Reinaldo’s Corner
by | Sep 3, 2020 3:09 pm | Comments (0)
Arts & Culture
District Works It Out
by | Sep 3, 2020 8:19 am | Comments (1)
As evening settled across District New Haven on James Street, Nick Di Maria and the New Haven Jazz Underground slid into another standard that filled the lawn outside the building with their sound.
Environmental Art Comes To Wooster Street
by | Sep 2, 2020 8:38 am | Comments (6)
On a sunny day, the trees above the frames on the wall on Wooster Street dapple the art those frames contain. For the latest installment of Studio Duda’s outside art gallery — begun in May as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic — this interaction with nature is particularly apt.
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Covid Be Damned, 9th Square Flourishes
by | Sep 1, 2020 5:54 pm | Comments (21)
Thomas Breen photo
Celebrating the new “Orange Street Promenade” in the Ninth Square.
Millie Yoshida, Jack Wolfe, and Matthew Shaffer on their lunch break.
Retail apocalypse? What retail apocalypse?
As commercial storefronts across the city and country struggle to stay open during the pandemic-induced economic crisis, a newly opened “Orange Street Promenade” showed off a Ninth Square in full bloom.
Newhallville Unites For Back-To-School Bash
by | Sep 1, 2020 7:30 am | Comments (1)
Laura Glesby Photo
Shaquan Whitfield with Joshua and Justin.
Diamond Tree (center) leads a hula hoop activity.
Shaquan Whitfield brought her children, Joshua and Justin Currie, to a neighborhood-spanning, back-to-school fair on the Farmington Canal Trail because she wanted to “show my kids there’s more positive than negative” in Newhallville.
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Author Unearths The Radical Side Of Italian-American History
by | Sep 1, 2020 7:23 am | Comments (4)
Everyone knows Frank Sinatra, but no one knows about his agitation for leftist causes in the 1930s and ‘40s. Fiorello La Guardia got an airport, but Sacco and Vanzetti got a march and a folk song. Italian-Americans are known for their cultural contributions to American society and, of course, New Haven in particular — look no further than Wooster Street, the cradle of pizza civilization — but what about their political legacy as a group that often struck and organized for worker’s rights and better treatment by White society? The path to assimilation was not smooth, and the very organizing that got them there seems to have been lost to public consciousness.
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Black Art Matters Brings Arts Back To The Street
by | Aug 31, 2020 8:08 am | Comments (2)
Love’N Co set up fast at the end of the block on Orange and Crown Streets and brought joyous songs to Black Art Matters, an art, music, and craft fair held on Saturday from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. that — masks and social distancing and all — brought the arts back to New Haven’s summer streets, with a message.
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Garage-Based Pandemic Halloween Alternative Pitched
by | Aug 25, 2020 11:49 am | Comments (4)
Forget the door-to-door trick-or-treating and the accidental sidewalk clustering of ghosts, demons, ballplayers, and Beyonces. Covid-19 may not allow for those traditions.
Here’s an alternative idea: Invite small groups of socially distancing trick-or-treaters and their families to four different garages to watch four groups of actors perform a story of a giant Brazilian snake that saves the forests and the world.
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How New Haven Keeps Eating During Covid-19
by | Aug 25, 2020 11:36 am | Comments (8)
Allison Hadley Photo
The Wooster Square farmer’s market, now held at Conte West Hills Magnet School on Chapel Street, buzzed with masked figures, leaning in (but not too close) and pointing at gleaming piles of produce: peppers, tomatoes, leafy greens springing up with an airy confidence.
A farmer paused between transactions to spray hands and surface with disinfectant.
Lines stretched even longer for Jitter Bus’s iced coffee, with six feet the norm between each person in the queue.
Everything was familiar and different, like a filter on Instagram, yet everything had also changed.
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Sock Dropping Sonnet
by | Aug 25, 2020 11:10 am | Comments (1)
The kids say I make ordinary things fun
Like straddling baby and dropping tiny socks
Auden Redux, A Covid Sonnet
by | Aug 24, 2020 1:28 pm | Comments (2)
We share the darkness and the air
We even occasionally talk of despair
The Cellar Takes Dinner And Show To The Patio
by | Aug 24, 2020 8:35 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio photos
David Taylor Coffey.
New Haven-based singer-songwriter David Taylor Coffey was at the Cellar on Treadwell again on Saturday — not virtually, as he was in April, but on the venue’s new expanded patio, as part of the Cellar’s latest Dinner and a Show.
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Remodeled And Resilient, Claire’s Reopens
by | Aug 21, 2020 5:42 pm | Comments (6)
Thomas Breen photos
Vegan treats back on display, behind plexiglass.
Claire Criscuolo at her reopened restaurant.
Downtown New Haven feels just a little bit more like Downtown New Haven again, now that Claire’s Corner Copia — remodeled, expanded, and replete with vegan baked goods and a supportive community 45 years in the making—has reopened.
“It’s gonna take more than a pandemic to get rid of us,” said Claire Criscuolo, a faint smile visible behind her face mask.
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Musician Makes Psychedelia For Now
by | Aug 21, 2020 1:10 pm | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photo
Hoffman.
“Gardener,” the first track from The Alex Butter Field’s first release, Psychedelipop, begins with a flourish of guitar and drums, splashy yet focused, somehow both anxious and comforting. The introduction proceeds from one idea to the next, winding toward a key, toward resolution, then settles at last. “Gardener,” the vocal declares, “bury your seeds in my heart and we’ll see what blossoms.”
Affordable Mill River Townhomes Deal Advances
by | Aug 21, 2020 11:05 am | Comments (1)
Urbane NewHaven
A rendering of the proposed townhouses.
City plans to sell a vacant Jocelyn Square lot to a developer interested in building six new two-family houses advanced — even as city staff cautioned that the proposed development will likely require zoning relief.
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State Signs Off On Historic House Move
by | Aug 21, 2020 9:39 am | Comments (8)
Thomas Breen photo
The historic Pinto House at 275 Orange St.
A developer’s plan to move a 200-year-old house several dozen feet up Orange Street won a key state recommended approval — paving the way for a seven-story apartment building slated to be built atop an adjacent downtown parking lot.
NHDocs Rolls From Romeo And Juliet To Jelly Doughnuts
by | Aug 21, 2020 8:02 am | Comments (0)
The weekend offerings of the NHDocs festival include two films at two live events — the first in the Park of the Arts on Saturday, featuring a local legend and the literary pursuits that defined her and many others; and the second at Whitneyville Cultural Commons on Sunday, featuring the story of a man and the legendary donut empire he created.
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Reinaldo’s Corner
by | Aug 21, 2020 8:01 am | Comments (0)
Crime Of The Century
by | Aug 20, 2020 7:59 am | Comments (1)
Ted Littleford
I once saw a bank being robbed but didn’t know it
It was a normal afternoon, August, in the middle of the day
Narrative Project Tells “These Truths”
by | Aug 20, 2020 7:58 am | Comments (2)
Scenes from These Truths.
There is a “gravitational pull” dragging down Black men in America. “There’s no respect in our community for each other as brothers.” “There are not enough men who are positive role models.” “What can we do as a society to lift Black men up, because y’all did a hell of a job tearing them down?”
These and many other hard truths came to light Wednesday night in the screening of and panel discussion about the short film These Truths: A Documentary on the State of the Black Community, hosted online by The Narrative Project and drawing an audience of about 100.
NHDocs Looks At Police Killing And Riot Past
by | Aug 20, 2020 7:47 am | Comments (0)
When Liberty Burns.
Friday night’s offerings from the NHDocs film festival include “a film under the stars” event in the Park of the Arts on Audubon Street, featuring When Liberty Burns, an incisive and engaging examination of the life and death of Arthur McDuffie at the hands of Dade County police in Florida in 1979, the trial and acquittal of the officers charged with his murder and the subsequent riots that ensued in Miami in 1980.
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New Coffee Shop Brings Majlis To Westville
by | Aug 19, 2020 12:07 pm | Comments (6)
Lotta Studio Photos
Inside the new Westville cafe, Pistachio.
The coffee was silky and smooth, with a rich, complex flavor. The foam on the top was thick and creamy, with a stripe of sweetness in it, a mystery ingredient. What made it taste like that? “You start with the best bean you can find,” said Mohamed Hafez, architect, artist, and now owner of Pistachio, the new coffee shop opening imminently at Lotta Studio in Westville. “Good milk that is fresh and coming from close by.” And maybe, he said, the sweetness came from a dash of agave.
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New Butcher Provides For Upper State Street
by | Aug 19, 2020 10:46 am | Comments (4)
Allison Hadley Photos
McGowan and Mingrone.
Provisions on State — opening on Upper State Street in September — will be New Haven’s only whole-animal butcher shop that uses regional animals; it also plans to have “everything you’d need for a simple, excellent meal,” said chef Emily Mingrone, who is busily readying the shop for its opening with business partner Shane McGowan.
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First Day Of School
by | Aug 19, 2020 10:07 am | Comments (0)
Kevin Sanchez Walsh cartoon
Families, line up right here by twos and threes
And we’ll soon find out who it will be
Dogs, Restaurant Workers Get A Fair Shake
by | Aug 19, 2020 8:18 am | Comments (0)
Seniors.
Thursday’s virtual offerings of the NHDocs film festival include one from the executive director of the festival himself. Gorman Bechard writes and directs one from the heart with Seniors: A Dogumentary, a touching, invigorating, and inspirational film focusing on older dogs and the people who not only love and care for them but make it their life’s work to give them the attention and spotlight they deserve.
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