Right Space, Team To Make A Movie

Gavin, Blau, and Marra on set at Lyric Hall.

Monday, July 31, 2017 - The cameras were in focus, the actors in position, the lights and furniture in the antique barroom rearranged in preparation for the next scene of the movie.

But just as the various players on the set were about to launch into their respective roles, 9-year-old non-professional actor and assistant-director-for-the-day Isaac Blau shouted out to the group, “Wait, wait, wait! I forgot to say, ‘Action!’”

Director Anna Marra smiled at Blau and flashed a wink towards the cast and crew as she said, “Of course, you are right. Thank you so much, Isaac. Where would we be without you?”

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City Prepares For More Floods

Water resources consultant Murphy with a FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) of downtown New Haven.

Friday, July 21, 2017 - Anticipating higher sea levels, harsher hurricanes, and more frequent floods in the not-too-distant future as a result of climate change, officials are embarking on an outreach campaign to inform residents in flood-prone neighborhoods about how best to protect themselves against the threat of rising water.

They are also pointing residents to a 15 percent, nationally-subsidized discount on flood insurance that New Haveners are now eligible for thanks to the city’s recent efforts to bolster and protect its floodplains.

The latest stop on the city’s floodplain awareness tour came this past Tuesday night, as City Plan Department staffer Susmitha Attota and water resources planning consultant David Murphy presented background information and flood protection tips to the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) during its regular monthly meeting at City Hall.

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Paca: I’m Like Yates; Harp’s Like Trump

Paca lambastes Harp administration at DTC candidate forum on Saturday.

Saturday, July 15, 2017 - 

Is New Haven a stable city that has become safer, more responsibly governed, and more attuned to the needs of its students and workers over the past four years? Or is it barely treading water, rife with violence and unemployment, led by a mayoral administration bent on political retaliation and deceit?

Mayor Toni Harp said the former, and her challenger for the Democratic mayoral nomination, Marcus Paca, offered the latter view as they pitched their candidacies Saturday morning to 60 party leaders during a forum held by Democratic Town Committee (DTC) on the steps outside the Betsy Ross Parish House on Kimberly Avenue.

Holmes Passes The Baton

Decker, Holmes at Thursday night’s announcement.

Friday, July 14, 2017 - 

A political science graduate student who already doubles as a zoning commissioner and a union organizer is looking to pick up the batons of criminal justice reform and community engagement from an East Rock alder who has decided not to run for reelection.

The grad student, Charles Decker, a sixth-year Yale PhD candidate in political science who also serves on the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) and has been one of the leading organizers of Yale’s graduate teacher union UNITE HERE Local 33, formally launched his Democratic campaign to become the next alder for East Rock’s Ward 9 on Thursday night from his campaign treasurer’s apartment at Orange Street and Bishop Street.

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Millennial Takes Downtown-Wooster Helm

New management team chair Smith: Next-generation civic leader.

Thursday, June 29, 2017 - When Caroline Smith first moved to New Haven from Lexington, Kentucky, she would never have defined herself by her relationship to a city.

Seven years later, Smith has become nearly synonymous with the city she proudly calls home. The energy, enthusiasm, ambition, and kindness that she brings to each of her community-building endeavors have made her a familiar face to residents throughout New Haven.

“I never thought about cities as an entity that you could form identity around until New Haven,” Smith told the Independent during a recent interview at Whole G Cafe on Orange Street. Smith, 24, first moved to New Haven to attend Yale as an undergraduate, and is now the the co-director of marketing at the local tech start-up SeeClickFix.

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Sensing Momentum, Ralliers Eye Single-Payer

Protesters at a healthcare rally on Wednesday night.

Thursday, June 29, 2017 - Over 100 health care activists rallied in New Haven Wednesday evening — because, they said, protest is working.

From 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, women and men from across Connecticut gathered outside Yale’s Sterling Hall of Medicine at 333 Cedar St. to speak out against what they described as a congressional attack on women’s health in favor of tax cuts for the rich.

The rally occurred one day after U.S. Senate Republicans announced that they will delay a vote on their proposed health care bill, following an outpouring of political organizing and protests across the country, including in New Haven. In addition to slashing support for women’s health care, the bill would cause tens of millions of low-income people to lose insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

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Ortiz’s Parting Plea: Civility & Courage

Ortiz Monday evening at her final Board of Ed meeting.

By Paull Bass & Thomas Breen

Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - Coral Ortiz noticed “something fishy.” She noticed that adults around her were too “intimidated” to mention it. So she spoke up —  and stopped a speeding political locomotive in its tracks.

Ortiz reflected on that experience as she completed a two-year term as one the two first elected student members of the New Haven Board of Education. She attended her final meeting Monday night at the L.W. Beecher Museum School of Arts & Sciences on Jewell Street, showered with praise from board members from the mayor on down about her success on the board. She offered a parting challenge to her colleagues to communicate better.

In her two years, she brought issues to the fore like widespread problems with the guidance counselor system in New Haven’s schools and administrative confusion at Hillhouse High School.

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Maybe By 2018?

Goldson: We’ve been deliberate and transparent.

Monday, June 27, 2017 - Eighteen people have applied to be New Haven’s next schools superintendent, in a process that began in 2016 and may now drag out until the end of 2017.

Board of Education member Darnell Goldson offered that update Monday night during the board’s bimonthly meeting at the L.W. Beecher Museum School of Arts & Sciences on Jewell Street.

Goldson, the board’s point person on the search process, offered the latest information that he had received from Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, the Chicago-suburb-based executive search firm that the board hired in early June to help them find the next permanent leader of the city’s public schools.

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Neighbors Help City Plan For Vacant Lots

Harris: This is all about giving local decision making power back to local residents.

Monday, June 26, 2017 - When Lisa McKnight first moved to Rosette Street almost 50 years ago, her family’s and her neighbors’ yards were lush with grapevines, apple trees, pear trees, and rose bushes. Now she may get to see such splendor reappear on the long-vacant, overgrown lawn across the street from her home.

Or it may become a dog park, playground, or public plaza.

The city is getting control of that vacant Rosette Street lot and 15 others from the state Department of Transportation (DOT). And it’s asking neighbors like McKnight to help decide what to put there.

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The End of TV, The Beginning of a New Art

Judy Sirota Rosenthalphoto

Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - The history of movies is a history of two parallel impulses: to record reality as faithfully as possible with a minimum of artifice, and to conjure illusions that look for something true beneath the real.

These are the traditions of the Lumière brothers and of Georges Méliès: of scientists documenting the movement of workers leaving a factory, and of a magician and acrobats shooting rockets into the face of a winking moon.

The End of TV, a new multimedia performance from the Chicago-based collaborative Manual Cinema, finds harmony between these two competing impulses in a show that embraces both artistry and its mechanics. It’s playing this week at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

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1 Labor Contract Settled

Clerkin presents Local 844 contract at Thursday night’s hearing.

Friday, June 16, 2017 - A city union that represents over 400 emergency dispatchers, school security guards, and a diverse array of public administrative and clerical staff has come to a new collective bargaining agreement with the city after working without a contract for nearly two years.

During a Board of Alders Finance Committee hearing at City Hall on Thursday night, City Budget Director Joe Clerkin presented some of the key provisions of the new five-year contract between the city and AFSCME Local 884.

The local represents 411 city employees in a variety of non-managerial positions, ranging from data control clerks and accounts payable auditors in the city’s Finance Department to school security guards to 911 dispatchers.

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Dems Hammer Out 1st-Ever Issues Platform

Underwood presents platform to DTC Thursday night.

Friday, June 9, 2017 - Candidates seeking the backing of Connecticut’s most influential local Democratic Party are on notice: They have some policy questions to answer.

Do they support eliminating school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests for all K – 12 students? How will they work towards ending institutionalized racism in the economy? Do they support drastically cutting the military budget and boosting public investment in airports, roads, bridges, and broadband?

The New Haven Democratic Town Committee (DTC) now has an official platform that embraces those positions, providing politicians at all levels of government with a template for the progressive causes that local Democrats support and seek to accomplish.

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“I Am Shakespeare” Reveals A Man In Two Shots

Henry Green in the new movie I AM SHAKESPEARE (2017)

Friday, June 2, 2017 - Stephen Dest’s new documentary I Am Shakespeare: The Henry Green Story is a reminder that the full history and power of cinema, a 120-year-old art form uniquely equipped to inspire empathy among strangers, can be distilled into two basic camera shots: the frontal close-up and the three-quarter profile. One angle to show us who we’re looking at, the other to show us who we are.

Dest’s movie tells the story of Henry Green, a young man from Newhallville whose life nearly tears him asunder. On the one hand, Green was a talented acting student at Co-Op High School, a confident and introspective young artist with a big smile and a penchant for Shakespeare. On the other hand, he was an angry and depressed young man who grew up with no money in a violent neighborhood that sits adjacent to one of the wealthiest universities in the world.

The vast majority of the movie sits with Green as he narrates his life story to the camera, facing the viewer eye-to-eye as his words conjure movement from the stillness around him. He tells us how his artistic talent and ambitions led him to the role of Tybalt in a summer production of Romeo and Juliet. His poverty, pride, and aggression found him with three bullets to the stomach after a street confrontation a few blocks from his home.

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Documentary Fest Puts Elm City On Screen

Thursday, June 1, 2017  - The New Haven Documentary Film Festival will be celebrating its four-year anniversary this June with a slate of nonfiction films that feature the Elm City and its residents both in front of and behind the movie camera.

“If I were to identify the theme of this year’s festival,” NHDocs co-founder and co-director Charles Musser said on a recent episode of WNHH’S Deep Focus, “I would say that the theme is New Haven. We have a wide range of films about people who work in New Haven, about communities in New Haven, about incidents in New Haven.”

For Musser, who teaches documentary film at Yale University and is an experienced filmmaker in his own right, the focus on New Haven not only recognizes people in this city who have not had a chance to see themselves or their neighbors on screen before; it also offers an opportunity for New Haven audiences to take a step back and better understand the great diversity of people, communities, challenges, and achievements that make up this city of 130,000 residents.

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Panel Gives Three Takes on Race And Education

Johnson, Walter, and DuBois-Walton at a panel on race and education on Tuesday night.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - How does racial disparity make itself felt in in the New Haven public school system today? And what is the best way to address that disparity so that all New Haven students are sufficiently prepared, supported, and empowered to become productive, self-sustaining citizens by the time they graduate high school?

Three local educational and policy experts offered three different takes on these questions during an hour-and-a-half panel discussion held on Tuesday night at the New Haven offices of Educators For Excellence at 153 East St.

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Neighbors Press For Action On Dumping

Andrea Konetchy with picture of recent tire dump in East Rock Park.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017 - The city can fine you for not shoveling your sidewalk or for dumping bulk trash outside your property. But until now, there has been little it can do to enforce those fines.

That’s about to change, now that the city has finally found a qualified person willing to volunteer time to adjudicate appeals to fines.

Neighborhood groups have been waiting for that change and pushing for help in tackling illegal dumping and other public-space violations.

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East Rock Gets Behind Cedar Hill Campaign

A sign for drivers passing through Cedar Hill. (Lucy Gellman photo)

Tuesday, May 23, 2017 - Thanks to support from the rest of East Rock, isolated Cedar Hill will receive $10,000 toward a grassroots beautification effort designed to build community pride and to connect to surrounding areas of the city currently separated by highway overpasses.

That was the result of a decision of the East Rock Community management team at its monthly meeting Monday night at mActivity gym on Niccoll Street. The team voted to allocate the entirety of its annual Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) funds towards the project in Cedar Hill, a small set of self-contained streets at the northeastern tip of the East Rock community.

For each of the past three years, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, has made available $10,000 in NPIP funds to each of the city’s community management teams to help them address neighborhood quality-of-life concerns.

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New Urban Farm Opens In The Hill

Sharic James.

Monday, May 22, 2017 - Leslie Radcliffe, whose family has a history of heart disease, started growing her own beans, peppers, kale, and tomatoes in 2013 after suffering three mild heart attacks over the course of 13 months.

Four years later, she stood before a quarter-acre plot of recently spread compost and organic topsoil behind Hill Regional Career High School to help usher in a new urban farm specifically designed to help Hill residents like her grow fruits and vegetables, eat more healthfully, build community around nutrition, and moderate diet-related chronic diseases.

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“Participatory Budgeting” Takes On Olive Street Speeding

Friday, May 19, 2017  - Olive Street will be the beneficiary of a new mobile, radar speed sign next year as the result of an annual exercise in “participatory budgeting”: a democratic decision-making process that empowers a neighborhood to decide how to spend a small share of the city budget.

During its monthly meeting at City Hall this week, the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCT) voted to dedicate $5,000 of its annual $10,000 in “Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP)” allotment towards traffic calming on Olive Street.

For the past three years, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, has distributed $10,000 in NPIP money to each community management team in New Haven to spend as it chooses. The program allows community members themselves to debate and decide on which quality-of-life issues they would like to address in any given year.

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Zoning Overhaul Hearings Postponed; Criticism Aired

Wednesday, May 17, 2017  - Two hearings scheduled for a plan to dramatically change how New Haven makes major zoning decisions have been postponed, and the proposal ran into some initial public criticism Tuesday night.

The Legislation Committee’s proposed amendment to the zoning ordinance governing “Community Impacts” came under sharp criticism from members of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSMT) on Tuesday night during their monthly meeting at City Hall.

The plan would create a new “high impact” category of zoning approval that would require Yale University to go through a new layer of review — and detail a wide-ranging list of “community impacts” — before it builds anything in New Haven. (Read a previous full article about the proposal, and arguments for and against it, by clicking here.)

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