Author Archives: Esther Zuckerman

A New Haven activist group wants each city department to cut its budget by 10 percent to keep the city’s current tax rate in place next fiscal year. So said Jeffrey Kerekes, one of the lead organizers of the New Haven Citizens Action Network, which has attended community meetings over the last several weeks to »

School policy requires every room in the Barnard Environmental Studies Interdistrict Magnet School to have a non-human living thing in it — and for Michael Crocco, the school’s principal, that thing is a fish in a small tank in his office. But across the room sits a whiteboard on which Crocco outlines his goals for »

It was Felicia Ricci’s ’08 first day as a standby for the role of Elphaba, the not-so-wicked Wicked Witch of the West, in the San Francisco production of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” She was watching the show from the audience and listened as the woman playing Elphaba sang her first big number, “The Wizard and »

New Haven’s residents need to look out for one another, Ward 12 Alderman Gerald Antunes said in an address Monday evening on behalf of the Board of Aldermen’s Black and Hispanic Caucus. Speaking in the wake of a spate of murders that has left 11 dead since January, Antunes’s call for residents to work together »

Ward 1 Alderman Mike Jones ’11 and two other aldermen want to raise the wages for some employees working with the city. They will submit a proposal to the Board of Aldermen today that would raise the “living wage” — the minimum salary, based on economic indices, for an average household to meet everyday costs »

They turned out in droves, 200 strong, gathered in the center of a neighborhood ravaged by a recent streak of deadly violence. And as they waited for the mayor and police chief, they grew restless. People scrounged to find spare seats in the East Rock Elks Lodge on Webster Street on Thursday night; others stood »

Out of money and out of time, the Cedar Street overflow shelter, which provides homeless men with a place to sleep and food to eat during the winter months, closed Monday, leaving about 75 homeless men with nowhere to go. The center’s closing comes two years after the city cut funding for the shelter by »

Ashlee Leak, a 22-year-old dining worker at Commons, went to Toad’s Place right after she got off work at 11 a.m. Tuesday, still wearing her Yale employee polo shirt and a hairnet over brown-and-purple hair. She wanted to see if she could make it onto the 25th season of MTV’s “The Real World.” The seminal »

Ward 19 alderwoman Alfreda Edwards did not know his name, but she would wave to him, recognizing him by his gray clothes and hat, as he went in and out of the halfway house across the street from where she lives. But on Thursday, his body was found on their street, rolled up in plastic »

Even though New Haven officials are already considering changes to citywide on-street parking, three aldermen have proposed a working group to speed things up. To find ways to improve the city’s on-street parking, the aldermen — Justin Elicker FES ’10 SOM ’10 of Ward 10, Roland Lemar of Ward 9 and Mike Jones ’11 of »

Raymond Clark III, who is charged with the murder of Annie Le GRD ’13, appeared in court today as New Haven Superior Court Judge Roland Fasano ruled in favor of his attorneys’ request to return Clark’s seized car. Still, the prosecution can use secondary evidence, such as photographs of Clark’s red 2000 Ford Mustang, said »

A judge is expected to decide today whether a car owned by Raymond Clark III and seized by police in September will be returned to Clark’s family, said Joseph Lopez, one of Clark’s lawyers. According to warrants released in December, police discovered a pair of bloody white Converse sneakers, stained hospital scrubs and a dark »