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Laura Glesby |
Apr 16, 2025 5:11 pm
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Laura Glesby photos
ConnCORP leaders, including Erik Clemons and Carlton Highsmith, celebrate the final beam...
... which bears Kim Harris's signature among many others, as Nina Silva photographed.
As the final beam of ConnCAT’s future health-job-childcare hub rose on Dixwell Avenue, Kim Harris and Julia Ficklin each thought of generations past and generations to come.
For Ficklin, that beam meant a longtime dream of her late husband, Alder Tom Ficklin, clicking into place.
For Harris, it meant a trove of resources for the children she teaches starting to materialize.
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Lisa Reisman |
Apr 10, 2025 9:45 am
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Lisa Reisman photo
Member of the maternal health program and baby at recent session at the Q House.
Chantell Thompson’s teenage daughter recently came home from school with her nose pierced. Thompson was livid. Then she took a deep breath. She cooled her thoughts.
“Instead of telling her she did something that would mess up her face — that’s a hot thought — I reframed it as ‘she’s exploring, she really wants a nose ring, and my job is to show her the proper way to care for her nose to avoid infections,’” Thompson told the eight women listening intently around a table. “My job is to tell her that if you ever want to do anything in the future that involves piercing, let me know and let’s create a plan.”
The scene was the Q House on a recent Thursday evening. Thompson, along with Kaussar Rahman, was leading the penultimate session of a 12-week maternal health program run by the nonprofit Mind Blossom, Inc., which provides mental health education and consulting.
Chief Jacobson, with Asst. Chief David Zannelli: "We’re going to do everything possible to find out who did this."
(Updated) The two victims of a double homicide in the Dixwell neighborhood Monday night were friends — and evidence found by police at the scene of the fatal shooting point towards a potential robbery or drug deal gone wrong.
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 31, 2025 10:09 am
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Maya McFadden photo
Wexler in-school suspension coordinator Doug Bethea: "A lot of people from this area can't go to Newhallville."
Keyana Calhoun fought back tears at the thought of her five elementary school-aged children being transferred from Wexler-Grant School in Dixwell to Lincoln-Bassett School in Newhallville.
She felt blindsided by the public school district’s decision to merge the two community schools. And as a Newhallville resident herself, she’s been working hard to keep her kids far away from what she considers to be her home neighborhood’s negative influences.
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 21, 2025 12:17 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
Wexler-Grant in Dixwell, to merge with ...
... Lincoln-Bassett in Newhallville.
Grappling with low enrollment and decaying buildings, the city’s public school district plans to merge Wexler-Grant and Lincoln-Bassett into a single PreK-8th grade school next academic year.
That doesn’t mean the total number of schools in New Haven will drop, however, as the district then plans to convert the current Wexler-Grant site into a new alternative middle school focused on “project-based learning.”
ConnCORP's Ian Williams, with ConnCAT's Steve Driffin: This redevelopment project represents "a total transformation" of the corridor.
At work on Monday.
Nearby, underground, in the Construction Academy's new classroom.
As a construction crew worked to lay the foundation for “ConnCAT Place on Dixwell,” redevelopers behind the neighborhood-transforming effort gathered in an underground classroom a few hundred feet away to lay the foundation for a more diverse, locally rooted construction workforce.
165 Years of House, the documentary that New Haven teacher and filmmaker Raven Mitchell is carefully constructing, describes concentric circles of community working together to support young people’s development. Mitchell uses this lens, based on a model called Bronfrenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, to describe the importance of Hillhouse High School over its 165 years of existence.
From interpersonal bonds in the family to parent-teacher relationships, connections to media and beyond, according to this model, each circle of community has an impact on the other levels and, ultimately, the child at the center.
On Saturday afternoon at NXTHVN art gallery in Dixwell, several of these circles were at play as Mitchell presented a sneak peek of her documentary-in-progress to a room full of intergenerational love, support, and family of all kinds.
More apartments, fewer bedrooms, coming to Henry St.?
The new owner of a pair of historic Dixwell row houses is seeking permission to reconfigure them into more apartments — raising concern from at least one neighbor about the impact on neighborhood parking.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 14, 2025 12:55 pm
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Timo Fahler
it's happening, can you feel it (my inheritance).
The plaster hand protrudes from the wall, dangling the gun from its trigger guard. It’s a precarious situation. Were it a real gun, there’d be a danger of it going off. But the gun is actually fashioned from glass; as a symbolic gesture, the gun is dangerous to others, even as it is also in danger of being broken. With a flick of that finger, a bullet could fly, or the gun could fall to the ground and shatter — or both.
Sometime in the ’90s, a woman in cracked, green crocodile skin, gold booty shorts, and a hat of crocodile heads and rolls and rolls of red tickets posed as the camera snapped. Decades later, New Haven artist Edwin Gendron would pick up the black-and-white photo he took, hand-paint the colors in, and make it into something new.
The piece was among several, all transformations of some kind, that Gendron had on display at a pop-up event Saturday afternoon at Fussy Coffee in Science Park.
Bless prepares to ride on the Wexler Grant track Wednesday with fellow second-graders completing a pilot bike-safety course.
Eighteen second-graders checked their tires and chains, fastened their helmets, and set off on two wheels Tuesday as the first cohort of a new New Haven safe-biking generation.
... which LCI's Taylor Munroe said has been the subject of neighbor and SeeClickFix complaints.
Wynter and two fellow Ocean Management workers hauled a mattress, a bicycle, two shopping carts, a frying pan, a wicker chair, a pile of clothes, and a host of other belongings and debris from a Dixwell Avenue homeless encampment Thursday and into the back of a U‑Haul.
The truck was parked on the sidewalk in front of the decrepit former Monterey Jazz Club — a long-vacant building that the Elicker administration tried to buy two years ago, but that still remains rundown and under megalandlord ownership.
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Jisu Sheen |
Feb 14, 2025 12:40 pm
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Jisu Sheen Photo
I-SHEA on the Conga, Seny Camara on Jembe, and Douglas Wilson III on guitar.
“The telepathy up here is crazy.”
Jocelyn Pleasant, leader of Connecticut’s well-loved Afro-funk fusion ensemble The Lost Tribe, might have been talking about communication between band members, but she also set the stage for an intimate connection between the band and the audience at a performance Thursday night at NXTHVN in Dixwell.
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Allan Appel |
Feb 14, 2025 9:35 am
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Allan Appel Photo
Stetson Branch Librarian Diane Brown (at right) with teen librarian Brooke Jones and children's librarian Phil Modin.
Gary Hogan wants you to know that while the Elks’ light may be temporarily dimmed due to the sale and demolition of their Webster Street building, and while a new club house is in the making further up on Dixwell, they are sponsoring a wide range of new literacy and cultural programs in a partnership with the local Stetson Branch Library.
Future home for workforce training ... and housing and community space?
(Updated with NHPS comments) Mayor Justin Elicker dropped a hint in paragraph 46 of his annual State of the City address about the potential future state of the Goffe Street Armory: as the home for a new vocational school.
UNITE HERE Prez Gwen Mills: The struggle begins in New Haven.
Standing room only in Dixwell's Trinity Temple.
Zachary Groz Photos
Marks addresses the thousand gathered, pushing for Yale and elected officials to back the working class.
“It feels like a boom is happening in this city,” thundered Rev. Scott Marks to a roaring crowd of 1,000 New Haveners overflowing the pews, hugging the walls, and huddling criss-cross on the floors of Trinity Temple Church of God in Christ (COGIC) on Dixwell Avenue Tuesday night.
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Thomas Breen |
Jan 20, 2025 11:53 am
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Thomas Breen photos
201 Winchester and 235 Winchester (below), now under new ownership.
For the first time in more than two decades, a vacant lot and an incomplete apartment building on Winchester Avenue are no longer controlled by NFL cornerback-turned-housing developer Kenny Hill.
by
Laura Glesby |
Jan 17, 2025 3:28 pm
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Laura Glesby Photo
Mandy Management tenants Noela, Mlebinge, and Jacqueline in the Clarion hotel lobby on Wednesday, waiting to go home.
After a two-night stay in a Hamden hotel, a family of nine Congolese refugees moved back to their Dickerman Street apartment on Friday morning — where, for the first time this winter, the heat came on.
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Thomas Breen |
Jan 9, 2025 12:34 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
"Old," leaving the warming center for a bit: "I try not to complain."
David Cox: "This is not where I want to be."
As the temperature outside dipped into the 20s Thursday morning, David Cox sat inside a Dixwell church extended-hour warming center — his legs crossed, bundled up in a coat and scarf and beanie hat, his walker by his side and a window sill lined with Pothos plants behind him.
He didn’t want to be at that warming center. And he didn’t plan on staying long. But for now, with the weather dangerously cold, it was a safe place to be.
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Thomas Breen |
Jan 6, 2025 10:50 am
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Thomas Breen photo
Varick Church, to stay at 242 Dixwell.
A historic Black church won’t be leaving Dixwell Avenue after all — now that congregants have voted against moving forward with a plan to sell the building and relocate.
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Maya McFadden |
Jan 3, 2025 9:38 am
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Maya McFadden Photo
Porto working as building manager during the school day ...
Contributed photo
... and as Wilbur Cross softball coach after class.
Andrew Porto takes pride in his daily work keeping preschool classrooms and hallways clean on Goffe Street — before heading across town to coach Wilbur Cross’s softball team.
“This job has been great to me,” he said during a recent interview about his three decades as a New Haven custodian and his two decades as a mentor for public school athletes. And there’s so much more he still wants to do.
by
Lisa Reisman |
Dec 23, 2024 4:12 pm
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Santana Brightly's “You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are."
A camera, held by a man in a hoodie, dominates a scene of seeming chaos. Two more hands help hold it up. Someone else’s finger rests on the shutter button. Still another hand shifts the lens. Look more closely and virtually everyone in the crowd is shooting pictures.
The piece, “You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are” by Santana Brightly, was among the works spotlighted at the opening of an exhibit on Saturday at Stetson Library. Santana, a seventh-grade student at Hamden’s Sahge Academy, produced the piece while taking part in a month-long graphic arts workshop in AI Art this summer at Stetson.
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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Dec 19, 2024 5:40 pm
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Nathaniel Rosenberg file photo
Daily Jackson, loved for his heart and his humor.
Tiny footprints in concrete and a “Daily knock” at the door helped bring Daily Jackson’s memory to life Thursday morning at a crowded funeral service for the 17-year-old Riverside student who was shot and killed in Newhallville earlier this month.
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Thomas Breen |
Dec 18, 2024 11:35 am
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Thomas Breen photo
235 Winchester: Fined for blight, foreclosure in January?
A long-vacant Winchester Avenue property that a developer and the city have fought over for two decades is the subject of $6,300 in new anti-blight fines — and a new “final” foreclosure date set for next month.
