Westville

Blighted Scientology Building Returned To Tax Rolls

by | Mar 8, 2024 2:28 pm | Comments (42)

Paul Bass Photos

No sign of "religious" activity: Assessor Pullen (left); portions of the blighted Scientology building.

Scientologists will have to pay taxes after sitting on plans to resurrect Ron Hubbard’s spirit inside the deteriorating doors of a former furniture store — now that the city revoked the church’s tax-exempt status.

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Students, Governor cARTie Hearty

by | Mar 5, 2024 9:45 am | Comments (0)

Students Monday outside the parked cARTie bus.

cARTie museum educator Nicole Pappo reads to students outdoors.

When asked does art matter?” second graders Mercedes, Mason, and Elia agreed yes.” Then they showed some of the reasons: Mason drew a sign reading art = peace.” Elia drew a self-portrait. And Mercedes drew a rainbow, reading I love art.” 

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Artists Walk The Path

by | Feb 21, 2024 9:34 am | Comments (0)

Roy Money

Emeishan View 2.

The view of a mountain in Sichuan, China is breathtaking, though not for the usual reasons. Photographer Roy Money doesn’t train his camera on the usual kind of tourist pictures — the highest peak, the widest vista, the prettiest temple. Instead, he has an eye for the beauty in the details, the shape of the land, a mat of vegetation, curls of fog. Pictures of famous vistas might make us want to go there. Pictures like Money’s might give us more of a sense of what it’s like to already be there.

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Pols, Pom-Poms Celebrate Pizza, Magnets

by | Feb 9, 2024 4:50 pm | Comments (5)

This reporter's favorite student as seen during Friday's Davis magnet school pep rally.

Nora Grace Flood Photos

Ernie's owner Pat DeRiso tries to get orders out for delivery while reporters hound him about National Pizza Day.

A plethora of pizza, pom-poms and politicians flooded Upper Westville Friday morning amidst a pair of symbiotic popularity contests – in which every party was a winner.

The slices of of za and strings of plastic were featured in two separate city celebrations taking place around the corner from one another. 

Over at Davis Academy, students screamed out of ostensible excitement or, perhaps, excess energy as their principal announced that both The Magnet Schools of America and the University of Connecticut have recognized the school for innovative excellence.”

Down the street on Whalley Avenue, politicians and thin-crust fanatics packed like anchovies inside Ernie’s Pizzeria for National Pizza Day and a proclamation by the governor naming New Haven the Pizza Capital of America.”

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Students Grill Senator

by | Jan 26, 2024 12:38 pm | Comments (33)

Laura Glesby Photo

"I can't quit": Blumenthal fields sharp Qs from Mauro-Sheridan fifth-graders.

If you had to either quit or work with Donald Trump as president, what would you do?”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal faced that question and others about his role in the future of American democracy — not at a press conference, or on the Senate floor, but in Lauren Bitterman’s fifth-grade classroom at Mauro-Sheridan school.

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Generation To Generation, Podiatry To Pickleball

by | Dec 19, 2023 11:07 am | Comments (8)

Photo courtesy of Bruno Semino

SCSU grad student Bruno Semino competing in a pickleball tournament in October at Edgewood Park.

The story of the proposed indoor pickleball facility slated to spring forth from a stretch of asphalt in Westville begins, in a way, in 1957, when Harrison Blume’s grandfather first hung a podiatry shingle on Blake Street.

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Elm City Montessori Welcomes Winter Through Song

by | Dec 18, 2023 2:58 pm | Comments (0)

Asher Joseph photo

Students sing loud and proud at Elm City Montessori's eighth annual Winter Sing.

Students, families, and teachers bundled together in the subfreezing temperature at Elm City Montessori School (ECMS) to lift their voices in song during the school’s eighth annual Winter Sing — which played out as candles flickered, under the silhouette of West Rock.

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Artist Questions The Questions

by | Dec 18, 2023 8:55 am | Comments (0)

The show of artist Amira Brown’s work, up now at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville through the end of the month, doesn’t have a title, nor do any of the individual pieces. That gesture alone seems to be part of the point, as is the elliptical, border-melting nature of the work itself. It’s a show to find your way into; one possible starting point is a piece that shows, in outline, a person in a classic pose of pondering, but the pondering itself is dissolving the person. The person contains other people. The person contains stars. But Brown’s sly humor is on full display as well. Meh,” is one complete thought. Shrug,” another. And then: rodeo.” The rodeo of making art? Of showing it? Something bigger? Whatever the case, it isn’t Brown’s first.

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Yale's Tree-Cutting Golf Course Renovation Plan OK'd

by | Dec 8, 2023 4:08 pm | Comments (17)

The Yale Golf Course, as pictured in a City Plan presentation.

Yale has won city permission to cut down more than 1,000 trees and renovate its Upper Westville golf course as part of a plan that university officials pitched as making 200 acres of fairways and tees more sustainable” — and that local activists criticized as environmentally backwards.

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Westville Nursery School Keeps Play Alive

by | Dec 8, 2023 2:23 pm | Comments (2)

Lisa Reisman photo

Inside the Westville Community Nursery School.

Mud happens and wet happens and messy clothes happen and it’s all good. 

Those are the words of author and play space designer Rusty Keeler about risky play, a philosophy that involves, in simplest terms, letting kids be kids, and is practiced at Westville Community Nursery School, a place where the tradition of jumping on mattresses has passed from generation to generation.

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Kehler Liddell Decks The Walls

by | Nov 28, 2023 7:55 am | Comments (0)

Penrhyn Cook

Holiday Reflections.

Penrhyn Cook’s series of photographs, Holiday Reflections, are absorbing enough in their own right. Colorful and festive, the images are just askew enough to warrant a closer look. Are we looking at double exposures? What do we make of the giant fruit and a rainbow on a city block? In the context of Kehler Liddell Gallery’s annual holiday show — titled Deck the Walls” and running at the Westville space through Dec. 24 — the title of Cook’s series earns itself a double twist, as the works of fellow gallery members on the opposite walls are reflected in the photos’ glassy surfaces. Images layer on images, an apt depiction of the show as a whole, in which all the gallery members play a part.

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Two Artists Consider The State Of Play

by | Nov 1, 2023 8:13 am | Comments (0)

Marjorie Gillette Wolfe

Alhambra Hedge.

Two photographs by Marjorie Gillette Wolfe hang in the front of Kehler Liddell Gallery, at 873 Whalley Ave. in Westville. They’re both of hedges, and the way Wolfe composes the image, the eye is drawn to the plant life, without worrying too much about where it is. We can see the similarities in the forms of the plants, the spacing between them. It’s only in looking at the titles that the true humor comes out, as one photograph is taken in front of a diner somewhere, and the other is taken at the Alhambra, one of the great architectural wonders of the world. Both locations are almost entirely absent from the images.

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Westville Brings The Heat With Open Studios

by | Oct 30, 2023 9:33 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photo

David Sepulveda at work in his Westville studio.

The last weekend of October finally gifted the city a warm and sunny Saturday, but nowhere was it hotter than Westville, where a two-day neighborhood event — part of the artist-led City-Wide Open Studios — encompassed everything from galleries, creative collectives, and private residences to Edgewood Park and even pods on Central Avenue.

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In "After Picasso," Artists Reckon With A Giant

by | Oct 27, 2023 8:39 am | Comments (2)

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Orange Interplay with Diatoms, Salt, and Seaweed.

Cynthia Beth Rubin’s collage crackles with energy, as colors vibrate off one another and forms within forms, textures within textures, rub against each other. Keen senses of both aesthetic freedom and control of technique suffuse the piece — which, it turns out, hearken back to a famous artistic ancestor.

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Parking Lot, Meet Pickleball

by | Oct 13, 2023 2:49 pm | Comments (18)

Lisa Reisman file photo

Pickleball played at the Floyd Little Athletic Center in April ...

BZA photo

... and next at an indoor trendy paddle sport building, coming to this parking lot?

Indoor pickleball instead of surface-lot parking could be coming to a busy Westville Village intersection, as the owner of a Valley Street stretch of asphalt has proposed constructing a new two-story gym and spa” dedicated to the trendy tennis-adjacent sport.

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