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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Mar 5, 2025 1:51 pm
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Thomas Breen file photo
City Building Official Robert Dillon (right): Olive & Wooster is a rooming house.
Thomas Breen photo
The luxury rooming house at 87 Union St.
A luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals is an illegal rooming house, and the building owners could face fines for running it.
That’s according to New Haven’s Building Department, which filed a Cease and Desist order accusing Olive & Wooster, one of the new high-end apartment complexes in Wooster Square, of violating the city’s zoning ordinance by running portions of the building as rooming houses.
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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Feb 19, 2025 2:47 pm
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Thomas Breen file photo
Olive & Wooster: If it quacks like a rooming house ...
Is a luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals actually an illegal rooming house?
A legal aid attorney argued that it is, as she defended a tenant facing eviction from one of the new high-end apartment complexes that have popped up in recent years on the downtown edge of Wooster Square.
Two Wooster Square lots that languished for years amid landlord lawsuits — and then burst forth into 230 high-end apartments amid a neighborhood building frenzy — have now sold to a pair of real estate investment firms for $71 million.
West Haven Officer Robert Rappa's body-worn camera footage. Note: Videos show graphic violence.
West Haven police had been following Aaron Freeman for seven months — setting up controlled buys of crack cocaine, watching him allegedly come and go from a Mill River Crossing apartment rented by a woman he appeared to be in a relationship with.
That drug-focused investigation culminated with an early-morning raid of the Grand Avenue residence that led to the cops’ seizure of nearly $6,600 in cash, multiple cellphones, and dozens of pills and baggies filled with white and tan powder substances.
That raid also sparked a shoot-out between police and Freeman, 35, in front of an 8‑year-old girl, a 32-year-old woman, and a 52-year-old grandfather, killing Freeman and injuring two West Haven cops.
While a NIMBY-stalled building plan leaves a stretch of Grand Avenue covered in blight, two grassroots artists picked up their brushes Wednesday to offer the neighborhood some temporary respite.
20, 34 Fair St.: Garages demolished, housing to come.
A development team has knocked down two vacant Fair Street garages — as builders move forward with plans to construct 168 new apartments on the housing-rich downtown edge of Wooster Square.
... 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 year ago, as 2023 wound down to its last hours, Joel Jacobson, 83 years old at the time, set out in his Toyota sedan from his East Rock condo for a holiday dinner at Adriana’s, on Grand Avenue.
Going to this popular Italian restaurant had been a household tradition, but this visit, he knew, would be different.
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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Dec 20, 2024 12:06 pm
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What might one day be built at 924 Grand.
A long-in-the-works plan to open a youth homeless shelter in Wooster Square got another jolt of public funding, as the Board of Alders approved spending $500,000 in federal Covid aid to help finance its construction.
Youth Continuum's Tim Maguire (right), with city Homeless Services Director Velma George: Looking to create "a one-stop shop for unhoused youth."
A proposal for a peer-led youth homeless shelter in Wooster Square is back on the table — with a higher price tag and a new design prioritizing privacy and public health.
In front of large computer screens and a focused film crew, a woman in a white dress walked up to a Wooster Square brownstone pretending to be New York City.
She reached the top of the entrance. Before she could open the door and walk inside, she stopped, turned, and walked back down the stairs — ready to repeat those moves again and again, as part of a new horror movie being filmed in part in New Haven.
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Maya McFadden and Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Nov 5, 2024 8:04 am
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MAYA MCFADDEN Photo
21 Wooster Pl: Recipient of 8.5% of ESSER building-repair funds.
A former school building in Wooster Square has yet to reopen as an administrative office building — even after two years and $1.2 million worth of renovations.
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Laura Glesby |
Oct 16, 2024 3:08 pm
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Laura Glesby Photo
Students Destiny Lugo and Makayla Kidd with CT Teacher of the Year Julia Miller.
“She lets her guard down with us. She’s human with us,” Metropolitan Business Academy Senior Makayla Kidd told a room full of students, educators, and city leaders.
Kidd was talking about her civics teacher, Julia Miller — who is now Connecticut’s Teacher of the Year.
“Beautiful!” a passing motorist called out while heading downtown Monday on Chapel Street.
“Thank you!” Jessie Unterhalter said for the tenth? 20th? time of the day.
Unterhalter didn’t want to be rude. People passing by the once-blank warehouse wall at Chapel and East Streets have brightened to see the swirling bright colors Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn have been painting there for the past three weeks. Unterhalter appreciated their appreciation.
Kiki Moreno and Fernando Morales: Formerly homeless, currently calling for better shelter hours.
Upon This Rock to revive the Grand Avenue shelter.
One of the city’s go-to homeless shelter contractors is slated to revive a shuttered 65-bed facility on Grand Avenue, with case management and healthcare services on site.
Alders voted to allocate $500,000 toward that effort — part of just over $1 million approved on Monday evening for helping people with nowhere else to go.
The apartment-less Grand Ave. property on Tuesday.
(Updated) A lawsuit by a pair of Wooster Square neighbors concerned about backyard shade is jeopardizing plans to transform a series of abandoned Grand Avenue commercial buildings into 112 new places to live.
One hundred and sixty eight more apartments took a big step closer to coming to Wooster Square, after the project’s new co-development team won permission to modify a plan last approved in 2021.
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Asher Joseph |
Jul 11, 2024 11:18 am
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Asher Joseph photos
Rudolph Ford, serving up Jamaican culinary "classics" ...
... including rice, peas, cabbage, jerk chicken, fried plantains, and oxtail, at Sunday Dinner Everyday on Grand.
Fifty-two years after arriving in New York City at the age of 16, Rudolph Ford has helped his wife, Dorma Bryan, achieve the “American dream” — with a Jamaican twist, as one of the newer culinary outposts of a fast-growing local immigrant community.
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Arthur Delot-Vilain |
Jul 9, 2024 9:10 am
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Arthur Delot-Vilain photo
At the new Jitter Bus cafe's grand opening.
While patrons celebrated the grand opening of Grand Avenue’s Jitter Bus Coffee, in the back corner of the café stood a framed coffee-stained page torn out of a notebook, tucked on a shelf.
It read: “This letter of correction serves to prove that Darlene A. Miconi sold a 1999 Chevy G30 Express to Daniel Barletta on February 6th 2015 for a sum of $3200.”
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Maya McFadden |
Jun 28, 2024 9:14 am
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Maya McFadden Photo
LEAP Aquatics Director Oscar Rodriguez at the soon-to-be-filled-with-water Jefferson Street pool.
A privately owned pool will be open for free public access on Friday evenings — and for low-cost swim lessons throughout the summer — thanks to a youth athletics and tutoring nonprofit’s commitment to keeping the community in the water.
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Laura Glesby |
Jun 18, 2024 2:09 pm
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Laura Glesby photo
Waiting for a pie from Sally's on Wooster St. ...
... as, right around the corner, Mykala Grace grabs two iced teas for maximum hydration at DESK's drop-in center.
Two lines that never meet form around lunchtime on one Wooster Square block: one for Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen’s drop-in center, the other for the world-famous Sally’s pizzeria.
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Arthur Delot-Vilain |
Jun 13, 2024 11:27 am
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(9)
Arthur Delot-Vilain photo
Co-owner Paul Crosby: "The dirty chai is a crowd favorite."
After eight years of slinging coffee on the streets of New Haven, the Jitter Bus has brought their dirty chais and espressos to a newly opened brick-and-mortar store on the northern end of Wooster Square.
Four years to the month after hundreds of people filled Wooster Square Park to cheer and jeer at the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue, neighbors and politicians and dignitaries returned — to applaud the installation of a new monument honoring the city’s Italian-American immigrant experience.
The statue of Christopher Columbus that for many years stood on a stone plinth in Wooster Square Park was a source of Italian-American pride, an affront to Native Americans and others, and a flashpoint for conflicts over fallen heroes of the past.
Today, hopefully, a new era of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect will begin with the official dedication of a new monument in Wooster Square.