by | Apr 11, 2025 9:32 am | Comments (35)
City of New Haven
The proposed pedestrian arc for Downtown Crossing.
The highway exit separating Downtown from the Hill could someday sprout an arc-shaped pedestrian ramp in the middle of nine lanes of traffic.
The city hopes to secure grant funding to build that ramp as part of a plan to help New Haven become a future hub of quantum computing technology.
by | Apr 10, 2025 1:14 pm | Comments (10)
contributed photos
91 Diner owner Stavros Karadimos with his son, decades ago.
On its last day, the diner's door "kept revolving" with customers saying goodbye.
“I feel like I’m grieving a death,” said Georgette Ieraci, as she described the feeling of saying goodbye to the Middletown Avenue diner her family opened and ran for 38 years.
by | Apr 3, 2025 9:52 am | Comments (0)
Lisette Vega: Diversity helps make America great.
Lisette Vega arrived at a “Hispanic Business Excellence” celebration with a vision of starting her own international trade business one day — and an ear open for advice.
by | Apr 2, 2025 3:48 pm | Comments (16)
Thomas Breen photos
Cars parked at 80 Elm ...
Thomas Breen photo
... to facilitate the construction of a different downtown development.
The fence is open and cars are parked on an empty Elm Street lot near City Hall.
Might this mean progress on a long-stalled downtown development?
Yes … just not the one you might think.
by | Apr 2, 2025 10:14 am | Comments (1)
Simona Silvestri at work at the newly opened La Fenice Gelateria and Italian Caffe.
Salvatore Scuro and Simona Silvestri could make chocolate gelato in 10 minutes with one machine if they chose to.
They choose to take their time instead.
by | Mar 25, 2025 10:42 am | Comments (0)
Thomas Breen photos
Going up: The new Fair Haven Health clinic at Grand & James ...
... and the new Mequity self-storage site at 129 Amity.
Community healthcare and self-storage centers are on the rise on opposite sides of town.
Need to find them? Just follow the signs.
Continue reading ‘Signs Approved For New Clinic, Self-Storage’
by | Mar 18, 2025 3:41 pm | Comments (16)
Thomas Breen photos
ConnCORP's Ian Williams, with ConnCAT's Steve Driffin: This redevelopment project represents "a total transformation" of the corridor.
At work on Monday.
Nearby, underground, in the Construction Academy's new classroom.
As a construction crew worked to lay the foundation for “ConnCAT Place on Dixwell,” redevelopers behind the neighborhood-transforming effort gathered in an underground classroom a few hundred feet away to lay the foundation for a more diverse, locally rooted construction workforce.
Continue reading ‘Dixwell Rebuilders Plan Construction Academy’
by | Mar 17, 2025 8:41 pm | Comments (23)
Thomas Breen file photo
Watch out, smoke shops: New rules on the books.
Laura Glesby Photo
Furlow (at mic): “This is one step towards a more healthy and vibrant city.”
New Haven officially has room for one last smoke shop — which will have to obtain a municipal license, alongside all of the city’s 212 existing tobacco retailers — thanks to new zoning and public health regulations passed by the Board of Alders.
by | Mar 13, 2025 8:06 pm | Comments (6)
contributed photo
Rendering of 410 Orchard St., one of the two new developments to be built by GDDC.
City officials, state lawmakers, and local nonprofit leaders gathered at the corner of Edgewood and Orchard Thursday morning to celebrate a $9 million state boost to various affordable housing developments across town.
by | Mar 11, 2025 3:51 pm | Comments (31)
Laura Glesby photo
Acting Assessor Pullen at Monday's Finance meeting.
More than 56 percent of real estate value throughout the city — or $10,132,855,885 in total — cannot be taxed this year.
Continue reading ‘56.79% Of City Real Estate Now Tax-Exempt’
by | Mar 5, 2025 5:34 pm | Comments (2)
Paul Bass Photo
At Wednesday's Toad's 50th anniversary event.
Decades after an aborted attempt by local officials to deliver an honorary certificate at Toad’s Place, New Haven’s mayor joined an alder onstage to officially express the city’s pride in the 50-year-old legendary York Street rock club.
Continue reading ‘City Cites Toad’s Place — For Making History’
by | Feb 26, 2025 6:35 pm | Comments (12)
Committee Chair Lemar: "The appropriate time to regulate an industry is at its onset."
HARTFORD — “When is it too late?”
So asked state AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne Wednesday during a public hearing on the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) systems out in the wild and the path to reigning them in in Connecticut.
There’s a lot of good that AI can do, he said, but not without a steady hand to guide it. Letting the technology proliferate unchecked poses risks –– mass firings, discriminatory hiring, and data harvesting, to name a few –– that the state’s “most vulnerable” just can’t afford.
by | Feb 24, 2025 9:39 am | Comments (28)
Jordan Allyn photos
Tending bud at Nautilus Botanicals ...
... owned by Luis Vega (center), celebrating a "dream come true" eight years after cannabis arrest.
Behind shelves of pipes by Bridgeport glass blower Mary Melts and across from a wall of paintings by Westville’s Shady Dankin, budtenders at Nautilus Botanicals invited the public to the grand opening of the city’s third legal pot shop.
by | Feb 21, 2025 11:25 am | Comments (2)
Some of the iconic New Haven products (above) Steve Thomas (below, at WNHH FM) sends out.
Steve Thomas noticed New Haven ex-pats hankering online for some Elm City pie and cannoli — and willing to pay to have someone ship it to them.
Continue reading ‘He's Shipping New Haven's Delicacies Nationwide’
by | Feb 20, 2025 4:01 pm | Comments (35)
Laura Glesby File Photo
City, state, and Yale leaders brainstorm "inclusive growth" over breakfast.
Over 150 Yale and New Haven leaders gathered amid sparkling lamps and plant walls at Hotel Marcel to start thinking about what a plan for tackling poverty and economic exclusion might someday look like.
by | Feb 19, 2025 9:25 am | Comments (2)
A "Collab" confab in 2017.
A Hartford-based nonprofit called reSET is acquiring New Haven entrepreneurship incubator Collab in a merger intended to expand their combined reach to help more small businesses in both cities grow.
by | Feb 17, 2025 11:55 am | Comments (19)
Another New Haven pharmacy is closing, this time the Walgreens at Whalley and Ellsworth avenues near Ella Grasso Blvd.
by | Feb 17, 2025 8:03 am | Comments (5)
Jacqueline James, New Haven city government’s former small business development chief and Democratic town chair, has a new assignment: heading up economic and community development for the Town of Hamden.
Continue reading ‘Jackie James Named Hamden Development Chief’
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 and | Feb 12, 2025 1:11 pm | Comments (22)
Zachary Groz photo
Applicant Villanueva: Spot is a "gold mine"
Thomas Breen photo
Landlord Marty Halprin: Time to look for another potential tenant.
A new smoke shop won’t be able to open up next to a methadone clinic and a strip club — after city zoners stamped out the latest bid to convert a vacant storefront into a tobacco sales “gold mine.”
by | Feb 4, 2025 2:32 pm | Comments (3)
Thomas Breen file photo
Outside Biohaven's 215 Church office.
Pharma giant Pfizer has agreed to pay $59 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing a local biopharmaceutical company of paying “kickbacks” to healthcare providers to induce them to prescribe its migraine-fighting drug to Medicaid patients.
by | Feb 3, 2025 1:07 pm | Comments (3)
Paul Bass Photo
Rapini (at center above): Phone theifs don't have your face.
Trick question: What’s your password again? For each of your 4,256 apps?
Continue reading ‘NeVER mINd All ThOsE nuMB3rs# & letTers & AMPERSANDs’
by | Jan 16, 2025 1:16 pm | Comments (8)
Thomas Breen photos
Thursday's presser at DISTRICT.
Bracing for Trump II tariffs and protectionism, the Lamont administration has launched a $25 million effort to try to build out “strategic supply chains” closer to home — in an effort to get ahead of potentially higher prices for imported goods.
by | Jan 16, 2025 9:27 am | Comments (8)
One last tobacco store could soon be allowed...
Allan Appel File Photo
...here? As circled in red in map above.
New Haven could soon have room for only one more smoke shop — specifically on one block of industrial Water Street cut off from the rest of the city by I‑95.
by | Jan 15, 2025 10:30 am | Comments (5)
Affinity's Rino Ferrarese at WNHH FM; some of his company's strains (top).
Rino Ferrarese noticed that the people who help him grow cannabis to sell in Connecticut end up buying their own stash elsewhere.
Therein lies a challenge for Connecticut’s fledgling industry.
Continue reading ‘2 Years In, Canna-preneur Battles Bummers’