, told a New Haven Register reporter at the 1983 meeting regarding the city’s vision of  Neighborhood Commercial Revitalization.

This reborn model of renewal spread across the Goatville neighborhood. One street over, another organization formed, the Upper Orange Street Neighborhood Association, led by landlord Joseph Puleo, Wardman Kathleen Wimer, and Architect Melanie Taylor, on whose porch they met.  As written in Philip Langdon’s 2017 book, Within Walking Distance, the association began with the space between buildings — with the street, its shade, its corners. 

“Puleo built combination seating-planter boxes, which the group placed at bus stops, and he installed bulletin boards at a few locations, including Lulu’s, to let people know what was going on in the neighborhood,” Langdon wrote. “Upper Orange Street Neighbors had a vision: creating inviting gathering places on the then-drab expanses of asphalt or concrete in front of several stores.” 

True to the men on the chairs in the street, renewal by the people of Goatville was concentrated largely on the street; the city pledged to install new brick sidewalks, curbs, trees, and street lighting — and provide a $10,000 grant to business owners hoping to improve their stores. The Upper State and Upper Orange Street neighborhood associations also received a $25,000 grant from the city for “community development.” New cafes and restaurants burst from old brick facades, set out chairs and flower boxes, and welcomed in the street. The whole effort cost the city just over one million dollars. 

And so, in the sweet years of the 1990s, Goatville was reborn. In the summers, Sundays filled the sidewalks with music, food, and dance, and beckoned passers-by into the newly glistening storefronts. Posters hung from lampposts and telephone-wire poles reading:

“There are people who live here who could live anywhere they want to, but they choose to live here. There’s a comfortable confidence they have in themselves,” resident Bill Donohue told the New York Times in a 1993 article. “Here, you are not beholden or obligated to an automobile, or to a social set. Here, you don’t have to go out and make that support system — it’s already here.”

—

A week after meeting Klugman, I return to Goatville.  It’s cold, gray, and 7 a.m. Brandon Doyle, dressed in Carhartts and a bright green URI beanie, bends down and brushes the top of a twig-looking plant poking out from the snow. 

“This is an Oak tree, can’t you tell?” he says. “Look at that little bud.” His black lab, Dolly, pants and sniffs at the little tree. It grows from a bright green planter box, next to an old abandoned construction site. 

Last fall, Doyle left his relationship, his house in Hamden, and his career, and came to Goatville, unsure and empty-handed. “I don’t like to call it a crisis — it was more like a midlife pivot,” he said. That’s when he found the two-by-sixes. “Someone had renovated their deck and left 26 of these green two-by-sixes neatly stacked on the corner of Nash and Edwards,” Doyle said. “So I took them. That was sort of the origin of Goatville Salvage.”

Since his arrival, Doyle has inherited the spirit of the neighborhood. So much so, he’s continuing the legacy of the antique shop owners and the city planners who came before him. 

From the two-by-sixes, he made six planters, and a bench or two, all of which he scattered throughout the neighborhood in places he felt needed them. We walk from this first planter to another, just off Upper State. From this one grows a little pea plant, its winter-browned stems supported by a rusted metal lattice he also found on the sidewalk. It’s encircled by a few stone benches, a walkway, and a leaning cedar tree; in the cold, silent, snow-filled morning, it feels like the center point of a sanctuary. 

“This corner didn’t feel particularly inviting. This street was a little neglected, ” Doyle said, sweeping his hand down State. “I wanted to make it into someplace to sit that is sunny and safe and tended to.”

When he placed this planter last summer, he left out a Sharpie for residents to write the names of their dogs as they walked by. The green box is covered with haphazardly scrawled names: Mok + Remmy + Minnow and Moxie and <3 CHRIS <3. “I wanted it to be playful, to engage people in having some sense of ownership.” 

We keep walking, this time up Upper State Street. These days, every block is full of restaurants, markets, and shops. On the side of a three-story brick building, we stop and look at a squat little Norway spruce. This is where Edward’s Lunch used to be — an antique shop owned by Edward, and photographed by Klugman in 1978. In her photograph, the sidewalk outside was filled with shoes. 

“This Christmas I met the owner of this building — back in the 70s, she and her husband bought it for a dollar,” Doyle said, pulling at one of the tree’s branches.  “She wanted a living tree out in front, so we planted it after Christmas.” Doyle and the owner plan to turn the space around the building into a mini-park of sorts, filled with native plants, picnic tables, and trees.

We cross State Street to Lawrence Street Plaza, a triangle-shaped dog park splitting State from the down-ramp of US-5. There’s another green planter here, and a great big yellow one. “This park has seen a lot of different owners and uses over the years. It’s a veteran memorial. It’s the women’s park. It’s a dog park. It’s a street plaza,” Doyle said, setting his foot up on the yellow planter. Doyle has brought the plaza into a new era; he, with the help of friends, cleaned the area of invasive plants, polished the veteran memorial, and planted dozens and dozens of daffodils. They found an old fence and a rusted wheelbarrow to put up at the entrance. In September of 2024, they closed the street from traffic and brought a street fair to the plaza — kids drew chalk along sidewalks, live music played, and community members mingled in the sweet evening air. He’s an artist in rewilding. “There’s a culture of people leaving useful things on the sidewalk here,” Doyle said. “I salvage them and give them a new life.” He made Goatville Salvage his full-time career, building benches and planters from scrap for businesses and people all around New Haven. 

The sound of the highway thrums above us; as we stand, cars blazing up, slowing just as they hit the side of the park. This is the highway that once ruined Upper State Street. Concrete columns arch around us like great Oaks; the steaming Mill River runs below, illuminated by weak light falling from gaps between the two highway ramps. Invasive knotweed tangles and tumbles over the river’s banks. The asphalt clangs. Here, there are all sorts of wasted things; below the graying February snow lay piles of clothes, wind chimes, pieces of chairs, and cushions. It’s reminiscent of Klugman’s photographs, all spilled out and piled up in the present day. The space below this highway is Doyle’s next project; he dreams of integrating it into the street and the park, clearing it of trash and invasives, and running paths along it to complete what must be the final manifestation of the 1980s renewal projects in Goatville. 

“When we moved into our apartment off State it was really falling apart, you know,” Klugman tells me. “The rugs were all urine smelling. But we honored the fact it was a beautiful place. We went down into the street, got to know our neighbors, bought furniture from them, sat out on our porch.” 

The neighborhood has changed in half a century since she left it; the antique shops have disappeared, and the once-bare streets are now shaded with trees. But something in its soil, in its air, in its people, has remained unchanged — enough to push Doyle to participate in the same renewal that first arrived at State Street. It will continue long after Doyle’s oaks have grown.