by | Feb 6, 2023 5:04 pm | Comments (13)
Paul Bass Photos
Drew Ramsey and Javon Hailey clear Kimberly Park's invasive vines.
Paul Bass Photo
Dayton Death Row.
Five towering trees were sentenced to death on a crowded west side street. Meanwhile, across town, stewards whacked at vines in a reclaimed park to enable other trees to survive and thrive.
Continue reading ‘Street Trees Condemned; Park Trees Preserved’
by | Jan 30, 2023 12:34 pm | Comments (1)
Allan Appel photo
Mark Oppenheimer with his high school teacher and dean Alice Baxter on Sunday.
How about a written application — as opposed to an old boys’ nod from the rowing coach — and in-person interviews to detect your excessively Lower East Side manners?
How about a questionnaire requiring you to indicate, for example, what business your family is in? And written recommendations and aptitude tests?
Continue reading ‘Podcaster Gatecrashes Ivy League Anti-Semitism’
by | Jan 24, 2023 2:28 pm | Comments (8)
Three new apartment buildings, now OK'd for 446A Blake.
Make way for 144 new apartments on Blake Street, now that a Brooklyn builder has won the final needed city approval to convert a former factory-turned-office complex in Westville into new housing.
by | Jan 18, 2023 8:52 am | Comments (2)
Maya McFadden photos
State Comptroller Scanlon (right) taking a baklava break with legislative liaison Kevin Kurian at Pistachio Cafe ...
... and talking retirement plans with Westville salsa entrepreneur Alisa Bowens-Mercado, Tuesday.
Angela Naranjo now puts aside 3 percent of her Westville massage-therapy paycheck towards her retirement — thanks to a new state program that encourages workers across Connecticut who do not have employer-backed retirement plans to start saving early, even if they have decades to go before leaving the workforce for good.
Naranjo, a 34-year-old Westville native, shared her story about getting ready for retirement — many years down the line — during a neighborhood walking tour promoting that program as hosted by newly elected state Comptroller Sean Scanlon.
by | Jan 12, 2023 1:48 pm | Comments (4)
Allan Appel photo
Neighbors Marjorie Weiner and Meg Friedman checking out Beecher Park photos before Wednesday's meeting.
Lizzy Donius was driving near Valley Street on Dec. 19 with a car full of 16-year-olds, including her own son, when a volley of police vehicles, sirens blaring, raced past.
Later, she learned the cruisers were headed to a nearby scene where another local 16-year-old, Joshua Vazquez, had just been shot and killed while riding his bicycle.
“That’s our community,” Donius recalled, choking back tears.
Continue reading ‘West Side Q: What Makes For A Safer Neighborhood?’
by | Jan 12, 2023 12:42 pm | Comments (18)
Laura Glesby file photo
The view from the soon-to-be-replaced Mid Bridge.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn at Tuesday’s Zoom meeting.
A dance venue. A community garden. A set of lights for the skate park. A … West Rock-bound gondola?
Those were a few of the ideas that made it onto a community-built wish list for $800,000 worth of improvements for Edgewood Park, as put together by roughly 100 parkgoers.
by | Jan 10, 2023 8:29 am | Comments (0)
The centerpiece of Lisa Toto’s part of the latest show at Kehler Liddell Gallery — running now through Feb. 5, and also featuring works by Hank Paper and Chris Ferguson — is two prints of the same image, of a young girl in a dress running by a relief. She exudes joy, but there’s something wrong.
Continue reading ‘Photo Show Takes Westville Gallery To Chernobyl '89’
by | Dec 19, 2022 2:23 pm | Comments (2)
Maya McFadden photos
First grader K'Jalee makes tasty treat for birds during Wellness Wednesday, an outdoors and inclusive successor to a talented and gifted program.
Students looking for color inspiration for their art class mandalas.
An Edgewood School first grader spooned sun butter and Cheerios onto a pinecone to feed a hungry bird.
Nearby, one of her fourth grade schoolmates found inspiration for a classroom art project in a pale-yellow house with green shutters.
And in an outdoor classroom area near Yale Avenue, an eighth grader weaved coral-colored yarn around two sticks to make a dream catcher to beautify her school, all as a part of a unique effort to address both social emotional challenges in the classroom and concerns about exclusivity in enrichment programs.
by | Dec 16, 2022 9:12 am | Comments (0)
Julie Fraenkel
Party Girls.
The subjects of Julie Fraenkel’s Party Girls are as the subject says. One after the other, they’re portraits of fun, leisure, unwinding. One of them dances with a lampshade on her head. Another arrives with a large piece of cake and an expression on her face that suggests that she knows the recipient of that slice is going to first politely refuse such a large slice, then acquiesce and eat the whole thing. A third is being borne aloft by balloons. The general public will never know what one party girl was doing, however, because that piece has already been sold.
by | Dec 12, 2022 9:16 am | Comments (8)
Maya McFadden photos
Semilla's Tortillería Collective co-founders: Ariana Shapiro, Elizabeth Gonzalez, Anabel Hernandez, Martina Perez, and Javier Gonzalez-Villatoro.
Freshly made tortillas, hot off the comal.
Standing over a hot comal filled with half-cooked handmade tortillas, Elizabeth Gonzalez pinched her thumb with her index and middle fingers to grip the corner of a puffy tortilla and flipped it over — showing in a single swift motion how she and a small group of worker-owner chefs hope to bring a Central American and Mexican staple to the streets of New Haven.
by | Dec 1, 2022 4:40 pm | Comments (13)
Paul Bass Photo
Laydon crew on peanut-prep duty Thursday.
The Great Peanut’s staging ground is beginning to take shape in Westville.
by | Nov 23, 2022 9:55 am | Comments (0)
144 more apts., en route to Blake St.?
Local legislators cleared the zoning path for 256 new mostly market-rent apartments to be built in Westville and Long Wharf.
Continue reading ‘Alders Approve Plans For 256 New Apartments’
by | Nov 22, 2022 12:20 pm | Comments (3)
Nora Grace-Flood photo
Bloom owner Alisha Crutchfield with a gift box she designed for the holidays.
Alisha Crutchfield gathered a blank journal, pens promising that “You Got This,” a homemade candle bathed in “blessings,” a chain necklace with the reminder that “Black Femmes Aren’t Your Playground” — and then labeled the overflowing arrangement the perfect present for “the person who loves self care and spending time alone after a long day of work.”
In other words, Crutchfield, the founder and owner of a year-old Westville lifestyle boutique called BLOOM, curated that care package with herself in mind.
She did so to show how she busily assembles her top-selling products in personalized baskets for those seeking professional help upping their gift giving game — and as part of a broader effort to urge New Haveners to shop local this holiday season.
Continue reading ‘BLOOM Blossoms In Buy-Local Holiday Spotlight’
by | Nov 17, 2022 12:32 pm | Comments (0)
Maya McFadden photo
Gateway's William Brown talks reading, kindness at Mauro-Sheridan.
With a book in hand, Gateway Community College CEO William T. Brown showed Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School second graders the superpower of kindness — and the benefits of good deeds and college educations.
Continue reading ‘Gateway Chief Uncovers Student Superpowers’
by | Nov 15, 2022 8:59 am | Comments (6)
Trekking with the New Haven Bioregional Group through Edgewood Park.
Sunday marked the first cold morning of the year, with rain, and at the Edgewood Farmer’s Market, people hurried from stall to stall. But another group of people gathered at the gazebo and soon headed farther into the park, unharried by the weather. The occasion was a walk of the New Haven Bioregional Group, into a part of the city where trees and moving water had something to do with preparing the Elm City, and the region, for the future.
Continue reading ‘Park Volunteers Manage The Bends In The River’
by | Nov 10, 2022 5:20 pm | Comments (1)
Thomas Breen photos
Maintenance manager Wilden Bunting: Remodeling underway.
One of the city’s largest investor-landlords has snapped up a Fitch Street apartment building that once housed previously homeless families, after a middleman flipped the property at a $875,000 markup.
by | Nov 8, 2022 7:19 pm | Comments (0)
Maya McFadden Photos
Jackie Randolph and Treasurer hopeful in Westville Tuesday.
Alder Carmen Rodriguez and State Rep. Juan Candelaria with Holly Jiang and Betty Fludd outside Clemente in the Hill.
When Jackie Randolph arrived at Davis Street Magnet School Tuesday, she wasn’t expecting to see her neighbor Erick Russell.
But she was expecting to vote for his hometown candidacy for statewide office.
by | Nov 8, 2022 6:16 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass photos
James Wilson prepares to return a serve Sunday at the rebuilt courts.
Patrick McGovern back at play.
The pop of tennis racket returns can be heard again in Edgewood Park — along with a briny new variation.
by | Nov 8, 2022 2:30 pm | Comments (6)
Paul Bass Photo
Lindsey Tengatenga tends to the Election Day bake sale crowd.
Ward 25 voters wrestled with a choice when they arrived at the polls Tuesday morning: Banana bread muffins? Or lemon cupcakes?
Continue reading ‘Word On The Street: The Banana Vote Emerges’
by | Oct 27, 2022 8:49 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery photos
On one side of Kehler Liddell Gallery is a panoply of children’s faces, caught in a thousand different expressions, a snapshot of both the feelings of dozens of different people at any given moment and the range of emotions that all of us are capable of across time. On the other side of the gallery are more abstract pieces, forms with faces that appear to be mid-transformation, the expression of something more interior.
Continue reading ‘Two Artists Look From The Inside Out And The Outside In’
by | Oct 24, 2022 10:38 am | Comments (19)
144 more apts., coming soon to Blake?
Dixwell Alder Morrison: Do better, developers.
Two plans that promise to bring a total of 256 new apartments to Westville and Long Wharf moved ahead — as alders pressed for more affordable units and questioned whether the city’s recently adopted “inclusionary” housing law goes far enough.
by | Oct 20, 2022 9:10 am | Comments (9)
New apartments, coming to a convent near you?
A historic and long-vacant McKinley Avenue convent building may see its 20 “nuns’ cells” converted into 10 new apartments for empty nesters, thanks to the zoning board’s approval of a church-to-housing plan.
by | Oct 19, 2022 9:23 am | Comments (6)
Diane and Tim Nighswander
Uterus.
The poster isn’t trying to be subtle. It’s an expression of protest, and the anger underneath it. That the message is delivered so clearly is a testament to the people who made it — professional visual artists, photographers and graphic designers Diane and Tim Nighswander.
by | Sep 19, 2022 9:29 am | Comments (4)
Thomas Breen photo
Topeka Jemmott and mom Denise Hallums at 537 Fountain auction.
Topeka Jemmott has looked up at the faded, overgrown, and seemingly abandoned single-family house at 537 Fountain St. just about every day over the past year during her morning walks around the neighborhood.
Now the Upper Westville resident will have a chance to bring that blighted property back to life, after she submitted the winning — and only non-bank — bid at the house’s foreclosure sale.
by | Sep 15, 2022 5:20 pm | Comments (0)
Maya McFadden Photos
Judge Robinson with Mauro seventh graders.
Retired Superior Court Judge Angela Robinson ordered seventh and eighth-grade students at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School Thursday to chase their dreams.