The Shack Community Center Reopens in New Haven's West Hills

The Shack Sisters opened the celebration with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” backed by The Shack band, and the crowd packed into 333 Valley Street on April 6 knew exactly what kind of morning it was going to be.

New Haven’s West Hills neighborhood gathered its political establishment, its educators, its advocates, and its neighbors to mark the grand reopening of The Shack community center, freshly restored after a $550,000 State Urban Act Grant funded structural improvements and building repairs. The turnout told its own story. Mayor Justin Elicker was there. Former Mayor Toni Harp was there. The superintendent of schools, the acting police chief, state senators and representatives, the Board of Alders president and majority leader, and a host of alders filled the room.

The person they came to honor was Alder Honda Smith, founder and executive director of what has become one of the city’s most quietly consequential community institutions.

State Sen. Gary Winfield put it plainly. “This is Honda loving her community that makes us all want to be in this space,” he told the crowd.

Smith and a team of neighbors revived The Shack in 2021, taking a former community center that had deteriorated past usefulness and rebuilding it into something that now serves more than 750 residents each month. The center runs educational, vocational, and recreational programs for youth, adults, and seniors. It provides food assistance for families. It houses a radio station, an art program, a music program, a vegetable garden, and chickens. It carries the legacy of former Shack director Ron Augustine.

Harp credited Smith’s creative vision as the force behind all of it. “Honda is an example of what thinking something into existence is all about,” Harp said. “There was a blue building that was about to fall apart, and she saw a center to bring people together, a place to honor former leaders like Ron Augustine, a place to learn art, to make music, to have a radio station, a place with a vegetable garden and chickens.”

Elicker described Smith’s approach with young people as the core of the center’s success. She “listens to young people, she listens to what their interests are, what will draw them into this space, and she goes from there,” he said.

The reach of that approach extends well beyond the building. Lindy Lee Gold, who worked alongside Smith on the H.O.L.L.A. Mentoring Program, said the program has helped put 125 young people through college and graduate school. “Honda has changed not just the lives of young people, but the lives of their future generations, setting a new paradigm,” Gold said.

Smith herself offered a rare window into the personal history that shaped her purpose. She described a period in her life when “things were very grim.” She found herself in a jail cell for something she said she did not do. “I remember the silence more than anything,” she said. “The kind of silence that comes after rejection, after family turned their backs, friends grew distant.” She described turning to prayer in that moment. “My vision grew clearer. My purpose got louder than my pain.”

That turning point, by her own account, is the root of everything at 333 Valley Street.

The morning also featured a more intimate moment: Jamire Casteel performed “A Song for You” alongside his grandmother, Honda Smith.

The reopening reflects something New Haven does occasionally get right. A neglected building in a neighborhood that too many city plans have overlooked became, through one person’s refusal to accept its deterioration, a center that serves three generations of residents every month. The state money followed the work, not the other way around. That sequence matters.

The Shack is open. West Hills showed up to say so.