by | Nov 23, 2021 3:54 pm | Comments (19)
Thomas Breen photo
Timothy Fields at the downtown library’s computer lab Tuesday: Looking up spaghetti sauce recipes.
“Mr. Daniels” works two barely-more-than-minimum-wage jobs, and spends most nights sleeping outside downtown.
A newly funded full-time social worker position at the city’s public library is geared towards helping patrons like him find safe places to live as they climb out of hard times.
by | Nov 18, 2021 11:51 am | Comments (21)
Thomas Breen photos
Looking down High Street from Elm. Will this some day look like…
… this? Looking east on the Yale-owned section of Wall Street.
The city has agreed to close off a portion of High Street to car traffic, and to allow Yale to fund, design, and maintain a new publicly-owned walkway in its place.
Raising the question: How exactly is this different from selling a city street?
Continue reading ‘Yale High Street Deal: How Is This Different From Selling A Street?’
by | Nov 18, 2021 9:31 am | Comments (20)
Beacon Communities
Proposed housing slated to replace parking at 300 State lot. (Building on left would be new. Building on right currently exists.)
A Boston-based affordable housing developer has won city approval to build 76 new apartments — and only three new parking spaces — in the Ninth Square.
by | Nov 11, 2021 9:11 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
Before he sat behind the drums, Gil Hawkins, Jr. addressed the crowd at the Owl Shop from the microphone set up in the middle of the stage. “Wednesday night is jazz night at the Owl Shop. It’s been that way for years.” For the Hawkins Jazz Collective — this Wednesday made up of Hawkins on drums, Mike Godette on guitar, and Lou Bocciarelli on bass — “years” meant well over a decade, Covid-19 shutdown notwithstanding. As the group slid into its first tune, it created a sense less of normalcy (whatever that means anymore) than of timelessness.
Continue reading ‘Hawkins Jazz Collective Keeps Swinging At The Owl Shop’
by | Nov 10, 2021 8:42 am | Comments (1)
From seemingly all around the classroom at District Arts and Education on Tuesday evening came a series of meandering tones, a series of chirps and clicks. The sounds were coming from an open-source live-coding program called Estuary, and they were the result of musician Carl Testa feeding it a couple simple commands. He was about to demonstrate how people could use the program to make music together by coding in real time.
The demonstration opened up possibilities for gaining confidence in learning how to code. It also suggested compelling questions about what music composition is when the software makes some of the decisions.
Continue reading ‘When Software Meets Songwriting: Musician Cracks The Code’
by | Nov 9, 2021 5:58 pm | Comments (8)
NHPS
The Board of Education (BOE) has approved a renewed lease for the Adult and Continuing Education Center that will see the rent rise tens of thousands of dollars a year in a rundown space.
by | Nov 9, 2021 8:34 am | Comments (1)
From a distance on Audubon Street, it looks like a city has sprung up inside the gallery space of Creative Arts Workshop, stretching far back into the building. Come a little closer, though, and you see that the buildings are rusted, almost derelict, the windows empty. Go inside the gallery and explore, and you come across the small outline of a person, lying there as if outlined in chalk. There’s a small tablet close by, but its screen glows only a blank blue.
Where are all the other inhabitants? What happened to them?
by | Nov 5, 2021 3:13 pm | Comments (1)
Jami-Lee Messenger Photo
Chapel & York streets closed off as police investigate bomb threat.
Updated: The city announced via email and text message alert at 6:36 p.m. that “the Downtown Area has been deemed safe. All businesses and streets are open and back to normal.”
And at 6:52 pm, Yale Police announced that an “all clear was given and Yale’s campus is back to normal operations.”
by | Nov 4, 2021 5:28 pm | Comments (13)
Emerging from the pandemic, people have grown used to spending more time at home — and may therefore want roomier apartments with work space.
The conclusion animated site plans for two building projects that won approval this week.
Continue reading ‘Plans Greenlighted For “Corsair Cousin” & Audubon Phase 3’
by | Nov 2, 2021 7:54 am | Comments (3)
Hiroshi’s Chair.
It’s a painting of a room, rendered with fidelity, but suffused with light and sadness. Even without knowing who Hiroshi is, there is a sense of loneliness to the scene, though it’s not abject; there’s comfort there, too. It turns out that Hiroshi is a close relative of the painter, Steven DiGiovanni, and the family lost Hiroshi to Covid-19. The story brings into focus what’s in the painting already. In the way DiGiovanni depicts the room, and especially the chair, well-worn, well-loved, we feel it all, both Hiroshi’s absence and his presence.
Continue reading ‘Steven DiGiovanni Blurs The Lines In CAW Exhibit’
by | Nov 1, 2021 11:49 am | Comments (17)
Thomas Breen photos
129 Church (center): Apartments next?
MOD’s Jacob and Josef Feldman.
A development duo sold an eight-story downtown office building for $8 million, three months after winning city permission to convert it into 92 apartments.
Meanwhile, Mandy Management obtained control over another 22 properties, worth $2.3 million, and flippers kept flipping, among the city’s latest property transactions.
by | Nov 1, 2021 9:24 am | Comments (3)
Brian Slattery Photo
Matos at her new downtown haunt.
A customer walked into Kiara Matos’s new storefront ceramics studio and gallery on Orange Street looking to buy two matching mugs she had seen earlier on the shelf. The problem: In between visits, another customer had come in and already bought one of them.
“Don’t worry,” Matos said. “I’ll make more.”
“You’re doing well!” the customer beamed.
by | Oct 25, 2021 10:15 am | Comments (2)
Valerie Pavilonis Photo
Katalina Riegelmann at Sunday’s party.
Katalina’s Bakery and Coffee Shop celebrated its 10-year anniversary on Sunday afternoon with a birthday party open to family and friends.
Continue reading ‘Woven Into Community, Katalina’s Cupcake Spot Celebrates 10th Anniversary’
by | Oct 13, 2021 11:36 am | Comments (21)
Thomas Breen photo
Pedestrian, bike infrastructure at almost-done Orange intersection.
Donna Hall (right) leads Wednesday morning’s site visit.
Painted crosswalks, protected bike lanes, sculptural light fixtures, and pedestrian crossing signals now line a new almost-finished Orange Street intersection that — when it opens in a few weeks — will mark the culmination of the city’s latest efforts to stitch together downtown and the Hill.
by | Oct 13, 2021 7:56 am | Comments (1)
John T. Hill Photos
The image — to many New Haveners, an iconic one — is so vivid it seems like you can almost hear it, a murmur of voices, maybe a cacophony. Maybe there’s a speaker’s ragged voice echoing across the Green through a bullhorn. The two men standing nearby seem like they’re having a conversation. Is it worry or sarcasm on that man’s face, or something else? The one message that seems clear is coming from the young man’s face, front and center in the picture. His mouth is closed, but his eyes convey so much — even more than the little sign he has pinned to his shirt, that reads “Human Rights Not Violence.”
by | Oct 12, 2021 3:08 pm | Comments (1)
Paul Bass Photo
Restaurant Week diners enjoying al fresco meals on the College Street “promenade” Tuesday afternoon.
You get to enjoy great food, out in public. Restaurant owners and workers get a needed boost. And money flows to hungry families.
by | Oct 11, 2021 4:10 pm | Comments (23)
Thomas Breen photos
Sadé Heart of the Hawk at Monday’s ceremony on the Green.
Ricky Looking Crow and Norm Momowetu Clement smudging sage.
Dressed in orange to commemorate the victims and survivors of Indigenous boarding schools, Sadé Heart of the Hawk beat a turtle-decorated hand drum as she sang about a child — much like her mother — who was ripped from her family, home, and culture, and sent away to Shubenacadie.
by | Oct 8, 2021 9:45 am | Comments (4)
Thomas Breen photos
Stephen Kobasa, Allie Perry at final stone laying at B’way Triangle.
Twenty years to the day after the United States first bombed the Taliban, New Haveners officially put an end to one home front of the Afghanistan War — by laying a final stone commemorating last month’s military and civilian deaths from “forever wars” in the Middle East.
by | Oct 5, 2021 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Wangechi Mutu
Sentinel I.
Wangechi Mutu’s Sentinel I stands guard over its space in the Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibit “On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale,” on view now through Jan. 9. But it’s not a passive sculpture; in a way that no photograph can do justice to it, the piece appears to shift its shape as you get closer or farther away, and as you walk around the piece. The human figure morphs into something more like an animal, or maybe a plant, or maybe something more elemental, like fire or smoke. In a hall full of powerful pieces, it seems to protect and at the same time draw strength from the art around it.
Continue reading ‘It Takes A City: Art Gallery Exhibit Explores “150 Years Of Women At Yale”’
by | Oct 4, 2021 5:46 pm | Comments (27)
Thomas Breen photo
Nayeli Garcia (center) at Monday’s protest with Meg Fountain and Catherine John.
A mic held against her mask, Nayeli Garcia looked up through the rain at U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s office to let the New Haven Congresswoman — and everyone within earshot — know who she is.
I am a student at Gateway Community College, Garcia said. I am an essential worker who cleans houses. I am an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. And I deserve a path to citizenship.
by | Oct 1, 2021 8:28 am | Comments (0)
The gallery space is an exercise in sensory saturation. The walls are covered in vivid drawings, other images that hover somewhere between representation and schematics for circuitry. There is music to listen to, projections to follow. There’s a video game to play, like Doom but weirder and glitchier; it’s a game that loves but also mocks other games. And over in the corner is a glassed-in booth, a fortune-telling machine.
The only issue is that, as advertised, it dispenses bad advice. Hit a button and it dispenses tickets. When this reporter tried it, half of them said “give up.”
by | Sep 30, 2021 2:09 pm | Comments (16)
NHPD images
Officers arresting Shawn Marshall at the CT Financial Center.
CRB’s Devin Avshalom-Smith: Head punches deter trust in police.
A police internal investigation has found Officer Justin Cole acted appropriately when he punched a troubled man in the head three times after that man kicked him during an arrest at a Church Street office tower.
by | Sep 23, 2021 3:03 pm | Comments (21)
Finding A Line - New Haven image
A prefab skate park, coming soon to downtown?
Paul Bass photo
Next stop, George Street: Roberts and Joseph at their previous project, Scantlebury Skate Park.
A prefabricated skate park is one big step closer to landing in downtown New Haven, as parking authority commissioners unanimously approved a plan to host the artistic-athletic installation atop a George Street surface lot.
by | Sep 23, 2021 12:57 pm | Comments (26)
Kenneth Boroson Architects image
A downtown landlord won city permission to build 106 new market-rate apartments atop a Crown Street parking lot and in the adjacent, converted LoRicco Tower.
by | Sep 13, 2021 4:02 pm | Comments (18)
Thomas Breen photo
Elected officials, cycling advocates shovel celebratory dirt.
Phase IV, in the works: As viewed from Whitney Avenue.
Public officials and cycling advocates tossed shovels full of dirt Monday to celebrate the start of construction of the city’s final leg of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail — which when finished in December 2022, will finally connect downtown to Long Wharf.