Downtown

DeLauro Drops In With The Check

by | Jan 18, 2023 4:47 pm | Comments (3)

Paul Bass Photo

Earmark Community Project Bucks: DeLauro, DESK board Chair Timothy Opstrup, board veep Alyse Sabina, and Steve Werlin at Wednesday's event.

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro delivered a seven-figure homeless-helping check written from an account she created in Washington to a downtown New Haven homeless agency, confident that changing Capitol winds won’t stop more checks from heading this way in the future.

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MLK Slam Poetry Returns To The Live Mic

by | Jan 17, 2023 8:49 am | Comments (1)

Brian Slattery Photos

Ngoma Hill at Monday's poetry slam.

On Monday afternoon, halfway through the Z Experience Poetry Slam, host Ngoma Hill remarked that this year — the event’s 27th — saw the event’s biggest turnout yet. It was a fitting return to in-person form for the slam, in honor of community organizer Zannette Lewis, as poets filled the O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall in the Yale Science Building and, for a few hours, turned it into one of the hottest slams on the East Coast.

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MLK Storyfest Centers Black History

by | Jan 16, 2023 12:42 pm | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery photo

Hanan Hameen of Dance and Beyond Sunday at New Haven Museum.

Through words, music, and movement, storytellers, drummers, and dancers offered dozens of families a chance to find their place in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., the broader causes of social justice he dedicated his life to, and the rich culture he came out of. 

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2023 Visions Come Into Sight

by | Jan 9, 2023 9:00 am | Comments (0)

Kimberly Wipfler Photo

Lauren Sellers working on her vision board (below) along with other members of the public at a library-hosted 2023 visioning event.

Lauren Sellers made short, careful cuts through shiny magazine paper, tracing along the edges of an image of an ice cream cone — all while mapping out a vision for how to be her best self in the year ahead. 

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Photography Show Develops The Past

by | Jan 3, 2023 9:02 am | Comments (1)

The image of beloved New Haven photographer David White, Jr. is an image that plays with time. It starts with the obvious anachronisms, from the instrument in White’s pocket to the sepia background, even as it’s clear that White is a modern man. The melted edges of the image, though, are another layer of history. They’re not digital artifacts, but the blurred edges of a process few people see anymore: the development of a Polaroid, and in this case, an especially hefty one — a 20 x 24 camera, so rare only five were initially manufactured,” an accompanying note explains. The photograph was taken in 1993. Why the Polaroid? Why the anachronistic style? And why is it paired with an image from 1815? 

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Whose Boom Is It? City Cut Top Investors $166M Break In 2022

by | Dec 23, 2022 1:08 pm | Comments (42)

Thomas Breen photo

360 State St.: Sold for $160M, appraised at $115M.

New Haven land records database

New Haven cut a $166 million break for out-of-town investors in the 10 biggest real estate deals of 2022 — leaving local taxpayers with the bill in a year that was supposed to start seeing the real estate boom pay local benefits.

The break came in the form of real estate tax appraisals that ended up far lower than the prices that buyers actually paid when they determined what the true values of high-end properties should be.

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Two Artists Trace The Echoes Of War

by | Dec 22, 2022 9:05 am | Comments (0)

Bill Brandt

Liverpool Street Extension.

The image of people huddled together in a dark, circular tunnel could be coming from Kyiv or Mariupol, ripped from any number of newspapers covering the war in Ukraine. The expressiveness of the image, undoubtedly the work of an experienced photographer, conveys the misery, the desperation, the desire for it all to be over, in a single snapshot. But it’s not from Ukraine. It’s from London, in 1942.

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Memory Map Locates Town-Gown Bridge

by | Dec 20, 2022 10:11 am | Comments (6)

Laura Glesby photo

Corie Betha marks the memory map at library workshop.

On the Collective Memory Map,” most streets have no labels. Someone hand-drew the salt piles by the Mill River. Scantlebury Park could be identified only by the caption Skateboarding happens here.” 

Corie Betha peered at the map, orienting herself by the shapes of the unmarked streets, before uncapping an orange pen to add her own landmark. 1974 – 75 Betha & Henderson Ages 4 & 3 yrs old skating,” she wrote by the Yale ice rink, enshrining her and her sister’s last names alongside names of Yale buildings and longstanding businesses that others had preserved on paper.

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Shelter Sought From Cold-Weather Emergency

by | Dec 16, 2022 2:35 pm | Comments (4)

Thomas Breen photo

Keith Petrulis picking up a coffee from J'Quan Towns and Gigi Levesque Friday.

Keith Petrulis walked out of the frigid winter rain and into a State Street drop-in center to pick up his regular daily cup of hot coffee, cream and sugar — and to stand alongside fellow unhoused New Haveners and local homelessness service providers in advocating for more, permanent state aid for shelter from the cold.

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Three Sheets Combines Tasting With Cutting And Pasting

by | Dec 14, 2022 8:45 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Tuesday evening at Three Sheets on Elm Street found not a band onstage, but a vast assortment of paper with arrays of compelling images on them — from owls to goat people to skeletal horses, as well as letters, dingbats, and geometric shapes — along with scissors, pieces of cardboard, and glue sticks. The tables and chairs in the room were full of people using those materials to make collages — and try what Three Sheets and Hershey, Penn.-based brewer Tröegs Independent Brewing had to offer.

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Adam Carmon Walks Free From Prison

by | Dec 12, 2022 9:33 pm | Comments (0)

Laura Glesby photos

Father and son, reunited.

Adam Carmon, right, hugs his son outside of prison for the first time.

After 29 years in prison, Adam Carmon walked out of the Church Street courthouse handcuff-free on Monday. His son, Najee, ran out after him. They hugged for a minute, tears streaming down their faces.

You’re here. You’re here. You’re here,” murmured Najee, who had only ever seen his father in prison or in court. 

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On the "Other Side of Prospect," Hope

by | Dec 12, 2022 12:04 pm | Comments (1)

Allan Appel photo

Neighborhood Music School Director Noah Bloom and NMS Production Fellow Ibn Orator Friday.

A young African American musician named Ibn Orator wanted to know if Black and white people, who have such starkly different common memories — the one of slavery and incarceration and the other a rosier patriotic version of the American past — can ever develop a memory broad, shared, and potent enough to be the basis to solve our country’s seemingly intractable problems. 

An answer, well, a partial answer to that profound question came during a Friday night book talk from Nicholas Dawidoff, the white, New Haven-born prize-winning author of the recently published The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and The American City.

The answer was: Yes, for all our enduring troubles, this is a country where historically change has happened. “

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Punk Rock Flea Market Skanks Into The Season

by | Dec 12, 2022 9:07 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

New Haven-based ska band The Simulators had finished the second song of its skank-filled set at College Street Music Hall on Saturday afternoon when bassist Zachary Yost had a question: Who’s enjoying spending all their money on all these lovely local vendors?” He meant the dozens of artists and artisans who had jammed into the place for the College Street Punk Rock Holiday Flea, which, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., changed the College Street performance space into a bazaar for original art, thrift clothing, instruments, records, and much more.

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Disability Advocate Pounds Pavement For Safer Sidewalks

by | Dec 9, 2022 2:21 pm | Comments (48)

Laura Glesby Photos

Tripping hazards on Audubon St.

Dave Agosta: "It is not possible for people with disabilities to 'travel' in New Haven. They can only 'navigate hazards.'"

Spotting a loose brick on the Audubon Street walkway, David Agosta nudged it with the tip of his toe — then reached down and handily uprooted the cube.

That block could have caused a twisted ankle or worse, the downtown disability rights advocate said, especially for pedestrians who get around using walkers or crutches or canes. 

Mobility hazards like these have led him to ramp up his broader critique of New Haven’s accessibility by filing a formal complaint with the federal Department of Justice.

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"A Soldier's Play" Digs Deep

by | Dec 9, 2022 8:54 am | Comments (0)

As A Soldier’s Play — running now at the Shubert Theatre through Dec. 11 — opens, a group of faceless and as yet nameless soldiers join in a song. Their performance is full of strength, energy, even joy. But the song is a work song, captured at Parchman Farm, the notorious maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary, in which inmates were made to work in conditions all too reminiscent of slavery. The parallel is clear: these Black soldiers in the U.S. Army, at (the fictional) Fort Neal in Louisiana, deep in the Jim Crow South, are in some sense prisoners, trapped and laboring under a crushing system of racist oppression that they are in no position to be able to change. Though this being the Army, they do have the chance to be promoted in it, if they follow the rules and don’t make too much trouble. So what happens when one of them, Sgt. Vernon C. Waters, is shot to death under mysterious circumstances?

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Wábi Gathers People And Ideas

by | Dec 8, 2022 9:12 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

On Wednesday evening, dozens gathered in KNOWN, the co-work space in the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St. It was part of KNOWN’s Wind-Down Wednesdays, a chance for people to exchange ideas and just relax. But the art on the walls — like Daniel Ramos’s Monk at the Ojo de Agua — wasn’t there as a coincidence; this particular Wednesday evening was a chance to celebrate the opening of Assemblage,” a show put together by Kim Weston of Wábi Gallery. As it turned out, the gathering of humans at KNOWN was mirrored by the exhibition itself, which Weston conceived of as its own gathering of artists, and the ideas and spirit they share.

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Does "The Brightest Thing" Add Light?

by | Dec 5, 2022 9:02 am | Comments (0)

Joan Marcus Photos

Michele Selene Ang and Katherine Romans.

Set in Lexington, Kentucky (home of the University of), Leah Nananko Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World is a rom-com, a sitcom, and a story of addiction and recovery, of the bond between sisters, of goofy romance between a nerdy woman and a more worldly one. It has babbling drunks and maudlin drunks, tough honesty and an almost slapstick emergency, with enticing baked goods, cutesy Christmas paraphernalia, a random dance number, and a final scene of intense, visceral truth. The play, receiving its world premiere, is running now at Yale Repertory Theatre through Dec. 17, directed by Margot Bordelon.

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Tree Lighting Shines A Light On Holiday Green

by | Dec 2, 2022 3:39 pm | Comments (1)

Lisa Reisman photo

The Celentano School chorus performing at Thursday's annual tree-lighting ceremony on the Green.

On a bone-chilling Thursday evening, friends Alex Gonzalez and Ellen Martin danced amid scores of high-spirited revelers under a perfect half-moon on the New Haven Green — the massive, dark, soon-to-be-illuminated Norway Spruce behind them lending the festivities an air of happy anticipation. 

I love seeing everyone out, seeing the small businesses, seeing the kids, especially given the last few years,” Gonzalez said of the annual tree lighting, which was hosted by the New Haven Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism. It’s like a hometown celebration.” 

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