Wooster Square is a neighborhood in the city of New Haven, Connecticut to the east of downtown. The name refers to a park square (named for the American Revolutionary War hero, David Wooster) located between Greene Street, Wooster Place, Chapel Street and Academy Street in the center of the neighborhood. Wooster Square is known as a bastion of Italian American culture and cuisine, and is home to some of New Haven's, and the world's, best-known pizza (specifically, apizza) eateries, including Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Sally's Apizza.
The square and much of the neighborhood are included in the Wooster Square Historic District which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. The district covers a 40-acre (16 ha) area bounded roughly by St. John, Olive, and Wooster streets and I-91.
The neighborhood has also holds an annual Cherry Blossom Festival in Wooster Square Park that commemorates the planting of 72 Yoshino Japanese Cherry Blossom trees in 1973 by the New Haven Historic Commission in collaboration with the New Haven Parks Department and neighborhood residents. The Festival has grown from a modest event in the early 1970s with a local band entertaining a handful of neighbors under lighted trees to a major New Haven event that in 2012 drew well over 5,000 visitors.
Read more about Wooster Square: Geography, History, Culture and Commerce, List of Streets, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the word square:
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)