Fair Haven

Protest Targets Migrant Worker Eviction

by | Feb 23, 2024 9:43 am | Comments (6)

Laura Glesby Photo

Edgar Becerra protests with ULA outside MDF Painting and Power Washing.

We have human rights,” Edgar Becerra called into a bullhorn, speaking in Spanish. We have a heart.”

He was surrounded by over 25 immigrant rights activists outside the Branford headquarters of his Fair Haven landlord and former employer — who brought him to the U.S. as a temporary worker, allegedly fired him for work-related injuries, and is now trying to evict him a second time.

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State Sues UI For Power Plant Passivity

by | Jan 29, 2024 4:03 pm | Comments (42)

"Just look at this place": State Attorney General Tong, Mayor Elicker, State Sen. Looney, and DEEP Commissioner Dykes on Monday.

State officials stumbled across the littered grounds leading up to English Station to announce a lawsuit filed on the same grounds as other failed threats against United Illuminating — seeking to re-energize the company’s long-delayed remediation of the site.

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Parent Leadership Mission Returns

by | Jan 22, 2024 12:14 pm | Comments (3)

Contributed Photo

PLTI Class of 2018.

Vimary Parra needed help. Her two young kids were already behind. They had to learn English. She didn’t know how to teach them. Having grown up in Venezuela, she was learning the language herself. Then she saw a flyer at her local library for the Parents Leadership Training Institute (PLTI) — an initiative that’s returning to New Haven.

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Landlord-Boss Boots Injured Migrant Worker

by | Jan 12, 2024 2:54 pm | Comments (24)

Edgar Becerra in court: "I just want everyone to know the name of this company and all the injustices they did."

Construction boss-landlord Mark DeFrancesco, right, in court with lawyer Josh Brown.

Edgar Becerra fell off a 30-foot ladder — then landed in court this week fighting to stay in the country against a boss who first fired him then moved to evict him.

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Commission Frets Over Kids Playing Soccer

by | Jan 4, 2024 1:15 pm | Comments (16)

Contributed photo

These kids can't drive or park on River Street, but they'll be able to kick the ball.

What if 12 kids playing soccer in a vacant warehouse becomes 200?

City Plan commissioners debated that allegedly nightmare scenario for an hour before deciding they could live with it after all — as long as the number of players, benchwarmers and spectators doesn’t escalate beyond that cap.

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Alders OK Selling Bigelow Lot For $1

by and | Dec 18, 2023 9:15 am | Comments (15)

Thomas Breen photo

198 River St.: Former factory, to be sold for $1.

The Elicker administration won approval to sell a vacant, contaminated waterfront industrial property in Fair Haven for $1 to a local builder and provide $400,000 in cleanup funds, to help develop the site of the now-demolished former Bigelow factory complex into a new 10,000 square-foot commercial/industrial building.

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Grander Grand Greeted With Joy

by | Nov 28, 2023 4:32 pm | Comments (7)

Allan Appel photo

Sen. Looney, Mayor Elicker with Fair Haven School eighth-grader Natalia Marcano and Principal Monica Morales.

Fair Haven schoolchildren and neighborhood boosters and elected officials gathered for a festive press conference celebrating an even grander Grand Avenue to come — with dozens of new apartments and millions of dollars worth of streetscape improvements now in sight.

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Overdose-Prevention Grant Heralded On Grand

by | Nov 21, 2023 2:49 pm | Comments (25)

Thomas Breen photo

Mayor Elicker (at podium) and regional health leaders on Tuesday.

Roughly $10 million in federal aid will flow to the New Haven area over the next five years to help municipal health departments take a regional approach in combating the opioid epidemic through the hiring of 10 case-management navigators” and the cross-town sharing of overdose data.

This aid comes as the number of overdose deaths in 2022 reached 490 in New Haven county, including 128 in the city itself.

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Fair Haven Pizza Landmark Up For Sale

by | Nov 21, 2023 11:09 am | Comments (7)

Allan Appel Photo

George Carranzo, ready to pack up at Grand Apizza.

George Carranzo had been working off and on in pizzerias since barely becoming a teenager. But it wasn’t until the snow-filled winter of 2005, when he recalls driving shift after exhausting night shift in a plow truck for the City of New Haven, that he decided it was absolutely time to make a big life change: to buy a pizzeria and go into business for himself.

Roll the clock eighteen years later and Carranzo, the owner of Grand Apizza at 111 Grand Ave. near Clinton Avenue, is ready to make another life change, and the successful pizzeria is up for sale.

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Atwater Thanksgiving Brings Fair Haven Together

by | Nov 21, 2023 11:01 am | Comments (6)

Nora Grace-Flood photo

F.A.M.E. Middle Schoolers from dance Cumbia with their senior citizen counterparts in Fair Haven.

Fair Haven school kids filed into the Atwater Senior Center to keep their senior counterparts company in advance of Thanksgiving — and to dance cumbia with New Haveners like 73-year-old Yvonne Sheppard, who said the celebration was less a loneliness intervention than it was a special occasion among a vibrant city full of friends.

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"Magical Thinking" Is The Real Deal

by | Nov 16, 2023 8:34 am | Comments (0)

T. Charles Erickson Photo

Kathleen Chalfant as Joan Didion.

This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” In the first lines of The Year of Magical Thinking — currently staged by Long Wharf Theatre at various locations in and near New Haven through Dec. 10 — the lone actor on stage establishes herself. She’s a reporter, drawing power from facts. Her voice matches the unblinking eye and mind implicit in her words. But that voice, with its mix of sharpness and vulnerability, also flags what’s ahead: that the coming waves of shock and grief will tip over some facts, wash away some logic. If facts and logic have been your guiding lights, how do you navigate the next days, months, years, without them? And where are you at the end of it? 

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New Mural Brings Flowers To Fair Haven

by | Nov 15, 2023 7:30 am | Comments (4)

Lisa Reisman photo

Kwadwo Adae (center) with friends at Grand-Blatchley mural unveiling.

For nine weeks, they painted, enduring darkness of night, thick humidity, and driving rain.

The result: Las Flores de Esperanza, a mural color-saturated with flowers that spans 50 feet of concrete wall at the corner of Blatchley and Grand, and the latest street-beautifying creation of the Ghanaian-American visual artist and muralist Kwadwo Adae.

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Furnishing Day Readies Rent-Free Homes For Early Ed Teachers

by | Nov 6, 2023 12:54 pm | Comments (3)

Lisa Reisman photo

Volunteers, including Stacey Smith and Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, assembling a child's dresser.

No light bulb,” a volunteer called out on a recent afternoon at a two-story, one-family home in Fair Haven Heights. 

The lamp that needed a bulb was among the community donations at the first-ever Furnishing Day, which saw a revolving group of 60 friends, neighbors, and board members assembling furniture, hanging pictures, and stocking the pantry in the newly-built structure.

They were preparing the house for two early childhood educators at Friends Center for Children to move into, and live rent-free, with their children later this month. While sharing the kitchen, each family will live on one floor.

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