The Hill

Hillfest Brings Out The Neighborhood

by | May 19, 2019 9:21 pm | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Dozens of people thronged the lot across from the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center on Columbus Avenue on Saturday for Hillfest, a neighborhood festival organized by the Hill community under the auspices of International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The event brought food, music, and a host of activities and kept the crowds out for a full sunny afternoon.

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Landlord Tops 340 Units

by | May 15, 2019 12:32 pm | Comments (6)

Thomas Breen photos

Brodie Fair Haven holdings: 52 Maltby, 127 Clay 143 Fillmore, 154 Fillmore., 114 Lloyd, 161 Clay, 176 Wolcott, 191 Wolcott, 176 Wolcott.

Note: This article has been substantively updated since its first publication, now with an interview with Brodie about his background and investment strategy.

A 33-year-old, Monsey, N.Y.-based landlord bumped his local apartment holdings up to 347 units with the recent purchase of eight two and three-family homes in Fair Haven, the Hill, West River, and Westville.

That’s 347 more than when he started out in real estate a decade ago, when he first learned about investment opportunities in New Haven through a chance encounter at a gym in upstate New York.

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Files Reveal Slumlord-Chasing Challenges

by | May 8, 2019 5:42 pm | Comments (24)

Markeshia Ricks Photo

LCI chief Serena Neal-Sanjurjo: “We have to do better.”

The owner of a rundown two-family home in the Hill — which was apparently being turned into a death-trap rooming house — kept missing appointments with city inspectors to qualify for a needed license.

Then flames erupted in the house, tenants leaped from windows — and two men never made it out alive.

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Tenants Who Escaped Deadly Fire: Smoke Alarm Didn’t Sound. Slumlord Didn’t Care

by | May 6, 2019 5:16 pm | Comments (20)

Thomas Breen photo

Tenants Hasson Hallet and Dershaya Hargrove describe surviving the fire — and slumlord’s indifference at 150 West (below).

Dershaya Hargrove and Hasson Hallet were asleep in the groundfloor bedroom of a carved up Hill rooming house when a loud noise jolted them awake.

That noise wasn’t the blaring of a fire alarm. It was a neighbor pounding on their bedroom window, shouting Fire!” and urging them to leave the burning house as upstairs tenants jumped for their lives out of second and third-story windows.

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2 Die In Hill Fire; Tenants Leap For Lives; Questions Raised On Smoke Alarms, Exits

by | May 5, 2019 8:03 pm | Comments (9)

Paul Bass Photo

Fire investigators Detective Mike Torre, Fire Capt. Ray Saracco confer with officers on scene Sunday after obtaining search warrant.

Contributed photo

(Updated) An investigation into a fire that killed two tenants in a crowded Hill rooming house appears bound to focus on whether the building met safety codes, including having working smoke alarms.

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Riverside Spared

by | Apr 9, 2019 12:18 pm | Comments (17)

Christopher Peak Photos

Senior Denzel Caldwell at Monday night’s meeting.

Cyd Slotoroff, Kirsten Hopes-McFadden, Matt Wilcox, Nijija-Ife Waters, Steve Mikolike, Hyclis Williams speak out for school.

During her freshman year at High School in the Community, Sonimar Colon, a student with a learning disability, earned D’s and F’s in her classes. She started skipping school, because she thought no one would give her the help she needed. Administrators later kicked her out for fighting.

Now, as a junior at Riverside Education Academy, the district’s last remaining alternative school, Colon has a special-education plan and intensive therapeutic supports. She’s now earning top marks. But the latest round of proposed budget cuts had put her school at risk.

The Board of Education listened to Colon at a meeting Monday night, and it vowed to her that Riverside will remain open next year.

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Next Vlock House Must Fit Block’s Design

by | Apr 8, 2019 7:58 am | Comments (27)

SONYA SCHOENBERGER PHOTO

41 Button St. Vlock house: Next design won’t look like this.

The city has agreed to sell a vacant Hill lot to Columbus House for the construction of a new affordable home.

That agreement comes with a catch: the building, to be designed by Yale School of Architecture students, must fit the look and feel of the existing neighborhood. Or else no deal.

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Kimberly Square Pizza Hold-Ups Stopped

by | Mar 21, 2019 2:52 pm | Comments (1)

Allan Appel Photo

Officer John Caron and Sgt. Brendan Canning.

The cops put the kibosh on a string of robberies of pizza deliverers in the Hill South neighborhood, where police believe a tech-savvy 15 year-old was using a scrambled phone number app he had downloaded in order to lure his pie-and-cash bearing victims.

Meanwhile, officers got word of a new problem — open gambling, smoking, and dealing a few blocks farther along on Greenwich Avenue at Galvin Park.

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St. Martin Set To Rebuild A Block

by | Mar 15, 2019 7:37 am | Comments (39)

Thomas Breen photo

St. Martin de Porres Academy President Allison Rivera at community update.

Don’t be fooled: Those towering, late-19th century red brick church buildings at Columbus Avenue and Cedar Street may look abandoned.

But they’re actually home to a thriving faith-based, tuition-free middle school that fully intends on staying in the Hill and building up the block.

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Holocaust Survivors Can’t Forget

by | Mar 8, 2019 8:45 am | Comments (5)

Christopher Peak Photo

Mila Nishball, 97, who fled Czechoslovakia after the Nazi occupation.

As a child growing up near Prague, Mila Nishball saw her weekly trips to the synagogue as a chance to gab with her girlfriends rather than to participate in her family’s religious tradition.

But today, Nishball still tears up when she recalls visiting the site in the late 1980s to discover that the synagogue was gone. It had been torn down by the Nazis after she’d gone into hiding and then fled Czechoslovakia with help from an American-born boy.

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Zug Found Under Rug

by | Mar 1, 2019 2:30 pm | Comments (1)

Allan Appel Photo

Principal DiNicola welcomes the volunteers in her “seussified” Strong School lobby.

There was a zug under the … rug, Mayor Harp said, calling the kids’ attention to the pleasurably goofy rhyme as she read to them from Dr. Seuss’s There’s A Wocket In My Pocket

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House Condemned; Tenants Displaced

by | Feb 15, 2019 8:59 am | Comments (17)

Thomas Breen photos

Boxcutter-wielding landlord Xie Meiqiang flees a reporter Thursday outside his Orchard Street property.

68 Mechanic St.: Condemned.

The city condemned a two-family home that two Guilford-based landlords had illegally converted into a five-unit rooming house. Four tenants were displaced.

The landlords’ — and their citywide tenants’ — problems may have just begun.

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Medical Records Key To Cop Shootout Case

by | Feb 8, 2019 1:37 am | Comments (1)

Thomas Breen photo

Marcus Rivera with Asst. Public Defender Kelly Billings in court this week.

Detectives are pouring through over 600 pages of medical records as they seek to prove that a chainlink fence — rather than a large, armed, unidentified assailant — was the source of a hand injury on a man accused of shooting at city police.

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