When residents arrived in Wooster Square on Sunday afternoon for the city’s 47th annual Cherry Blossom Festival, they saw very little pink. Most of the sakuras — Japanese for cherry blossom tree — had already passed peak bloom. Nonetheless, after a two-year hiatus, the show’s return saw a park bustling with music, food carts and families as they celebrated nature and a sense of community.
At the heart of the celebration was a repertoire of elegant instrumentals and striking vocals, courtesy of four local bands: Airborne, St. Luke’s Steel Band, Movimiento Musical and Carlos y su Momento. This year’s ensembles played a mixture of contemporary jazz, calypso, reggae, classical, sacred and percussions — each note wafting through the air as locals enjoyed dishes from 13 local, multicultural food stands.
“This event means community and neighborhood,” Sarah Greenblatt, co-chair of this year’s celebration, said. “People can come and bring their chairs and their blankets and listen to really good music in the park.”
For Greenblatt, the best part of the event was seeing families having fun together in the same space after being disconnected over the course of the pandemic. She spent the day at an information booth, guiding visitors to different sections of the park and explaining the history behind the celebration.
Beside her, local high school students passed out brochures, cleaned up the park and talked to community members. Volunteer and New Haven resident Michael Pavano watched them with pride, and expressed his happiness that they will soon become the “futures of our community.” Several hundred feet away, representatives from the city government and the Yale School of Environment offered to plant trees in local neighborhoods per request of community members, hoping to restore the “urban canopy” one treeling at a time.
Beyond this feeling of togetherness, Greenblatt emphasized that the festival also afforded opportunities for city residents to get closer with nature. Every annual festival is a commemoration of the very first 72 Yoshino Japanese cherry blossoms that were brought to and planted in the Wooster Square neighborhood in 1973. Since then, the city has systematically replaced many of the original trees due to their rather short life span of 40 to 50 years, Greenblatt explained, pointing to the smaller, younger trees dotting the edges of the park.
New Haven-raised Jacquelyn Rosario-Mora, who attended the event nearly every year before the pandemic, echoed the community-building aspect of the festival, saying that it was a good way for families to come out of the isolation of their homes and spend quality time together in nature.
In previous years, the fair typically had “family events and kid projects,” she said, and hoped to find these same booths as the event unfolded over the course of the afternoon. Mayela Garcia, who was also raised in the city but had never been to a Cherry Blossom Festival before, said she looked forward to eating the hot food being sold at the curbs and sidewalks. She noted that the “enticing” smells of different cultural cuisines reflected a sense of the community coming together.
Residents hailed from all over the state. Sarah Hite from Bloomfield, Conn. thanked her local senior citizen group for bringing her to the festival, saying that she couldn’t help but wait to see the cherry blossoms in-person after noticing how beautiful they looked on the news.
As much as the festival was a celebration of nature and community, it also highlighted the fierce resilience of local food and beverage businesses throughout the pandemic. The planning committee, which met from December to April, worked hard to give small businesses a more than deserved opportunity to put themselves out there and get back on their feet, according to Greenblatt.
Manning the La Carreta Mexican Food Truck, Blanca Campos was among this year’s small business owners. She prides herself on a colorful variety of traditional, homemade dishes.
“I like to enjoy the music and the people coming,” she said. “They [especially] like the tacos … and quesadillas.”
Other vendors like Laura Abate, who was selling pizza, have been coming to the annual event for decades, saying that she “wouldn’t [have] miss[ed] it for the world.” John Nanneti from the Swagat Indian food stand mentioned that he had sold out of “everything,” citing the event as both a way to make good money and have fun.
At the end of the day, what brought Pavano the most pride and joy was “giving the community an opportunity to … engage and interact [in a way that] they haven't been able to for quite a while,” he said. “We're really excited about how many people showed up. We usually average about 10,000 people throughout the day, and I think we're gonna come close to that today.”
This year’s Historic Wooster Square Cherry Blossom Celebration was presented by the Historic Wooster Square Association and Wooster Square Conservancy, lasting from noon until 4:30 p.m.
At 2:45 p.m., Charlie and Charlotte Murphy, active members of the Historic Wooster Square Association and residents of the historic Rowland House since 2003, were designated the recipients of the 2022 Friend of Wooster Square award.
Sadie Bograd and Keenan Miller contributed reporting.