Move Over, Boomers

Baby Boomers ran New Haven in 2014 — officially, at least. Meanwhile, a new generation grabbed the wheel.

The year began with the inauguration of a new mayor—who was born in 1947. A fellow boomer continued to head the city’s Central Labor Council and expanding Yale-New Haven Hospital. Boomer state legislators continue to dominate the state delegation; one of them, Martin Looney, is becoming the State Senate president. Yale had a newish president — a boomer. All people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet, as the year wore on, another set of people slipped into leadership roles, cooked up ideas, or just made things happen in New Haven. They came of age in the 1980s and 1990s (and in one case the ​“aughts”).

New Haven’s Democratic Party elected a new chairman, for instance: Vincent Mauro Jr. He was born in 1973. (Mauro’s pictured above and at the top of the story with his nephew Mason Desmond before the March 18 vote at the parish house next to Betsy Ross Arts School on Kimberly Avenue.)

When a boomer governor fretted he could lose his reelection campaign, he turned to Mauro and a fellow Gen Xer, Yale union organizer Gwen Mills, to turn out the vote in the state’s most Democratic city. They delivered a state-leading 19,692-vote plurality.

For the first time in two decades, one of New Haven’s state senator positions opened. (New Haven Democratic state legislators basically serve for life, or until they decide to move on.) Gary Winfield, who’s 40, ascended to the position in a special election. He continued to get out in front of criminal-justice issues, and delivered a powerful (and tear-filled) message at one of the local rallies held in the wake of the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, police officers.

Also delivering powerful testimony at one of those rallies was Latoya Agnew, a community organizer with New Haven Rising. Agnew, who’s 22, has emerged as one of Newhallville’s grassroots voices on the crisis of violence facing young people in New Haven.

Garth Harries — he’s 42 — completed his first full year as superintendent of New Haven’s schools. It was touch and go for a moment, but he got a full three-year contract after a first-year trial. He succeeded Reggie Mayo, who held the job for 20 years. Harries hustled to make his mark on school-reform policy while getting to know parents and kids up close.

The emergence of post-boomer machers extended beyond the political and governmental realms. After a fire destroyed Delaney’s Restaurant & Tap Room at Whalley and Central avenues, Westville’s Chris Heitmann (who’s 42) led the effort to help displaced families and employees while working toward a rebirth of the commercial corner. He did it through an organization he has built into an engine of renewal and civic participation, the Westville Village Renaissance Association.

Post-boomer Natalie Elicker took the reins of the not-for-profit Institute Library, building on a post-boomer predecessor’s success in hosting fun, unconventional, intellectually adventurous events.

A 33-year-old minister named Rev. Eldren Morrison, who oversees one of New Haven’s fastest-growing churches, emerged as a leader in the city’s educational, civic and religious realms (read a follow-up story about that here) …

… while an early 30-something concert promoter named Mark Nussbaum (aka ​“Manic Mark” of Manic Productions) cemented his position as the post-Boomers Jimmy Koplik, booking many of the cutting-edge music performances at local clubs ranging from Toad’s to Cafe Nine to Bar to the Space.

One of the city’s top landlords, Shmully Hecht, pivoted to an increased focus on restoring luxury historic residential buildings in 2015, along Orange, Prospect and Crown streets. His company, Pike International, is managing close to 1,000 apartments in the city. Pike lured a national arts supply retail, Artist & Craftsman Supply, to the transitional downtown block of Chapel between Orange and Church. As the year came to a close, Hecht’s other organizational home, a Yale society called Shabtai, which he cofounded 18 years ago, purchased the circa-1882 Anderson mansion with plans to rescue and restore it as the group’s new base.

A reality TV show was launched in 2015 for another 30-something real-estate powerhouse, Roberta Hoskie. Besides selling and investing in properties and running a training school for agents and investors through her Outreach Realty company, Hoskie formed an investing club for women called BFF Group. She prepared to take statewide a program guiding renters to become owners of homes they’re living in. She also made time to share her insights and her inspiring personal up-from-public-housing story with teen girls.

On the heels of dinner with the president (and before than an appearance on Oprah), health and fitness guru Mubarakah Ibrahim saw her Facebook following top 198,000 this year. She opened a new free not-for-profit ​“Fit Haven” enterprise in Newhallville and developed a company employing out-of-work New Haveners, Eco-Pioneer Construction, with her post-millennial husband, police Sgt. Shafiq Abdussabur (who also had a busy year).

Ibrahim, who’s 38, continued to take her message abroad, addressing an audience 20,000 people last week at the annual Rising of the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto, the largest gathering of Muslims in North America.

Meanwhile a Gen Xer, Matt DeRienzo, remade the city’s print daily, the New Haven Register. The paper won a national award for diversifying its newsroom and reporters became avid Tweeters and Touters under DeRienzo before he departed the editor’s position at age 38, as the paper’s hedge-fund owners continued stripping the company to prepare for a sale.

One of the most successful new-economy entrepreneurs in town, Ben Berkowitz, who’s 35, saw his New Haven staff grow to 19, his government client base grow to 220 (representing 40 million people), and over 1.5 million citizen issues raised (1 million of them fixed) through his SeeClickFix company on Chapel Street. Like business leaders of the Boomer past, he also continued sparking or supporting local civic projects on the side, like a SeeClickFix-built ​“snowcrew” app linking able-bodied people to neighbors who need shoveling out; and a proposed Mill River Trail in Fair Haven. Berkowitz attributes the success of post-Boomers in part to their ability to find new technological avenues to carry out ideals, of a better-connected and engaged citizenry, cherished by the Vietnam generation. ​“We’re not rebelling against our parents,” he said.

Those boomers — the last of whom celebrated their 50th birthdays Wednesday — haven’t left the building yet. But if 2014 is an indication, they should keep an eye on the rear-view mirror. The millennials are taking over.