East Rock Porch Fest
Lawrence Street Plaza
New Haven
Sept. 13, 2025
Charlie ran into friend and neighbor Kiera Saturday afternoon at the first-ever East Rock Porchfest, a music festival comprised of local acts and people willing to lend out their porches for the occasion. Charlie and Kiera jumped around excitedly as Ian Ferrara played a folksy twist on neo-soul guitar melodies at the newly closed-off stretch of road constituting the Lawrence Street Plaza at Lawrence and State streets.
“He’s the best dog in East Rock,” said Charlie’s human, Tom Tang.
Kiera’s human, Yuval Ben-David, said the dogs usually cross paths on morning or afternoon walks near Atticus Market. They’re always happy to see each other, and Saturday was no exception.
The one-day festival was an engineered, but still loose enough to stay spontaneous, celebration of these chance encounters. As the mid-September sun hearkened back to warmer days, over 50 bands lured neighbors out of their houses and onto the sidewalks, where they could mingle and feel like part of something larger than themselves.
Porchfest was organized by Sam Winfield and Vin Amendola of Connecticut band Modern Refuge, quickly gathering the support of Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, Lauren Mallet of New Haven Flea, Brandon Doyle of Goatville Salvage, the Lawrence Street Plaza volunteer crew, East Rock Brewing Co., and poster artist Hayden Gaillard.
Tang noticed local architects Tian Xu and Iris You watching the performance.
“I saw them working hard in the nighttime,” Tang said. Behind Ferrara were two wooden structures defining the stage area of the plaza, which Xu and You spent the past few weeks designing. Together with Anjiang Xu (no relation to Tian), the “triptych” of artists create structures for events under the name Studio Trip.
For Porchfest, the team used reclaimed material, sourcing pallets from local businesses. They got 2x4s from a house in the neighborhood. In the end, they only needed to buy fasteners and paint.
They received help from volunteers, especially in painting giant letters spelling out PORCH and FEST. “If the neighborhood members make the pieces together, they look after it,” Xu said, putting forth a hypothesis that she hopes Studio Trip’s creations can help support.
So far, so good. The studio’s last big project was a collaborative pallet-based sculpture for the New Haven Summer Night Market this past July, where the team invited passersby to leave their mark with paint. Now, Studio Trip is looking for a home for the pieces, which they can break down into different configurations for specific outdoor furniture needs.
The Porchfest pallets are also destined to transform into tables and seating arrangements, which will live in the Lawrence Street Plaza. In fact, this was the part You was most excited for. Both she and Xu seemed to find joy in the unexpected, telling me that architects might expect a certain use for their pieces, but that their audience often surprises them.
“I’m so happy,” Tang said as Charlie sniffed my toes under the picnic table. He hopes the Lawrence Street Plaza can stay as long as possible, maybe forever. Right now, the plans are to keep it open until Oct. 31.
I complimented Charlie’s leash, a whimsical design of cute insects, and Tang said he bought it earlier that day. One of his East Rock neighbors, Troy Stover, was selling dog accessories on a porch a few blocks away under the name Nickel & Dime.
I walked down Foster Street to get a closer look at Stover’s collection. Patterns of puppies, crayons, and splotches decorated the neatly sewn collar and leashes. Most of the products were one-of-a-kind, handmade with care from pieced-together scraps. Stover had his first vending event at East Rock Coffee about a year ago and figured he might as well set up shop as porch-goers wandered around the neighborhood.
It seemed like every time I passed by a porch, its audience grew larger. When I first saw guitarist and singer JJSlater playing his breezy beach tunes among the greenery on Lawrence Street, I was one of a handful of admirers. The next time I walked by, the crowd had spilled out over the sidewalk and well into the road.
Other musical acts were more fleshed out, with drum sets and even brass sections. On Cottage Street, Always Morning rocked out on the pavement to a cover of Heart’s “Barracuda.” On Foster Street, surf-rock/ska/Afro-Latin fusion band Fuselaje took their audience into new dimensions with spacey synth and bright trumpet.
East Rock’s streets took on a surreal quality as small crowds formed in seemingly random locations. A closer look at each cluster revealed musicians in driveways, on lawns, and on porch steps. Like iron filings in a science experiment, people and their dogs were drawn in by each porch’s magnetic pull.
