When you’re a kid, your neighborhood is the center of your universe. Everything that you know, you learned there — at home, in school and with your friends right there on the street where you lived. Growing up in New Haven’s Wooster Square gave me an opportunity to have an experience that I still treasure and appreciate.

How can you not appreciate living in a neighborhood that provided a uniquely harmonious environment for a group of people who would otherwise have been strangers in a strange land? When my parents immigrated to New Haven from Amalfi, Italy, at the turn of the 20th century, they came to a place that held the promise of welcome and even familiarity, because the door had been opened by others who had come earlier.