Day In The Life Of A Muse
by | Mar 7, 2025 12:04 pm | Comments (3)
Jisu Sheen photo
Ana De Los Angeles and Miguel Trelles en route from Gateway to Manjares.
A new generation, an arts opening, and Latin-serenaded tapas.
Westville
Rawa Serves Up Turkish Tunes
by | Mar 6, 2025 10:41 am | Comments (0)
Using levers to get exactly the right note.
Jisu Sheen photos
Umut Yasmut brings the kanun to RAWA, all the way from New York.
As Umut Yasmut filled the dining area of Westville’s Mediterranean and Middle Eastern fusion restaurant RAWA with cascading melodies, the New York musician said that his instrument, an intricately carved stringed creation, did not exist.
What Do You Do After School? Math!
by | Jan 31, 2025 9:54 am | Comments (4)
Maya McFadden pHoto
Seventh grader Laila Washington: "You get to learn a lot" at Math Counts.
Sohan Bendre (right) refreshes students on what a variable is.
If you write out the numbers from 1 to 1,000, how many times will you write the number seven?
That question was posed to a group of 6 – 8th graders at Edgewood School — who had shown up to a voluntary after-school program for students interested in further developing their math skills.
Shaunda Holloway Sings The Canvas Electric
by | Jan 28, 2025 12:36 pm | Comments (2)
Leigh Busby Photo
Shaunda Holloway at Monday's opening reception. Below: reciting one of her poems.
Paint met rhythm Monday night at an opening reception in Westville for a new exhibition by a New Haven artist.
Continue reading ‘Shaunda Holloway Sings The Canvas Electric’
Switch Flicked For Holocaust Remembrance
by | Jan 27, 2025 9:37 am | Comments (5)
Allan Appel photo
At Friday's ceremony at Chapel Haven.
Roughly 100 people across the generations gathered — with memorial candles, prayers, and hopes — at Chapel Haven Schleifer Center (CHSC), the residential campus for people with disabilities, in order to “Flick the Switch.”
Continue reading ‘Switch Flicked For Holocaust Remembrance’
Can't Sell Soda. Can Sell Cigarettes
by | Jan 21, 2025 4:33 pm | Comments (14)
Thomas Breen photos
Sodas and energy drinks, not allowed ...
... cigarettes and vaping products, still allowed, at 864 Whalley.
A “Not For Sale” sign remains taped to the top of a beverage case filled with Monster energy drinks, Powerade and Diet Coke at the Grab n’ Go Market in Westville Village — where city zoners recently rejected Mohammed Ababneh’s bid to sell soda and prepackaged food in addition to vaping products and cigarettes.
Artists Have The Magic Touch
by | Jan 14, 2025 9:30 am | Comments (0)
The tower is made of small wooden pieces. But as assembled on the floor of Kehler Liddell Gallery, it echoes natural forms, created by ants or bees. Not far away, an abstract piece reveals itself to involve not just pigment, but mirrors, so that the piece changes from every angle you look at it. Not far away, a small sculpture of a figurine in a sled is made, partly, from the shape of a gas mask.
2 Years Later, Footbridge Replacement Moves Ahead
by | Jan 2, 2025 11:31 am | Comments (1)
Laura Glesby file photo
The Edgewood Park Midbridge, back in January 2023.
The city’s long-in-the-works effort to replace a deteriorating footbridge in the middle of Edgewood Park took a big step forward, after the City Plan Commission signed off on the state-funded project.
Continue reading ‘2 Years Later, Footbridge Replacement Moves Ahead’
Westville Apartment Complex Sold for $10.25M
by | Jan 2, 2025 9:10 am | Comments (2)
Arthur Delot-Vilain photo
Imperial Gardens: Under new ownership.
A mystery buyer affiliated with a local property manager who used to work for Ocean Management has purchased a 72-unit Westville apartment complex for $10.25 million.
Continue reading ‘Westville Apartment Complex Sold for $10.25M’
Kehler Liddell Paints Holiday Hues
by | Dec 4, 2024 9:23 am | Comments (0)
Craig Frederick
Breath.
Craig Frederick’s Breath looks lighter than its materials. If it were a sea creature, it appears like it could be spiraling through the water. If it were in flight, it could seem like it was made of paper, corkscrewing through the air. It makes space for itself in the gallery, as if it’s just passing through, and we happen to be there when it stops for a minute.
Best Video, Lyric Hall Pair Up For Film Series
by | Nov 27, 2024 9:32 am | Comments (15)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Best Video's Rai Bruton, with Lyric Hall's John Cavaliere: “Places like this and Best Video will only last if we work together.”
Lyric Hall Theater came full circle on Tuesday night as the beloved Westville venue partnered with Best Video for the first night of its new monthly film series for New Haven movie fans.
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158 Westville Apartments Sell For $28M
by | Nov 25, 2024 10:13 am | Comments (23)
Thomas Breen photo
That's some mighty fine "beton brut.”
A pair of six-story concrete “gigantic megaliths” on Fountain Street have traded hands for $28 million — leaving 150-plus Westville apartments under new ownership for the first time in two decades.
NHPS To Edgewood: "Wear Layers"
by | Nov 19, 2024 9:37 am | Comments (5)
Update: Tuesday 11:37 a.m. A maintenance crew has repaired a broken heating system at Edgewood School, and the heat is back on in the building, schools spokesperson Justin Harmon reported Tuesday morning.
“The first of the two pumps has been repaired and reinstalled,” Harmon told the Independent.
A previous version of this story follows:
West Siders Press Pols On Car Theft Quandary
by | Nov 14, 2024 3:21 pm | Comments (41)
Allan Appel Photo
Sen. Winfield (right), with Alder Marx: "Most of the kids are not repeating and do not belong in jail."
A chronically under-staffed police department 90 officers short meets a national post-pandemic rash of juvenile vandalism, car thefts and life-threatening joy riding that makes everyone feel unsafe.
That “perfect storm” for policing that has arrived in New Haven was analyzed in a crime and safety-focused Westville-West Hills Community Management team meeting Wednesday night.
Continue reading ‘West Siders Press Pols On Car Theft Quandary’
3 Arrested After Street Takeover
by | Nov 4, 2024 12:00 pm | Comments (2)
Police arrested three Wolcott residents caught in a stolen Crown Vic — as cops worked to thwart two street takeovers, one in Newhallville and another in Westville, this weekend.
New Haven Picklers Can Now "Dink" Indoors
by | Oct 25, 2024 1:48 pm | Comments (10)
Thomas Breen photo
Welcome to Picklville CT ...
Lisa Reisman photo
... at the intersection of Valley & Blake in Westville.
On a recent afternoon at Pickleville CT, the new Westville indoor pickleball facility along Blake Street and Valley Street near Whalley Avenue, Winny Sanchez was “dinking” for the first time in her life.
Continue reading ‘New Haven Picklers Can Now "Dink" Indoors’
Artists Look Through The Glass
by | Oct 22, 2024 9:57 am | Comments (0)
Eddie Hall
Contuse and Reflex.
Eddie Hall’s artwork at first glance comes across as a high-gloss study of bold geometric shapes, akin to the forms produced by fiber artists or, in some cases, older video games. But the reflective surfaces also give something away: look again and you see that the glass isn’t in front of the canvas; it is the canvas, and part of it is transparent, revealing the wall behind it. Even bolder, sometimes the surface is a mirror. Stand in front of it, and you become part of the image.
Printmaker Rides The Highs And Lows
by | Oct 16, 2024 9:40 am | Comments (0)
Allan Greenier
Untitled (Karloff).
It’s a transfixing stare, made more intense by the medium. A woodcut hearkens back to an earlier time — and, in German Expressionism, an earlier mode of expressing anxiety. But Allan Greenier’s much more modern piece makes a strong case for the old medium’s abiding ability to create arresting art. He also gives it an interesting spin, in that the face in the picture is that of Boris Karloff, best known as the monster in 1931’s Frankenstein.
Stacey Abrams Wows Future Voters
by | Oct 8, 2024 8:30 am | Comments (16)
Allan Appel photo
Stacey Abrams (right), and interlocutor Emily Bazelon: "If you’re interested in peoples’ lives being better, that’s politics.”
State government is by far the least understood in our system, and in many ways the most important to get right if we want to achieve the goals of democracy.
Former Georgia state rep and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams made those remarks, by turns trenchant yet largely apolitical, at the Hopkins School Monday afternoon before no fewer than 1,200 enthusiastic, applauding young people.
A Clean Lawn, & A Path Past Prison
by | Sep 23, 2024 4:18 pm | Comments (7)
Laura Glesby Photo
Harold Jones, in the "flow" scooping early fall leaves in Upper Westville.
“You can’t work with a cluttered mind,” said Harold Jones as he de-cluttered the Ijeh family’s front yard — on a job outing where stories of incarceration and reentry, witnessed and experienced from different angles, had a chance to intersect.
When The Light Tricks The Mind
by | Sep 17, 2024 8:59 am | Comments (0)
Sven Martson Photos
Rochester Truck Door.
The profile, of a cartoon crone, is easy to see — easier than seeing what it really is. Keep looking and you might see other faces as well. But keep looking, and you see that it’s all something else, that your mind is finding patterns, meaning, in a chance encounter. “I was walking around in Rochester one day, and before crossing a street, I looked to the right, and down at the end of the alley was a shiny truck door reflecting the distorted image of the building across the street,” Sven Martson notes. “My point of view was all important. Just a few inches to the right or left and the image broke up and disappeared.” It’s only a reflection of a building. But it also reflects something else, in the way we find so much else in it.
Zoning Enables Reluctant Smoke Shop
by | Sep 12, 2024 12:15 pm | Comments (22)
Thomas Breen file photo
Harvest Mart advertises its wares, with the help of a novelty-sized blunt.
Hassan Alsufyani wanted to open up a convenience store at the entrance to Westville Village.
But local zoning law prohibits such a use at that spot — so he now sells strictly tobacco, bongs, e‑cigarettes, and vaping products instead.
Scientologists Pay Taxes, Ready Partial Demolition
by | Aug 27, 2024 1:10 pm | Comments (12)
Thomas Breen photo
So long, 949 Whalley's western addition?
The Church of Scientology has paid local taxes for the first time in 14 years for a vacant former furniture store in Westville Village — and is now looking to demolish part of that neglected property as part of a long-delayed renovation.
Continue reading ‘Scientologists Pay Taxes, Ready Partial Demolition’
Artist Makes The Mythology
by | Aug 22, 2024 9:28 am | Comments (1)
Ralph Levesque
Match Maker.
Ralph Levesque’s Match Maker, at first glance, looks like religious art, from the halo encircling one of the figures to the positions of the figures in relation to each other. We’ve seen the general idea before, in Christian medieval art. But the first glance proves deceiving, an overt meaning elusive. Who or what is the visage in the background? And why the faces on sticks? Are they mirrors? Portals? The title suggests that a transaction of some kind is taking place. But what? We don’t know what’s going on, but the sense of meaning, a belief system being enacted, remains.
Photographers Make Life Into Art
by | Aug 16, 2024 8:39 am | Comments (0)
Sarah Groate with her two photos.
Sarah Groate’s photographs, Duke’s Arrival and Waiting at The Rainbow Bridge, married two of her great loves: photography and horses. Groate works at the CT Draft Horse Rescue, and she uses the horses there as both inspiration and the subjects of her art. “I just found that I loved photographing them,” she said. “They’re the true gentle giants.”