East Rock

City Pitches A "Slow" Orange Street

by | Apr 10, 2024 9:50 am | Comments (66)

Thomas Breen file photo

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn (right): Goal is to keep everyone safe.

Upper Orange Street’s parking spots will all stay put. The city will build no new dedicated bike lanes.

But! The city will slow” the street and make room for cars and cyclists alike by narrowing the road, trimming the speed limit, improving signage and sightlines, coloring the street, and putting in a median.

Such are the details the Elicker administration has put together after years of debate over a new design for a nine-block run of Orange Street between Humphrey and Cold Spring Streets.

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Choir Sings The Fragility Of Refuge

by | Apr 8, 2024 9:06 am | Comments (1)

Brian Slattery photo

Voices filled the space of Bethesda Lutheran Church on Sunday afternoon, raised in song. But the harmonies weren’t what many may have been used to in a church; they were sharper, more angular, provoking of thought. Nor was the text from the Bible; it was a dispatch from halfway around the world, from the present day. 

We sense something grave is happening around us. We don’t know what the future holds,” the choir sang. The land we tilled for generations is shrinking; salt water poisons what’s left of our fields. Many people have gone, displacement and death everywhere.” 

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Cross GSA Finds Its Way

by | Apr 3, 2024 3:00 pm | Comments (3)

Maya McFadden photos

Cross GSA: Zulaikha Khan, Alejandro Zacatelco, Levi, Jaime Soares, Gema, and Mikey.

Pins made by Cross GSA for teachers to wear and put up in classrooms.

More You Are Safe With Me” pins and This Is A Safe Place” stickers are popping up around Wilbur Cross High School hallways thanks to the efforts of the school’s recently revived Gender & Sexuality Alliance (GSA).

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Artists Open Path To Grappling With Climate Change

by | Apr 2, 2024 8:45 am | Comments (0)

Susan Hoffman Fishman

The Earth Is Breaking Beautifully.

Susan Hoffman Fishman’s painting seems at first to be an abstract, full of brilliant colors and bold lines. Soon, though, one can see how it’s derived from natural forms — but at what scale? It could be a cross-section of a tree or a landscape viewed from space. It turns out that it’s more the latter. 

As a result of climate change, the extraction of minerals and the damming of the Jordan River, which once provided a source of new water to the Dead Sea, over 8,000 sinkholes have developed along its shores. Seen from above via satellites and drones, the sinkholes are brilliant cobalt blue, lime green, white, yellow ochre and rust red,” the artist writes. The Earth is Breaking Beautifully emphasizes the contrast between the horrifying destruction around the Dead Sea and the beauty of that destruction.”

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Lights Up Lands "Little Mermaid"

by | Mar 6, 2024 9:30 am | Comments (0)

June Lanpher, Zara Baden-Eversman, Erin Palmer.

Ariel keeps disobeying her father, Triton, king of the ocean, who tells her not to try to explore the world above the waves. But she can’t resist. She sees the passing ships, collects the artifacts they drop in the water, clambers onto rocks to gaze at the land beyond. And in time, she sees a prince — and the prince hears her singing — and suddenly both feel a tug, binding them together, that no injunctions from parents can dislodge.

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Cross Bakeshop Gets Meal Out The Door

by | Jan 30, 2024 12:03 pm | Comments (4)

Maya McFadden Photos

Junior Klever Chilel practices omelet making.

Friday's fresh blackberry scones and brown sugar banana muffins.

Genesis Correa flipped a farmer’s omelet onto the grill, Damani Wheeler cut thick slices of ciabatta toast, Klever Chilel delivered the fresh off the grill breakfasts, and Tracey Salazar poured customers of the Wilbur Cross Bakeshop a cold cup of fresh grapefruit juice. 

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Sacred Harp Brings The Joyful Noise

by | Jan 17, 2024 9:00 am | Comments (0)

The Sacred Harp participants for the evening.

Do you like to sing? I do, but I haven’t done much formally or had any instruction in it. For 2024 one of my goals was to truly find my own voice without shame or judgment. Lucky for me, Volume Two at Never Ending Books has a gathering of the New Haven Sacred Harp every third Monday of the month, where new and inexperienced singers are always welcome. 

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Calls Renewed For Crosswalk To Edgerton Park

by | Jan 9, 2024 2:10 pm | Comments (33)

Laura Glesby Photo

Darko Jelaca has a vision for this intersection.

Yet another driver barreled down Whitney Avenue, crossing the New Haven-Hamden town line far faster than the 25 miles-per-hour limit.

TWENTY FIVE!” Darko Jelaca shouted at the car, having just made it to the corner of Whitney and Cliff after darting across the avenue.

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Mandy Buys Albertus Student Housing For $7.4M

by | Nov 28, 2023 12:21 pm | Comments (12)

Thomas Breen photo

490 Prospect St.: Now owned by Mandy, leased by Albertus.

Tapping the current advantageous real estate market,” Albertus Magnus College has sold 20 units of student housing and related office and meeting space for $7.4 million to an affiliate of Mandy Management — and has entered into a long-term lease with the local megalandlord to preserve the property for school use.

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FiFac's House Makes A Home At Never Ending Books

by | Nov 27, 2023 8:19 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio photo

Michael Slyne at Volume 2.

On the day after Thanksgiving, many scattered through stores to find the best prices on holiday presents. Others settled into couches to catch college football. A select few found themselves making their way to FiFac’s House, a monthly music series held on the last Friday of each month over the past year at Never Ending Books. Not unlike the multitude of series held at the State Street gathering space — both before and after its reimagination under the Volume Two collective — the night offered an array of performers that established a symbiotic relationship between creator and listener via dissonance, dreaminess, and experimentation. 

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Student Climate Activists Speak Up About What To Fear, What To Be Thankful For

by | Nov 22, 2023 8:29 am | Comments (3)

Maya McFadden file photo

Student composters at work in Cross's cafeteria back in June.

This Thanksgiving season, Wilbur Cross sophomore Manxi Han is thankful to have a home that is not routinely submerged in several feet of water as sea levels rise, for access to food despite climate change-related disasters destroying farm lands, for healthy and clean air year-round, for minimal heat waves as the earth’s temperature rises, and for biodiversity as rates of extinction increase. 

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Special Needs Meet "Life Skills" In Cross Class

by | Nov 17, 2023 9:22 am | Comments (2)

Maya McFadden Photo

Margaret Stevens in her "life skills" classroom.

When Wilbur Cross English teacher Margaret Stevens told her class of multilingual students that the word of the day was invent,” her students put their fingers to their bottom lips to feel the vibrations as they pronounced the word aloud with a va” sound rather than a ba” sound more familiar to Spanish speakers. 

That exercise took place as part of a new effort at the East Rock public high school to teach life skills” to students with special needs who are also still learning English, along with peer mentors, all in one class.

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