by | Aug 6, 2024 8:27 am | Comments (12)
Lisa Reisman photo
Danilo Mongillo's Ragú Napolitano
“This is the story of the ragú,” Danilo Mongillo said, sliding a small bowl of sauce from the refrigerator and setting it on the counter of the newly opened Strega New Haven on Chapel Street, “and it’s a slow story.”
The story began with a mix of pork and beef.
Continue reading ‘Grandmothers' Ragú Transported From Puglianello’
by | Aug 5, 2024 8:26 am | Comments (2)
Eleanor Polak photos
Jody Sharninghausen, at The Loop: “I think some of these things you couldn’t get in New Haven before.”
Beef and rice bowls, ready to eat.
Jody Sharninghausen bought matcha powder, umeboshi, and furikake powder to go — and ordered a fried chicken bento box to stay — at a new Japanese grocery store and restaurant downtown.
Continue reading ‘New Japanese Grocery Keeps Customers In The Loop’
by | Aug 1, 2024 3:57 pm | Comments (20)
Thomas Breen photo
The former SNET HQ on Orange: Lots and lots and lots of empty space inside.
More than 150,000 square feet of downtown office space is up for lease — at a mid-century phone company headquarters half-filled with electronic equipment, and ready for conversion to life science laboratories.
by | Jul 31, 2024 8:54 am | Comments (5)
ASHER JOSEPH PHOTOS
Sandra Redjali, Kristin Barendregt-Ludwig, and Amanda Glatter celebrate the "fruits of [their] labor."
A New Haven age snapshot, thanks to the CT Town Data Viewer.
Want to know what percentage of New Haven households are owner-occupied?
Or how much of the city’s population is foreign-born?
Or how New Haven’s mid-century Urban Renewal changes were rooted in a long history of city planning ideas from Europe, and weren’t just a response to post-war blight?
Well then you’re in luck, thanks to the launch of two new research resources focused on Elm City data and the interaction of New Haveners and the built and natural environment.
by | Jul 30, 2024 3:37 pm | Comments (100)
Thomas Breen photos
Here comes the neighborhood: Potential buildings to come (in white) to transform the Ninth Square. (Cafe 9 is at center near bottom.)
Housing authority head Karen DuBois-Walton: "We need to be building more housing. That is how we move forward."
Builders are ready to un-pave parking lots — and erect hundreds of new mixed-income apartments downtown.
Two dozen officials announced that news Tuesday afternoon alongside developers during a press conference heralding newly inked agreements to redevelop a car-centric stretch of State and George streets.
by | Jul 29, 2024 4:47 pm | Comments (8)
Allan Appel Photo
Greenberg at Lost New Haven's Benedict Arnold display.
Paving stones dug up by developers' excavation at 294-300 State St.
Robert Greenberg wants to “read the dirt” at one of New Haven’s latest downtown apartment construction sites.
He’d like to sift through the speckled ground for signs like oyster shells — which serve as a “tell” that a little further below may be an old smoking pipe, coins, buttons from military uniforms, medicine bottles, a spout from a once elegant tea set from the China trade.
Continue reading ‘Might History Lie Beneath Developer's Dirt?’
by | Jul 26, 2024 3:02 pm | Comments (1)
Annette Walton with Minh Vu.
Outside Yorkside Pizza, Yale doctoral student Minh Vu surveyed a basket of roughly 70 chrysanthemums.
“I’ll take them all,” Vu told a woman bedecked in a party hat, aka “Flower Lady” Annette Walton.
Walton invited Vu and fellow Yalies to an impromptu 64th birthday sidewalk celebration for the lifelong New Havener who, except for a hiatus during the pandemic, has been selling flowers around Yale’s downtown campus since the 1990s.
by | Jul 24, 2024 9:19 am | Comments (1)
Even though the signs are in sync with one another, not offering contradictory information, the photograph conveys a sense of disorientation. You have to read them twice, maybe, to see that they line up. The inclusion of the house matters, too; it gives the disorientation context. What does it mean for the people who live on that block, that multiple signs tell people unfamiliar with the street layout that they’re not supposed to go there? What does it mean that there’s only one way off the block for the residents, a sense of limited options? Who made these decisions in the first place?
The picture is unsigned, but it was shot by one of 17 students from Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School and High School in the Community for “New Haven Revisited,” a photography show running through July 31 in the gallery on the lower level of the Ives Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
Continue reading ‘Student Photographers Roll Out (Un?)Welcome Mat’
by | Jul 23, 2024 9:26 am | Comments (0)
Can Yağız
Not today either, detail.
It’s not entirely clear what New Haven-based artist Can Yağız’s image is of, though in its first iteration it has just enough shape to suggest a prone human form. If it’s a person, are they sleeping or dying? In either case, the image itself is about decay, the loss of light, shape, defined borders. But there’s acceptance in it, too, an embrace and investigation of change.
by | Jul 19, 2024 5:02 pm | Comments (5)
Maya McFadden Photos
Kica Matos (right) flips the script and has LEAP students read aloud to her ...
... as books and kids and volunteers come out to the Green.
Nose deep in books on the Green, roughly 800 young New Haveners were transported to watching a Bronx street performer bust a move, to visiting a second-floor apartment in a Russian mining town, to spending some time with the Cat in the Hat — all as part of an annual “read-in” downtown.
by | Jul 16, 2024 9:05 am | Comments (0)
Horacio Marquinez photo
Gallup, New Mexico.
It’s a road in the Southwest, and the photograph’s exposure emphasizes the blasting sun and shadows it makes. The weathered face of the subject, the cast of his eyes, makes him seem as though he has a thousand stories, and maybe he’ll tell us one. But, the photographer reveals, he never did.
“At the height of the summer of 2020, we landed in Gallup, NM empty streets. An eerie desert silence mixed with the constant whistle and screeching metal on metal wheels and track of the never-ending present locomotive,” the photographer writes. “Here I encountered these two Native American gentlemen. We never spoke a word.”
by | Jul 15, 2024 8:40 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Mildly Allergic.
Before getting off stage, Tony Mascolo of Wasteworld gave the crowd an earnest stare. “Does anyone need to use my amp?” he said. Someone from one of the other bands getting ready to play answered strongly in the affirmative. Mascolo nodded and left his amp where it was, helping someone in the next set out. The sharing of equipment — and in time, personnel — was a hallmark of the strong sense of camaraderie among the members of four bands that rocked Three Sheets on Friday, two of which had just a couple years ago started off playing house shows around the area and now were hitting stages.
by | Jul 12, 2024 9:34 am | Comments (1)
Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma.
New Haven is a pretty easy place to find Italian food and fairs, but what about films? The Institute Library is satisfying that craving this summer with their new film series, “Ciao, Bella!” On Thursday night the second film of the three in the series — 1962’s Mamma Roma, directed by Pier Polo Pasolini — was screened among the stacks of their biography room. Library member John Hatch had the idea for the series and according to operations manager Eva Geertz, it was one she was happy to help come to fruition.
Continue reading ‘Italian Film Series Sizzles At Institute Library’
by | Jul 12, 2024 8:31 am | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photo
Alice Matthews, Jasmine Keegan, and Chris Chew clean a reproduction of Child with Dog.
There’s a lot of work that goes into curating and maintaining an art collection like that of the Yale Art Gallery, located at 1111 Chapel St., and usually, the public only gets to see the finished product. But on Thursday, the gallery offered a glimpse behind the curtain to see some of the conservation work that goes into taking care of its artwork in a Sidewalk Studio workshop.
by | Jul 11, 2024 9:08 am | Comments (1)
Mamma Mia!
The crowd in Pitkin Plaza.
Several dozen people gathered in Pitkin Plaza on Wednesday night for Movies in the Plaza, a weekly summer movie night organized by the Town Green District.
The night’s screening was the beloved and absurd ABBA-based jukebox musical, Mamma Mia!
A strong wind kept the audience cool and provided the perfect backdrop for dramatic hair-flips and other musical staples as the crowd gathered on fold-up chairs and picnic blankets to answer the age-old question: who’s the father?
Continue reading ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme Mamma Mia! In Pitkin Plaza’
by | Jul 10, 2024 5:11 pm | Comments (20)
Jabez Choi photo
Still figuring it out: Drivers side-by-side across double yellow line on newly two-way stretch of York.
As Yale New Haven Hospital staffer Rosalyn Curry walked out of work and down York Street, a car sped past her, barreling down the wrong side of the street. She shouted after the driver: “It’s a two-way now!”
by | Jul 10, 2024 10:19 am | Comments (17)
(Updated) West Haven driver Nader Elias Hanania, 63, died early Wednesday morning after his vehicle was struck by a car that blew through a red light at South Frontage Road and College Street.
by | Jul 10, 2024 9:23 am | Comments (0)
The untitled piece conveys, first and foremost, a sense of the warm, abiding joy when people come together arm in arm. The strength of the piece begins with how easily this joy is conveyed, through the simplicity of the figures. It’s all in the color and the gesture. The objects at the figures’ feet give context for the feeling. The assortment of weapons on the ground — weapons they have discarded — give a sense of the violence the figures have overcome. They’re symbols of conflict across place and time, from ancient grudges to today’s all-out wars. What would happen if we laid those weapons down? What could the world be like?
by | Jul 3, 2024 1:49 pm | Comments (8)
Thomas Breen photo
Jimmy Reardon, at work renovating the bus kiosk.
Jimmy Reardon cut a hole in the roof of the decades-old bus kiosk on the Green — to install a vent for a new air conditioner, and to help bring that long-shuttered building back online so that bus riders can buy passes in person again on Chapel Street.
by | Jul 3, 2024 12:26 pm | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photo
At Tuesday's pottery class at CAW.
“I feel like failure is a really bad word, but there’s a lot of failure in pottery,” said Megan Smith, the teacher of Centering With Clay: Focusing on Pottery Foundations, a seven-week-long class for adults at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street.
Smith’s goal for the first class on Tuesday wasn’t that her students make the perfect pot; that seemed unlikely, seeing as most of them were beginners. Rather, it was to lay the foundations, and instill in them a fundamental truth of all art: practice makes progress, and failure can be fun.
by | Jul 3, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (2)
Tatiana Jackson
Clothed in Christ.
“Life could be black and white like the old TVs. Instead, God made it like an art gallery.” These are the words of Msgr. Paul Steimel on Aug. 27, 2020, hanging beside his portrait, Clothed in Christ, in the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center’s new exhibit, “Do This In Memory of Me: National Sacred Art Exhibit,” running now through Aug. 25.
The show — its title taken from the words of Jesus during the Last Supper, before he was crucified — demonstrates the ways in which humans represent and interpret that which they hold sacred, showing how people relate to Christianity and how they can share it with others through the medium of art.
Continue reading ‘Religious Artists Make The World A Gallery’
by | Jul 2, 2024 10:56 am | Comments (0)
Abiba Biao photo
Dancing to the sounds of Sudanese music.
Kallou Gindeel knew how to get the crowd moving. As traditional Sudanese music played from the speakers behind him, attendees around the room joined to form a conga line.
Continue reading ‘Refugees Recognized Amid Ukrainian Dolls, Sudanese Spices’
by | Jul 2, 2024 9:26 am | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photos
Audio crew member Bryan Butler: Dobet Gnahoré "had an absolutely killer band, and her stage presence was amazing."
Workers disassembling the main stage on the Green.
Stormy weather was a challenge.
Working with Afropop sensation Dobet Gnahoré was a delight.
Arts & Ideas techies offered those takeaways on Monday as they worked hard to dismantle the festival’s main stage on the Green — and reflected on their work coordinating events, arranging sound production, and providing lighting that illuminates the artists for the people of New Haven to see.
by | Jul 1, 2024 9:39 am | Comments (1)
Eleanor Polak photos
Repping "Trinbago" on the Green: "Come out and learn about other people’s culture."
Gammy Moses: "When we play the drums, we are paying tribute to our ancestors."
Michelle Cave, Allison Lewis, Anthea Bartholomew, and Allison DeRoche of the Trinbago American Association of Southern Connecticut showed up to the Green to show off their heritage.
Their table at Saturday’s Caribbean Festival was lined with cultural objects from Trinidad and Tobago, including a steel pan, local drinks like Trinidad rum and Sole Apple J, and sweets like tamarind balls. They also had a large flag with the Trinidad and Tobago coat of arms, featuring a scarlet ibis, two hummingbirds, and a bird called a cocrico above the motto, “together we aspire, together we achieve.”
“This is great because people can come out and learn about other people’s culture,” Lewis said. She expressed that most of the time, we are fully immersed in our own experience, and don’t look outside of ourselves. The festival provided an opportunity to change that. “It’s like traveling without having to go somewhere.”
by | Jul 1, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (0)
At the very beginning of the evening on the New Haven Green on Friday night, percussionist Nino Ciampa asked a fundamental question: what is salsa? “Salsa is flavor and spice,” he said. “Salsa is Latin soul. The essence of salsa is ritmo — rhythm — and it started in Africa and the Caribbean with the conga, skin on wood.”
The conga in the Hartt Salsa All-Stars began, laying down a steady percolating groove that, it turned out, did not let up for nearly three hours. For one of the final nights of this year’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, the All-Stars and Grammy-winning artist Dobet Gnahoré, from Côte d’Ivoire, luxuriated in the power of African and Afro-Caribbean rhythms to create joy and connection.