Snapshots

For years, a few local women have stood by the road, calling for peace.

At 11:30 a.m. on the Sunday after President Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Susan Klein dons a floppy maroon hat with a pink “Women for Peace” button planted proudly on the front, straps on a red fanny pack stuffed with fliers, and steps out the door. It’s a half-hour walk from her home near Westville to the triangular island at the corner of Broadway and Park Street in New Haven, across from Christ Church and Maison Mathis. By noon, she’s in position, holding up a silver Styrofoam. . . Read more

ID cards have given us access to Yale since the ‘90s. What do they signify?

When Miko McGinty was a senior at Yale in 1993, she could get in anywhere. Most students on campus lugged around three keys at all times (one for their college’s courtyard, one for their entryway, and one for their suite), and still had to wait outside the gates of other residential colleges until a sympathetic student let them in. McGinty made no such sacrifices: as the owner of a master key passed down from an upperclassman friend, she was one of only about ten students. . . Read more

A sticker helps small businesses show their pride in a post-industrial city

Matthew Freiner sits in his makeshift office on the second floor of the Devil’s Gear Bike Shop on Orange Street, leaning back in his folding chair. His desk is piled with random notes, and an array of cycling suits is tacked to the wall. Since 2001, he has designed and printed his own t-shirts and stickers, in addition to fixing bikes and selling gear. Freiner loves making things, but making them in New Haven, he says, is especially rewarding. “Ugh, God. It’s colossal,” he said.. . . Read more

An urban explorer documents the former gun factory before it transforms.

Bryan Buckley, a lanky 23-year-old wedding photographer and welder from New Bedford, Massachusetts, pulls into the parking lot of the Winchester Lofts in his red Volkswagen. He is not interested in the new loft apartments but in the decaying walls and boarded-up windows immediately adjacent to them. He wears a hoodie, jeans, and a baseball cap. His face is smooth and boyish. He takes out his phone and pulls up a satellite image of the block on which we’re parked, which shows the sections of. . . Read more

A flashy “free speech debate” takes the stage.

The empty stage of the Yale Repertory Theatre looked like the set of a talk show. A black-and-white photograph of the New York City skyline hung in three panels in the center, and two empty frosted-glass tables stood on either side of the stage, each flanked by a black podium. Lights on the walls shifted sunset-like from orange to pink. On March 1, Yale students, professors, New Haven locals, and even high school debate teams shuffled into the Rep clutching grey pamphlets that declared: “Free. . . Read more

Navigating the limits of the university’s support.

Elise* ’16 speaks the way most people write—without garden-path syntax, unnecessary repetition, or filler words. Her tone is even and detached, simultaneously emphatic and matter-of-fact. Her lack of facial and auditory expressiveness is common in autistic people and brilliant but abrasive television detectives—but then, I knew what to look for. We didn’t make eye contact. Like many women with autism, Elise received her diagnosis relatively late in life. She was frank about the process. “It sucked. I always knew something was wrong, or off, and. . . Read more

Sewage contamination in New Haven’s out-of-sight River.

Photo by Jen Lu New Haven is a city of unseen rivers. In addition to sitting on the shores of the Long Island Sound, it is part of three separate watersheds—water runs off into three different rivers that run through the city: the Quinnipiac River, the Mill River, and the West River, the last of which is twenty-five miles long and, in New Haven, largely out of sight of the city dwellers. “Some people honestly don’t even know that the river exists,” said Kendall Barbery,. . . Read more

A canon for the neighborhood.

Photo by Edward Columbia A three-storey building on the corner of Day Street and Edgewood Avenue bears two side-by-side signs. The first reads, “A Walk in Truth: Christian Books”; the other, “blackPRINT: a Black-American Heritage Gallery.” Hanging in the window to the right of the entrance is a large banner with the words “TELL ALL THE CHILDREN OUR STORY—WE’VE COME THIS FAR BY FAITH” in red, black, and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag. Campaign signs for Mayor Toni Harp run along the windowsills,. . . Read more