Downtown

Exhibition Shows All The Hues Fit To Print

by | Sep 24, 2024 9:22 am | Comments (0)

Carol Strause FitzSimonds

Flora and Fauna #23.

My art is a living thing, a labor of birth, exasperation, growth, change, and joy. Printmaking has always been my primary passion, from exploring traditional Old World techniques to new 21st-century materials and technologies. Wanting to expand my art into a more sculptural tactile experience led me to experiment with altering published books and to crafting one-of-a-kind books from my original prints and drawings. I find my image inspiration in the everyday of nature, ordinary places and things, and the human form.”

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Ground Broken On 96 New Apartments

by | Sep 17, 2024 12:18 pm | Comments (61)

Thomas Breen photo

Developer Jay Hakimian (center) at Tuesday's groundbreaking.

An $18 million infusion to a long-stalled downtown development means that 96 new apartments will finally soon rise at the site of the ex-Harold’s Bridal Shop — the latest step in a builder’s journey that began with a love for Louis Kahn’s architecture. 

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Gogol Bordello Unleashes Positive Fury

by | Sep 16, 2024 10:09 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Gogol Bordello.

In an election cycle marked by acrimony and fractious divisiveness, the music at Toad’s on Friday — featuring international punk band Gogol Bordello, supported by label mates Puzzled Panther and Crazy and the Brains — amounted to a ragged, full-throated cry for action and greater community, with a sharp edge.

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Omni Workers End 4-Day Strike

by | Sep 16, 2024 9:33 am | Comments (13)

Jabez Choi photos

Scabby the Rat joins the picket line.

Jabez Choi file photo

Local 217 Sec-Treasurer Josh Stanley: "We couldn't be prouder of each other."

More than 120 Omni hotel workers have put down their picket signs and gone back to work — without a new contract, but with a message sent to management that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to win.”

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Artists Make Light At Gateway

by | Sep 12, 2024 8:53 am | Comments (0)

Liah Sinq

For a split second, the kid is in the hands of gravity, but you just know he’s going to be all right. Maybe it’s the matching pajamas that give it away. It’s Christmas morning, perhaps, and the kids want to play with a father, or an uncle. But what really seals the deal on the tone of the piece is the quality of the sunlight, streaming through the window behind them. It lets us see the care the adult is putting into it, lets us see the way the kid is enjoying the ride. He may be falling, but the landing will be safe.

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Start Your Bicycles, For 9th Annual Grand Prix

by | Sep 9, 2024 3:26 pm | Comments (10)

Thomas Breen photos

Colin Caplan: New Haven is the center of so much "invention, ingenuity, art, commerce, culture."

A fading stone monument to New Haven's cycling past.

Everyone now knows that New Haven is the pizza capital of the country, Colin Caplan proclaimed at the corner of Chapel and College Streets.

A little monument” at that same southwestern corner of the Green, meanwhile, suggests we might be the capital of bicycling as well.”

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4 Months Later, Bus Kiosk Still Closed

by | Sep 9, 2024 2:29 pm | Comments (18)

Thomas Breen photos

Frustrated bus riders Natalie Averill and Abdullah Livingston: "It's an inconvenience."

New signs, new reopen date: Sept. 23.

Closed” signs have been replaced with those reading We’re Back & Better Than Ever!”

But the bus pass kiosk on the Green is still not open, four months after the state first shuttered the small sales outlet and info center for repairs.

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From Can Collector To Bomb Suspect

by | Sep 5, 2024 11:40 am | Comments (22)

Thomas Breen photo

At the scene of Friday's bomb squad investigation.

A 22-year-old man who regularly returns bottles for cash at Stop & Shop was picking up empty cans on Orange Street when he found three metal canisters. 

He decided to throw those objects away after noticing how rusty they were — an action that ended up snarling downtown traffic for hours, having City Hall evacuated, activating the city police’s bomb squad, and leading to his arrest on three felony and two misdemeanor charges.

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YUAG Offers Snapshot Of Mexican Photographers

by | Sep 5, 2024 9:29 am | Comments (0)

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

La hija de los danzantes.

It’s a famous picture, of a girl peeking into a window, and seems almost like a happy accident, a case of the photographer being in the right place at the right time. If so, that timing was nearly miraculous, due to the beauty in its formal composition. The circle of the hat echoes the circle of the window, while both offset the relentless diamonds on the wall. It succeeds in feeling like street photography and like an intricately composed image all at once. 

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Restaurant's Liquor Permit Suspended After Shooting

by | Sep 4, 2024 11:07 am | Comments (22)

Ronak Gandhi file photo

NOA on Crown St. According to downtown's top cop, "This establishment poses an immediate danger to its customers, the commercial businesses that it adjoins, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic."

Thomas Breen photo

Liquor permit suspension sign now up at NOA.

The state has suspended a Crown Street Thai restaurant’s liquor permit after an early Saturday morning shooting — following a stabbing last year and numerous complaints over the past two years — led investigators to believe that the business is being run in a manner that imperils public safety.”

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Buttery Cake Ass, Read Aloud

by | Sep 4, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery photo

Sam Carlson and Aug Stone.

When we were, like, 15, 16, me and my best friend Trig used to go record shopping. And it was weird. Our local record store had this counter with all the cassettes behind it. The goods! You had to ask to see them,” a gregarious voice announces. Trig was always after Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album. Week after week we’d ask, only to week after week be disappointed. Truth be told, Trig much more so than I. I didn’t know anything about Buttery Cake Ass. But that’s the beauty of music, of any sort of artistic creation — that another’s excitement for it can infect you like this.”

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Summer Cookout & Continued Care

by | Sep 3, 2024 2:08 pm | Comments (1)

PFTL Program Manager Yvonne Elung, Executive Director Tahnesha Bonner, and Director of Admissions and Outreach Kyleigh Marrero at Saturday's cookout.

As the sun beamed over a Broadway parking lot Saturday afternoon, Parents’ Foundation for Transitional Living (PFTL) Executive Director Tahnesha Bonner was in her zone on the grill. 

While she’s usually in charge of logistics for the downtown nonprofit that provides residential care for adults struggling with mental illness, this day was different. Instead, she served smiles and cooked burgers and hot dogs for residents and family members to enjoy.

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Yale Film Archive Goes On Surreal "Picnic"

by | Sep 3, 2024 9:15 am | Comments (3)

A still from Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The 50th anniversary of a Francis Ford Coppola classic, a historic documentary set in 1970s New Haven, and The Bride of Frankenstein screened on Halloween night: these are just a sampling of what Yale Film Archive is offering movie fans this fall, revealed along with a host of other anniversary screenings and premiere prints at the first screening of the semester this past Friday at the Yale Humanities Quadrangle. 

First, however, a capacity crowd was treated to a new 35-mm print of Peter Weir’s mesmerizing 1975 classic Picnic at Hanging Rock.

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5,000 Run Across New Haven

by | Sep 2, 2024 3:08 pm | Comments (7)

Allan Appel photos

At Monday's annual Labor Day road race ...

Kiara Matos: "I felt like I couldn't show up without the sign."

Holding up her political sign may have cost East Rocker Kiara Matos a few minutes’ time in her 5K race. It was even all right if the announcer mistakenly called out that Nicolas Maduro, and not Matos, was crossing the finish line. 

It was all good because Matos could use Monday morning’s 47th annual Faxon Law New Haven Road Race in part to publicize her ardent opposition to Venezuela’s president — as she joined 5,000 fellow runners as part of the city’s Labor Day athletic tradition.

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City Hall Evacuated Amid Bomb Squad Probe

by | Aug 30, 2024 1:09 pm | Comments (10)

Thomas Breen photo

City spokesperson Lenny Speiller talks with police as they re-open Elm and Orange streets soon after 12 p.m.

City police shut down two busy downtown blocks and evacuated City Hall and 200 Orange St. as they investigated — and rendered safe — three suspicious, and ultimately empty, canisters that had been placed near those municipal government buildings early Friday morning by a man who is now in police custody.

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French Film Series Turns Institute Library Into Le Cinema

by | Aug 30, 2024 9:26 am | Comments (0)

A still from Beauty and the Beast.

The Institute Library became le cinema Thursday night as its French film series — Bonsoir, Mes Ami(e)s!” — began with Beauty and The Beast (also known as La Belle et la Bête), the renowned 1946 film by Jean Cocteau based on the fairy tale originally published in the 1700s. The three-film series is being presented in conjunction with Best Video and is being hosted and curated by John Hatch, who recently organized a successful Italian movie series at the Chapel Street institution. 

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Yale Protests Resume Along With Classes

by | Aug 28, 2024 2:37 pm | Comments (24)

Laura Glesby Photo

Student-led protests resume as the semester starts up.

Over 100 Yale students and allies marked the first day of classes by calling for a Free, Free Palestine” on the steps of the Elm Street courthouse — as 14 students arrested on campus for protesting last spring returned to the courtroom to call for their misdemeanor trespassing charges to be dismissed.

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State House Compilation In The Works

by | Aug 28, 2024 9:47 am | Comments (0)

Local rapper Ceschi, to be featured in State House compilation.

The State House may be closed — but its music lives on, in recordings made of a wealth of live performances that happened during the much-loved former venue’s five-year run.

Former co-owner Carlos Wells has a plan to release some of those recordings via a digital compilation featuring four Connecticut artists — in what he hopes will be the first in a series that documents the vast array of local, national, and international acts that left their mark on the Elm City at the now-shuttered State Street spot.

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Artists Paint An Ailing Planet In Vivid Color

by | Aug 28, 2024 8:39 am | Comments (1)

Eyes on the Planet.

They’re eyes, but they’re taking in a universe of shifting shapes and colors. The piercing structures of the irises only accentuate how the rest of the eyes are swimming with color. In the middle of each pupil is an astronaut, which throws the scale of the image into question. On one level, it’s all fun and inviting. On another, it’s disorienting. The astronauts could be exploring a colorful new dimension. They may also be in danger.

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