When The Crowd Gets Weird, The Weird Gets Published

You’ve probably seen the posters for The Crowd around town. Black and white, and affixed to everything, from the usual light poles to more avant-garde trash receptacles, they shout at passersby to ​“vote early, vote often” and portray such illustrious figures as socialist and trade unionist Eugene Debs.

The posters are part agitprop and part advertisement. But there is no contact information. The poster points the way, but to find the Crowd requires more digging.

A search on Instagram (@bat_crowd) or Google delivers a tiny sliver of web presence that allows one to ascertain that The Bridge and Tunnel Crowd is a subscription publication — or, as it describes itself, a ​“monthly shmata of the disaster prone tri-state area,” featuring ​“local history, classifieds, underground cartoon strips, new Americans.”

Black and white with risograph printed covers, the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd is a beautifully, frenetically composed print publication that captures the essence of Weird New Haven in all its manic creative glory. It’s a footprint, an echo, of the larger creative scene.

It also doesn’t stop at New Haven, but extends its roots into the rest of the land of bridges and tunnels: New Jersey, Queens, and beyond. Much like New Haven, it takes work to explore every corner of the Crowd and realize its depth and breadth. Bilingual French-English hockey column? Check. In-depth history of New Haven’s graffiti scene by the one and only legend Dooley‑O? Check. Histories of Italian agitation, conversations about death and the mail, intro to sex work, a music column that lovingly calls out bands from CT claiming to be from NYC? Check, check, and check. Laid out like a more traditional zine on steroids, the Crowd weaves stories and columns together with manic visuals and a layout that is itself a work of art.

The Crowd’s editor, Win Vitkowsky — who also teaches journalism at Common Ground High School — has been interested in zines and independent publications for years, even writing one (Common Sense) in high school. In a sense, Vitkowsky is a living archive of zines, workers’ publications, and book anthologies. The complicated web of influences and inspirations for the Crowd include the New Haven Workmen’s Advocate, a trade newspaper that agitated for labor; Youth Rights Media (Vitkowsky has written for them) and its Prensa Libre de New Haven, another newsletter with news in Spanish from New Haven and beyond, ranging from a witness account of a holdup to dispatches from Palestine in 2006; Cometbus, a zine from the Bay Area; Life Harvester, a zine out of Pittsburgh; The Rat, an independent newspaper from New York; and others.

But it took an impassioned speech last autumn to birth the Crowd.

“I gave a rousing speech at Rosh Hashanah of 2019… and I was on this 8‑hour-day thing — we are rapidly losing these gains that we struggled for as working people over 134 years. We already don’t have an 8‑hour workday, which was the rallying call of nearly 100 years of labor in the U.S. And that sounded so utopian to me. I was talking about it and nobody heard it…. I was like, ​‘I need to record my thoughts.’ I don’t think I said anything profound, but it felt like it, and I said I needed to get my voice into the public.” he said.

Vitkowsky also solicited contributions from friends near and far, including Colin Hagendorf — writer at Life Harvester in Pittsburgh (and of a column shared among publications, ​“Ask A Schmuck”) — and more local friends Stefan Christensen (Music Man Stevie C) and Allison Hornak (Beaky with the Long Stare). He published the first issue of The Crowd in November 2019, and it has been monthly since. It has gathered steam and contributors with every issue, branching from labor and music to more in-depth oral histories, like Dooley‑O’s.

“I love oral histories,” says Vitkowsky. Dooley‑O story, which appears in the Crowd’s May and June issues, explains the birth of graffiti in New Haven and its various currents and contributions, along with generously provided pictures. In the Crowd’s April and May issues, the tale of the Peretta brothers — great uncles of contributor Jean P. Moore — showcases another strong inheritance of the Crowd: that of socialist newspapers. The brothers Peretta, Italian immigrants and accused anarchists, were executed in New Britain under entirely dubious pretense, as was the tradition with foreign dissidents at the time in the U.S. (see Sacco and Vanzetti).

As he sat in a camp chair on his front porch in Westville, going over the latest proofs for the next edition of the Crowd, Vitkowsky called out greetings to the coming and going neighbors on his block. Right now, he said, he’s in the red to make the Crowd, but he hopes to get more readership through subscriptions. The next issue, out in October 2020, will have financial disclosures for the first six months of its existence. The sense of accountability also extends to the people who make up the Crowd, both contributors and inhabitants of the tri-state area. 

“The Bridge and Tunnel Crowd is those who are outside of the center of cultural, economic and social/political life. That’s people from the Bronx, Westchester County, Fairfield County, New Haven, Bergen County, Passaic, Long Island, Ridgewood before it was a chic place to live, Greenpoint where my mother lives — you know, outside of the big hat community,” Vitkowsky said. ​“The Joshua tree people. It’s people who are in the outside who have their own weird, unique shit. That includes gutter people in Norwalk who write graffiti under bridges. It includes undocumented immigrants fighting for their rights as workers and human beings. It includes all people on the outside of the cultural, political and economic center.”

Christensen came to The Crowd thanks to a long friendship with Vitkowsky. ​“Me and Win started hanging out in like 1999 — since we were kids,” he said. Vitkowsky’s high-school zine, Common Sense, ​“directly affected me” in understanding the cultural pull of New York, and what it was to be on the periphery. In the first issue of the Crowd, Christensen called out the band Youth of Today for claiming to be from New York City when the band was in fact based in Danbury.

Hornak had a less straightforward journey to the masthead: ​“Win asked me to write about birds, I think just as a ​‘why not?’ kind of thing,” she said. ​“In my studio, I work with four budgies who fly free. Win was present when the first one flew out of the woods randomly. He was there when the first budgie came to be. Within a couple months it led to four budgies that hang out in the studio.” Both Christensen and Hornak also contribute photos.

Christensen noted that nearly all of their friend group has or had contributed in some way to the Crowd. It’s as much a scene as a publication, and the endless stream of references and credit freely given to printers, photographers, and contributors in the Crowd reflected the sense of community embedded within its pages.

Over the course of the interview, Vitkowsky’s porch rapidly filled with zines, photocopies, book anthologies, physical manifestations of a thousand viewpoints, a thousand versions of a ​“cry out to the world which is significant and beautiful in itself,” he said.

Vitkowsky was quick to distance the Crowd from other zines for precisely this reason. ​“I’m looking more toward a publication that could amplify freak voices more than just speaking out of my own volition,” he said. ​“I’m not trying to tell my story.”

But that doesn’t negate the importance of understanding the primordial soup from which the Crowd emerged. The things on his porch were monuments to that. The affection for the object, and things worth saving, translates to the Crowd, as well.

“I want it to be passed around, I want it to be reproduced without regard for consent, and I want it to be precious, because the people who contribute have these precious thoughts. They’re good and they’re golden. If it wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t bother putting it out,” Vitkowsky said.

The Bridge and Tunnel Crowd is available via web subscription. Issues can also be found at Grey Matter Books on York Street and Sam’s Food Mart on Whalley Avenue. A small number of copies can be found at the Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue. Further copies are available by request from Firehouse 12 with any food pickup, at Elm City Sounds on Wednesdays ​“when Dooley‑O is there,” and at Lower Forms by appointment.