Laura Glesby Photo
Drivers honked to protest Yale. Marchers chanted and claimed the street. A boxed-in bus driver yelled his own protest and ended up in a rush-hour stand-off. Other drivers slipped by ferrying menorahs.
The evening ended with a hushed tree-lighting to launch the official Christmas shopping season.
It was in some ways just another Thursday night in New Haven.
And in others, a unique melding of the city’s vibrant social-justice, transit, religious, and civic-booster traditions inflected by a pandemic.
Nightfall Thursday brought the beginning of the eight-day Hanukkah holiday, the annual lighting of the Christmas tree of the Green, and a two-part protest —a caravan from Long Wharf to downtown, which met up with a march through the streets.
Fifty protesters, led by immigrant rights and racial justice organizations Unidad Latina en Acción and Black and Brown United in Action, participated in the caravan and march to call on Yale to share more resources with New Haven communities. They advocated for the university to contribute the taxes it has been exempt from paying for its academic buildings per the state’s charter; provide empty housing space for people in need of a place to live; and hire more New Haven residents.
The demands echoed those raised recently by Yale union activists, students, and the mayor himself, as the pandemic ravages city finances and Yale emerges with a budgetary surplus.
The protesters took to the road on Chapel Street. Car drivers took a detour via High Street. The driver of the 243a bus couldn’t, because his vehicle can’t clear a Yale University Art Gallery overpass
“Fuck your protest!” the bus driver was heard yelling at the crowd.
That failed to budge the marchers.
“We would have let them pass,” protester D’Juan Eastman explained. But after the driver’s comment, which multiple protesters attested to, the rest of the crowd flooded the street with bold signs and determined chants.
“Whose streets?” called out protest organizer Luis Ramirez.
“Our streets!” the crowd yelled back.
After about 20 minutes, passengers on the bus eventually spoke to the protesters. According to Eastman, the riders said they disagreed with the bus driver, but many were traveling home after an exhausting workday and just wanted to pass through.
The group stepped aside from the road. A few people cheered.
The march circled around Chapel Street, Elm Street, and the New Haven Green, veering back and forth between the sidewalk and the middle of the road.
The protesters’ presence in the streets was symbolic. Ramirez (pictured) recounted through a bullhorn that Yale had purchased High and Wall Streets from the city for $3 million in 2013.
“These streets belong to the community. They belong to us,” he said.
The crowd echoed call and response chants: “¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!”
A second caravan was taking place at the same time: From New Haven’s Orthodox Jewish community, celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. The protesters’ voices occasionally melded with Hanukkah music blasting from Chabad-owned cars, the roofs of which displayed bright electric menorahs for the first night of the Jewish holiday.
The march was Career High School student Yisen Contreras’ first protest with ULA. Contreras (pictured) drove for most of the protest with her family in their car, before joining the protesters on foot at the end.
“It’s not fair,” she said of Yale’s relationship with New Haven. “They don’t have to pay taxes, and we do.”
Nayeli Garcia (pictured at the right, with Rosalba Montoya), who co-organized the protest, argued that Yale’s annual $12.5 million voluntary contribution in lieu of taxes to the city isn’t enough compared with its $31.1 billion endowment. (Yale argues that it donates more money to its host city than peer institutions do and helps New Haven in many other ways, too.)
Wilbur Cross student Dave Cruz-Bustamante, an activist involved with Sunrise New Haven and Citywide Youth Coalition, rode up to Thursday’s march on a bright red bicycle. He said he was protesting as a lifelong city resident who grew up in Fair Haven. “You just realize there’s this giant divide” between the city and the university, he said. He named police brutality and gentrification as two issues that Yale has perpetuated.
Marchers wove in between city buses and gothic university buildings, over the bright yellow Black Lives Matter street mural that decorates Temple Street, side by side with Chabad cars spreading Hanukkah joy.
After the protest eventually dissipated, a cluster of people gathered quietly amid the darkness around the new Christmas tree on the New Haven Green, waiting for the city’s annual holiday tree lighting ceremony.
Usually big, boisterous crowds accompany the annual lighting of the Xmas tree (which the city officially calls a “holiday” tree).
This year’s ritual was devoid of a formal in-person public celebration (and, unfortunately, of llamas) because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, NBC reporters geared up to broadcast the event so that New Haveners could watch it from their television screens. They sent a drone into the sky for an aerial shot.
The tree was the second Christmas conifer this year to arrive on the Green; the first had toppled during a November rainstorm.
Hamden residents Laura and Anthony Santino (pictured at the right) had heard about the first tree’s collapse on the news. They thought of a solution: the 35-foot Norway Spruce sitting in the cul de sac where they live, Robin Hill Lane.
Anthony said he called up the mayor’s office, which redirected him to the parks department. When he initially offered to donate the tree, he said, the parks official on the line seemed hesitant. Then, he texted the official a photo of the massive tree and said he heard back a resounding “we’ll take it.”
It took the tree trimmers three days to prepare the tree for safe transport, according to the Santinos.
On Thursday, the Santinos traveled from their Hamden home to watch the tree light up with their neighbors, Vaughn Willis and Vaughn Willis Jr.
Until about 7:20, they stood with two dozen others who had circled around the tree. After the protest, Hebrew song, and heated traffic had died down, a quiet settled over the public park as onlookers waited.
Call it a silent night.
Without warning, the multicolored lights turned on. Those who had gathered gave out a soft, collective “whoa.”
Cheers to the bus driver. I totally agree. I'm all for your right to protest. You have an entire Green, the sidewalks, the parking spaces. You really think it's your right to block people from picking up their dinner, their kids or their spouses who need a ride home? Or getting home to their family? Ignore the mob.