by | Oct 16, 2020 12:44 pm | Comments (1)
Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison partnered with her sorority sisters to bring food gift cards and hand lotion to the seniors of Dixwell and Newhallville.
Continue reading ‘Alpha Kappa Alpha Comes To Seniors’ Aid During Pandemic’
by | Oct 14, 2020 11:52 am | Comments (4)
Laura Glesby Photo
Angel Hubbard with memorial shirt.
Contributed Photo
Divonne Jaquel Coward.
Divonne “DJ” Coward was the one his family members called for a ride when they were stranded. When someone didn’t have a way of getting home late at night, he’d promise from other end of the line, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Coward would rouse his niece to wake up at 5 for early-morning runs. He could be counted on to dispense advice on vitamins to take, herbal teas to drink. He loved to stop by a neighbor’s house to argue about Donald Trump. At family gatherings he played sports with the kids, who adored him.
Continue reading ‘Post-Homicide, DJ’s Family Demands Dignity’
by | Oct 13, 2020 4:12 pm | Comments (1)
RABHYA MEHROTRA PHOTO
“This is heaven-sent,” said Lexy Johnson. “Seriously, I can’t thank you enough.”
Johnson and her friend, Nisha Mirror (pictured), came in their car to a food distribution site set up Thursday by the police substation on Charles Street in Dixwell. They were among hundreds of households to pick up food.
Continue reading ‘Pandemic Food Giveaway Feeds Hundreds In Dixwell’
by | Oct 6, 2020 10:53 am | Comments (4)
Zoom
Monday’s virtual Board of Alders meeting.
The Board of Alders voted unanimously in support of transferring $100,000 in city funds towards paying for a planning study for a new social worker-centered mobile crisis response team.
Continue reading ‘Alders Transfer $100K For Crisis Team Study’
by | Oct 5, 2020 3:35 pm | Comments (17)
Developer Yves-Georges Joseph II: A “renaissance of investment.”
Thomas Breen photos
Canal and Henry Streets: Soon to hold 150 new apartments?
A local developer plans to build a new five-story apartment complex — with one third of its 150 units at affordable rents — atop a city-owned grassy lot on the Dixwell/Science Park border.
by | Sep 27, 2020 1:46 pm | Comments (1)
RABHYA MEHROTRA PHOTO
The Bereavement Care Network team at Saturday’s event.
Doris Moye came to watch her granddaughter’s fusion dance team at a Peace Mobile Caravan and Rally Saturday in Goffe Street Park. She also came to mourn the loss of her cousin, who died two weeks ago from homicide.
Continue reading ‘Homicide Victims Remembered, With Doves & Forward Vision’
by | Sep 27, 2020 9:32 am | Comments (10)
Maya McFadden Photo
After seven years of planning, New Haven Saturday unveiled a 700-pound bronze monument to one of the seminal and no-longer forgotten figures of the city’s Black history, William Lanson.
by | Sep 18, 2020 12:46 pm | Comments (6)
Paul Bass Photo
Covid killed Demelle Turner’s and Marquel Caesar’s chances of throwing touchdown passes this fall. Instead they found themselves throwing soil into garden beds — with a team devoted to preventing violence.
by | Sep 16, 2020 3:04 pm | Comments (2)
Thomas Breen / NHFPL images
Clockwise from top left: City arts director Adriane Jefferson, Stetson Librarian Diane Brown, and the public library notice for Dana King’s and Lisa Dent’s talk about William Lanson.
When young Black New Haveners walk by the new statue of William “King” Lanson, Dana King hopes they think to themselves, “That looks like me.”
Continue reading ‘“Gov” Sculptor Urges Kids To Claim History’
by | Sep 15, 2020 12:25 pm | Comments (14)
DANIELA BRIGHENTI PHOTO
High-schoolers help prepare the Escape before work stopped.
The perennially-stalled and never-opened “Escape” youth homeless shelter lurched towards its formal demise at a city government hearing Monday night.
by | Aug 31, 2020 8:27 am | Comments (3)
Maya McFadden photos
Salwa Abdussabor teaches Gia and Alana Ciuitello to skate.
Thursday’s ribbon cutting at the new park.
Teenage sisters Gia and Alana Ciuitello can now join in on the fun at Dixwell’s new Scantlebury Skate Park, after picking up free boards of their own at the park’s official ribbon cutting.
Continue reading ‘Scantlebury Skate Park Celebrated, On Wheels’
by | Aug 25, 2020 6:32 pm | Comments (12)
Steve Roberts (above right, below with co-creator J. Joseph) checks out the contours of the new Scantlebury skatepark.
Paul Bass Photos
Steve Roberts found the flow just where he’d always pictured it — at a new skatepark in the neighborhood where he grew up, and where he can now teach other young people to hone their moves.
by | Aug 17, 2020 12:21 pm | Comments (1)
Courtney Luciana photo
Jazmyn Richardson looks for a new backpack Saturday.
Ava Rodriguez shows off her new backpack.
Melissa Rodriguez helped her daughter, Ava, pick out a new backpack for her first day of 5th grade.
The mother-daughter duo weren’t at a school supply store — but instead at a Dixwell back to school drive, where they joined other families struggling to navigate precarious finances and uncertainty around the coming school year amidst the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
by | Aug 14, 2020 12:17 pm | Comments (10)
Paul Bass Photo
The city decided this place is dangerous.
by | Aug 14, 2020 8:15 am | Comments (1)
Titus Kaphar
Analogous colors.
On one wall of NXTHVN’s gallery is a possibly already-iconic painting: A Black mother, eyes closed, her hair kept from her face by a headband, cradling only the silhouette of a baby. New Haven-based artist Titus Kaphar painted it in reaction to the killing of George Floyd, and in June it ended up being on the cover of Time magazine.
Facing that image, on the opposite wall, are a series of black pieces of paper that contain faces and words and crossed out lines. One side of the gallery is a short shock; the other is a lake of layers to sink into.
Together, they make up “Pleading Freedom,” a small but deep exhibition of work by Kaphar in collaboration with memoirist, poet, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts that has much to say about the condition of being Black in America at a time when people’s ears are prepared to hear that message as much as they have been in a generation.
by | Aug 10, 2020 9:45 am | Comments (2)
Courtney Luciano Photo
River and Stevens with school supplies they donated for fellow students.
Jayleani Rivera and Zonasia Stevens are keeping optimistic about adapting to the upcoming school year and overcoming the obstacles of Covid-19. In the meantime, they joined their families on Saturday to donate school supplies at the Dixwell police substation on Charles Street.
Continue reading ‘Dixwell Donates Back-To-School Supplies, For Either Reopening Scenario’
by | Jul 30, 2020 2:51 pm | Comments (6)
Sophie Sonnenfeld Photo
Reyes with Alder Honda Smith at community anti-violence event.
Otoniel Reyes began his police career as a young beat patrol officer keeping in touch with the pulse of the neighborhoods.
Twenty-one years later, as chief, he’s repeating those steps — hitting community management team meetings over the past week in Dixwell, East Rock, and Newhallville to check in with neighbors on his department’s response to a crime uptick and demands for change.
by | Jul 29, 2020 9:52 am | Comments (1)
Maya McFadden Photo
Natalie Marshall and Kathryn Piscitello.
Close friends Natalie Marshall and Kathryn Piscitello met up at a Dixwell food drive Tuesday to pick up groceries. Before leaving the pair arranged a dinner night with each other.
by | Jul 28, 2020 9:36 am | Comments (6)
Thomas Breen photo
Their voices were heard: contractors protest outside Q House site.
Four local African American-owned contractors recently landed work at the Q House construction site, bringing the project’s share of subcontracting work awarded to Black-owned businesses past the city’s 10 percent goal, for now.
by | Jul 22, 2020 10:59 am | Comments (9)
Courtney Luciana photo
Catherine “CJ” John and Barbara Fair at Tuesday’s rally.
A third group of protesters held a rally outside at the construction site of the new Dixwell Community “Q” house to call attention to the lack of contracts for black-owned companies.
by | Jul 17, 2020 12:31 pm | Comments (9)
Maya McFadden Photo
Howard Lewis’s family at Ice The Beef rally in Goffe Street Park.
“You hurt us, in a way that it can’t be explained.”
So declared the daughter of one of New Haven’s latest homicide victims, as 100 people showed up to call for an end to the violence.
by | Jul 15, 2020 6:14 pm | Comments (47)
Thomas Breen photo
Crime scene tape left at site on one of Tuesday night’s homicides.
Homicide victim Howard Lewis (center) with family in early July.
Melissa LyTrelle: “The devil was busy in our city last night.”
Life went painfully on Wednesday for Howard Lewis’s family as they held an outdoor birthday party for his 10-year-old son — while top cops and city officials sought to figure out who killed Lewis and one other man the night before, and how to get a handle on New Haven’s worst stretch of violence in a decade.
New Haven has now surpassed the number of shootings it saw in all of 2019. It’s only July.
by | Jul 10, 2020 2:42 pm | Comments (4)
Dana King photo
The head and, behind, the body of the new William Lanson statue coming to the Farmington Canal.
Sculptor King working in her Oakland studio.
A seven-foot-tall bronze statue of William “King” Lanson will soon stand along the Farmington Canal — giving a permanent, public, and highly visible form to a Black New Havener who helped build the modern city.
by | Jul 7, 2020 9:24 am | Comments (4)
WFSB
“Black Money Matters! Brown Business Matters” protesters chanted at a rally outside City Hall, demanding more jobs for Black and Hispanic New Haveners on the Dixwell Community “Q” House project.
Continue reading ‘Q House Protest Cry: “Black Money Matters”’
by | Jul 3, 2020 9:57 am | Comments (0)
Paul Bass Photo
Chris “Big Dog” Davis signs his new CD at Thursday afternoon’s release party.
“Big Dog” stared down death. And discovered a new groove.
Continue reading ‘“Big Dog” Returns To Stetson For CD Release Party’