Feedback sought in developing Jubilee Park - the city's only downtown green space

NORWICH — A mural going up on Castle Church is just the start of a new park in Norwich.

Castle Church will be showing a documentary on Jubilee Park, at Castle Church Saturday at 6 p.m. From there, guests will be able to see a 3D model of the site, research on the history of the property and give feedback on developing the park to the Yale Urban Design Workshop, along with some musical performances from the church.

Castle Church requests that people register for the Saturday event on the website. There are 71 people attending as of Wednesday, Pastor Adam Bowles said.

The YUDW is a community design center, and is run by Yale staff and graduate students, providing services for communities through non-profits, community organizations, and sometimes municipalities and developers. The kinds of design projects can range from affordable housing to parks, and anything in between, said Andrei Harwell, director of the workshop and a senior critic in the school of architecture for Yale University.

“We’re interested in projects that involve trying to understand what places want, and to help them visualize what a set of choices they might make might look like, and to help them to understand what steps they need to take to get there,” he said.

Workshop is about the ideas, possibilities

The role of the workshop isn’t to dictate what projects get done, but help communities create projects they can carry forward if they see fit, even if it doesn’t look anything like what YUDW pitched, Harwell said.

“It’s really about ideas, not so much about things being executed,” he said. “But they do inspire change in the way people think.”

In Groton, YUDW worked with the Avery Copp House on how to become more relevant to the community. From taking to them and other groups, they rediscovered and reinvented a heritage park plan, created the Thames River Heritage Park, connecting points of interest by water taxi, Harwell said.

Castle Church and YUDW have worked together since March 2021. Bowles sought a college-based entity in developing the idea to help gather feedback, and to keep costs down. He saw some work the organization did for Resilient Bridgeport, and found a connection between the environmental resilience and resilience on the human level and the city level with Jubilee Park.

At the beginning: Baptisms, outreach and COVID-19 mark church’s first year

Harwell said Bowles has had a passion for getting this project done, so long as there’s a plan to follow. The Jubilee Park project is also interesting for YUDW, as public spaces are a specialty for the organization.

The partnership between the church and the workshop has been motivating, Norwich Community Development Corporation President Kevin Brown said.

"We're excited to take what is the only downtown green space, and turn it into something," he said.

YUDW had also worked with Norwich in the 1990s in developing the Chelsea District Urban Design Guidelines, which also had the same goal of bringing more people to downtown Norwich, through identifying its strength, and seeing what the community wanted, according to a July 1995 article from The Bulletin.

Mural at Jubilee Park has generated racial justice conversations

It has been about a year since Ben Keller’s mural debuted, featuring the likenesses of two important Black figures in Norwich’s history, Sarah Harris Fayerweather and James Lindsey Smith. Harris Fayerweather was the first Black student of Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury in 1832. Smith was an escaped slave who settled in Norwich, and became an author, minister, and a businessman.

With that herald of Jubilee Park, it helped bring attention to the project, generating conversations about racial justice and Norwich’s history, and showed what it could look like if “we gave it some love and gave it some attention,” Bowles said.

“The mural has generated so many conversations about vision, about people saying ‘I’ve always wanted to see that site improved,” he said. “We feel like people have been highly engaged.”

More: A mural is the first sign of a new park in downtown Norwich.

Brown also credits the mural for encouraging the current progress in revitalizing Norwich. He also wants to expand the YUDW's study scope up to Norwich City Hall, including the parcel by the Metamorphosis mural by Carlitos Skills. It would involve studying more possibilities, like planting trees, or improving parking or sidewalks.

"It took what was solely going to be a Castle Church effort, and turned it into something that can create momentum for all of lower Broadway, and the city as a whole," he said.

One of the Castle Church parishioners, Richard Young, said the park project makes people curious about the church, and is an improvement for Norwich.

"Other cities should do the same," he said.

Even in its unfinished state, Jubilee Park has been used for community events, notably for kids' activities during the NorWITCH Halloween Strut last year.

Status of YUDW project

As it stands, the workshop has completed the fact-finding portion, and is now trying to come up with ideas, and will try to get feedback from people attending the documentary screening, Harwell said.

“Someone will say something that produces an amazing idea that unlocks the project, and it’s sometimes surprising where that comes from,” he said. “It might come from a kid saying something offhandedly.”

On Saturday, YUDW workshop representatives will be in attendance, Bowles said.

While what the space can do is part of the conversation, there are other factors. On one side, there’s practical matters, like how it would handle water runoff. On the other side, it’s about who the space represents, Harwell said.

“It’s a challenge how we think about and encourage lots of different kinds of people to be comfortable in this space, and project themselves into this space,” he said.

The mural is only the beginning, Bowles said.

“There’s an opportunity to do something special here for Norwich,” he said.

This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: Castle Church partners with Yale Urban Design Workshop for Jubilee Park