New Haven Independent

Iannone was among the crowd of teachers, students, officials, and labor history-makers past and present who gathered at the 85-year-old Edgewood Avenue school to celebrate its $52 million makeover. It’s the 26th school renovated or rebuilt under the city’s $1.5 billion construction program.

Architect Herb Newman and the Fusco and Gilbane construction companies did a lovingly delicate job of preserving the school’s architectural grandeur. Patricia Garland restored 26 of the school’s Depression-era federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals.

The murals retell stories of New Haven’s history. And they serve as an historical reminder of how in tough economic times federal spending on public works and on the arts can put people back to work, send dollars back into circulation, and rebuild communities. (Hint, hint.)

Added to that treasure trove is a new 12-panel mural on Troup’s ground floor, a collage of photos (many by New Haven’s Virginia Blaisdell) from New Haven’s labor union history. The city commissioned Brooklyn artist Susan Bowen to put together the mural with the help of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association. (Click here for a full story about the mural.)

Checking out the mural, Gale Iannone bumped into her younger self Sunday. She posed (in the photo at the top of this story) by her image captured during the 1983-4 formation and strike by Yale’s office-workers union, Local 34 of the Federation of University Employees. Iannone was one of the first workers to sign on as an organizer of that drive.

Union organizing was in her blood. She found a photo of her mother, Jill, in the same mural. “She was an organizer for the ILGWU [International Ladies Garment Workers Union] in the ’30s,” Gale said. “And she was a great basketball player.”

Her aunt Sophie Passariello, a dressmaker, was on the same union team — and showed up right next to Jill on the Troup mural wall.

The city came up with the union theme for the mural because of the school’s namesake, Augusta Lewis Troup. Troup was a union organizer, suffragist, and labor journalist in New York and then New Haven. She also served in the state legislature and on New Haven’s school baord. She lived from 1848-1920.

In time for Sunday’s event, the Labor History Association prepared a pamphlet telling the story of Troup’s life, a history lesson handed out to all attendees.

Even the performance of Troup’s chorus included a history lesson. The children sang “America the Beautiful.” Students sang the same number at the school’s opening ceremonies 84 years ago.

Sunday’s ceremonies concluded with the unveiling of a plaque renaming Troup’s grand hall the “Philip Voigt Auditorium.” The plaque offers a history lesson of its own, about a Troup School graduate who went on to work in Yale’s physical plant, serve as a union steward and executive board member for more than 30 years, and make laws as a city alderman from 1994 until his death in 2005. As an alderman, Voigt authored one of the nation’s first living wage ordinances. Voigt’s widow, Democratic Town Chairman Susie Voigt (pictured), showed up with family members to unveil the plaque.

Schools Superintendent Reginald Mayo (pictured with Yale’s Michael Morand) reminded students in the audience that history may be about to made again — a history they can share in.

“There is a possibility,” Mayo said from the stage of the Voigt Auditorium, “of a minority becoming president of the United States. You can be anything you want to be.” They can become teachers, the way he did. Or they can become presidents.