Wooster Square Cherry Blossom Festival

Wooster Square's Cherry Blossom Festival celebrates the neighborhood's 72 Yoshino Japanese cherry trees, planted in 1973 by the New Haven Historic Commission with the city's Parks Department and neighborhood residents. Organized by the Historic Wooster Square Association, the springtime festival has grown from a small local gathering into a major New Haven event drawing more than 10,000 visitors in recent years.

Wooster Square is one of New Haven's most historically significant neighborhoods, named for Revolutionary War hero General David Wooster, who once owned a warehouse near the area's southern edge, and shaped over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by waves of immigration, most notably a large Italian-American community that gave the neighborhood much of its enduring cultural character.