by | Jul 14, 2023 1:10 pm | Comments (4)
Kian Ahmadi photo
Digging holes and planting flowers in the peanut on Friday.
Crackling thunder and a downpour of rain didn’t stop roughly 15 Westville neighbors from venturing outside Friday morning on a traffic-calming-infrastructure-beautification effort.
by | Jul 14, 2023 8:26 am | Comments (20)
Thomas Breen photo
Aaron Goode (right) overseeing Thursday's RCV mayoral straw poll in Westville.
There was no need for an instant runoff in Thursday’s Westville ward committee straw poll for mayor, as two-term incumbent Justin Elicker won a majority of votes on the first ballot.
But, for the fun of it — and to practice running a ranked-choice-voting election — the neighborhood Democrats assembled in Edgewood School’s auditorium counted a second round of votes anyway, and shed a bit more light on this year’s mayoral race in the process.
Continue reading ‘Elicker Ranked First In Westville Straw Poll’
by | Jul 14, 2023 8:15 am | Comments (0)
Frank Bruckmann
I-95 N. Benson Rd.
Frank Bruckman’s paintings of the highways around the state have been a thread running through Kehler Liddell Gallery’s programming for years. The technical ability and attention to detail brought to such a mundane subject has layers of meaning attached to it. On one level, no one said that paintings can’t be funny, and there’s humor in every brushstroke. But there’s also the message built into the skill and hours brought to the canvas: driving in traffic on the interstate may seem like something to get through, something to forget. But we all spend hours of our lives doing it. Maybe it’s important for that reason alone — as important, in its own way, as a naval battle, or a visitation from a saint.
by | Jul 12, 2023 5:46 pm | Comments (49)
Thomas Breen file photo
The abandoned Doyle's Cleaners. Housing, shop coming soon?
Could four apartments and a specialty foods shop turn Westville into another Dixwell, East Rock, or, worse … Manhattan?
by | Jul 7, 2023 1:21 pm | Comments (22)
Thomas Breen file photo
The Yale Golf Course: 800 trees coming down, 2,000 going up?
Mia Cortés Castro Photos
Alders Festa, Punzo, Ficklin, and Miller at Thursday's CSEP meeting.
Yale plans to cut down roughly 800 trees at the university’s Upper Westville golf course, and plant another 2,000 in their stead, in order to create more grassy space for hitting the links — prompting pushback from neighbors and local environmentalists about the potential harms of felling so much wood.
Continue reading ‘Timber! Yale To Fell 800 Golf-Course Trees’
by | Jul 3, 2023 8:49 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
Celine Who at Seeing Sounds.
Celine Who let out a melisma of notes that floated through the air of the skate park in Edgewood Park. They commingled with the voices of vendors and of friends chatting, the scents of arepas and vegan Caribbean food. On the other side of the skate park, Eastine Akuni pumped out music from a second stage to a crowd brought to their feet on the lawn in the shade. It was early in the day for the second year of Seeing Sounds, the music and art festival organized by Trey Moore. Already a few hundred had arrived, and many more were coming.
by | Jun 21, 2023 8:42 am | Comments (2)
Eleanor Polak Photos
Alisa Bowens-Mercado teaches a salsa lesson at Salsa Night.
The foot-tapping rhythms of “Triste y Vacía” by Héctor Lavoe & Willie Colón reverberated throughout the blocked-off space outside 650 Central Ave. in Westville.
by | Jun 16, 2023 10:56 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
Jamila Hokanson, Sasha Lehrer, Jordan Sloshower, Damian Paglia, Stephanie Kilpatrick, in West Rock Wellness's art gallery.
A team of clinicians and wellness instructors has opened a new mental health center in Westville, offering everything from psychotherapy to mind-body medicine to ketamine-assisted psychedelic therapies.
This panoply of offerings is unified by their greater aim to create connection and community.
Continue reading ‘Whalley Wellness Center Explores Therapy's Frontier’
by | Jun 14, 2023 3:19 pm | Comments (6)
Kian Ahmadi Photo
DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes at Wednesday's Edgewood Park press conference.
John Cavaliere saw reason Wednesday to hope that water won’t stream into Lyric Hall in future rainstorms, now that state money is on the way to plan how to protect the heart of Westville from future floods.
by | Jun 12, 2023 2:55 pm | Comments (12)
Paul Bass Photo
Josh Philie finishing up one of the new Coogan murals.
The city’s youth and recreation department handed cans to graffiti artists to spray away on the walls of Coogan Pavilion and Edgewood skate park — in the hope of retaining a family-friendly feeling for the summer.
by | Jun 6, 2023 8:43 am | Comments (2)
Eleanor Polak photo
At Monday's Shakespeare-in-the-schools rehearsal.
Nineteen middle-schoolers, all dressed in black, filed into the band room of Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School. They were preparing for the dress rehearsal of their production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Before they took the stage, however, they partook in a light refreshment of fruit snacks, Cheez-Its, juice boxes — and grapes. When the students dangled bunches of the purple fruit from their hands, they looked for all the world like the Roman citizens they were about to embody.
Continue reading ‘Mauro-Sheridan Lends Its Ears To The Bard’
by | Jun 5, 2023 9:18 am | Comments (13)
Thomas Breen photos
Elicker (right) catches up with nico w. okoro and family before forum's start ...
... as Abdussabur (right) greets Frank Cochran and Stephanie FitzGerald.
More emergency beds. A zoning overhaul. A freeze on taxes. A move away from being the “methadone capital of Connecticut.”
The four Democrats seeking New Haven’s top elected office pitched those proposals when pressed during a mayoral candidate forum on what to do about the city’s lack of affordable housing and rising tide of homelessness.
Continue reading ‘Debate Portrays Housing As Politics Problem’
by | Jun 2, 2023 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Robert Bienstock
Concentricity 3.
Robert Bienstock’s Concentricity 3 is an abstract piece, but the lines are evocative of several natural forms at once. They could be the shapes on a topographical map, depicting hundreds of square miles of land. They could also be organic or inorganic forms growing under the light of a microscope. Bienstock may make conceptual art, but the patterns point toward the real.
by and | May 30, 2023 8:35 pm | Comments (30)
Paul Bass Photo
Ward 26 candidates Joshua Van Hoesen and Amy Marx outside the polls Tuesday.
Legal aid lawyer and Democratic ward co-chair Amy Marx will be the next alder for Upper Westville’s Ward 26, after winning a special election to fill the seat left empty by Darryl Brackeen.
by | May 25, 2023 8:40 am | Comments (1)
Lisa Reisman photo
Tyler Booker (center) with campers: “The kids got a whole lot out of it, and that’s the point, and they had a whole lot of fun."
The rain came in torrents. It kept coming. No one seemed to care. This was the long-awaited second annual Tyler Booker Football Camp, and a little rainstorm wasn’t going to get in the way.
by | May 19, 2023 8:50 am | Comments (17)
Laura Glesby photo
Ten-year-old Corinne: "This is what community looks like!"
Hundreds of elementary, middle, and high schoolers gathered to send a message to adults: We’re not too young to be worth hearing.
by | May 18, 2023 4:54 pm | Comments (1)
Maya McFadden File Photo
Davis seventh-grader Dulce puts pen to not-paper to make a 3D guitar figure.
Out of thin air and a 3Doodler pen emerged miniature plastic avocados and guitars and lava lamps — as hands-on learning took a new shape, literally, in an Upper Westville classroom.
by | May 17, 2023 8:55 am | Comments (0)
Danae.
Anastasia Mastilovic’s painting Danae may be named after a figure in Greek mythology, but her style makes the figure evocative of more. The woman could be a goddess or a mermaid. She could be in repose, or unleashing magical powers. Or perhaps it’s all a metaphor, about power, latent and dynamic, and how it can be used to transform the world.
by | May 16, 2023 9:04 am | Comments (22)
Paul Bass Photo
Joshua Van Hoesen finally got to speak to an unaffiliated voter on Benton Street about an upcoming special election for alder. But first he had to break form and agree to break a rule.
by | May 15, 2023 8:36 am | Comments (3)
Luxuriating in a warm spring day, ArtWalk — organized by the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance — brought out a crowd on Saturday for a full afternoon of art, craft, music, theater, food, and community.
by | May 5, 2023 9:13 am | Comments (0)
Keith Johnson
Flying Untied (detail).
The sky is full of planes. Not like it is at an airport, or ever an air show. No, in Keith Johnson’s Flying Untied, the atmosphere is littered with planes, as if they’ve been shaken all at once out of a gigantic cosmic bag, or as if a dozen air traffic controllers messed up at once and we’re in for the biggest cumulative air disaster the world has ever seen. Flying Untied succeeds in being both somewhat comical and a little threatening in this regard, an effect amplified by the fact that — apart from their proximity to one another — the planes seem totally natural.
Continue reading ‘Two Artists Capture The Matter Of Moments’
by | May 4, 2023 2:34 pm | Comments (7)
Thomas Breen photos
Pastor Wilkins with city climate czar Steve Winter (right) at Thursday's presser.
Solar panels powering Wilkins' Westville home.
Want to save roughly $900 a year on your electricity bill while also doing your part to wean off of planet-destroying fossil fuels?
There’s a solar panel for that — and a new city-backed campaign to get more such sun-powered equipment on the roofs of New Haven homeowners and landlords, with the help of a New Orleans-based company that promises energy cost savings through long-term solar panel leases.
by | Apr 28, 2023 3:13 pm | Comments (26)
Ward 26 alder hopefuls Joshua Van Hoesen and Amy Marx.
Upper Westville voters will have the chance to pick between two different candidates running on — checks notes — two different party lines, as Democrat Amy Marx and Republican Joshua Van Hoesen vie to become the next alder for Ward 26 following the resignation of incumbent Darryl Brackeen, Jr.
by | Apr 28, 2023 12:20 pm | Comments (20)
Last summer, one of the other dads at daycare asked if I was on the Westville Dad email listserv.
Continue reading ‘Opinion: On Westville Dads & The Race For Mayor’
by | Apr 20, 2023 9:16 am | Comments (29)
A rendering of the Roger Road home and proposed detached ADU.
A Westville homeowner got the go-ahead to convert a two-car garage into housing for his aging father — after applying for zoning relief to raise the building’s roof and responding publicly to a neighbor’s concerns about property values and personal privacy.
