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Maya McFadden |
Feb 21, 2025 9:29 am
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Maya McFadden photos
Student leaders bring the first new recycling bin to math teacher Julia Pisani.
New bins!
When Scandinavian assemble-your-own furniture retail giant IKEA dropped off 30 new recycling bins at John S. Martinez School in Fair Haven, student council President Christian Ayapantecatl and Vice President Geovanelys Morales were ready to receive them, excited to build on all the progress the school has already made in sustainability.
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Lisa Reisman |
Feb 19, 2025 9:00 am
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Hamden Newhall Neighborhood Association President Tina Jennings-Herriott.
A Newhall meeting saw neighbors and Hamden town officials engaged in debate over what community members really need, in the latest installment in a group of residents’ fight to allocate one-time federal funds to addressing their crumbling home foundations.
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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Feb 17, 2025 9:15 am
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(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.
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Maya McFadden |
Feb 17, 2025 9:13 am
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(5)
Maya McFadden Photo
Don’t go breaking their hearts.
A group of students celebrated Valentine’s Day early by demanding that New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) spread the love and hire three coordinators to oversee the district’s climate change-combatting efforts.
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Jan Ellen Spiegel | CT Mirror |
Feb 12, 2025 8:25 am
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CT Mirror | Shahrzad Rasekh photo
City climate czar Winter: "It's maddening."
Ask Steve Winter how many times a day he’s checked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant funds portal since Jan. 21 and he answers with a wry laugh: “I couldn’t even say.”
Jan. 21 — one day into the Trump administration — he received a notification that the $20 million Community Change grant the City of New Haven had won, in partnership with a coalition of local groups, would be available for use.
Zrelak: "What you flush down the toilet, dump down the drain, this is where it ends up."
Yuck: "Raggy material," like wipes and tampons, that ends up in the dumpster.
Gary Zrelak, director of operations for the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority, wielded a several-foot-long plastic pipe with a valve at the end, which he nicknamed the “sludge judge.”
He was on a catwalk over the water draining out of the last of three enormous tanks at the East Shore Water Pollution Abatement Facility, taking a core sample of the 14-foot-deep pool.
As he expected, below the surface, the water was still brown, tinted with matter that was settling slowly to the bottom of the pool. But the top three feet of water were clear — almost ready to be released into the New Haven Harbor on a cold winter day.
The tank — and the two preceding it, and the entire facility that runs them — “is connected to everyone, every household and commercial building” in a substantial part of the greater New Haven area, Zrelak said. “They have a toilet, they’re coming here.”
... can now be thrown out in city compost bins, including on Crown St.
It’s a great time to be a banana peel in New Haven — as the city has installed three new public composting bins as part of a pilot program to help divert food scraps from the landfill.
A bigger bike share program, “climate resilience corridors” in Fair Haven, increased recycling education in the public schools, and energy-efficiency assessments and updates for 350 New Haven homes.
All of that, and much more, is on tap now that the city and the Greater Dwight Development Corporation have landed $20 million in federal funds for a host of different environmentally friendly projects.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 13, 2024 9:21 am
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Altered Futures.
This month there’s a small stretch of forest in City Gallery on Upper State Street — evergreens, ferns, moss — surrounded by a patch of dirt. It might take a moment to see that the plants aren’t rooted in the dirt, however. Rather, they’re planted in a woven aluminum boat, redolent of an ark. It will allow them to leave the gallery alive; maybe it will protect them from what’s coming.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 5, 2024 9:24 am
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(1)
Brian Slattery Photos
As the Olin Corporation, with oversight from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), continues its testing at Six Lakes, a.k.a the Powder Farm, to determine the extent of contamination from decades of arms testing and waste dumping, Six Lakes Coalition has finished a round of its own surveying — for community input into what neighboring residents would like the future of the now-forested acreage in southern Hamden to look like.
The resulting report finds that “neighbors desire public open space at Six Lakes that will allow them safe access to a quiet, natural area and provide a gathering space for the local community.” The report was feted Wednesday morning at a gathering at the edge of the property, in which local and state officials reiterated their support for the effort to turn Six Lakes into a public park.
New Haven's industrial port: Watch out, enviro scofflaws.
Tom Breen File Photo
AG Tong: “Gulf Oil ran a defective operation and falsified records to cover its tracks."
An oil tank operator in New Haven’s industrial port has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a state lawsuit that accused the company of falsifying inspection reports and undertaking construction and demolition without pulling the proper permits.
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Thomas Breen |
Nov 1, 2024 3:53 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
The electric crane, at New Haven's electrifying port.
DeLauro: These types of investments are "the gift that keeps on giving."
None of the three federal legislators standing on a pier in New Haven Harbor Friday afternoon mentioned the presidential and congressional elections that are days away.
But, in their remarks celebrating $34 million newly set to wash ashore on the city’s industrial port, they all made an argument that is central to the political legacies of Biden-era Democrats.
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Thomas Breen |
Sep 30, 2024 3:14 pm
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Thomas Breen file photo
At Tweed for Avelo's first flight to Puerto Rico, last November.
Temporary office, ticketing, and passenger-waiting trailers can stay for another three years on Tweed’s New Haven side — as the regional airport works to build up a new terminal in East Haven by 2027.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 11, 2024 9:49 am
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Thomas Breen file photo
English Station: Oh the potential, oh the decay.
A derelict power plant. A neighborhood school. A vibrant community history of hardship and resilience. And the ticking clock of climate change.
All these elements came together in the first of a series of walking tours — a collaboration among several public and nonprofit entities put together by Anstress Farwell, president of the New Haven Urban Design League — focusing on the decommissioned and toxic English Station power plant and the Mill River District in Fair Haven.
At Tweed for Avelo's first flight to Puerto Rico, last November.
Tweed’s operators are looking to keep in place for another three years temporary office, ticketing, and passenger waiting trailer buildings on the New Haven side of the airport property, as they continue to try to relocate the terminal to a new larger permanent structure on the East Haven side.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 28, 2024 8:39 am
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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.
As truck after truck barreled through New Haven’s industrial port district Monday afternoon, the asthma-inducing particulate matter in the air at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Alabama Street reached 29.5 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m³).
That compared to 16.4 outside Mitchell Library and 28 outside Tweed Airport and 21 by the Hill South police substation at the exact same time.
City government is now collecting and making public that data through 11 recently installed air quality sensors, which shine a light on just how much hazardous haze New Haveners take in with every breath.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 21, 2024 9:50 am
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Brian Slattery photo
On the trail again ...
A walk by the New Haven Bioregional Group followed part of the route through Morris Cove of the proposed Shoreline Greenway Trail, which will connect the Farmington Canal Trail to the shore. In the process, it revealed a complex history of land use, and the ways that the push and pull of industrial use versus green spaces have shaped — and continue to shape — the neighborhood.
Q Meadows Alder Theresa Morant: “Yes! A safer neighborhood, finally!”
Laura Glesby File Photo
Route 80, make way for slower traffic, including in front of the 270 Foxon Blvd. hotel-turned-shelter.
Traffic calming medians and lighting are one step closer to coming to a six-lane stretch of Route 80, also known as Foxon Boulevard, thanks to $1.6 million in state funds that city government has now officially accepted.
