A street named for a chapel
Chapel Street takes its name from the Yale College chapel, and the stretch running west from York Street to Sherman Avenue has been a distinct neighborhood for well over a century. In the late 1800s and early 1900s it was one of the addresses in New Haven, home to judges, a governor, Yale professors and the merchant families whose stores anchored downtown. Two of its grandest houses eventually became hospitals.
That did not survive the second half of the twentieth century intact. Urban renewal took buildings out of the streetscape, stores closed, and by the 1970s the western end of Chapel Street had a reputation that kept customers away from the businesses still standing.
Evelyn Schatz
Evelyn Schatz grew up in Morris Cove and met Morris Schatz at a dance at the YWCA on Chapel Street in the early 1950s. He was standing by the coffee machine with a pipe in his mouth, she said later, and looked so cute. They married nine years afterward, once both families had been talked round, and moved into the apartment above Schatz Furriers at 1255 Chapel Street, the shop Morris's father had opened at the turn of the century on the corner of Chapel and Howe.
They stayed. As other families left for the suburbs, the Schatzes stayed and argued. In 1970 they gathered the residents and merchants of the block into the Upper Chapel Street Neighborhood Association, on the straightforward theory that City Hall would listen to a group where it would not listen to a shopkeeper.
Being listened to took a while. Evelyn's methods became well known around New Haven: call the city until someone acts, call the police until someone comes, call the landlords until they sell to someone better. One city official put it plainly, that Evelyn could pester anyone to death and never let up. Late in the 1970s, impatient with the pace of things, she fastened a life-sized inflatable doll to the front of a bus, filled the bus with neighbors, drove it across town to the mayor's house and made her case in front of the television cameras.
1986
In 1986 the Chapel West Special Services District was established by city ordinance and state statute, giving the neighborhood something it had never had: a budget of its own, funded by the property owners inside it and spent only here.
Evelyn Schatz became its first business manager and executive director. She ran it from an office with three telephone lines and a view of an old stone church, on sixteen-hour days, with a staff of two, a street sweeper and a set of hedge clippers. Within a decade the district had laid granite-bricked sidewalks, put up old-fashioned street lamps and trash containers, and the buildings that had stood abandoned were coming back into use.
People called her about everything. Where to get a birth certificate, how to deal with an aggressive panhandler, who to ask for a can of paint, whose sidewalk needed sweeping after a broken bottle. She took the calls. Every morning she read the New Haven Register looking for anyone with the slightest connection to the district, cut the item out, laminated it and mailed it to them.
In June 1998, the week of her seventieth birthday, the city hung banners along her block of Chapel Street proclaiming it Evelyn Schatz Way.
They're calling it that because I always get my way.
Asked whether she would ever run for office herself, she said she had absolutely no taste for politics.
She led the district until she passed away in 2003. The sign still stands at Chapel and Howe.
Vincent A. Romei Sr.
Walk west on Chapel Street from the Yale School of Architecture toward Sherman Avenue and you will pass roughly thirty faces looking down at you. Paul Giamatti. Constance Baker Motley. Eli Whitney. Karen Carpenter. Each one a black-and-white portrait on a vinyl banner, each one a person who was born in New Haven or spent a meaningful stretch of life here.
That installation was Vin Romei's idea.
Vincent A. Romei Sr. served as President of the Chapel West Special Services District until March 2021, and he conceived the banner project in the early 2010s as a way to do two things at once: promote the district and remind people that this stretch of Chapel Street sits inside a long and consequential history. He sourced honorees the way a man of his generation would, from newspaper obituaries and running lists of notable New Haveners, and handed them to Strong Cohen Graphic Design, a firm located right here in the district, to render. His instruction to the designers was simple and firm. Keep away from politics. Over the years the district has turned down more than a few local political families who wanted a relative up on a pole.
His own explanation of the project was characteristically plain. "We're just trying to bring notice to New Haven history," he said when the first batch went up. The point was to choose people who had contributed something, and to let passersby be impressed on their way to lunch.
Vin was born in West Haven on September 1, 1933, to Michael and Josephine Romei. He went to West Haven High School, excelled at nearly every sport the school offered, and met the girl he would marry, Lois DelGuidice, in its hallways. They were married sixty-six years. He studied accounting at Central Connecticut Teachers College and New Haven College and built a career as a working businessman rather than a figurehead: partner and treasurer of L.G. DeFelice Construction Company, partner and treasurer of the Colony Inn of New Haven, and a founding member of the Bank of New Haven.
He gave the same energy to civic work. He chaired the New Haven Visitors Convention Bureau. He coached in the Woodbridge Father's Baseball League. And at Chapel West he was not a name on a letterhead. He managed the district's projects alongside its business manager, the daily unglamorous business of a neighborhood that runs its own street cleaning crews, plants its own trees, installs its own lights and cameras, and knows, as Brian McGrath put it, every property owner and every inch of the street.
That is the part worth holding onto. A special services district is an odd creature: a taxing district created by referendum in 1986, funded by the people inside it, accountable to a nine-member board elected from its own membership. It only works if someone shows up. For years, Vin Romei showed up.
He died on July 13, 2022, at Yale New Haven Hospital, at 88. He is survived by Lois; his children Michael, Laurene, and Vincent Jr.; three grandchildren; and a long roster of siblings, nieces, and nephews. He was remembered by those who knew him as one of the most giving people they could name, a man whose loyalty went first to his family and, some distance behind, to the Yankees and the Giants.
The banners are still up, and more have gone up since. It is a fitting kind of monument for a man who spent so long making sure this street got noticed: he is not on any of them, and every one of them is his.
Brian McGrath
The generation that followed knew the district through Brian McGrath, its executive director. He came to the job after a full career in New Haven city government, where he had run the traffic and parking department and overseen economic development projects, following his father William, who had held the traffic and parking post before him. He sat on the city's Redevelopment Commission too, and worked with Dwight neighbors on a redevelopment plan that took its lessons from what urban renewal had got wrong.
At Chapel West he argued for the district's businesses and for the renewal of the neighborhood around them, and he was the force behind the New Haven Notables: the banner series of biographical portraits of notable New Haveners, Meryl Streep and Dr. Spock and Norman Lear among them, that put the city's history on the sidewalk of Chapel Street.
He was, by every account, impossible to overlook. Outspoken, salty, with a permanent glint in his eye, he loved to shock people with a strong opinion and then keep talking to them. He registered countless voters, took his son canvassing for as long as the boy could remember, and seemed to be at every political gathering and every transit hearing in the city. He collected stamps, went to the New Haven Philatelic Society every Tuesday night for forty years and was its president until he could no longer go. He played pool. He spoke and read German, French, Italian and Spanish, and a little Russian, and was taking Arabic classes toward the end of his life. New Haven was his home team, and he was one of its most ardent boosters.
Brian McGrath was born on September 21, 1946, the eldest of eleven children, and died at home on April 9, 2020, at the age of 73. "There was so much energy and curiosity," State Representative Pat Dillon, a friend and political colleague of forty years, said of him. "He noticed everything."
Chapel West today
The district is governed by a nine-member Board of Commissioners elected from its membership, who conduct its services and business. The work is much what Evelyn started with: clean sidewalks, working lights, trees in the ground and an eye on the street, for the restaurants, shops, hotels, offices, hospitals and residents between York Street and Sherman Avenue.
The argument she made in 1970 has not really changed. A block does better when it speaks with one voice.
The district keeps a longer memory than its own founding, too: New Haven Notables is the banner series on the people who were born here, studied here, or made something here that outlived them.