by | Feb 16, 2024 4:00 pm | Comments (85)
A national Jewish organization called on Mayor Justin Elicker Friday to take disciplinary action against a city employee over an Upper Westville encounter that laid bare local tensions over the war in Gaza.
by | Feb 9, 2024 4:50 pm | Comments (5)
This reporter's favorite student as seen during Friday's Davis magnet school pep rally.
Nora Grace Flood Photos
Ernie's owner Pat DeRiso tries to get orders out for delivery while reporters hound him about National Pizza Day.
A plethora of pizza, pom-poms and politicians flooded Upper Westville Friday morning amidst a pair of symbiotic popularity contests – in which every party was a winner.
The slices of of za and strings of plastic were featured in two separate city celebrations taking place around the corner from one another.
Over at Davis Academy, students screamed out of ostensible excitement or, perhaps, excess energy as their principal announced that both The Magnet Schools of America and the University of Connecticut have recognized the school for “innovative excellence.”
Down the street on Whalley Avenue, politicians and thin-crust fanatics packed like anchovies inside Ernie’s Pizzeria for National Pizza Day and a proclamation by the governor naming New Haven the “Pizza Capital of America.”
by | Jan 26, 2024 12:38 pm | Comments (33)
Laura Glesby Photo
"I can't quit": Blumenthal fields sharp Qs from Mauro-Sheridan fifth-graders.
“If you had to either quit or work with Donald Trump as president, what would you do?”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal faced that question and others about his role in the future of American democracy — not at a press conference, or on the Senate floor, but in Lauren Bitterman’s fifth-grade classroom at Mauro-Sheridan school.
by | Jan 19, 2024 11:30 am | Comments (4)
Maya McFadden Photo
Edgewood students sing with Thabisa Rich.
The Edgewood Free Birds took flight on stage, dancing and singing about their dreams for love, peace, and liberty for all.
by | Jan 18, 2024 12:34 pm | Comments (35)
Design for one of the planned courts.
Break out the paddles, because indoor pickleball is coming to town.
Continue reading ‘Pickleball Complex OK'd For Valley Street’
by | Jan 15, 2024 11:54 am | Comments (2)
Nobody stole any vehicles in West Hills, West Rock, Westville, or Amity during the first week of 2024.
by | Jan 12, 2024 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Hank Paper
Another Brand New Day.
Hank Paper may have given his photograph the perfect title. Another Brand New Day is on one level just a normal street scene in Italy, but its vivid colors and warm light are almost supernaturally delicious. Paper finds the ecstasy in the everyday, and with it, a palpable sense of hope.
by | Jan 9, 2024 3:59 pm | Comments (10)
The city ordered six people to clear out of a four-tent encampment in Edgewood Park after working with them to find indoor places to stay.
by | Dec 21, 2023 10:27 am | Comments (15)
Paul Bass Photo
The peanut’s shell didn’t crack.
by | Dec 19, 2023 11:07 am | Comments (8)
Photo courtesy of Bruno Semino
SCSU grad student Bruno Semino competing in a pickleball tournament in October at Edgewood Park.
The story of the proposed indoor pickleball facility slated to spring forth from a stretch of asphalt in Westville begins, in a way, in 1957, when Harrison Blume’s grandfather first hung a podiatry shingle on Blake Street.
Continue reading ‘Generation To Generation, Podiatry To Pickleball’
by | Dec 18, 2023 2:58 pm | Comments (0)
Asher Joseph photo
Students sing loud and proud at Elm City Montessori's eighth annual Winter Sing.
Students, families, and teachers bundled together in the subfreezing temperature at Elm City Montessori School (ECMS) to lift their voices in song during the school’s eighth annual Winter Sing — which played out as candles flickered, under the silhouette of West Rock.
Continue reading ‘Elm City Montessori Welcomes Winter Through Song’
by | Dec 18, 2023 8:55 am | Comments (0)
The show of artist Amira Brown’s work, up now at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville through the end of the month, doesn’t have a title, nor do any of the individual pieces. That gesture alone seems to be part of the point, as is the elliptical, border-melting nature of the work itself. It’s a show to find your way into; one possible starting point is a piece that shows, in outline, a person in a classic pose of pondering, but the pondering itself is dissolving the person. The person contains other people. The person contains stars. But Brown’s sly humor is on full display as well. “Meh,” is one complete thought. “Shrug,” another. And then: “rodeo.” The rodeo of making art? Of showing it? Something bigger? Whatever the case, it isn’t Brown’s first.
by | Dec 8, 2023 4:08 pm | Comments (17)
The Yale Golf Course, as pictured in a City Plan presentation.
Yale has won city permission to cut down more than 1,000 trees and renovate its Upper Westville golf course as part of a plan that university officials pitched as making 200 acres of fairways and tees more “sustainable” — and that local activists criticized as environmentally backwards.
Continue reading ‘Yale's Tree-Cutting Golf Course Renovation Plan OK'd’
by | Dec 8, 2023 2:23 pm | Comments (2)
Lisa Reisman photo
Inside the Westville Community Nursery School.
Mud happens and wet happens and messy clothes happen and it’s all good.
Those are the words of author and play space designer Rusty Keeler about risky play, a philosophy that involves, in simplest terms, letting kids be kids, and is practiced at Westville Community Nursery School, a place where the tradition of jumping on mattresses has passed from generation to generation.
Continue reading ‘Westville Nursery School Keeps Play Alive’
by | Nov 28, 2023 7:55 am | Comments (0)
Penrhyn Cook
Holiday Reflections.
Penrhyn Cook’s series of photographs, Holiday Reflections, are absorbing enough in their own right. Colorful and festive, the images are just askew enough to warrant a closer look. Are we looking at double exposures? What do we make of the giant fruit and a rainbow on a city block? In the context of Kehler Liddell Gallery’s annual holiday show — titled “Deck the Walls” and running at the Westville space through Dec. 24 — the title of Cook’s series earns itself a double twist, as the works of fellow gallery members on the opposite walls are reflected in the photos’ glassy surfaces. Images layer on images, an apt depiction of the show as a whole, in which all the gallery members play a part.
by | Nov 1, 2023 8:13 am | Comments (0)
Marjorie Gillette Wolfe
Alhambra Hedge.
Two photographs by Marjorie Gillette Wolfe hang in the front of Kehler Liddell Gallery, at 873 Whalley Ave. in Westville. They’re both of hedges, and the way Wolfe composes the image, the eye is drawn to the plant life, without worrying too much about where it is. We can see the similarities in the forms of the plants, the spacing between them. It’s only in looking at the titles that the true humor comes out, as one photograph is taken in front of a diner somewhere, and the other is taken at the Alhambra, one of the great architectural wonders of the world. Both locations are almost entirely absent from the images.
by | Oct 30, 2023 9:33 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photo
David Sepulveda at work in his Westville studio.
The last weekend of October finally gifted the city a warm and sunny Saturday, but nowhere was it hotter than Westville, where a two-day neighborhood event — part of the artist-led City-Wide Open Studios — encompassed everything from galleries, creative collectives, and private residences to Edgewood Park and even pods on Central Avenue.
Continue reading ‘Westville Brings The Heat With Open Studios’
by | Oct 27, 2023 8:39 am | Comments (2)
Cynthia Beth Rubin
Orange Interplay with Diatoms, Salt, and Seaweed.
Cynthia Beth Rubin’s collage crackles with energy, as colors vibrate off one another and forms within forms, textures within textures, rub against each other. Keen senses of both aesthetic freedom and control of technique suffuse the piece — which, it turns out, hearken back to a famous artistic ancestor.
Continue reading ‘In "After Picasso," Artists Reckon With A Giant’
by | Oct 13, 2023 2:49 pm | Comments (18)
Lisa Reisman file photo
Pickleball played at the Floyd Little Athletic Center in April ...
BZA photo
... and next at an indoor trendy paddle sport building, coming to this parking lot?
Indoor pickleball instead of surface-lot parking could be coming to a busy Westville Village intersection, as the owner of a Valley Street stretch of asphalt has proposed constructing a new two-story “gym and spa” dedicated to the trendy tennis-adjacent sport.
by | Oct 12, 2023 7:40 pm | Comments (8)
Paul Bass Photo
The Yale Avenue cycletrack and edge of the park.
A woman who often jogs in the morning with a group of friends set out alone Thursday — and ended up fending off an attacker.
by | Oct 3, 2023 10:41 am | Comments (0)
Lisa Gray Photo
At Bloom-hosted Afrogalactic Tea Party.
The description online read: “In this ephemeral haven of sonic and poetic delights, the Afrogalactic Tea Party invites you to immerse yourself in a curated experience of taste and culture.”
The Sunday afternoon event at the flower and lifestyle shop Bloom on Central Avenue in Westville was part of the ongoing 6th Dimension Afrofuturism festival, a series of art exhibits, talks, screenings, and other gatherings running now through Oct. 25.
I love a tea party, and coupling one with Afrofuturism intrigued me, so I headed to the festival website to grab a ticket, which was pretty reasonable at $23. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
by | Oct 2, 2023 8:33 am | Comments (0)
Outtafocus Media Photos
Westville Music Bowl said so long to the summer and another full season of outdoor concerts with their closing show Thursday night, headlined by none other than boygenius, a band with a name spelled in lowercase letters and stacked with uppercase talent. Singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus have been touring the country in support of their first full-length album, the record, which was released in March 2023 with a variety of opening acts. On this night it was Palehound, who also released an album, Eye on the Bat, in July.
by | Sep 21, 2023 9:00 am | Comments (7)
Thomas Breen file photo
The former Doyle's dry cleaners at 203 Alden Ave.
A contaminated ex-dry cleaners and an abandoned ex-school are steps closer to transforming from neighborhood eyesores into over 60 new apartments.
by | Sep 20, 2023 12:07 pm | Comments (1)
One wall of the gallery is a long stack of lively faces, the energetic style matching the animation in the faces. They match their subject, a clown in the old-school sense, more Charlie Chaplin than Ronald McDonald. The artist, Brian Flinn, has numbered the series under the title Auditions. It’s an entertainer looking for a gig. But for Flinn, it’s a sly double meaning, because it’s also a test run for new way for making art. Does it pass?
Continue reading ‘Artists Explore Themes And Variations, With And Without AI’
by | Sep 20, 2023 9:13 am | Comments (2)
Thomas Breen photo
92 Lexington Ave., recently sold for $2.25M.
A Waterbury-based holding company has purchased a 50-bed nursing home and residential care facility on Lexington Avenue for $2.25 million — and a Stamford-based contractor has bought a Westville ex-convent and 10-unit apartment-complex-to-be for $865,000 — in some of the city’s latest property deals.
Continue reading ‘Property Sales Roundup: Nursing Home Sold For $2.25M’