New Haven Independent

So where did the professor of American literature, recently arrived from Beijing Foreign Studies University for a year of study at Yale, go on his quest?

To a car dealership in North Haven? Most certainly not.

On rainy Sunday afternoon, Zhang made his way to the New Haven Green. He found a dozen people participating in the New Haven Bioregional Group’s winter walkabout of the historic Nine Squares.

“There are a lot of rising middle-class people in China,” said Zhang, who is on his first journey outside of his homeland. “So there’s a lot of interest in Updike.”

“Actually,” he added, “probably the main reason I came on the walk is that my wonderful landlady where I live in Westville said I’d just meet some nice people here.”

Zhang was candid in describing thus far his encounters with Yale students and colleagues, middle-class or otherwise. “Frankly, I just wish people at Yale were friendlier.”

Certainly everybody on the walkabout was.

Organized by the group’s leaders, Maria Tupper (pictured with Zhang), Fred Cervin, and Roger Uhlein, Sunday’s promenade featured Joe Taylor, the major amateur archivist of images of New Haven buildings bearing rain-proof binders with views of long gone New Haven.

At a dozen points in the two-hour loop around the Nine Squares he paused to show pictures of views of the now invisible past.

Daughter and dad Sarah and David Perkins also paused at the corner of Crown and Orange for personal and family reminiscences of the old Norge restaurant and watering hole.

There Sarah’s grandfather, Nate Podoloff, used to lunch daily in the 1930s. Podoloff was the builder of the Arena at State and Audubon. It was New Haven’s downtown sports mecca for decades, torn down in 1972 for the Coliseum, now also torn down.

Whether or not he found Updikean characters, Zhang was certainly learning about New Haven from Taylor. At the corner of Church and George Taylor told him about the street cars that used to operate in the New Haven. “They moved right here along Congress Street,” Taylor said, “past 300 separate street addresses, all buildings, long gone.”

Some added that at least the streetcars, if not the buildings, may yet be back.

The Bioregional Group features tours of the natural and built environment. Sunday it journeyed to the invisible environment as well.

“Knowing what was here before us,” said Maria Tupper, “is also critical, especially as reclamation, that is, reclaiming the local in terms of energy and food production and even security, are pressing new realities.”

To that end, she added, “Maybe we will sooner than we think return to the vision of the Indians.”

“Gosh,” said Taylor, as he cleaned some rain off the plastic protectors on his photo binders. “I wish the colonists had let Quinnipiack remain the name of the colony.”

This summer the Bioregional Group walk may sponsor a several-day-long walkabout, including camping out, that makes a circumference of a 323-square mile zone that traces the region including Waterbury and Wallingford, as it was known by the Quinnipiack Indians. To them, she said, “Greater New Haven” meant something similar but also very different from what it means to us.”

David Sensabaugh, a curator of Asian art at the Yale University Art Gallery, said he was not in a position to comment on the friendship experiences of the many Asian graduate students, scholars, and fellows in the Yale community. “I would say, however, that a fellow studying American literature is very unusual. The overwhelming majority of Asians here are in the sciences.”

As the group turned the corner at Chapel and Orange, Taylor showed pictures of the department store that preceded Shartenberg’s on the site currently being built, 360 State Street. Someone else explained to Zhang how much closer Long Island and the Atlantic were in Colonial days to the center of town. This piqued Zhang’s interest; next to Updike, his favorite author is the guy who wrote The Old Man and the Sea.

“He was published very early in China,” Zhang said.