by | Feb 20, 2025 9:28 am | Comments (15)
Thomas Breen photo
Squint and you can almost see the green.
One idea for a future Gibbs Street Park, which received support from neighborhood kids.
A new public park may someday take shape where Gibbs Street meets the Farmington Canal Trail — perhaps with a playground, exercise equipment, and a park for neighborhood dogs.
by | Feb 19, 2025 3:52 pm | Comments (26)
Elphaba, Sen. Kissel: This bill is wicked. So to speak.
Hartford — Should Connecticut movie theaters have to publish accurate start times for films and previews — or else face $1,000 false-advertising fines?
New Haven State Sen. Martin Looney says yes. Cinema owners say no. And an Enfield lawmaker was embarrassed that such a question would even be asked.
by | Feb 19, 2025 2:47 pm | Comments (18)
Thomas Breen file photo
Olive & Wooster: If it quacks like a rooming house ...
Is a luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals actually an illegal rooming house?
A legal aid attorney argued that it is, as she defended a tenant facing eviction from one of the new high-end apartment complexes that have popped up in recent years on the downtown edge of Wooster Square.
by | Feb 19, 2025 9:47 am | Comments (10)
John T. Hill photo
May Day 1970 rally on the Green.
Allan Appel Photo
Notes from New Haven's underground.
This coming Saturday you might think it’s Feb. 22 and only Washington’s birthday — but not if you happen also to be at the New Haven Museum, where the under-appreciated Whitney Library will be time-traveling back to May 1, 1970, the historic May Day rally on the Green and at Yale.
by | Feb 18, 2025 8:42 pm | Comments (5)
Laura Glesby Photo
Daniel Juárez at a January Aldermanic Affairs Committee meeting.
The Board of Education has a new member in New Haven Public Schools parent, opera singer, and Yale fundraiser Daniel Juárez, who was unanimously approved for the position on Tuesday evening by the Board of Alders.
by | Feb 18, 2025 2:53 pm | Comments (15)
Thomas Breen file photo
Prez Srajer: "The tenant movement is here to stay."
Nathaniel Rosenberg file photo
"Just cause" co-sponsor Laurie Sweet (center), in January.
Hartford – Connecticut Tenants Union President and New Havener Hannah Srajer was in the middle of laying into the “unchecked greed” of corporate landlords who use no-fault evictions to hike rents when the co-chair of the state legislature’s Housing Committee said her three minutes were up. She asked Srajer to summarize the rest of her testimony.
“The tenant movement is here to stay,” Srajer concluded. “We’re not raising new problems. We’re just making them more visible. Let’s get this done.”
by | Feb 18, 2025 9:06 am | Comments (11)
Maya McFadden Photos
Senior Lily Gonzalez: "Just had to get used to" not texting mom or friends as much.
NHA's wall-mounted locking and unlocking devices near school exits.
New Haven Academy’s hallways and cafeteria have gotten louder — now that the high school has become the first in the district to adopt Yondr pouches, leading to students spending lunchtime talking to each other instead of looking at their phones.
by | Feb 17, 2025 3:41 pm | Comments (61)
Laura Glesby Photos
Dorothy Cupariello attends her first protest...
...and Patricio ignites a chant for transgender rights.
Holding up a pink triangle sign — which in another time and place might have marked them for death — Patricio seized a moment of silence, cupped their hands over their mouth, and started a chant of their own among the hundreds of protesters gathered outside City Hall.
Their words — “Trans rights are human rights!” — spread through the crowd like fire.
Continue reading ‘Hundreds Protest On (Not My) President's Day’
by | Feb 17, 2025 9:15 am | Comments (22)
Thomas Breen file photo
Eco-friendly affordable housing on Dixwell: More, please.
With the Connecticut General Assembly’s legislative session in full swing, New Haven’s eight state lawmakers are pushing 184 different bills that touch on everything from growing housing near transit to digging deep on thermal energy to requiring movie theaters to disclose what time the films, and not just the trailers, actually start.
by | Feb 14, 2025 4:58 pm | Comments (8)
Vernon Horn, Marquis Jackson, and Stefon Morant en route to getting their money.
A state panel Friday gave a thumbs up to paying three New Haveners a combined $16 million for spending decades in prison on wrongful convictions — while putting on hold plans to compensate another two.
Continue reading ‘State Closer To Compensating 3 Of 5 Wrongfully Incarcerated Men’
by | Feb 14, 2025 2:31 pm | Comments (28)
Thomas Breen photo
The Whit sold for .... The What??
Two Wooster Square lots that languished for years amid landlord lawsuits — and then burst forth into 230 high-end apartments amid a neighborhood building frenzy — have now sold to a pair of real estate investment firms for $71 million.
Continue reading ‘They Came. They Built. They Sold For $71M’
by | Feb 14, 2025 11:35 am | Comments (15)
Laura Glesby photos
Local licenses, inspections are on the horizon for tobacco retailers.
Health Director Maritza Bond: Inspections would protect kids from exposure to addictive carcinogens.
The city’s Health Department could soon have the power to crack down on smoke shops that violate the law — by way of a proposed municipal license system that would allow for stricter local regulation of the 212 businesses already OK’d by the state to sell tobacco in New Haven.
Continue reading ‘Municipal Tobacco License Proposal Advances’
by | Feb 14, 2025 9:00 am | Comments (17)
Not Godfrey's goat. But you get the idea.
A parking garage under the Green? Not on the Proprietors' watch.
The Green almost had an underground parking garage and a statue of JFK — and it did at one time have a state house and Seth Godfrey’s goat.
As the city, the Proprietors, the just-formed New Haven Green Conservancy and other “stakeholders” of all kinds are weighing in on the next turn in the evolution of the Green’s uses, here is just a taste of what was and what might have been on the city’s central greenspace over the past four centuries.
by | Feb 13, 2025 5:06 pm | Comments (11)
West Haven Officer Robert Rappa's body-worn camera footage. Note: Videos show graphic violence.
West Haven police had been following Aaron Freeman for seven months — setting up controlled buys of crack cocaine, watching him allegedly come and go from a Mill River Crossing apartment rented by a woman he appeared to be in a relationship with.
That drug-focused investigation culminated with an early-morning raid of the Grand Avenue residence that led to the cops’ seizure of nearly $6,600 in cash, multiple cellphones, and dozens of pills and baggies filled with white and tan powder substances.
That raid also sparked a shoot-out between police and Freeman, 35, in front of an 8‑year-old girl, a 32-year-old woman, and a 52-year-old grandfather, killing Freeman and injuring two West Haven cops.
by | Feb 13, 2025 5:02 pm | Comments (19)
Murphy (right) to McMahon (left) at Thursday's hearing: Possibility of revoking funding for schools with programming based on ethnic or racial identity is "chilling."
WASHINGTON — After grilling her at a confirmation hearing, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Thursday he is a “hell no” on confirming Connecticut businesswoman Linda McMahon to be U.S. secretary of education, saying President Donald Trump’s executive order curbing diversity programs would result in the beleaguered agency “micromanaging” public school curricula.