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Alexandra Martinakova |
Jun 19, 2025 10:21 am
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Alexandra Martinakova Photos
Madelyne at the front door of her new apartment ...
... at the now-half-occupied Curtis Cofield Estates.
A welcome mat and a single small sunflower in a bright yellow pot sit in front of Madelyne’s new apartment at 691 Legion Ave., where she has been living alongside her three children for the last few months.
56 new townhome-style apartments in West River ...
... as celebrated with an official ribbon cutting.
Six decades after Urban Renewal’s bulldozers plowed through the Oak Street neighborhood — and nearly three decades after the late Rev. Curtis Cofield II began fighting to build back housing there — city officials, nonprofit developers, and West River neighbors cut the ribbon Monday on 56 new affordable apartments.
“Sixty years ago, they said this would never be replaced,” longtime community leader Jerry Poole said about the residences that were destroyed to make way for a mini-highway. “I use one word to describe how I feel about [the new housing here today]. Magnificent. Magnificent! That’s how I’m feeling.”
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Alexandra Martinakova |
Jun 12, 2025 3:49 pm
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Alexandra Martinakova photos
Peace gardener Aaron Goode: “We’re hoping to have a mutually beneficial relationship" with ...
... the newly opened Curtis Cofield Estates residents next door.
As the thermometer showed a temperature in the mid 80s Thursday morning, Paula and Frank Panzarella and Aaron Goode watered the West River Peace Garden with bottles and buckets they brought themselves.
They tended to that public greenspace, which still lacks its own water supply, as new neighbors have begun to move in next door at a long-in-the-works affordable housing development.
The Elicker administration has begun chopping down trees on an overgrown Winthrop Avenue lot — in advance of trying to tear down a dilapidated former nursing home later this summer.
The property is also the subject of a new anti-blight lien as well as a new foreclosure lawsuit, in which the city claims the landlord owes more than $250,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties. The landlord, meanwhile, has dismissed that legal action as mere posturing by a city more interested in collecting taxes than fostering development.
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Lisa Reisman |
May 6, 2025 5:16 pm
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Lisa Reisman photo
Rosemary DeCosta Hoke with granddaughter Erika Bogan (right) on her 100th birthday.
If you walk into Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church on Orchard Street for the worship service on any given Sunday, chances are that an impeccably dressed older woman with twinkling eyes will wish you good morning, welcome you to her church, and encourage you to sit as close as you can to the front.
That woman is long-time parishioner Rosemary DeCosta Hoke who, on a recent Sunday at Beulah Heights, with her 13 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren looking on, celebrated her 100th birthday.
Anna Salemme and Lyudmyla Kobylyanska at Sunday's mass.
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine — and began a war that President Trump now falsely claims Ukraine started — 75 people gathered on George Street for a somber Sunday mass to try to figure out how best to support the country they love in such tumultuous times.
Cherif, with Scotch: Stipulation reached, eviction trial avoided.
(Updated) A mom of three young disabled children can stay in her Orchard Street apartment through the end of May — per a court-mediated agreement she struck with her landlord on the day her eviction case was set to go to trial.
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Zachary Groz |
Dec 5, 2024 10:18 am
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Zachary Groz photo
Beam me up, YNHH.
High in the sky, two crewmen from CT Ironworkers Local No. 15 & 424 waited for a crane to haul in an enormous beam.
The workers started as motionless dots against the deep blue backdrop. As the beam neared, they went into action, harnessing each side and battling the wind to get the slab to click into place.
When it finally did, the external structure of the Adams Neurosciences Center at Yale New Haven Hospital was officially complete — eight years after concept, and two after groundbreaking.
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Thomas Breen |
Dec 2, 2024 8:27 pm
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(Updated) Christopher Santana had driven a friend to the parking lot behind a George Street apartment complex Monday afternoon when he was approached by two masked men.
One “abruptly shot” Santana — before both fled on foot, leaving the 25-year-old New Havener to die.
... and not the former linen-cleaning company (pictured).
The “route men” are long gone from the former Monarch Cleaners in West River.
So are the pleas of “Uncle Sammy, you got a summer job for me?” that sisters Cathy Dziekan and Jan Lougal still remember their dad being asked by extended family in need of work.
But the history of their family’s long-time laundry business will live on — in the name and in the story behind 64 new affordable apartments now on the rise on Derby Avenue.
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Maya McFadden |
Oct 17, 2024 11:55 am
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(20)
Thomas Breen file photo
Barnard Principal Stephanie Skiba shows off a Yondr pouch, where the cellphone goes.
All New Haven public elementary and middle school students will have to stow their phones in magnetically sealed “Yondr” pouches starting in January — per a new districtwide policy designed to minimize pocket-buzzing distractions by creating cellphone-free learning environments.
Owen Agba, Grace Sherman, and Nathaly Ynoa Martinez: No phones, no problems.
When Barnard School eighth-graders Grace Sherman and Nathaly Ynoa Martinez and Owen Agba arrived at school Friday morning, they put their smartphones in magnetically sealed pouches — which they likely wouldn’t unlock until the end of the day.
After participating in a year-long experiment in phone-free classrooms, they looked forward to another day of in-person learning and socializing with friends, unmired by the distractions of TikTok and Instagram. Meanwhile, their governor and one of their U.S. senators popped into their school to learn about how that’s all going.
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Lisa Reisman |
Aug 20, 2024 9:43 am
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Lisa Reisman photo
Young entrepreneurs (clockwise from left) Erron Duncan, Chance, Tae Cunningham, Michael "MJ" Smith, Nyla Shepard, and Mathieu Duncan, with Gorilla Lemonade's Kristen Threatt.
On a recent sun-drenched morning, Nyla Shepard, a ninth grader at Eli Whitney Tech, approached a white Honda on the corner of Legion and Sherman Avenues, a bottle of lemonade in each hand. The driver shook her head, then redirected her eyes at the road.
“People are gonna do that,” she said, as the light turned green. “You just gotta get used to it.”
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Thomas Breen |
Aug 5, 2024 3:10 pm
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Thomas Breen file photo
Retreat's now-closed 915 Ella T. Grasso location.
Patient records, narcotics, and piles of mail allegedly remained inside a drug rehab center on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard a month after the facility abruptly closed — and were all accessible to anyone able to push through the shuttered complex’s back door.
Millie Grenough, Aaron Goode, and Frank Panzarella (behind) empty their bottles at the Peace Garden on Ella T. Grasso Blvd.
New Haven is proudly a United Nations Peace Messenger City — so says the beautiful gladioli-draped welcome sign that even many New Haveners may not know exists because they whiz by on speedy Ella T. Grasso Boulevard between Legion Avenue and North Frontage Road.
Yet New Haven is also a city that doesn’t always provide water hook-ups to all its public green areas, even a gateway location such as this one.
That means that Paul Bloom, Frank and Paula Panzarella, Aaron Goode, Millie Grenough, and other, dedicated, long-time members of the Friends of West River Peace Garden – the site in question — are “always carrying tons of water in our cars,” said Grenough.
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Arthur Delot-Vilain |
Jul 2, 2024 1:50 pm
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(22)
Thomas Breen file photo
596-598 George St., to be sold to veterans housing nonprofit.
Alders signed off on selling a long-vacant, city-owned duplex next to Yale New Haven Hospital for $6,000 to a local veterans housing nonprofit that plans to rehab the property into six affordable rentals.
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Thomas Breen |
May 22, 2024 11:52 am
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Thomas Breen photo
St. Raph's ambulance drop-off area: Closing for construction. Temp drop-off area to be built next door.
How do you double the size of a hospital’s emergency department without displacing ambulances from a construction zone?
Yale New Haven Hospital is seeking to solve that riddle by shutting down a portion of Orchard Street for 18 months — and paying the city an extra $150,000 for the inconvenience — as it builds a larger emergency department for its St. Raphael’s campus.
Broken past, fixed future for 596 George (pictured)?
The city has abandoned plans to convert a long-vacant duplex on George Street into owner-occupied housing — and is now looking to sell the boarded-up brick buildings to a local nonprofit with the goal instead of creating affordable rentals for veterans.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 19, 2024 10:10 am
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Allan Appel Photo
Daniel Wood, Jeremy Tremblay, Stephany Miller, Paul Bloom, Aaron Goode, and Millie Grenough on Thursday.
City peace commissioners and a crew of freshmen from Albertus Magnus College ventured out to a green patch off of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard with rakes, gloves, bags, and high hopes for adding a little color and joy to the world.
Joseph: "Verbal agreement" in place for med-office parking.
Should a planned new medical office building on a West River superblock be allowed to have 0 off-street parking spaces — when there’s a 700-space parking garage right next door?
Officials joined West River neighbors to celebrate the government-backed construction of 56 new affordable apartments where Urban Renewal’s bulldozers once plowed through the Oak Street neighborhood six decades ago to make way for a mini-highway.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Mar 26, 2024 3:27 pm
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(19)
Laura Glesby Photo
Developer Joseph: Big plans for Rte 34.
Four stories of medical research will join a daycare, a 130-room hotel, and a social services center — as the last development in the decade-long construction of the Route 34 West “superblock.”
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Laura Glesby |
Jan 30, 2024 3:13 pm
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(8)
X'Nique suggests to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn that city prioritize shade and sensory play.
A tire swing. A skate park. “A lot of butterflies.” And toys promoting “sensory play.”
Neighborhood children eagerly offered those visions for a planned redesign of Kensington Playground, following years of adult-dominated debates over the future of the park.
