River Street Soccer Turf OK'd
by | Jan 11, 2024 9:01 am | Comments (4)
There was no talk of controlling traffic, limiting crowd sizes, or banning soccer games.
Fair Haven
Fair Haven Votes For Garden Beds
by | Jan 8, 2024 1:37 pm | Comments (5)
Allan Appel Photo
Make way for greens: Neighbors have begun planning new planting at Grand Acres (pictured).
While the harshest months of winter may be just upon us, spring planting is already on the minds of those optimistic Fair Haveners who gathered for the first Fair Haven Community Management Team (FHCMT) meeting of 2024.
Armed Carjacking Ends With Arrest
by | Jan 5, 2024 9:05 am | Comments (18)
NHPD
Handgun recovered from stolen Honda.
Edward didn’t have time for this.
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.
Soccer Field Pitched For River St. Warehouse
by | Dec 14, 2023 12:19 pm | Comments (7)
Contributed photo
Coach Gervacio Ortiz with his team.
Fake grass, real goals, and striving young athletes could be the latest additions to an otherwise vacant Fair Haven waterfront warehouse — if a 50-parent plan to build an indoor soccer field gets the green light.
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New Team-Minded Alders Ready To Roll
by | Nov 29, 2023 2:09 pm | Comments (5)
Alders-Elect Kiana Flores, Frank Redente, and Caroline Smith at WNHH FM.
Three of New Haven’s alders-elect with Fair Haven connections said they’re pumped to get to work as part of a community “team” that tackles safe streets, affordable housing, and small business growth.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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Student Moviemakers Keep It Spooky
by | Nov 3, 2023 8:49 am | Comments (0)
"Try to Survive" Movie Trailer
"From the Death" Movie Trailer
"Revenge" Movie Trailer
Despite New Haven having no more movie theaters, it isn’t lacking in young, creative, and spooky-loving moviemakers — particularly at John S. Martinez School.
Collective Consciousness Takes The Sharpest View
by | Nov 2, 2023 8:41 am | Comments (0)
Jamie Guite, Marie R. Altenor, Kendall Driffin, Joshua Eaddy.
There’s a moment rather early in Fairview when a family is dancing together, performing steps and singing a song that they all remember. It’s an expression of joy, the strengthening of a familial bond. It’s silly and easy to like. But then Keisha, the youngest family member, steps away from her family and into a spotlight. She’s not having fun. She’s troubled. “My future just looks so big and bright, I can’t wait for it to hurry up and Get Here. I want to know all there is to know and be all there is to be,” she says. “But. But I feel like something is keeping me from all that. Something.… Yes, something is keeping me from what I could be. And that something. It thinks that it has made me who I am. It’s.… It’s just so confusing.”
Something’s off. Something’s wrong. And we’re just getting started.
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6 Seniors Apartments OK'd For Fair Haven
by | Oct 23, 2023 12:51 pm | Comments (5)
Zoom photo
A design of 6 new senior apartments coming to Ferry Street.
Six new one-bedroom apartments for seniors are coming to two vacant lots on Ferry Street, in a developer’s bid to help elderly residents get out of nursing homes and back into neighborhoods.
Artist-Led Open Studios Take Over Erector Square
by | Oct 23, 2023 8:35 am | Comments (1)
Chelsea M. Rowe
Chelsea Rowe's Symposium-inspired art.
Artist Chelsea M. Rowe marries festive colors to a violent act in her art, a contrast that opens up the possibilities for interpretation. There’s no getting away from the pain, the blood spilling from both figures as they split from one another. But it’s not just a portrait of torture. It suggests a form of creation and change, too: the chance to survive, make something different.
The sense of energy, connection, and a little bit of revolution in Rowe’s piece was in the air at the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios’ Erector Square weekend.
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Star Martinez Teacher Wins $25K Milken Educator Award
by | Oct 18, 2023 3:33 pm | Comments (3)
Maya McFadden Photo
Alyssa Basso teaching her audiovisual class earlier this month.
STEM teacher Alyssa Basso landed a surprise recognition on Wednesday of her hard work making learning exciting and interactive for her students at John S. Martinez School — in the form of a Milken Educator Award, along with a $25,000 cash prize.
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"Sea Sky" Student Broadcasters Get The Scoop
by | Oct 17, 2023 12:12 pm | Comments (4)
Maya McFadden Photo
Student broadcasters on set, ready to report.
John S. Martinez School eighth graders perfected the lights, turned on their camera, and were ready for the action of bringing back the school’s Sea Sky News broadcast.
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New Clinic Entrance To Pivot From Sidewalk
by | Oct 16, 2023 1:45 pm | Comments (2)
BZA image
This type of sliding-door won't face Grand Ave., per Fair Haven Health application.
The sliding-door front entrance to Fair Haven Community Health Care’s new Grand Avenue clinic building won’t face Grand Avenue, but will instead point east towards the center’s existing headquarters — in order to prioritize accessibility for patients with disabilities and to avoid existing high-voltage power lines.
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Regina Winters-Toussaint To Be Inducted Posthumously Into CT Women’s Hall of Fame
by | Oct 12, 2023 4:00 pm | Comments (2)
Regina Winters-Toussaint.
While a student at the Yale School of Architecture in 1992, Regina Winters-Toussaint created her own summer internship. As one of the first counselors for LEAP, then a new youth enrichment program in New Haven, she moved into Westville Manor public housing, where she mentored the young people living there.
That willingness to steep herself in the experience of those who would live and work in the structures she built is among the reasons for the induction of Winters-Toussaint, who died of cancer at 47 in April 2016, in the CT Women’s Hall of Fame, according to its executive director Sarah Lubarsky.
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Wine Down Closes Out Summer With Groove
by | Oct 10, 2023 12:19 pm | Comments (0)
Lisa Gray Photos
Wine Down CT’s end-of-summer event, Dear Summer, went down Sunday evening. If you get a chance to go to their next event, get your ticket early because they sell out fast, and I see why. Wine Down CT — which, according to Aislin Magazine, started hosting lusciously curated events as a riff on Wine Down Wednesdays, popularized by the TV show Insecure — throws fabulous day parties that draw hundreds of people to hang out, taste great food, vibe to good DJs and live music, imbibe scrumptious libations and generally have a good time.
CDC Director Boosts New Covid Booster
by | Oct 5, 2023 12:40 pm | Comments (41)
Thomas Breen photo
CDC Director Mandy Cohen (second from right): Time to get another Covid shot.
The nation’s top public health official swung by Fair Haven Thursday morning with a vaccine-promoting message: Covid is still with us, and so now is the latest shot designed to protect everyone from an ever-changing virus.
Get the shot, she urged, and don’t worry about paying for it, as the costs should be covered by private insurance and the federal government.
"Grander" Grand Vision Lands $6M
by | Sep 29, 2023 3:15 pm | Comments (25)
Thomas Breen photo
Alder Claudia Herrera (right) inside Dayvett's Gifts with co-owner Ines Vidals.
The state has awarded $6 million towards overhauling Grand Avenue to make the bustling Fair Haven commercial corridor safer, cleaner, better-lit, and more pedestrian-friendly.
Those improvements can’t come soon enough for neighborhood stalwarts like Maria Ocotecatl of Grand Fish Market, and Javier Sanchez of Evolution Hair Studio, and Angeles Romero of Rodeo Groceries, and Ines Vidals of Dayvett’s Gifts, who have built up their small businesses because of their diverse and supportive community — and despite some of the conditions that persist outside their shops’ front doors.
