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Laura Glesby |
Mar 15, 2024 2:03 pm
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(3)
An all-boys charter school is gearing up to open this fall in a stately Dixwell Avenue building that neighbors stopped from becoming a methadone clinic two years ago.
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 8, 2024 9:32 am
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(2)
Fifth-grader Aly Gaye knew where to start when New Haven’s poet laureate asked him to write verses about himself: My power lies in my brain, in my smarts.
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Lisa Reisman |
Feb 29, 2024 4:21 pm
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(8)
Diane X. Brown and Honda Smith grew up two blocks from each other in Newhallville during the 1960s and 1970s in families steeped in politics and a New Haven pulsing with the Black Panthers, racial unrest, and a burgeoning sense of possibility.
Brown, 66, became the first African American librarian in New Haven in 2006, transforming the Stetson branch into a thriving community and cultural hub. Smith, 59, a retired city public works employee and longtime civic activist, took the reins as West Hills alder in 2020 upon her retirement from a three-decade career working for the city government. She’s known for, among other initiatives, The Shack, which she revitalized into a thriving intergenerational community center on Valley Street.
The Independent sat down with Brown and Smith at The Shack to get their takes on observing Black History Month in 2024 New Haven.
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Lisa Reisman |
Feb 28, 2024 3:05 pm
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(2)
“This was our vision in prison,” said Marcus Harvin, as he led his team with boxes of meals past a queue of people waiting for the doors of Dixwell’s Varick A.M.E. Zion Warming Center to open.
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Maya McFadden |
Feb 28, 2024 9:30 am
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(8)
Elijah Johnson walked into King/Robinson School classroom in his United Airlines pilot uniform — on a mission to inspire some of the students one day to take flight.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 22, 2024 3:09 pm
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(36)
City Plan commissioners killed a request to turn a dilapidated former factory serving as local artist studios into storage units — after deciding the development sounded like “dead space.”
Sheila Harris was murdered by her domestic abuser minutes after five police officers left her home, and hours after she arrived, scratched up, at police headquarters to report a stolen gun.
Now Harris’ daughter Mercedes Harris is suing the city and 13 officers, arguing the police should have done more to protect her mom on the night of Aug. 19, 2023.
by
Lisa Reisman |
Feb 12, 2024 9:13 am
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(3)
The Sunday, Aug. 21, 1994, edition of the Connecticut Post pictures a young Black man in police blues holding a hangman’s noose. The man was David Daniels, a police officer. The noose was left on his patrol car.
Developers returned to the City Plan Commission with a promise: If they get permission to transform a Shelton Avenue industrial building into self-storage units, the artists currently working there can stay.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 8, 2024 2:25 pm
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(11)
Police have made arrests in a pair of hit-and-runs that caused the deaths of two New Haveners, including 17-year-old Bryan Ramirez-Guttierez last February.
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Lisa Reisman |
Feb 5, 2024 2:10 pm
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(1)
(Updated) You can speak all you want into somebody’s ear. If their stomach is growling, they can’t hear it.
Those were the words of Marcus Harvin, the visionary founder of Newhallville fREshSTARTs, at Pitts Chapel Unified Free Will Baptist Church on Friday night. The occasion was the grand opening of the fREsh-taurant, a food recovery initiative that will provide free hot, nutritious meals for the community, either eat-in or take-out, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening. Everyone is welcome.
As Science Park developers presented renderings of a housing complex soon to rise on Winchester Ave., Carlota Clark wondered if one of the 283 apartments would someday be hers.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Jan 25, 2024 4:15 pm
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(21)
Mother Juniper frontwoman Lindsay Skedgell unplugged from her Vox AC15 and tuned into Zoom from a “vacant” ex-factory building to send developers a message: 91 Shelton is far from empty.
Skedgell was among dozens of artists who banded together to flood the City Plan Commission’s Zoom room after hearing earlier that day that their studio space, a five-story former factory building at 91 Shelton Ave., is slated for sale to a self-storage company.
The Q House is celebrating the 100 years that have passed since the community fixture first opened its doors in 1924.
The space will be hosting events throughout 2024, which can be read about here, to honor Q House history and strengthen its current community. Below, we’ve included a letter sent by the Q House Centennial Committee with more details.
by
Dereen Shirnekhi |
Jan 3, 2024 3:29 pm
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(54)
On Monday Troy Streater was sworn in for his first full term a city alder. On Tuesday he sued the city for $50 million in punitive damages and $50 million in compensatory damages for the two dozen years he spent in prison on a wrongful conviction.
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Allan Appel |
Dec 20, 2023 8:24 am
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(6)
Marcus Harvin is working on a fresh start: for the food in his home community of Newhallville, and for formerly incarcerated people like himself who are looking to improve their own lives and the lives of those around them.
Enter Newhallville Fresh Start: a food pantry he’s in the process of founding to provide healthy produce and, eventually, programming for neighbors in need.
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Maya McFadden |
Dec 18, 2023 6:54 pm
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(5)
Helen Caraballo is looking forward to attending nursing school while raising her five children and bouncing back from an otherwise “rough year” — with the knowledge that she’ll no longer have to keep looking backward at a decade-old, low-level felony conviction, which will soon be erased.
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Lisa Reisman |
Nov 22, 2023 8:42 am
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(2)
The scene was a bare-bones space with concrete walls in an industrial building on Shelton Avenue. Jeff Bell was pleading with Carter Goodrich not to hurt him.
“I have some money in my pocket and a watch worth five grand,” Bell told Goodrich, his voice quaking. “Just let me go. Please let me go.”
Off in the distance, a door slammed shut. A siren wailed.
“That’s a wrap,” said director and producer Darrell Bellamy.
by
Laura Glesby |
Nov 22, 2023 8:32 am
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(4)
Geneva Pollock and Pearlie Napoleon were friends who both dedicated their lives to their students and their Newhallville community. So it’s fitting that the street corners soon to be named after them will be located just one block apart.
by
Nora Grace-Flood |
Nov 16, 2023 8:28 am
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(11)
Millions of dollars in cannabis-legalization money are slated to trickle back into New Haven’s neighborhoods most negatively impacted by the War on Drugs — and residents are responding with programmatic pitches to put those funds towards community revitalization, from serving the homeless hot meals to mentoring Black billionaires in the making.
by
Allan Appel |
Nov 13, 2023 9:05 am
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(1)
The congregants of Pitts Chapel United Free Will Baptist Church are not only raising their historic sanctuary’s roof in dancing, singing, and exuberant prayer as they do every Sunday — now they are also able to fix it.