“Where are you from? How old are you?” he asks through broken teeth as the cab shudders through the night. The city distracts me: Car horns collide with urban noise, motorbikes hurl themselves across traffic lanes, pollution obscures the descending sun. I return his questions with vague answers in Mandarin. I don’t tell him that I am American and fifteen. My hands are sticky with sweat and street market mango.
He dances in front of me on the New Haven cement, inflecting his voice as he repeats, “There is nothing to be scared of. You are making up your own fear.” I don’t know this part of town, but I do know two men behind us are snorting something. My phone is dead in my bag. I soberly turn to my friend, “You don’t understand.”
His laughter shakes his entire body and he slaps my thigh. I am pressed against the side of the cab when I realize that we are no longer headed towards my home. Before he asks me another question, he slaps my thigh again. The radio plays old Chinese hits as I lodge my tote bag near the packs of cigarettes surrounding the stick shift, between the driver’s seat and mine.
A sofa store with cheap neon lights is our lone landmark as we try to locate campus. “You’re scared?” he asks again, smirking and jumping into the road. Behind him, the lights glimmer in the bruised black-blue of nighttime, reflecting across the windows of the unidentified buildings surrounding us. I am wearing a cream dress and a memory. We keep walking. My necklace breaks.
I look at the road more than he does. I don’t want to see him look at me. I fumble at my phone and send several messages to my friend, Phil. “I don’t know what is going on” and “What should I do?” are among them. My address is written down on a slip and I try to confirm it again with the driver. He paws at it, but does not respond. It’s been twenty minutes and he instead wants to know where I study. There is nothing lost in translation.
Our conversation tugs back and forth. I make our return to campus into a game, “Want to bet on who can find the right way back?” I want to ask him about the first time he realized he was vulnerable. I want to ask him about his hidden fulcrums and fabrics of experience that he wears and that wear at him. Disguising my vulnerability as something he could win was the only way to ensure that my concerns were taken seriously.
Text messaging becomes a phone call. “Phil, I need you to speak to this driver. He won’t listen to me. I know he understands me.” The maroon handheld passes between the driver and me. Phil brokering the situation with the cab driver momentarily suspends his questions and taunts. The pollution is back and I watch the incremental increase of renminbi on the cab fare meter. I press back up against the door as we take a sharp turn.
I locate the blocks leading to Broadway. One of my last maneuvers is wrong so he suggests we swivel around. Spotting the shops I am familiar with, I realize I lost my own game in one sense — I didn’t find the right way back — but that I won it in another.
My grey apartment complex later emerges. I pay the cab driver, closing a transaction that I had not wanted to be a part of. Before climbing up the stairs of my complex, my breath has already peaked.
I hold my broken necklace at the intersection and think about cab rides, being nineteen and people — myself and others — not understanding. I think about making up fear. I wonder if I should have asked my friend if that taxicab ride was not real. I walk back to my dorm with other friends whom I find getting late night meals at GHeav, but he and I remain friends with questions, pollution and places unknown.
I realize that my sense of fear is heightened and often not justified. So what do I do with it? How do I get out of the taxicab?
There is something desolate and industrial about the walk up State Street to Interstate 91. Fallen leaves — thin, auburn, curled like fists — are left unraked and scattered messily on the pavement. The park by the intersection of Humphrey and State is empty but for a small playground with a tired pair of swings and accompanying metal slide. The same sunlight that caresses the collegiate Gothic structures and throngs of college students on Old Campus feels harsher and starker here. I can see the top of the underpass and just make out its rusting surface, burnt umber scars on the ash grey concrete. Pulled out of the warm, Disneyland-esque cocoon of Silliman College, I find the area run-down barren and impersonal. As I turn right on Humphrey Street to face the underpass, however, everything changes.
An explosion of color: The underpass is lit up by ecstatic strokes of azure, bright cerulean, magenta and chartreuse. Two large murals cover every inch of the inner walls. This is the Under 91 Project, a quest to transform the grim concrete canyon of the underpass that divides East Rock and Upper State Street from Fair Haven. According to Aicha Woods ARC ’97, one of the lead organizers of the Under 91 Project, “the differences are pretty stark between the more economically diverse East Rock side and the Fair Haven side, which has anecdotally always been a pretty rough area.”
The statistics tell the same story: violent crime rates in the Wooster Square, Mill River and Fair Haven area are higher than the citywide average. On a map of income distribution in New Haven, presented by the Data Haven Community Index, the left area of Interstate 91 is shown to have significantly lower income levels and a higher concentration of public housing than the right.
Walking into the passageway, I first see Alberto Colon, one of the commissioned artists, atop a tall ladder, putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece adorning the passage’s right wall. He’s going over with a spray can what seems to be a series of purple, bubble-like, hexagonal shapes, which he later explains to me are human cells. They are supposed to correspond to the large colorful gummy worm strings on the far end of the wall, which he says are DNA strands. The cells and strands flow from one end of the wall to the next without any border or breakage, fluid and continuous. This feeling of continuity is precisely what Colon was trying to communicate.
“I like organic shapes, I try to avoid having any straight squares or rectangles in my artwork,” he says, pointing out the smoothness of each stroke, a drastic contrast to the stiff lines of the actual architecture of the underpass. The diverse, vibrant colors of the DNA strands, coupled with their fluid, borderless presentation, fit neatly into the mission of the Under 91 Project, as explained by the project’s website: to reclaim the passageway as a connector rather than a rigid concrete divider. In doing so, the project aims to bring together the vibrant and diverse Jocelyn Square and East Rock communities.
The very process of putting together this mural was centered on the idea of bringing together a community. Not only was the selection process for the artists based on a door-to-door survey of the Jocelyn Square neighborhood, but the final murals were decided upon through community vote. When the artists were at the tail end of finishing their pieces, people from all corners of New Haven — inhabitants of the immediate area, college students, little children, their grand parents — were invited to leave their own physical mark on the walls of the underpass. Paintbrushes were handed out, and participants were asked to do whatever they wanted.
“We didn’t do a lot of advertising but turnout was much larger than we anticipated,” says Woods. “People were told to write initially within the set boundaries, but it totally exploded all over the walls.”
The evidence of that explosion sprawls before me. Underneath Alberto’s DNA strands, I find a chaotic medley of names (Romeo Yoniel, Shanda, Jay Vory), song lyrics (“Birds flying highhhh, you know how I feel”) love declarations (“Theo Loves Us,” “Xander Loves Bacon”) and thoughts (“I think Yale business students should have to do people’s taxes for free”). The words are anarchic and spontaneous, sentences and phrases snaking over and underneath each other.Illustrations are crammed into small spaces and scattered across the wall: bunny heads, flowers, Arabic characters, phrases in Spanish. I instantly recognize a collection of self-portraits as the work of a first grade artist, thanks to the two-dimensional, blocky style: opaque circle eyes, upright vertical lines as strands of hair, and wide, u-shaped mouths.
Stepping back to take everything in, I find a certain rhythm and harmony in the disarray and discord. I feel a sense of comfort knowing that so many people once stood where I now stand and baptized the wall with their exuberant, uninhibited self-expression.
“The public kind of went overboard last Saturday,” Colon says, laughing. “But that’s OK.”
I imagine that before the project, this was a place through which pedestrians would quickly shuffle, anxious to reach the other side. The underpass of Interstate 91 now seems to produce the opposite effect. It makes us amble, pause and appreciate. A car slows down as it drives through, the driver whipping out his phone to snap a picture. A man in sagging jeans and a bright red hoodie and his girlfriend in a rose-patterned skirt stop to admire the expansive mural on the left wall. As I follow their gaze from one end of the wall to the other, I realize that the mural contains an entire storybook narrative.
It begins with a depiction of outer space — three spheres that appear to be Earth, Mercury and Jupiter, orbiting each other. The dominant color of this mural is the electric crimson that one finds in Manga comics, Yugio cards and East Asian computer games. Then this outer-space world seamlessly morphs into an underwater one: Neil Armstrong, a motif transposed from the earlier mural, clutches his American flag as he stands next to a miniature space rover atop the rim of a large bathtub, as if about to dive in. In the center of the bathtub, sitting next to the chubby hand of a child, is a canary yellow rubber duck, imposing in its brightness.
To the right, the powder blue bath water suddenly swirls into a violent, onyx tide that has caught a container ship in its stormy wrath. Towards the far right of the mural, we enter the depths of the bath water sea, a rich, azure, Jules Verne-esque world of caverns, stalagmites and a large reclining octopus. At the final section of the wall, the sea transitions into a grass field of strong, vermilion stalks and a large butterfly, drawn with the meticulous, anatomical detail of an entomology textbook or a diagram at a natural history museum. A week ago, Woods tells me, a woman stood in front of this section of the wall, in tears. Her grandmother had told her before passing away that she would come back as a butterfly.
This continuous series of imaginary, child-like realms seem to suggest that the world around us — its grandeur, terror and danger — are simply projections of our own mind and consciousness. Just as a bathtub can be transformed into a mythological underwater world, a cold and dingy underpass can be wholly reinvented by sheer force of the imagination. Perhaps, as Woods believes, the stark division between the neighborhoods was “as much in our heads, as in the data of disparity or the barriers of urban infrastructure.”
However, despite its seemingly idealistic, Wordsworthian message, the art of Under 91 remains grounded and realist in its aims. As I turn around to leave, I notice, for the first time, the small patch of wall space at the entrance of the passageway. There are no underwater kingdoms or DNA strands here, but a painted portrayal of Interstate 91 itself: pale blue sky, wisps of cirrus clouds, the rusting grey asphalt of the underpass and two iron poles holding up an industrial metal sign, bearing the words “New Haven” in plain white letters.
The artists of Under 91 do not overstate the transformative power of their artwork: I-91 is still an interstate. But take a stroll through the underpass of Interstate 91 — maybe you’ll start to see it a little differently
Sylvie McNamara’s ’16 heater won’t start. It is January in New Haven, and for two weeks, she has dealt with the cold of winter in her third-floor Pike International apartment on Park Street.
When her heater stops working, she puts in a work order — a request for utility fixes — online. She receives no confirmation email, no response. She tries again. After submitting a second work order, once again unanswered, she picks up the phone and begins leaving voice messages.
“I feel like when your heat is broken in January, that’s something that you pay attention to as a landlord,” McNamara says.
When maintenance staff come into her studio apartment to fix the heater, they leave no note indicating they have been there or addressed her concern, a practice she says is typical of the real estate services company.
McNamara’s story is not an uncommon one. Of the 14 current and former tenants interviewed, many of whom requested anonymity out of fear that Pike would seek retribution through litigious or other means, a vast majority expressed negative opinions of the company’s management and customer service.
The real estate organization’s blue signs and white letters are ubiquitous in the Elm City. Founded in 2000 by Rabbi Shmully Hecht, the company — which has been renamed several times — aggressively expanded its operations as housing prices plummeted during the 2008-’09 recession. With over 1,000 apartments across the city, Pike has emerged as New Haven’s most influential landlord.
While the company’s hold over area real estate properties continues to grow, little is known about its operations. Heating issues, as it turns out, are just the tip of the iceberg.
* * *
Former mayor John DeStefano, Jr. rejected the suggestion that Pike’s expansion during economic downturn was an opportunistic business strategy. Rather, he saw the move as a sign of the company’s confidence in New Haven’s continued growth.
“[Hecht] lives here. He’s involved in the community,” DeStefano said. “He does a good job with his properties. They’re clean. He’s been a solid landlord and he does what you’d expect a landlord to do,” the mayor said.
When the University-Wide Advisory Committee on Graduate and Professional Student Housing met with Pike, committee member Marie-Amelie George GRD ’17 said it became apparent that Hecht has very close ties to both Yale and City Hall.
DeStefano denied this connection. Although he said Hecht has donated to his past political campaigns and those of other Democrats such as Henry Fernandez ’94, the amounts were neither significant nor donated with an intent to acquire political capital.
Although he raised about $400,000 for his last campaign, DeStefano said he only received a thousand or so dollars from Hecht. He added that Hecht “never sought to be involved in politics” and was only donating within his right as a politically engaged citizen.
University Director of Housing and Fleet Management George Longyear said Yale seeks to have partnerships with all the major landlords in New Haven, including Pike, in the hopes of acting as a mediator when problems or miscommunications arise. He added that Yale’s on-going discussions with Pike have been fruitful and have already yielded positive changes in the way Pike conducts its business.
“We believe that Pike shares our desire to have students satisfied with their rental arrangements and wishes to work with us to achieve that goal,” he said.
But students with experience in Pike-owned properties disagreed. Brandis Yarrington ’14, who lived in a Pike house last year, said the company’s business practices were questionable and targeted students who, either because of financial constraints or naiveté, have no other alternatives.
“They have a near-monopoly on affordable apartments in New Haven,” housing committee member George noted.
She added that the company’s acquisitions have been strategic, with a focus on securing properties close to campus. A former Pike tenant herself, George said the advisory committee was formed after a number of graduate students complained to the Graduate Student Assembly and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate about the living conditions.
Both George and Songhee Bae DIV ’15 said Pike’s rapid expansion could be one reason for its poor responsiveness as a landlord.
Bae said a former employee informed her that Pike was expanding at too fast a rate. Rather than consolidate and provide quality services to existing apartments, Pike was more focused on acquiring properties as swiftly as possible, the employee told Bae.
“I think one of the pitfalls might be that they are juggling too many balls at once,” George noted.
Despite the voluminous complaints that students and residents have filed against Pike, she said the company has largely escaped consequences, likely because it benefits from the political influence that Hecht wields.
Hecht declined repeated requests to comment for this story, forwarding all questions via email to Pike Director of Operations Christina Rossetti.
Hecht’s connection to Yale rests largely in his involvement with the Jewish community on campus. In 1996, he co-founded Eliezer Society with future Harvard Law professor and public intellectual Noah Feldman LAW ’97 and future U.S. Senator Cory Booker LAW ’97. Since its inception under the name Chai Society, the group has remained Hecht’s most visible connection to the University. Eliezer invites Yale students to discuss Judaism and other theological or secular issues with prominent guest speakers. A 2011 TIME Magazine article reported that “world leaders clear their schedules to attend Shabbat dinner” at the society. Past guests include Senator Joe Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren.
But while Hecht continues to be a chief participant in and advisor to Eliezer, the management of Pike remains his day job. In a July 2011 New Haven Independent profile, Hecht claims to have received “tens of millions of dollars” from out-of-state investors to fund Pike’s expansion. Because the company is privately-owned and uses a number of limited liability corporations to house its properties, these investors are difficult to identify.
“Money’s coming from Canada. Money’s coming from Tel Aviv. Money’s coming from New York City. Money’s coming from Florida. Money’s coming from all different types of families and institutions,” he told the Independent, adding that his investors are typically high net-worth families who also believe in New Haven’s growing attractiveness as a city.
One Yale senior, who wished to be anonymous because he feared Pike would exploit the social security number and credit card details he gave them, said Yochanan Levitansky was one of the Pike employees he and his friends dealt with last year. Levitansky, according to a 2009 New Haven Independent article, was found guilty of defrauding hundreds of eBay customers by selling them electronic goods he never intended to deliver. Levitansky pocketed $237,257 from these false transactions. Although she did not confirm the years during which Levitansky worked for Pike, Rossetti confirmed that he was a former employee who has since left the company.
When Rossetti was asked how a rabbi could find the millions in investments needed to build such an extensive property portfolio, she wrote in an email that she was not involved in raising the company’s seed money.
Check out this rental property investments post here if you’re looking for high property investment opportunities!
* * *
Hyungmi Lim ’15 and Carlisle Runge ’14 moved into their apartment on 162 Park St. later than expected. Pike had not cleaned the property in time for their September 2013 move-in date.
But within a month of residency, their problems were going to get much worse.
It was October when the building began to reek with a pungent stench: “God, it wasn’t like anything I had ever smelled before,” Lim said.
The smell grew so strong that she began to have a gagging reaction each time she entered the house. Soon, it permeated her and Runge’s clothes, and the smell followed them outside. For nearly a month, Lim, Runge and a Yale School of Management student who lived on the third floor attempted to contact Pike almost daily about the smell. The third-floor tenant, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said he often went to the office only to be rebuffed.
“They were just stonewalling me. Just ignoring me. They don’t give a shit — they assume it was just a stink and didn’t bother,” the tenant on the third floor said. He added that often Pike employees would tell him that they were sending somebody shortly. That person never came.
When Lim finally noticed activity around the door leading to the first-floor apartment — from which the smell emanated — the movement was traced to maggots that were making their way through the building. She realized then that something had gone horribly wrong.
Edmund Valuskas was found dead due to natural causes on Oct. 28, when Lim returned to the apartment to find New Haven police officers and medical crews in HAZMAT suits congregated outside. By then, the smell had been present for over a month.
The SOM student said Pike tried to conceal Valuskas’ death.
“They tried to deny [his death] at first. They told me he was missing or usually unresponsive,” he said.
Pike Director of Operations Rossetti wrote in an email to the News that Pike responded immediately to the smell at 162 Park.
Referring to Valuskas as a “hoarder,” Rossetti explained that they considered his unresponsiveness normal.
“He was on a subsidy from the government and the government consistently failed to do their inspections,” she wrote. “This was a government failure not Pike International.”
While New Haven housing officials deemed the property unsanitary, Lim said Pike was unresponsive when the three remaining tenants asked for assistance in procuring replacement housing. It was only when Runge’s guardians, who are both lawyers, threatened to intervene that the company began to engage with their requests. Still, Lim added, Pike argued that they bore no legal responsibility because they had not played a part in Valuskas’ passing.
* * *
Not all the stories are so morbid, but accounts from other students and faculty represent Pike as equally evasive and unresponsive.
As a woman entering Yale from South Korea with a husband and a four-year old daughter, Bae knew she had to make the right call with her off-campus housing.
Because she also manages several businesses in South Korea, Bae wanted to rent two apartments in New Haven, one where she would live near the Divinity School, where she would begin her graduate studies, and another which would serve as a make-shift office. From South Korea, Bae searched for apartments online and found two apartments from Pike that seemed exactly what she wanted. The first apartment, a three-bedroom place on 670 Prospect St., was $3000 a month, the most expensive and luxurious apartment owned by Pike. The second, which was to be her office, cost $2000 a month and was on 477 Prospect St.
Although she was not able to visit these locations in person because she was in Korea, Bae said she thought Pike’s frequent referrals to Yale on its website was a sign that the company was University-approved.
Bae arrived to find the living conditions unsuitable for her family. And her new office on 477 Prospect St., she said, looked nothing like the photos of the apartment listed on Pike’s website.
“When we walked inside, it was not the space on the Internet,” she said. “It was completely different and definitely smaller,” she added, noting that unlike the actual property, the one on the Internet was very modern.
Even the more expensive apartment was underwhelming. The ‘living room’ was a basement, she explained, and constant stream of cold air from downstairs made her daughter sick. Soon Bae and her family moved into the one-bedroom apartment that she had planned to use as an office.
Yet beyond the poor conditions — which included a lack of heat, uneven floors and windows that were structurally unsound and posed a safety risk to her daughter — Bae was most disappointed by Pike’s customer service.
“It was my first time being offended by a receptionist on the phone. She just hung up the phone on me whenever I wanted to talk to someone higher up,” she exclaimed. Although she was laughing about it over the phone when interviewed on Tuesday, Bae recalled feeling sad and confused at the treatment she received.
When Bae realized she was pregnant again, she knew her living situation was untenable. After speaking with friends and University officials, she met a former employee of Pike who sympathized with her story. The ex-employee advised Bae to break her lease.
When she did so and drew up papers with a lawyer, Peter Blasini, who had worked with other former Pike tenants, she recounted the anger with which Pike officials reacted. Every day in the lead-up to her move-out day, Bae said two or three people from Pike would come and angrily knock on her door.
“I felt terrible and scared something was going to happen when we moved out,” she said, adding that she approached Divinity School faculty about being afraid for her safety. On the day that she moved out, Bae turned off her phone because she feared Hecht would call her and try to convince her to stay.
Although her original home was just a few minutes away from the Divinity School by foot, Bae decided to leave her Pike rental property in favor of housing in Trumbull, Conn. — a 45-minute drive from school. Her new landlord often responds to emails within minutes, she said.
By the end of her stay with Pike, Bae and her husband had considered a class action suit against the company, but ultimately did not file one due to time constraints.
* * *
When Matt Lawlor ’14 and his roommates moved into their Pike house on 401 Crown St., there was a mountain of trash by the front steps. Inside, there were abandoned kegs, holes in the walls and footprints on the ceiling. All of the first floor drains were clogged and crusted with black mold — and there was no hot water, he said.
“We went to [the Pike staff], and we told them ‘you have to fix this,’” Lawlor said. Initially, Pike was somewhat responsive, fixing the plumbing and water heater. But then, he recalled, “They started ignoring me.” So much so that when Lawlor and his housemates called into the office multiple times, in need of further utility fixes, they received the same message for days on end: that the person they were looking for was in a meeting.
Soon, Lawlor and his housemates established a rotational calling schedule between the five of them, one person on duty every hour to call.
Yarrington, one of Lawlor’s housemates, explained the problems that led to this endeavor. Their apartment’s floor was detached from the wall and sinking, causing, cold air from the basement to seep through. As a result, their apartment was chilly and they were forced to pay more for heating.
Yarrington added, mice were constantly scuttling around.
Cody Kahoe ’15, who lives at 37 Lynwood Pl. with five other undergraduates, has also dealt with increased heating costs as a result of broken windows. The house’s washer and dryer, which have been inoperable since the summer, were only repaired by Pike last week.
While Kahoe said he and his housemates are fond of their living space because it has its own “flavor,” he added that it is not a place he would want to live for the rest of his life.
“It’s kind of dumpish,” he said. “The stairs are incredibly warped, to the point that my friends will ask me, ‘am I high, or is there something wrong with your stairs?’” He added that from the back of the house, it becomes clear that the structure is crooked.
Lawlor, Yarrington and Kahoe’s experiences with Pike’s unresponsiveness do not surprise McNamara. When she moved into her apartment in August, the man showing her around handed her the keys and his card and said, “Call this number if you ever need any maintenance done, and we’ll get people within four days.” That turnaround time is nothing to brag about, McNamara said.
Still, Rossetti said Pike is becoming proactive whereas it was once reactive. In an email to the News, she said the company sends out regular emails and letters to check in with residents. The company is also upgrading its software, she said, to make sure maintenance teams can be notified of requests in real-time to expedite the process. In addition, Rossetti said she personally visits both Pike’s buildings and also Yale administrators to ensure that “nothing is slipping through the cracks.”
* * *
Despite the prevalence of these incidents, students interviewed said rent in Pike properties is much higher than that of comparable spaces in the city.
“Pike is more interested in getting your money than in providing the services,” Yarrington said.
Kahoe feels this acutely. Though he is bothered by Pike’s utilities and maintenance issues, he is particularly frustrated with the high price he has to pay.
“We’re paying New York City rent for a house in New Haven,” he said, adding that his six housemates pay around $5,500 a month in rent. Price ranges depend on room size, which means that his housemates living in the largest rooms pay upwards of a thousand dollars a month.
And while Kahoe has the house’s smallest room, he said he pays two to three times more than friends living in similarly-sized spaces in nicer houses on Dwight Street.
Under these conditions, what causes students to sign leases with Pike?
Some undergraduates, like McNamara, a transfer student who was not familiar with New Haven before coming to Yale, enter off-campus housing unaware of others’ experiences.
“Most of my friends know better,” McNamara said. “[Pike] has such a bad reputation that when I tell people that I live in a Pike-owned building, they’re like, ‘I’m so sorry.’”
But others know about Pike’s reputation and decide to live there anyway. They say there are simply no other choices.
Kahoe said Pike is a part of an “oligopoly” on the housing market for students, so when it decides to increase rent, students are in no place to negotiate. When Pike wanted to increase Kahoe and his housemates’ rent by 5 percent (compared to the previous year), Kahoe tried to speak with them about it. But “they claimed they had other people who were interested.” Eventually, they negotiated the increase to 2.8 percent.
“They claim that it is customary to raise rent 5 to 10 percent per month each year,” Kahoe said in an email to the News. “This is really not true. I have friends who rent from other people in New Haven who have not had their rent increased in the last two years.”
* * *
Several students and faculty interviewed said they wish Yale were more involved, in some way or another, with properties off-campus.
“Many graduate students would like the University to build more housing for graduate or professional school students,” said George, adding that the principal problem is New Haven’s high occupancy rate. At 98 percent, George said, the rate makes it is difficult for students to negotiate with landlords because they can easily find other tenants.
Yale French Lector Ruth Koizim, whose friends have broken leases with Pike, said she hopes Yale will apply more pressure on the real estate company. Still, Koizim, whose late husband was involved in local politics, pointed out that in the New Haven community, Hecht is recognized as “a big mover and shaker” — a status that perhaps protected him from political consequence.
Some students expressed hope that Yale will purchase more properties that the University could lease as off-campus housing for students. They cited as an example Harrison Court, an apartment building adjacent to Pierson College that Yale owns and leases to students at market prices. But Koizim said such an action is likely unfeasible due to complex fiscal reasons.
Bruce Alexander, University vice-president for New Haven and state affairs and campus development, said Yale only purchased properties on Howe Street “to arrest a serious decline in that neighborhood adjacent to Davenport and Pierson.”
Longyear said while the University cannot control off-campus housing it does not own, Yale recognizes that students’ living arrangements affect the quality of their college experience. As such, Yale’s Off-Campus Living website is in the process of establishing a Landlord Ratings platform where students can compare and evaluate their rental experiences. Longyear believes that this resource will incentivize landlords to build good relationships with their tenants.
* * *
Lawlor and Yarrington now live in an Off-Broadway Inc. property. Their current landlords have been quick to fix burst pipes and shovel snow throughout the winter months, they said.
The students were eager to leave their Pike house last spring, but even moving out posed its challenges. For several months, Pike refused to return their security deposit. After threatening to go to court, Lawlor also showed the company time-stamped photos of the house.
After a year, the mold that greeted them at the beginning of their stay had remained intact.
It’s difficult to go through four years at Yale without hearing: “To the tables down at Mory’s / To the place where Louis dwells / To the dear old Temple Bar we love so well.” For years, Yale’s most storied a cappella groups have sung of evenings spent with good drink and good company at the famous club. But the past six years of Mory’s history haven’t been as rosy as the Whiffenpoofs might imply.
In December 2008, this time-honored bastion of Yale tradition was forced to close its doors, citing low revenue and a diminishing endowment. After much fundraising and extensive renovations, Mory’s reopened in the fall of 2010, and since then has put all its efforts into launching Old Yale into the New.
Like Yale, Mory’s has in the past been criticized for being an “old boy’s club” and out of tune with the new generation of Yale and its community. Today, it is trying to shake that image, endeavoring to appeal to a broader audience, one more suited to the modern age, while maintaining their roots — and these roots are strong. Mory’s is steeped in history, a rich and colorful one, closely intertwined with that of Yale.
Mory’s began in 1861 as an obscure alehouse. The working-class saloon, then owned by Frank Moriarty and his wife, was located at 103 Wooster St., close to the waterfront. It wasn’t long before Yale students began trickling inside its oak doors. Indeed, its relaxed atmosphere attracted the attention of the Yale Crew Team, who made the bar their post-practice staple.
Over time, as its popularity with the Yale boys continued to grow, it moved — the first of many such changes — to Court Street, where it was given the name “The Quiet House.” The saloon trappings of before were discarded in favor of a Victorian-style pub, where students congregated to drink Guinness and India Pale Ale.
When Moriarty died in 1876, his wife changed location again to Temple Street, where it was renamed “The Temple Bar.” Here it remained for many years, changing management and going through a period of trouble until eventually a German man called Louis Linder bought the lease from the Moriarty estate.
Linder, a popular at what was now known as “Mory’s,” loved music and drew inspiration from his German roots and his time working for Lüchow’s — a favorite in the New York entertainment and restaurant scene. In 1909, Linder encouraged a group of Yale Glee Club singers to perform together one night at Mory’s — a group that eventually adopted the name “Whiffenpoofs.” Audiences would eagerly await the Whiffs’ singing of the new Mory’s anthem, which immortalized Linder and the Temple Bar. “Louis made Mory’s fun,” history professor Jay Gitlin ’71 MUS ’74 GRD ’02 illuminates.
In 1912, Mory’s faced redevelopment plans and financial difficulties due to rising rent and strong competition that threatened to close the bar. Linder, whose health was failing him, prepared to go out of business.
Yale students and alumni greeted this with uproar, abhorring the notion that this long-loved establishment might close its doors for good. It had become an integral part of the Yale tradition, and those who loved it were spurred into action, donating to the cause, and in the process, forming the Mory’s Association.
Under the new management, with Linder still in the position of steward, the bar and restaurant became a private club, taking up its new and final residence at 306 York St. — fitted with all the accoutrements that had made the Temple Bar such a beloved place.
Linder died the following year in 1913, though Mory’s continued to grow from its humble beginnings. “It was a kind of informal alumni gathering place,” Gitlin explains, and soon much of the administration and faculty attained membership. “It became part of the Yale life cycle. It had become a place of memories.”
And thus Mory’s carried on for much of the 20th century — allowing women to join as of 1972 — encouraging both alumni and current students to consider the club a home away from home in the heart of New Haven.
Yet as times changed, Mory’s was reluctant to change with them. Gitlin describes how “People came here who came to perceive Mory’s, rightly or wrongly, as elitist Old Yale.”
“Mory’s had a certain identity in the 1910s, and for a long time it was stuck in the Mory’s of 1912,” Basie Bales Gitlin ’10, who is co-writing the official Mory’s history with his father Jay Gitlin, elaborated. As a result of the growing discomfort with Mory’s perceived elitism, student involvement dropped and lifetime memberships — enrollment in which was possible up until 1974 — drained the club of money. Lacking sufficient capital and the appropriate business model to tackle the deficient facilities and operating losses, Mory’s was forced to close in December of 2008.
Much like in 1912, Yale alumni and students viewed the potential end of this 150-year-long era, and the idea of a Yale without Mory’s, as unacceptable. Tom Ketchum, President of the Mory’s Association Board of Governors, details: “People just couldn’t imagine Yale without Mory’s.”
A feasibility plan was soon put forward, setting the ball rolling for renovations and the eventual reintroduction of Mory’s. For the better part of 2009 and early 2010, donations poured in and the building was overhauled, its new, more modern face becoming the symbol for what the club one day hoped to be.
In the fall of 2010, 20 months and just over $3 million later, Mory’s opened its doors once more.
With the club back in business, Mory’s had much to prove. Above all, it had to demonstrate that it could move with the times, that it could adapt and evolve just as the Yale student population had.
The greatest struggle Mory’s faced was where to start.
Given that lack of student involvement in Mory’s was one of the primary reasons for their closure in 2008, student outreach was at the center of their efforts. Jackie Morr, the Mory’s general manager of one year and the first woman to take the post, described the “many moving parts to engage students, to make them feel like a part of the Mory’s family.”
Their initial goal was to try to get a sense of whether the current members were happy, and then build a comfortable space for them. Renovations played a huge role in achieving this goal with the addition of the new “Temple Bar” — a more casual bar area with a relaxed dress code — and the ability to rent space upstairs during the day where free tea and coffee are provided to members all day.
Over time, Mory’s had developed a reputation for sub-par, overpriced club fare. Two years ago, the Mory’s Association approached Jeff Caputo – previously of Scoozzi Trattoria in New Haven (now closed) — to mix things up in the kitchen. Caputo was at first hesitant: “Food was never taken seriously [at Mory’s], and I did things in a different kind of way.” However, as executive chef, Caputo has brought about a new era to the club’s food culture, bringing in elements of his past in Italian cuisine to improve on the Mory’s basics.
But it had to be more than a matter of just improving the quality of Mory’s and its facilities — it had to increase its visibility on Yale’s campus. This meant that not only did it have to re-establish itself with its old customers — alumni, and of course the Whiffenpoofs — but attract current students who once formed the lifeblood of Mory’s.
“We really do want students to take advantage of us,” Mary Hu ’82, head of Mory’s Membership & Marketing Committee, elucidated. Of Mory’s 14,000 members, 2,000 are current Yale graduates and undergraduates. Mory’s has organized a variety of activities to bring in even more students, such as Thursday Trivia nights and Happy Hour pricing during the week, which Hu notes have been met with praise and are especially popular with seniors and graduate students. Following further suggestions from current and past Yalies, Mory’s established a Student Ambassador program that rewards new signups with food credit and Mory’s gear, and set up a private dinner comprising of prominent student leaders — not all members — to work to change current perceptions of Mory’s.
“I had only heard of old Yale alumni and professors going to Mory’s,” Devika Mittal SM ’15, the current president of ISO, says. Mittal was one of the student leaders invited to the dinner, among representatives from YCC, YIRA, BSAY and others. Mittal was impressed by what she saw. “[Mory’s] has been doing an incredible job with outreach,” she said. “It was a very intimate setting, and the food and service was excellent.”
Yet despite these efforts by the Mory’s team, many on campus are still unaware of these initiatives. “I haven’t heard of any at all,” Celine Cuevas TD ’15 says. “I’ve never even been to Mory’s.”
The club’s management is not blind to this reality. “There are still a lot of students who don’t know what Mory’s is,” Ketchum admits. Rather than give up, Mory’s has made a conscious effort to rise to the challenge.
One of these concerted pushes was the release of the new reduced-price student menu at the beginning of this year, a move that has encouraged a 35% increase in student membership this semester alone. Morr determines: “It’s about understanding what people want, developing relationships and what they’d like to see.”
“There are a lot of uncharted waters, and we’re just trying to sail through and build momentum,” Caputo confirms.
Across the board, the team behind Mory’s is united in its vision in bringing together the best parts of traditional Old Yale Mory’s with New Yale, each one of them wholly dedicated to the cause they love so much. Though they will have to continue to fight the highly exclusive, WASP-y image long associated with it, in many ways, moving with the times is in line with the true mission of Mory’s. Basie Gitlin argues that “Mory’s history of tradition isn’t stuffy; it’s not about tradition in the sense of being ponderous and old. Its history is one of evolving with the student population.”
Mory’s ultimate aim is to remain much as it always was: a place to create memories. Because, as Jay Gitlin observes: “Continuity resides at Mory’s.”
This is a story about numbers. The first number is 1978.
A story, with dateline New Haven, ran on page seven of The New York Times on May 29, 1978, with the headline, “Connecticut to Reimburse Cities for Tax Lost on Exempt Property.”
Explaining that, for the first time, a state government would make payments to municipalities as partial compensation for the presence of nontaxable nonprofit organizations, the story opened with an anecdote evocative of the Elm City’s property tax predicament.
“From his 13th-floor office window, Mayor Frank Logue [’48 LAW ’51] looked down at the Yale-New Haven Hospital and then at the hills beyond the city line — and beyond the city’s tax grasp — where most of the patients come from,” Matthew L. Wald, special to the Times, wrote.
He then quoted Logue, who governed the city from 1976 to 1979: “Only one in five patients in the hospital over there comes from New Haven, but its tax exemption hits us.”
The very same statement could come today from the mouth of Mayor Toni Harp ARC ’78, perhaps looking from her second-floor office window past the New Haven Green and beyond Center Church at Yale’s Old Campus.
After representing New Haven for 21 years in the Connecticut State Senate, Harp took the city’s helm this January, nearly 36 years after Logue reflected on what remains one of New Haven’s thorniest problems. Roughly 47 percent of the city’s grand list — the enumeration of its properties — is nontaxable, either in the hands of the government or of nonprofit institutions exempt from paying property taxes.
In recognition of the revenue problems tax exemptions create — most harmful, though certainly not unique, to New Haven — the state elected in 1978 to lend a hand. A $10-million hand. Of that sum, New Haven would get roughly $2.9 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1, the Times story reported.
A 100 percent reimbursement was not sought, the article said, in recognition for the benefits towns and cities receive from playing host to institutions such as Yale.
So they settled for a 25 percent in Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT), as the program is called. The state was already doling out $7.2 million in compensation for state-owned property through a program dating back to the 1930s. In total, the state would give $17.2 million that year.
In 2014, the numbers are larger — much larger. Under a formula laid down in 1999, towns and cities are supposed to get 77 cents back from the state for every dollar they lose from tax-exempt colleges and hospitals. For nontaxable state buildings, the reimbursement is 45 cents on the dollar.
In New Haven, the payment should sum to $105.3 million, more than 20 percent of the city’s current operating budget for fiscal year 2013-’14.
Harp, who ran for mayor touting her clout in Hartford, put the matter succinctly.
“The state of Connecticut is a lifeline to New Haven,” Harp said.
THE COFFER HALF FULL
In recent years, that line has frayed. In 2014, New Haven is slated to receive $43.6 million in PILOT, well under half the amount it is owed: Just 29 percent of lost funds from colleges and hospitals and 33 percent from state-owned properties.
New Haven does not suffer alone. Statewide, the payments have not hit statutory levels in years. In the wake of the recession, Connecticut has had to tighten its budget, relying on a clause of a 1999 statute specifying that the payments to each municipality can be reduced based on fiscal constraints.
“As a former [New Haven] alderman, I always used to read it as ‘You should give us 77 percent,’” said Connecticut State Rep. Roland Lemar, who represents portions of New Haven and East Haven in the body that help decides New Haven’s fiscal future. “Most of my colleagues see it as, ‘We fund PILOT based on however much we’re lucky to have.’”
As New Haven’s budget dealings loom — and as it grapples with a major hole in state aid — some in city government are ready to do battle in Hartford for increased funding.
Harp promised a lighter touch.
“I’m going to go with my hat in hand,” she said, adding that budgetary requests from city department heads warn of a potential $19-million hole in the general fund. “If the state does find a surplus, they should give it back to the cities.”
Lurking behind the fragile relationship between the city and the state is a third player: Yale University, the largest employer in New Haven and a multi-billion dollar institution that pays virtually no property taxes on its prominent downtown footprint.
The property taxes the University does pay — more than $4.3 million for the golf course and University Properties retail locations — make Yale one of the five largest taxpayers in the city, according to Lauren Zucker, Yale’s assistant director for New Haven and state affairs. Those payments, combined with Yale’s vast voluntary contributions to the city, have put the question of Yale’s tax-exempt status to bed, Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, Yale’s deputy chief communications officer, insisted.
“What’s notable now … is that taxation of colleges and universities is not part of the conversation here because PILOT and the University’s voluntary payment have created a context where it’s not an issue and the focus can be on cooperation…,” said Morand, whose experience at Yale and in New Haven also includes a stint as a city alder in the early 1990s.
MORE, PLEASE
Taxation, however, is part of the conversation; lawmakers both in New Haven and across the state are making sure of that. As New Haven stares down its fiscal future — budget negotiations begin in March — city leaders are sending a message to Hartford: Give us what we deserve.
New Haven’s Board of Alders unanimously endorsed a resolution in early February calling on Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and the General Assembly to fully fund PILOT. More than a dozen alders co-sponsored the resolution, drafted by freshman alder Mike Stratton, who represents Prospect Hill and Newhallville,
“This is not charity for the city of New Haven — this is our right,” Stratton said before the Monday evening vote. “Just give us our money.”
Stratton said the state has sought to substitute PILOT payments for piecemeal “pet projects,” putting cash into programs of its choice rather than giving autonomy to New Haven. The city is best situated to allocate its own money, he said.
New Haven is taking the hit for all of Connecticut, Stratton added. Nonprofit institutions — including universities, hospitals, museums and churches — benefit the entire state, indeed the region, but cripple New Haven’s ability to raise revenue, he said, echoing Logue’s logic from 1978.
“The whole region is freeriding on the backs of our taxpayers,” Stratton said. The city’s mill rate — which determines property taxes based on assessed value — is 41.88, one of the highest statewide. Under the current rate, the owner of a home with an assessed value of $200,000 would pay $8,376 in property taxes. Harp has said she does not want to raise taxes in the budget she presents to city alders by March 1.
The Board’s statement is largely symbolic, Stratton acknowledged. But it represents just one piece of the alder’s plan to convince the state to send more money to New Haven.
Stratton has also devised a lobbying strategy, which he has hired Bob Shea, a West Hartford lawyer, to execute.
“Bobby [Shea] is helping us navigate where the power is,” Stratton said. Shea did not return multiple requests for comment.
One idea Shea will float with state lawmakers is creating a board with regional oversight over the allocation of PILOT funds.
If the 77 percent and 45 percent thresholds were met, Stratton said, New Haven could lower its tax rate by a full 20 percent.
Nancy Wyman, Connecticut’s Lieutenant Governor, said reaching full PILOT funding this year is not possible. The state lacks the necessary funds, she said.
Harp made a more modest ask in the legislative agenda she laid out the same week the Board passed its resolution. She requested a $5-million increase in PILOT payments to New Haven, a proposal that Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney called “reasonable” at the time. Anything more, he said, would be difficult given the city’s financial constraints.
In his budget proposals — presented Feb. 6 at the opening of the legislative session — Malloy called for an $8-million statewide increase in PILOT for colleges and hospitals. If approved, the increase would mean just over $2 million more for New Haven, less than half of Harp’s stated goal and a fraction of the Board’s.
Stratton said he is after more than one-time upticks in funding. A small increase does little to “change the culture in Hartford” surrounding PILOT, he said. He called on New Haven’s state delegation to fight harder for city. Right now, “They’re taking the easiest road to compromise,” he said.
State lawmakers interviewed said more drastic alterations to PILOT funding this year are highly unlikely. The biennial budget is already in place. Legislative sessions during even calendar years rarely see new appropriations but rather amendments to the current budget.
“A radical redetermination of our entire budget is not likely in the 90 days that we’ve got,” said Roland Lemar, House vice-chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee.
Further, state spending is capped at roughly $21 billion per year, Lemar said. To fully fund PILOT, the state would have to “blow through that cap.”
Still, Lemar said, full statutory reimbursement is a worthy goal, one he has to figure out how to pitch as an urban legislator to his suburban counterparts.
AN EVER-SHRINKING PIE
PILOT funding is like a pie, said Connecticut State Sen. Len Fasano ’81, a Republican who represents parts of Durham, East Haven, North Haven and Wallingford — suburbs surrounding New Haven. As the number of nontaxable nonprofits balloons, and as their footprints expand, different municipalities demand a bigger share of the pie. If funding is static, one town’s increase has to mean another town’s loss.
Many cities get themselves into their own revenue crises, Fasano added, pointing to New Haven’s courting of Gateway Community College in 2012.
“The legislature doesn’t have control over the expansion that municipalities themselves are pushing for,” he said.
Rather than increasing PILOT funding, the state should clarify the process by which a nonprofit moves into a city and takes the property off the tax rolls, said Fasano, who sits on the Planning and Development committee. When Quinnipiac University took over the site of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in North Haven in 2007, the acquisition cost the city a fortune by making the property tax-exempt.
As the PILOT law stands, he said, the state overpromises and underperforms every year.
Fasano said problems of tax exemptions are not unique to New Haven — and the state already sends vastly more money to cities than to suburban towns. For every dollar New Haven sends to the state in taxes, it gets back nearly two dollars, he estimated; North Haven retrieves roughly 12 cents on the dollar.
“Don’t make it sound like you’re doing all these great services for the state, and we’re starving the city,” Fasano said. “If that much is coming from all of our pockets, you need to tell us what you’re doing with the money. And let us review it.”
Former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said moving toward fully funded PILOT is important, but additional revenue should not change the need to control expenditures. He said the debate highlights the need to diversify the tax base.
An ability to levy a sales tax or to charge user fees would free New Haven from its exclusive reliance on property taxes, he said, which inevitably skyrocket when state aid falls.
“Right now, we’re fundamentally attached to the state’s economic wellbeing,” DeStefano said. “When the state catches a cold, the city of New Haven gets pneumonia.”
The best time to reopen the issue of the tax base would be when the economy is on firm footing, he added.
What seem like upward trends in the state’s current economic forecast might loosen up funds to at least address municipal budget needs this year, Harp suggested.
“If the [state] economy improves and the surplus deepens, that creates an opportunity to get more resources,” Harp said. Upgrades to information technology and more trucks for the Public Works Department are one-time payments that could be covered by isolated, single-year state contributions. Rebecca Bombero, a legislative liaison, said that following the passage of the Board’s resolution, the mayor’s office is putting consistent pressure on the state to up the payments. The mayor’s relationship with the governor is strong, Bombero added.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73 also pointed to the state’s budget surplus — of $500 million, not counting delayed bond repayments — as an avenue to redress New Haven’s revenue woes. Connecticut as a whole, Blumenthal said, is uniquely dependent on property taxes in funding education and other local needs.
Partially in recognition of that fact, Connecticut is one of just two states to compensate municipalities for tax-exempt property. Rhode Island also furnishes its cities and towns with PILOT.
“I CALL IT REVERSE PILOT”
Simply increasing PILOT does little to address underlying inequities in revenue, said Speaker of the Connecticut House Brendan Sharkey.
In a proposal that he said will take the form of a bill later this year, Sharkey said he wants to scrap the PILOT law altogether and impose property taxes on nonprofit institutions. Colleges and hospitals will then have to apply to the state for reimbursement, he said, but cities and towns will be guaranteed the revenue.
“I call it ‘Reverse PILOT,’” Sharkey said. “We will have substantial discussion and debate about this. It will be heard in committee this year. I can’t say whether we’ll be able to work out all of the details by the end of the session.”
The logic behind the proposed change is two-fold, Sharkey said. First, cash-strapped municipalities should not be subsidizing private institutions, some of which have endowments that dwarf local budgets. Second, the designation of “nonprofit” does not account for the ways in which major universities are involved in generating profit, Sharkey said.
Sharkey said he thinks there is unique political will behind shifting the onus of taxation back onto nonprofits, namely because the process of haggling over PILOT funds has become acrimonious.
Stratton said the law could be worked out to set a certain exemption level after which nonprofits have to chip in. The first $1 million of property value could remain exempt, he said.
“A small church in Newhallville might still not pay any taxes,” Stratton said of the “Reverse PILOT” proposal. “It’s aimed at the bigger guys.”
Harp said Yale may have a legal claim against such a move. The University’s tax-exempt status is unique; it is written into Connecticut’s constitution, immutable by simple statute.
Sharkey said another possible loophole could exist for municipalities and nonprofits that can independently work out a mutually satisfactory arrangement. He pointed specifically to Yale as a model of how universities should orient themselves to their home communities.
When asked if Yale should up its payments, both Harp and DeStefano — who presided over a renaissance in town-gown relations along with former Yale President Richard Levin — said the University already contributes immensely. Voluntarily, Yale will give New Haven more than $8 million this year alone. Since 1991, when Yale’s payments began, the University has bestowed more than $82 million in voluntary contributions on New Haven. Now it also gives money to West Haven and Orange, owing to the expansion of West Campus.
Yale’s footprint, much of which occupies prime downtown real estate, constitutes no more than 6 percent of New Haven’s total acreage, Morand estimated.
But Yale’s tax-exempt property is immensely valuable — and would generate substantial revenue for the city if it were taxed. This property totals roughly $2.44 billion in value, according to Michael Condon, a municipal assessor for the city of New Haven.
Under that estimate, Yale would owe more than $102 million in property taxes. Yale-New Haven Hospital is worth roughly $748 million, which would generate another $31 million.
James Pascarella, the president of Hamden’s Legislative Council, said the perception of exempting Yale from an otherwise statewide change would be disastrous. Pascarella called the “Reverse PILOT” idea a “last-ditch response” to a decades-old problem of “people who are barely able to make ends meet essentially subsidizing huge corporate nonprofits.”
Quinnipiac gives Hamden an annual stipend of $100,000, which goes to various charities, not the municipal budget, Pascarella said. Unlike Yale, Quinnipiac does not have its own police force; when a fight breaks out on campus, the Hamden Police are called.
“We want a partnership,” Pascarella said. The single Quinnipiac official authorized to discuss relations with the town is away until March.
Sharkey said Quinnipiac has defended its actions — or inaction — by pointing to its federal nonprofit status. Though nonprofit designation is federal, Sharkey said, tax exemptions are all granted at the state level.
Sharkey and other proponents say they are prepared for substantial blowback from colleges and hospitals.
“I approach this fully aware that the proposal would impose a substantial burden on [nonprofits] in the short-term, which is why we should begin the conversation now,” Sharkey said. “Nobody likes to pay taxes. But we’re talking about equity.”
Lemar said the item would be “really, really politically challenging to pull off in 90 days.”
Connecticut State Rep. Pat Widlitz, House chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, said she would have “great difficulty” supporting such a bill. Finding the money to put into PILOT would be more politically palatable, she added.
Fasano simply said no.
“This would not be a party line vote. Democrats and Republicans would be against it, urban and suburban legislators would be against it,” he said. “In an election year, when you have the governor’s office at stake and legislators up for reelection, I doubt the bill ever gets debated on the floor of the House or Senate. It would be a hugely unpopular vote to have.”
BENEFICENCE OR BUST
Judith Greiman, president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, said the “Reverse PILOT” proposal is bad policy — its legal complications aside.
She said reversing tax exemptions would “upend town-gown relations at a time that towns and non-profits that are major employers need to be working even closer together.” Further, she said, the change would hurt students, because it would likely increase the cost of college.
From Yale’s perspective, Morand said the change would disrupt an effective partnership between Yale and New Haven, one that has become a “poster child for how to get along,” he said.
“One should not mess with longstanding policies in that way,” Morand said in response to Sharkey’s proposal. “This has proven to work.”
The system — whether it is the fault of the state, the nonprofits or just bad economic times — does not work, according to city, state and national leaders. Yale and other nonprofits enjoy the services and benefits of New Haven, Blumenthal said — why should they not pay into them?
Morand countered that Yale does not call on most municipal services. By and large, students do not have school-age children who attend the New Haven public schools. The city’s public works department does not pick up trash in Yale dormitories. Morand said the University’s net budgetary impact on New Haven is “actually quite salutary.”
Fasano, who was born and raised in New Haven, agreed, putting the dynamic bluntly: “Without Yale, New Haven would perhaps be more like Bridgeport in terms of economic growth.”
Blumenthal said it is also a question of equity: New Haven is at a disadvantage, while Yale has immense resources at its disposal. Under Levin and now under Yale President Peter Salovey, the University has advanced “lightyears in helping New Haven,” Blumenthal said. But the future is uncertain.
“Do we want to rely on beneficence?” Blumenthal said. “Do we want to rely on the wisdom of really good leaders, like Levin?”
He answered his own question: “At some point, there may be a need to revisit the principle that nonprofits pay no local property tax.”
Voluntary payments are just that — voluntary. Yale’s payment formula has built-in growth: It is a calculation of the percent of fire services the University uses plus a figure tied to the number of employees and students on campus. When hundreds of new students arrive and begin to populate the two new residential colleges, Yale’s payments will likely increase.
When asked if the formula itself is static — or subject to discussion and debate — Morand said the current method works.
“Your University makes the single largest payment to any municipality … it’s already the single largest, and it has a built-in growth” he said. “It’s a question that need not be asked.”
But that did not answer the initial question: Could the formula itself be revised to reflect changes in the city and perhaps growing need on the part of New Haven?
“The University’s willingness is established,” Morand said.
The question was put a third time: Is the amount the University pays up for discussion or revision?
“The voluntary payment formula works extremely well and ties the University’s growth to growth in the payment,” Morand said.
WHO PAYS?
In the authoritative “Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City,” the late Yale political scientist Robert Dahl turned to New Haven to explore a mammoth question about power and governance: In America— indeed wherever popular government exists — who actually controls political decision-making? He theorized that power in New Haven was dispersed among many groups, not concentrated in the hands of the business elite. No single group held all the cards.
In a new preface to the book’s second edition, Dahl dwelled on the complexity of his initial question.
“The absence of satisfactory ways of measuring power and influence, and thus describing them accurately, presents a huge challenge,” he wrote.
In 1978, power aligned in Connecticut to reimburse the state’s towns and cities for a portion of the money they lose every year to tax-exempt properties. The Times story noted an unusual coalition of municipalities and tax-exempt institutions, “two traditional adversaries.”
Unlike power, money is an easy calculus. It adds up. Except when it doesn’t.
Money is zero-sum — and not just for Connecticut municipalities competing in 2014 over shrinking PILOT funds.
“Someone has to pay,” Stratton said. “For years, it’s been the taxpayers of New Haven. Maybe it’s time someone else pitches in.”
Tessa Berenson ’14 and Lisa Lin ’14 can’t quite describe Toad’s. Lin looks at her computer screen thoughtfully. Pondering the York Street nightclub, Berenson seems at a loss for words. And then, suddenly, Lin starts and exclaims: “Wait! Remember that article?” Going from pensive to determined, she begins to type. Berenson watches. “Here, it’s called Eight Underappreciated College Campuses You Have to Check Out.”
Lin reads from the Total Frat Move article. “Number six: Quinnipiac University/University of New Haven/Yale.” The post goes on to explain, “the only reason these schools are on this list is because of Toad’s … It’s not so much a bar as it is a massive portal to hell where morality is forgotten.”
When interviewed, Yale alumni speak to a similar vision of Toad’s, sounding amused and even a little wistful. “Toad’s was drunken and crazy. It had a wild hook-up scene,” said Emma Gardner ‘06. “I would definitely say that one of my most distinct memories of Yale is being at Toad’s.” She remembers the “athletes and athlete groupies” at the bar and a ground sticky with urine and sweat. “It was disgusting.”
Disgusting or not, Toad’s has been on the forefront of the Yale social scene since it became a dance club in 1976. With penny drinks and dependable Wednesday and Saturday night emails promising “DJ Action and Mark spinning all your favorites,” Toad’s seems as tightly woven into the fabric of New Haven as Yale itself.
But if Yale and Toad’s are unable to reach a settlement soon, this social staple could be upended. On April 30, 2013, Yale filed a lawsuit against Toad’s for allowing its employees and patrons to trespass onto University property. Toad’s exits spill onto the adjacent walkway leading to Morse and Ezra Stiles, property under the University’s purview. And with the case set for trial as early as April, a majority of Yale students — if the decision goes in the University’s favor — could be forced to find a new place to conclude their Wednesday and Saturday nights.
***
Yale and Toad’s have found themselves embroiled in this particular dispute for some time. In 1978, Michael Spoerndle, then-owner and operator of Toad’s Place, entered into a revocable license agreement with Yale to allow Toad’s staff and patrons to access the University’s adjoining property in case of an emergency — an arrangement that either side could revoke at its discretion with 10 days’ notice. James Segaloff, Toad’s’ corporate attorney, said Yale offered to extend the license for another ten years in 2008.
Toad’s’ current owner, Brian Phelps, who had taken over ownership of the nightclub by this point, refused to accept the agreement with the revocation clause intact. Yale then terminated the contract on July 21, 2008.
Two years later, Yale filed a trespassing complaint, claiming patrons of Toad’s were using the emergency exits “for improper purposes,” such as “smoking, drinking and littering,” according to the Summary Judgment Ruling released on Nov. 29, 2013.
Phelps is seeking a solution whereby patrons, like they’ve been able to in the past, can exit Toad’s onto the adjoining Yale property in the event of an emergency. Unlike the past, however, he wants this agreement to be set in stone, not tied up in a “revocable clause” with the University. If the two parties cannot reach a settlement within the next two months, the case will go to trial. Scheduled for an April start date, the trial and its outcome will likely determine the fate of a club that has hosted the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, U2 and Billy Joel in its 40-year history.
“If Yale prohibits the use of the side entrances, then Toad’s has no egress,” said Segaloff. “All we are asking for is to use the exit doors in an emergency situation.”
According to University spokesman Tom Conroy, Yale is seeking a permanent injunction enjoining Toad’s and its employees from entering or trespassing on Yale property. He noted Yale is still willing to enter into a license agreement affording Toad’s access for emergency purposes, contingent on the prevention of improper use of the property. Indeed, it’s not the institution itself that has Yale running for the courthouse — “Yale isn’t interested in having any negative effect on Toad’s business,” he said — it’s the question of property rights.
“The purpose of the litigation is to protect Yale’s property rights and to establish that Toad’s may not use Yale’s property without the University’s permission,” Conroy said. “If Yale prevails, there is no reason, in Yale’s view, why an agreement between Yale and Toad’s cannot be achieved.”
But while Segaloff agrees that the issue is certainly “resolvable,” he adamantly disagrees with Yale’s approach to its relationship with Toad’s. “What they did was meaningless for all intents and purposes,” he said. “If you can revoke the agreement at any time, then what good is it?”
***
The situation in which Toad’s finds itself today is the result of legal disputes intertwined in a storied—and controversial—cultural history.
Michael Spoerndle and his two co-managers opened Toad’s Place in January 1975, replacing the short-lived Caleb’s Tavern with a family-friendly establishment—a restaurant. As touted on a 1975 advertisement, Toad’s offered “the finest continental cuisine” with dishes like Beef a la Wellington and Veal Cordon Bleu.
Spoerndle was a Cleveland chef with big dreams, and when the restaurant proved financially unsuccessful, he added music to the mix. Local Bluegrass bands began performing at lunch, afternoon entertainment became “evening entertainment.” By the late seventies, Spoerndle had renovated, expanded and eliminated all meal service.
Toad’s was officially a music hall. And given its proximity to the New Haven Coliseum—a nationally renowned entertainment arena—big-name artists, like Billy Joel, would stop by the dance club after their performances.
“We were young, and the world was our oyster,” Phelps, enlisted as manager in 1976, said. “We wanted to go for it and bring in the best artists we possibly could.”
Bruce Springsteen was the first superstar Toad’s snagged. “People couldn’t believe that he was here,” said Phelps of the 1979 concert. Billy Joel performed a year later and his first live digital recording featured a song played at Toad’s, “Los Angelenos.” Newer, alternative artists followed suit—both Debbie Harry and the Ramones made their way to the York Street nightclub in 1989.
Toad’s was for locals, a place where “good musicians who [hadn’t] made it nationally [could] show their stuff,” remarked Spoerndle in a 1979 News article. A police officer at the time described Toad’s as “a nice place to go out – lot of the fellows bring their girlfriends or wives here.”
But Yale kids, for the most part, weren’t interested. The article’s headline reads: “Club draws top names, but students stay away.” In the same article, Spoerndle expressed a fledgling desire to branch out and appeal to the Yale community. Students “used to walk on the other side of the street,” he said. “But then some of them came to this side of the street. And now they’re looking in the windows to see what’s going on.”
It seems just the reverse of what the headline might read today—”Club draws students, but top names stay away.”
By 1981, however, Spoerndle had tapped into the collegiate market: on Tuesdays, the so-called “Night of the Toad,” draft beers cost only 25 cents each. According to Phelps, Yalies were “timid at first” but soon enough, Toad’s “became a part of the University.”
With its large capacity and convenient location, Toad’s became an iconic campus bar. Barbara Bush stopped by about three times a week, according to Phelps. And when the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 passed, forcing bars and clubs across America into bankruptcy, Toad’s didn’t budge. And in 1989, Spoerndle and Phelps opened the venue to all ages, further securing the bar’s dominance of the Yale social scene. Today, Phelps says Toad’s’ major sources of revenues stem from Wednesday and Saturday night dance parties, adding that the two are key tenets of Toad’s’ business model.
While local resident Edward Cooke remembers the Toad’s crowd in the late eighties as “a melting pot for all of Southern Connecticut,” Amanda Poppei ‘01 found that Saturday night parties ten years later were “essentially populated by Yalies.” Gardner remembers a similar scene during her time at Yale. “It was all just Yale students and Q-Packers.”
Phelps speaks to the notion that, as Toad’s became increasingly popular with students, it also began to forge ties with the Yale administration. When asked how he emails the entire student body on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Phelps shook his head. “It’s a secret,” he said. “I can’t tell you.” He’d been chatting and laughing just a few minutes before, but then he grew terse and said, “if I do the wrong thing at the wrong time, they would shut me down in a heartbeat.” It’s a comment that suggests a long-standing relationship of sorts between Toad’s and Yale. But even in spite of this apparent “partnership,” Yale and Toad’s have been engaged in multiple disputes, even apart from the current lawsuit, for decades.
Yale and Toad’s first went head to head in 1985. Spoerndle and Phelps had leased the 300 York St. location from the Kligerman family, and when “Old Man Kligerman” died, Toad’s was put on the market. Both the University and Spoerndle made competing bids on the building, appraised at a value of $1 million. Although Toad’s offered well under the appraisal at $800,000, Yale offered $1.3 million. Nevertheless, due to a rights of first refusal clause in the lease, the family gave Spoerndle and Phelps 30 days to come up with the difference. They did.
Today’s lawsuit, almost thirty years since this episode, signals what Phelps believes is Yale’s desire to “control” real estate in downtown New Haven. Suing Toad’s, he said, is just another part of this “grandiose scheme.”
But according to Douglas Rae, a professor at the Yale School of Management, Toad’s is just one of several business properties that Yale’s Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs and Campus Development Bruce Alexander ’65 has been “assertive” with in his tenure. He added that Alexander, a senior executive at the Rouse Company for 25 years, has been more vigilant in assessing the loss of property value and rights than those before him.
“My impression is that he’s guarding the University’s legal interests,” Rae said. “I certainly don’t think he’s behaved in any way badly — he may be a little tougher and sharper than his predecessors, but I don’t think that he’s been out of line at all.”
Since the 1980s, Yale has sought to reform nightlife culture in the areas surrounding campus. Following the real estate crisis of the late ’80s, the University bought storefronts along Chapel Street and Broadway — two of the most trafficked streets in New Haven. When Richard Levin became president of Yale in 1993, the administration tried to revamp the Shops at Yale, the retail district near campus.
The University sought to eliminate so-called “bottom-end establishments,” Rae said. Yale gained nearly complete control of the real estate along Chapel and Broadway by the mid-1990s, and according to Rae, was largely successful in “changing the culture” in these areas. Indeed, whereas 1 Broadway used to be a “horrendous bar where people would be thrown out the windows every once in a while,” the street is now home to the likes of J. Crew and Jack Wills.
And while changes like this have been viewed, on the whole, as positive, Phelps has no interest in seeing his institution reformed along similar lines. According to Phelps, Toad’s occupies arguably the most secure nightlife space for Yalies. Unlike spots like Box 63 and Elevate, Phelps believes that his institution caters to Yale students of all ages and keeps them safe while doing so.
“They can have a couple of drinks and be sloppy, but they don’t have to worry about being hurt,” Phelps said. “People feel good about this place — we watch over Yale students, and I think that’s really important.”
***
For Alex Fisher ’14, Phelps’s belief that Yale students “feel good about this place” is a stretch. With the increasing influx of Quinnipiac students on Yale’s campus each Saturday, Fisher believes Toad’s has left Yale in a less-than-desirable state.
In a Yale Daily News op-ed on Nov. 16, 2011, Fisher accused Quinnipiac students of “creating scenes of squalor.” “Perhaps we ought to send a garbage truck filled with trash, vomit and urine and deposit it outside a Quinnipiac dormitory; this would serve only as minor recompense for what is done to our campus several times a week,” he wrote. Ultimately, for these reasons and the culture of Toad’s overall, he believes the club is “simply an unsafe environment to have in the middle of our University.”
Emma Poole ’17 expressed similar sentiments, noting that Toad’s caters to a warped sense of personal fulfillment. “It’s validation of the most primal kind — like, is the back of my body attractive to a random, heterosexual male?”
A belief that Toad’s is “a citadel of vulgarity,” as Fisher put it, reflects a similar doubt in the venue’s musical relevance. Many students today have trouble reconciling the bar’s illustrious past — The Rolling Stones in 1989, Bob Dylan in 1990, Dave Matthews Band in 1994 — with its current offerings, such as Aaron Carter and Snoop Lion. Of course, booking costs have skyrocketed, and Phelps admitted many big name bands “won’t even look at this place. You’ve got to catch them on the rise.”
Even Poppei, a 2001 graduate, remembered Toad’s as “definitely a place to see great artists, though it had been more so before.” She attended a Dar Williams show as an undergraduate and found the concert incredibly intimate. “I was only 10 or 15 feet away from the stage.” And Cooke, a Connecticut native who missed the legendary 1989 Rolling Stones concert by a matter of minutes, described a Johnny Cash performance three years later as “the best concert I’ve ever seen. The acoustics were phenomenal, you know? It was a night I’ll never forget.”
Today, Toad’s caters to a different set of concertgoers. Many recent Rap and Hip-Hop Grammy nominees have passed through the New Haven venue, including Drake in 2009 and Kanye West in 2004. But while Sophie Dillon ’17, a New Haven native, has attended numerous rap and hip-hop concerts at Toad’s, she still laments the paucity of quality acts.
“People who have never played an instrument before are playing on the same stage as The Rolling Stones,” she marveled.
According to Fisher, this perceived decline in Toad’s’ safety and musical offerings indicates that it’s time for Yale to step in more aggressively.
“Toad’s has demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge [Yale’s] basic right [to private property], which shows there is no basis for a productive relationship between the two,” he said. “I think it’s very clearly time to move away from having a place like Toad’s in the heart of Yale’s campus.”
But Yalies like Lin, Berenson and Keilor Gilbert ’14 contend that views like Fisher’s are, for the most part, anomalous. All three cherish their memories of Toad’s, spanning almost four years at Yale.
“I went to every Woad’s last semester,” Lin admitted.
According to Gilbert, “people just fall into this sort of loyalty” to the institution. Berenson added that “Toad’s is important to the culture of New Haven … it’s a Yale staple.”
The three seniors know the concert scene has dwindled. They know that the place gets pretty rowdy. Still, they don’t care — “We go there to dance.”
With the outcome of the lawsuit — and Toad’s continued presence on York Street — still up in the air, some students find it hard to entertain the notion of a Toad’s-less New Haven.
For Thomas Aviles ’16, the possibility of Toad’s’ absence seems unfathomable. “It’s iconic,” he said. “You can love it, hate it or not really care, but you can’t deny it’s a formidable presence on campus.”
Phelps plans to enlist the help of students like Aviles in ensuring that his club remains on York Street. Arvind Mohan ’14, who has served as the Toad’s’ campus ambassador since his sophomore year, controls the nightclub’s social media presence and reaches out to campus groups about renting the space. He is currently working with Phelps to organize a student letter writing campaign for Toad’s to present to the administration.
“The goal,” Mohan said, “would be to raise awareness that students do in fact support Toad’s’ place on campus.”
***
Ultimately, Phelps is confident in his nightclub’s chances in court. From his office above the dance floor, he recalls the 2010 conflict between Yale and Bespoke, a restaurant on College Street. The two fought over a small slice of property in the alleyway, owned by Yale but used as a second entrance by the restauranteurs, Arturo Camacho and Suzette Franco-Camacho.
“After the trial, Bespoke was broke,” Phelps intones. While a state appeals court ruled in favor of Bespoke in their trial versus the University, the Camachos told the News in a January 2010 article that the high costs of structural adjustments and litigation forced the restaurant to close.
Phelps pauses for a moment, and pulls out photos of the legends that have sold out concerts on Toad’s’ stage. Joan Jett. Bon Jovi. The Barenaked Ladies. He rocks back and forth quietly in his chair, flipping through the thick albums. The fluorescent lights buzz. He holds a Dunkin Donuts styrofoam cup but doesn’t drink from it — after two hours of talking, the coffee has gone cold.
When asked if Toad’s could share the same fate as Bespoke, if the trial could leave him penniless, Phelps shakes his head. “No.”
Behind him, Sterling Memorial Library looms ghostly and stately. It’s 10 p.m. on a quiet Tuesday night. The stacks shine bright. A student on the fourth floor peers down into the office.
“No,” Phelps repeats. “We see this as a fair fight.”
Nearly three years ago, Adele Ricciardi MED ’18 GRD ’18 moved to New Haven after having been a New Yorker for just under a year. After searching for housing in East Rock — an area popular among Yale graduate students — she settled in a neighborhood that reminded her of both her Big Apple home and her Albany, NY. roots.
From the beginning, New Haven’s Ninth Square Historic District struck her as surprisingly Brooklynesque: a “charming, small” locale with galleries and a diversity of restaurants — a place with few chain stores.
“I was really happy when I found [the Ninth Square], because it was familiar.” she said. “I started looking in East Rock, but the Ninth Square definitely felt more like home.”
As one of the first five tenants in her apartment building near the intersection of Crown and South Orange Streets, Ricciardi has witnessed the neighborhood develop steadily in the last few years. The district’s location conveniently situates her between her two workplaces at Yale Medical School and the University laboratories on Science Hill. Located in the downtown’s southeast section, its proximity to commercial areas and relatively low cost make it attractive to graduate students.
The Ninth Square also offers encouraging proof that New Haven can thrive on its own, despite a much smaller investment from Yale and University Properties (UP), which oversees the school’s commercial real estate assets in the city. In contrast, the company holds a virtual monopoly over the downtown area, where it owns enough property on Broadway, as well as Chapel, York and Howe streets to pay over $4 million in taxes annually.
“I think it’s New Haven without Yale, which we don’t really see a lot of,” Ricciardi observed. “The local community hasn’t been completely overrun yet.”
But it is a community on the edge of change, fueled by expansive commercial and real estate developments in recent years.
“In the time I’ve been there I can tell that we’re on the verge of a transformation,” she said.
* * *
Inside the Adae Fine Art Academy, the notes of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” filled a large, sunlit room where house plants sit under painted portraits.
“I read the news today oh, boy/About a lucky man who made the grade/And though the news was rather sad/Well I just had to laugh and/ I saw the photograph.”
The school’s director and founder, Kwadwo Adae, wore a navy-blue bowtie with a matching blue suit. His demeanor — kind, soft-spoken — reflected the nurturing environment he strove to create.
Adae explained that the music functions as far more than a mere affect.
“You have to have the mind occupied with music while you paint,” he said. “I learned that way, so I teach that way, too.”
An artist once described as “a mix of early Jackson Pollock, Keith Herring and Thomas Hart Benson,” Adae arrived in New Haven in 2005 after receiving a master’s in fine arts from New York University. In search of higher education teaching jobs, he received “no answers, no calls, no nothing.” So when an art store went out of business in his current space on 817 Chapel Street, he decided it was time to open a school of his own.
Eight years ago, the district was a different place. Rob Greenberg, owner of ACME Furniture and a third-generation New Haven resident, recounted how the popularization of the automobile precipitated the prevailing “urban renewal” philosophy of urban planning at the time, favoring large roads like Route 34 and modernism over some cities’ perceived “ancient” downtowns. However, then-New Haven mayor Richard C. Lee’s championing of these policies led to the destruction of some 20,000 buildings, and the Ninth Square, along with New Haven, “dropped off.”
“The problem that they had not accounted for was that when they tore out the city’s mom and pop stores and all these little shops — it was hundreds of years of evolution,” he said. “What they didn’t account for was that when they knocked out all the evolutionary forward motion, if it didn’t work, there was no backup plan.”
Thirty-five years after Lee left office in 1970, Adae was still feeling the effects of the mayor’s policies, as he dealt with “squatters” in his building and various other aspects of a depressed neighborhood that were decidedly unhelpful for “creating a nurturing environment.”
“The neighborhood was a lot rougher on the edges when I first started out,” he said. “A couple of my adult students were concerned with taking class, getting out at 8 p.m. and walking to their cars.”
But while residents were fearing for their safety in Ninth Square, city officials were already sowing the seeds of the neighborhood’s revival. Long before the arrival of district mainstays such as 360 State Street, Elm City Market or New Haven State Street Station, former New Haven mayor Biagio “Ben” DiLieto pushed a plan originally designed by Economic Administrator Will Ginsburg to reverse the march of urban renewal.
The McCormack/Behring Project, named for the design firms who pursued it, focused first on redeveloping residential areas — occupancy reached a passable level around 1994-1995 according to Stefano — and then moved to help businesses occupy available retail space. The first business to occupy these spaces was the now New Haven favorite Benatra, which opened in the Ninth Square in 1997.
“The values of property went down and they lent themselves to redevelopment,” DeStefano said. “That came at the end; after every downtown building was vacant, the market liked the older stuff.”
DeStefano said the sort of urban lifestyle to which Ricciardi and her fellow grad students aspired was a sign that times had changed since he and his wife were of that age. The pair married when DeStefano was 24 years old, when “cheap fields and cheap land” led many of their generation to the suburbs.
Today, he noted, young people in their twenties are less likely to be settled in their career and life direction. As a result, “You tend to live in cities,” he said.
* * *
Just a block away from the New Haven Green stands the state’s largest residental building, a looming glass skyscraper constructed on what was once the site of Shartenberg’s, the one-time largest department store in Connecticut. Designed by Bruce Becker ARC ’85 SOM ’85, 360 State Street houses a large number of Yale affiliates, many of whom study or work at the medical school.
According to Becker, retail vacancies have been “dramatically reduced” since Yale students began migrating to the area after the opening of Elm City Market and the State Street Station in 2005.
The 360 State Street Project opened in 2010, along with the Elm City Market in 2011 — a co-op founded in the midst of the recession and collectively owned by approximately 200 New Haven residents, according to Becker. Both the 360 State Street and Ninth Square have a significant percentage of Section 8 housing, a type of public housing that authorizes payment of rents with help of the federal government — a little over half of the Ninth Square is composed of this affordable housing.
But the neighborhood is not without its pricier establishments. Residents of 360 State Streets are within walking distance of some of the city’s most popular bars and eateries, including the gourmet food store Skappo Merkato and Bentara, a Malaysian fusion restaurant.
Chris Ortwein, economic prosperity manager for the Town Green Special Services District, has been involved with revitalization efforts since the 90’s, beginning in the Commonwealth of Pennsylania’s Main Street Program. As a resident of the Ninth Square herself, she understood better than anyone how far the neighborhood has come — when she first arrived, the Ninth Square had the highest vacancy rate of any neighborhood in New Haven. She said that the Ninth Square had been able to thrive as a “business district” despite its enclosed nature, a reason for which she now “goes carless”.
Despite the district’s burgeoning success, its mixture of one-way streets and hip restaurants is something of a concern for former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr., who noted that they create the atmosphere of a “dead end” with very little street traffic. Through streets, he added, are more conducive to economic and human development.
Ortwein agreed with the former mayor’s transportation assessment, saying the district would be better off with a more comprehensive and convenient public transit system.
“I think one of the things that would really help us is if we provided a better user experience for people who use the bus system,” she said.
And while DeStefano agreed that the Ninth Square district has been undergoing a revitalization, he pointed out that Yale students almost single-handedly sustained the housing market with what he termed “Med School East Rock.”
* * *
It was around noon at Adae Fine Arts Academy, and a miniature Maltese dog named Bird had wandered in from next door to join Adae for lunch. Bird belonged to Margot Broom, the owner of the neighboring Breathing Room Yoga Store.
Bird, despite her lack of opposable thumbs, seemed an apt representation of the ethos of the Ninth Square’s businesses — collaboration, coexistence and a friendly neighborhood feel.
“I’m there to support them and support the businesses in this community that engage the public,” Adae said. “All the business owners — no matter what they’re doing — have a vested interest in having a community that is aware.”
Neville Wisdom, the manager of a nearby dress shop, said he has similarly formed partnerships with other stores. He often includes their merchandise in his store as a form of advertising, and others do the same for him. At the moment, ACME’s Furniture and Adae’s paintings forge this “spirit of collaboration.”
The road to revitalizing a neighborhood is famously paved with adversity, the adversity that comes with revitalizing a neighborhood needs no mention. But, Neville Wisdom said a culture of community has made it possible for these business transplants to sustain themselves — he estimates he sells 300 percent more dresses in the Ninth Square than he did at his business’ previous home in Westville.
“The boutiques also bring us good clientele — even the yoga studios,” Wisdom said. “I think the combination of having businesses that bring a lot of people around has also made [our success] possible.”
“You guys brought your lunch?” Poncho Jackson focused his gaze on the bags of food student volunteers had carried into the Community Soup Kitchen in Christ Church. The plastic bags each contained two turkey or ham sandwiches neatly packaged in Saran wrap, a bag of chips, an apple, a large brownie and a plastic water bottle with a bold blue label — Yale.
Without skipping a beat, Jackson burst into laughter, amused that the students had chosen to bring their own food to a place whose purpose was serving it. The kitchen provides lunch to the homeless and hungry four days a week, with Jackson serving as the dining supervisor.
Christ Church stands at 84 Broadway, across the street from such Yale staples as the Yale Bookstore, the Apple Store and Urban Outfitters. But for Genevieve Simmons ’17 and the four other students who volunteered to work at the soup kitchen during Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, the building was unfamiliar. When the group first passed by the large Gothic church on the way from Dwight Hall, they kept on walking.
Simmons and her friends spent the first two hours at the soup kitchen grouping plastic spoons and forks, chopping up ham in the kitchen and bagging bananas to be donated. Simmons was standing behind a large countertop, slicing a pound of ham on a cutting board when Jackson called her over to the dining area to break for lunch.
The oversized bags of food remained in a closet, and Simmons stood in line behind four other student-volunteers. A vegetarian, she politely declined the meatloaf and accepted a tray of pasta salad and green beans from the same counter where, within an hour, over one hundred New Haven residents would file in to receive lunch.
Simmons believes that leaving campus once in a while is important. She runs through East Rock, bikes through downtown and has even jogged out to the University of Southern Connecticut. But staying in the walls of the University is easy, she said, adding that the idea of a “Yale bubble” certainly exists. Everything you need — food, shelter, your classes, your friends — are within a one-mile radius.
The University, however, strongly encourages students to explore the city, particularly through community service. The University offers the President’s Public Service Fellowship, which funds opportunities for students to work in New Haven’s public sector for up to 11 weeks during the summer. And on its official website, Yale highlights its ongoing partnership with the Elm City, proudly proclaiming that “more than 2,500 undergraduates — nearly one-half of all Yale College students — volunteer in community service activities in New Haven.”
According to a News survey sent to a randomized sample of undergraduates, 60 percent of the 142 respondents said they feel obligated to do some form of service work during their time at Yale. And 38 percent of those surveyed said they are currently a member of Dwight Hall, Yale’s center for social justice and public service. The group serves as an umbrella for 89 student-led service groups, addressing education, public health, social justice and international issues.
Despite these encouraging numbers, the true impact of Yale students’ service work is difficult to quantify. As Dwight Hall Executive Director Peter Crumlish DIV ’09 asked, “Can you really say, by the end of this week we created more ‘good’ in the world?”
FROM OLD CAMPUS TO FAIR HAVEN
A looming 19th century brownstone, Dwight Hall overlooks Old Campus as an unmistakable emblem of Yale, witnessing the daily rhythms of university life. But the building is also a stone’s throw away from the New Haven Green, a busy centerpiece of the city that ends almost at the point where Old Campus begins.
Dwight Hall was founded by Yale undergraduates in 1886. The organization grew out of an expression of Christian belief — one focused on giving to the poor and needy, Crumlish recounted.
“[In those days], it was the mindset of people who were privileged and went to a university like this that because they are privileged, they should find the needy and help them,” he said. “But that’s not the mindset anymore.”
Today, Dwight Hall provides an opportunity for students to connect with the real problems facing the community.
For Sophia Weissmann ’14, service manifests itself in her work as a Public School Intern at Fair Haven School, a K-8 institution that serves predominantly Latino and immigrant families. Weissmann explained that going to Fair Haven School is about much more than community service. It’s about learning how teachers and administrators interact; it’s about getting off campus and really understanding what it means to be a part of a city; and it’s about discovering her own place within New Haven, separate from Yale.
“For me,” Weismann noted, “Dwight Hall has been the cornerstone of the way I understand my place in the community.”
In contrast to other schools, whose center for community service is coordinated by the Dean’s Office. Dwight Hall functions as its own non-profit organization independent of the University. Students play a critical role in the governance of the organization. The leaders of Dwight Hall member groups make up the cabinet, which votes to promote provisional member groups to full member status and also elects the Student Executive Committee — 12 students who allocate funds and communicate with group leaders about Dwight Hall requirements and resources.
The benefit of this model, Crumlish explained, is that beyond just providing service opportunities, Dwight Hall allows students to develop leadership skills and take initiative on their own projects, unburdened by any expectation to pursue specific forms of work.
“We don’t tell people this is how you should make the world better,” Crumlish said. “If you have an idea, it’s our job to help you be as effective as possible.”
THE DICHOTOMY OF HELP
On a Wednesday morning last fall, Weissmann entered Fair Haven School’s Family Resource Center to find coordinator Luz Betancur bent over a desk, examining a scattered array of CD-ROMs along with a new computer and printer she had just received from the district. At 8:45 that morning, Weissmann had boarded the city bus on the corner of Orange and Chapel Street, prepared to perform her usual task: supervising preschoolers while their mothers took an English language class in the library. But within minutes, Weissmann found herself trying to install a printer, working more as a technician than a teacher.
At the end of her two-hour shift, the printer still didn’t work. The following week, Weissmann returned to the Center and spent over two more hours on the phone with tech support, following detailed instructions to install the software. Determined to fix the problem, she was late to her afternoon class back at Yale. When the printer company, Hewlett-Packard, agreed that Weissmann had exhausted all possibilities, it deemed the printer defective and promised to deliver a replacement.
After two more weeks of frustration, the new printer finally arrived. This time around, the machine cooperated.
In a mixture of excitement and relief, Weissmann screamed with delight, “Yes, Luz, we did it, we did this together!”
“I know it’s a small thing, but it was so satisfying,” Weissmann recounted. “Some of the things I do are really fun and inspiring … setting up a printer is neither fun nor inspiring, but it’s one of those things you might have to do when you are working in a school.”
As a PSI, Weissmann serves as liaison between Yale and Fair Haven, finding ways to best match University resources with the needs of the school. Rather than approaching her role in service as a “provider,” Weissmann said she goes into the school to learn about and help meet its needs.
But some students approach service entirely differently.
Like Weissmann, Suzannah Holsenbeck ’05 served as a PSI in college. Among those engaged in service, there was a clear dichotomy, she said. While some students learned about the issues facing New Haven before determining how they could help, others immediately felt they had a solution to the city’s problems and the power to “save everybody.” Those students who carefully evaluate the needs of New Haven are usually more effective, she explained.
Even today, there are students who are skeptical about Yalies’ approach to service. Last semester, MEChA de Yale, a Dwight Hall social justice group, began leading protests every Friday against Gourmet Heaven’s alleged unfair labor practices.
Some students, like MEChA Community Action Chair Evelyn Nunez ’15, consider boycotting the 24-hour deli as a way to work towards fair wages and worker justice, but others assert that students do not need to interfere in such issues.
In a New Haven Independent article that has circulated widely among local residents since its publication on Jan 15., Alexander Saeedy ’15 said he chose to ignore the protests and continue purchasing food at Gourmet Heaven because students do not have a place in this fight.
“I’m doing me. The Department of Labor will do them,” Saeedy told the Independent during a protest earlier this month. “I think this is emblematic of this belief Yale students have that they can create a world free of problems and full of happiness and justice.”
Whether the act of protesting outside of Gourmet Heaven will create justice is yet to be seen, but most students do agree that they can — to some degree — make positive change during their four years at Yale. Only 1 percent of those surveyed indicated that students cannot make any positive change, and 25 percent said students can positively impact the city “to a large extent.”
The complexities of New Haven’s needs have not dissuaded students from establishing more service groups each year. James Doss-Gollin ’15 founded New Haven REACH in 2011, a group that aims to increase college access for youth in the city. REACH became a provisional Dwight Hall member group January 2013.
Doss-Gollin said he is thankful for the resources Dwight Hall provides, particularly monetary funds and printing access. Through Dwight Hall, he has also found other Yale groups doing similar service projects on campus and has combined resources with some of these organizations.
“It’s nice to be able to count on them for our basic needs,” Doss-Gollin said. “It’s a lot better than having to write even more grants.”
But with a growing demand for service work-related funding, not all member groups have been able to receive the amount they requested.
GROWING PAINS
While operating as a non-profit allows Dwight Hall to maintain independence and foster student leadership, it also means that the organization cannot rely on Yale for all of its funding. Yale provides Dwight Hall with its building, some monetary support as well as some in-kind donations, but as with other registered non-profits, Dwight Hall relies on grants and donor support for most of its monetary resources
According to a “fact sheet” released by Dwight Hall, the Yale University Office of New Haven and State Affairs (ONHSA) contributed 5 percent of Dwight Hall’s nearly $900,000 operating budget for the 2013-2014 fiscal year. The remainder of this sum was funded by a combination of grants, individual donors, facility rentals and its endowment. Each Dwight Hall member group is required to complete four hours per semester of Phonathon, during which members call potential donors to solicit contributions to the organization. Twenty-seven percent of the 2013-2014 budget is supported by donor funds, the fact sheet notes.
Still, several members of Dwight Hall groups interviewed cited a shortage of funds as one of the biggest roadblocks currently facing the organization.
“We are financially strained by the resources we have,” said William Redden ’14, who served as Dwight Hall’s Financial Coordinator two years ago. “We are capable of [obtaining our own funds] but could always use more from Yale.” Redden noted that because Dwight Hall operates independently of Yale, the group is responsible for a large share of its development.
Over the past decade, Dwight Hall has grown tremendously, both in the number of member groups and in the amount of service each group performs. In the past 10 years, member groups have increased from 66 to 89, Crumlish said. The influx of groups has meant more funding requests. Though Dwight Hall has increased the total amount of money it allocates, supply has struggled to meet demand.
The executive committee accepts funding applications from its groups each semester. The amount of money requested from the Campus Community Fund — the principal source of funding for Dwight Hall groups — has grown significantly over the past two years. In the fall of 2011, member groups requested a total of $18,321.91 and in the fall of 2013, that number had risen to $27,180.34, according to data collected by the student executive committee.
During these semesters, Dwight Hall only distributed $8,544.13 and $12,523.87, respectively. The student executive committee has the difficult job of determining who should and should not receive funding. After the committee accepts or rejects a group’s funding request, the group must submit their receipts before they actually receive money from the Campus Community Fund. Thus, the difference between funding requests and allocations is in part attributable to groups spending less than they initially requested, former student financial coordinator Michael Wolner ’14 said. But he added that Dwight Hall could not possibly fulfill all of the requests it receives.
“If, during my fall semester, we had given out everything that was requested, we would have used up the budget for the entire year,” he noted.
REACHING ACROSS THE GREEN
As far back as he can remember, Doss-Gollin’s Sundays morning were spent at Church of the Redeemer on Whitney Ave. and Cold Spring St., and week nights were for playing soccer in New Haven’s youth leagues. When he walked past the gates of Old Campus, it was a foreign and imposing space.
As a senior at Wilbur Cross High School, Doss-Gollin considered himself lucky to have parents who hold college degrees. He had two people who could help him navigate the application process, but a lot of his friends were left floundering.
“My parents knew that at the end of Junior year, it’s time to start thinking about college and SATs,” he said. “But a lot of my friends — their parents didn’t go to college, some didn’t finish high school, and some didn’t even speak English.”
During his first year at Yale, Doss-Gollin’s younger friends sent him their college admissions essays for editing. The following year, he received a flood of about 20 applications — students from his high school soccer team and friends from his church who wanted guidance. When Doss-Gollin discovered that his classmates at Yale were excited to help read through these applications, he realized that he had an opportunity to create a significant impact on the lives of public school students in the city.
In the summer of 2011, Doss-Gollin worked with two of his friends to create a website and founded REACH.
Starting a group from scratch wasn’t easy. When Doss-Gollin and his friends called New Haven Public Schools to tell them about REACH, they were met with trepidation. The schools were accustomed to having multiple Yale groups come in, and they didn’t necessarily want more help.
Doss-Gollin recounted a conversation with an administrator who seemed frustrated that so many students from the University want to have access to their schools. Even if they are well-intentioned, the official explained, they don’t always understand how the school operates or what the children’s lives are like outside of school.
As a native of New Haven, Doss-Gollin understands where the administrator was coming from.
“I think a lot of people are rightfully a little cautious of groups wanting to come in and tell them how to do things,” he said. “Sometimes, especially from the perspective of an overworked administrator, it can be more work than it’s worth.”
And saying that you go to Yale carries a whole other set of implications, he added.
When Doss-Gollin was a student at Wilbur Cross, he and his friends would formulate theories about why Yale students stayed trapped inside of a bubble. “Was it because they were scared of us, or because they didn’t like us? My friends and I came up with all sorts of theories.”
While hostility towards Yale students doing service does exist, Claudia Merson, Director of Public School Partnerships at Yale, said it has lessened over time. When Merson began her post in 1995, working with the schools was markedly more challenging than it is now. There wasn’t a designated liaison between the school and Yale. Students communicated directly with the school principal, who was likely busy with more pressing issues.
That same year, Merson helped found the PSI program for Yale students.
“We call them the semipermeable membrane,” Merson said. “They are working in two different worlds … PSI’s have to be bilingual and bicultural.”
The relationship has also improved, Merson said, because NHPS and Yale have coordinated their calendars so that each side knows when events and tutoring sessions are feasible.
Still, Holsenbeck recalled being met with some hostile reactions from teachers as a PSI in 2004.
“When I went into schools, there were teachers who didn’t want anything to do with me just because I was a Yale student,” she said. “They felt [we] were snobby, that Yale students had flaked in the past … they had ideas of what Yale represented.”
Even now, having student volunteers can sometimes be a burden. On the MLK Day of Service, the natural rhythms of the soup kitchen were interrupted by its five student visitors.
Jackson had to orient the students around the kitchen and explain how the process would work: In about two hours, over 100 people would line up out the door to get their lunch. Some might be mentally ill, others might come in drunk, Jackson said, reassuring the students that he would protect them if a difficult situation arose
Having a new group of volunteers — while helpful — introduces its own set of challenges
“Sometimes, having Yalies, or really any volunteer group, come in, is more work than help,” Jackson admitted. “They finish one task, and then they just sit there instead of asking what to do next … And then we also have to watch out for their safety.”
But Jackson suggested that service is perhaps the best way to establish a connection between Yale and New Haven, however tenuous. Still, he thinks more needs to be done in order to truly close the divide.
“This could be the beginning of a bridge, but Yale and New Haven are still separate entities,” he said.
CYCLES OF PROGRESS
On next year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Jackson will likely go through the same process again: explaining what the soup kitchen does, that spoon goes on top of fork, and that it’s two, not three, bananas per bag. Perhaps Simmons will sign up to go to a different site, or maybe she will have another commitment and won’t participate in the Day of Service at all.
Each year, a group of student leaders graduates and a new cohort of freshman — many of whom have never been to New Haven — become residents of the city. Dwight Hall groups cycle through leaders and must work with students whose goals may diverge from those of their predecessors. Given this constant rotation, sustainability becomes an important factor in evaluating the effectiveness of Yale students’ service.
When Holsenbeck returned to Yale five years after graduating, she discovered that many Dwight Hall groups, fully functional during her time as a student, had completely disappeared. Only “a handful,” she remarked, were still going strong.
The groups that remained, such as Community Health Educators and Elmseed Enterprise Fund, were the ones with a sustainable model. To be sustainable, student groups must have a clear mission and had a logical plan for leadership transitions, Holsenbeck said.
Doss-Gollin said REACH recently underwent a board change. The model is sustainable, he explained, because while he is no longer in charge of the organization, he is still involved and available to help the new student leaders maintain the program.
Among the students who REACH assisted last year is Alondra Arguello ’17. She signed up for REACH when the organization’s email address was written on a classroom blackboard. She immediately emailed the group and was matched with student mentor Marisol Dahl ’15.
Arguello credits REACH with part of her Yale acceptance. Dahl would revise her essays within hours and Arguello would send them back, receiving additional feedback almost immediately.
Now, Arguello said, she feels empowered to help other students reach their full potential. She is currently organizing a panel of Yale students to lead an informal discussion with NHPS students who want to pursue college. Despite the stark differences between Yale and New Haven, she said, there is still good reason to bridge the gap.
Arguello recalled that in high school, “People viewed Yale as a place where they would never be.” Now, she remarked, “This is my place.”
Correction: Jan. 24
A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Dwight Hall was founded in 1866. In fact, the organization was established in 1886.
2013 marked the end of an era when John DeStefano concluded his 20-year term as New Haven’s mayor. DeStefano, whose main focuses while in office were education and public safety, now takes up the roles of Yale’s newest professor and banker at New Haven’s own START Community Bank. This semester, he teaches the seminar New Haven and the American City, which has already proven to be a hit among undergraduates. The ex-mayor sat down with WEEKEND to talk education, town-gown relations and Salovey’s facial hair.
Q: After 20 years in the Mayor’s Office, you’re now working as a banker and professor. How are you finding the transition?
John DeStefano: You mean going over to the dark side? The private sector and the institutional sector after all these years in the public sector…it’s different. What’s nice about both is that in many respects they have their roots in my public service career. Doing New Haven and the American City, which starts Thursday, is very much engaging the public policy issues and politics of how you get things done in cities, and why cities are a special platform and incredibly beneficial and effective platforms to promote family, individual and community wellbeing. So I feel like I’m engaged in a lot of what I was doing for 30 years, working for the City, just from a different seat.
Q: How do you think teaching a class will be a new experience for someone who ran a city for 20 years?
JD: If I can figure out this shopping week stuff, I can figure out anything! It’s like organized chaos! And the lobbying that goes on, holy moly! It’s truly different. One of the things campaigning and electioneering allowed me to do was come into contact with a lot of young people who cared a lot about policy and issues and felt passionately about it. I think teaching a class will provide me with the same opportunity that I always enjoyed.
Q: What would you like your students to take away from your class?
JD: That anything is possible. That if you’re smart, if you work collaboratively, if you listen to people, cities can be wonderful platforms to grow possibilities and opportunities for people’s lives in America, particularly in an era of federal government that has left the playing field for so many issues. Even if you look at DeBlasio in New York, which has sort of come to exemplify this challenge of income redistribution, it’s funny in a way that 50 years ago it was viewed on a national platform, and now it’s localized — the city is seen as the platform to engage the issues.
Q: You’ve talked about how teaching at Yale is part of your initiative to keep connected and involved with youth, and you’re teaching at Southern Connecticut State next semester. Do you have any plans to work directly with New Haven Youth?
JD: No I do not, except to the extent to which [START Community Bank] has in the past and will continue to reach out to New Haven youth to help them see their self-interest in developing behaviors around finances and to develop financial literacy. So, in a narrow focus, yes — in the context of the mission of the bank.
Q: During your administration you emphasized investing in troubled youth, helping them deal with problems still very prominent in New Haven. Do you think that’s something you’d like to continue to pursue outside of the Mayor’s Office?
JD: [The bank and the professorship] allow me to affect people in a more intense, albeit narrower, way. The bad news is that you can’t get engaged in everything. That’s part of the trade-off. It was a trade-off I was ready to do.
Q: What do you see as Yale’s role in New Haven?
JD: I think there are two areas that make a lot of sense for the University to get involved with. One is promoting, supporting and being a platform for innovation and entrepreneurial businesses. Increasingly, New Haven has credentials as a knowledge-based community, it’s displaying nascent and growing entrepreneurial activity. I think the University, as a supplier of talent and as a partner self-interested in innovation as a research university could help create a much broader platform for those kinds of economic activities.
I think the second place has to do with violence. I think we do a lot of here-and-now interventions and policing. But I think at the same time, we need to do interventions that are much earlier. In the end, you have a consistent emergent pattern of violent behaviors in New Haven. If there’s anything I left office with a real frustration with is that you could keep it down but then it bubbles up. I think it’s because there are conditions that promote violence. I think a lot of them have to do with economics, lack of family structure and oppositional values in communities of poverty where isolation develops. The reason why I mention Yale in that context is that Yale is a clinical institution with faculty who are thought leaders in this. There are lots of places in the university that could provide clinical, mental health support for very young people to try to create diversions well before patterns of violent behavior get started.
I mention both those areas particularly because not only are they urgent New Haven needs and opportunities, but because they also reflect the strength and self-interest of the University, and what ought to exist at the heart of Yale and New Haven collaborations are mutual self-interest. It’s not enough [for Yale to invest in New Haven] just because it’s the right thing to do.
Q: What do you think of Yale undergraduates’ involvement in New Haven politics?
JD: I think Yale undergraduates are involved in a host of community activities, all within a very sharp spirit of community engagement. We all have responsibilities to each other, when we act in awareness of our responsibilities to one another; we build a stronger, healthier community, giving some purpose and meaning from that in our lives.
Q: What do you think of Yale undergraduates running for positions of political power in New Haven?
JD: There has been a long history of Yale undergraduates as elected officials, but it’s interesting when you say “positions of power” — frankly, I think people who accept ownership of teaching kids to read are in positions of incredible power. I think sometimes we short-sell the value and importance of healthy community-level and direct one-on-one engagement with other people. If there’s anything I hope I convey in the course, it’s very much that these one-on-one engagements make all the difference in the world. I happen to think that if you’re engaged in a great reading program, or helping some church building housing, or helping undocumented immigrants navigate their lives, you’re in a position of power.
Q: Let me clarify. What about actual positions of political office, not community outreach programs?
JD: Undergraduates are like everyone else. Some will run for office, some will serve on a democratic committee, and that’s fine. Frankly, in my 20 years as mayor I served with about 120 aldermen. It’s not just Yale undergraduates who are transient. It’s 75% rental housing stock in this town. Some people stay for a long time, some people stay for a short time. I don’t think it’s a problem. I don’t think it’s necessarily uncharacteristic of residents of this town. I just think it’s a very small part of the reality of the presence of Yale’s undergraduates.
There are people who come to New Haven from all over the world who little understand New Haven or have experiences like it, so I don’t think that Yale undergraduates are particularly different of these, of whom there are a lot, who come to New Haven for a period of time and then leave. One of my reasons for leaving after 20 years as mayor was that: you know what? Twenty years was enough for me and 20 years was enough for the city. Time for change. So I don’t think it’s a problem or particularly uncharacteristic of other folks in the city.
Q: What do you see as the greatest problem facing New Haven today? How do you think your administration dealt in tackling it?
JD: I think the greatest challenge is competitiveness in the workplace. It’s a fast-changing economy and a competitive environment. If you’re skilled and you’re bright and you’ve got a great work ethic, I think you can succeed wonderfully, and I think lots of people don’t succeed wonderfully. I think a big challenge for New Haven right now is making sure people who are here are prepared to compete in the economy. As best as we reasonably can, we should provide people with the tools and the resources to take advantage of that economy.
Q: In light of the new Harp-Salovey leadership, what lessons can be learned from the DeStefano-Levin era?
JD: I guess what I would hope is that the city understands that it can’t be a great city if Yale isn’t growing and thriving, and Yale recognizes that it can’t be the best possible place for faculty and students if it’s not in a healthy host city. What that really translates down to oftentimes is learning to disagree within bounds. You recognize that you are going to have disagreements and do that respectfully. It isn’t a Woodbridge Hall-City Hall relationship; it’s a much more textured and rich relationship.
Q: Now, the most important question: Would you support a campaign to bring back the famous Salovey ’stache?
JD: No, I like him clean-shaven! He doesn’t have anything to hide. Plus, he always has food stuck in it, so it’s really rather unattractive.
“Through the Trees” is more than a collection of artwork. Its artists specifically emphasize that the exhibit is not merely “art for art’s sake” — its goals are to raise awareness about gun violence, and to memorialize victims of such violence in the process. To this end, the artists constructed six makeshift wooden trees, spray-painted them silver and hung them with highly varied pieces of artwork. Many of these are ornaments created by New Haven public school children. Paper mache cylinders painted with wintry scenes hang from the branches. Among them, paintings, largely of doves depicted in rainbow colors, have been slipped into the front of empty CD cases for protection against the weather.
The art is as touching as it is varied. Written on one tree are the words, “Mom, where’s my sister?” An ornament features two pictures of a young man — “sunrise” is written beneath a picture of him as a young child, and “sunset” beneath a picture of him taken soon before his premature death. There are other heart-tugging images of friends who died too young pasted onto heart-shaped cardboard, surrounded by glitter glue. Plain sneakers, spray-painted blue or covered in marker and stickers, hang from the trees by their laces.
The artists specifically sought interaction with the public, even providing free art supplies that viewers could use, and their decision to leave the gates to the exhibit open during the night allowed for some anonymous additions. Various fake birds have appeared: One large mallard, facing the ground, hangs from the branches of one of the silver trees, and a few other, smaller birds decorate one of its neighbors. This flock’s significance may be clear to the artist who put it up, but doesn’t seem obvious to anyone else.
During the afternoon that I spent at the exhibit, the element of public contribution was especially apparent. One woman squatted in the snow for nearly ten minutes, soaking her sweatpants as she carefully wrote her message: “STOP the violence … never give up … there’s always hope out there.” Other messages were harsher: “Gunz don’t kill people. People kill people. Smarten up people.”
Unfortunately not all would-be artists made such relevant contributions. As is inevitable with any exhibit that encourages its audience to draw, paint and write on the art itself, “Through the Trees” attracted its fair share of jokesters and ne’er-do-wells. Amid the serious work were helpful pieces of advice like “Shrek yourself before you wreck yourself” and meaningful comments like “#tree” scrawled in purple and green marker. These immature additions made it difficult to take “Through the Trees” as seriously as it deserved.
The exhibit does good work, but I have to wonder whether its true purpose was fulfilled — indeed, whether this sort of public can achieve the social change it seeks. The collection — with the rawness of its emotions, the passion behind its sentiments — likely struck any who stumbled across it, forcing them to think about the problem of gun violence. But when I visited the exhibit, my fellow attendees were mainly people who had been somehow involved — the artists themselves, patrons of the exhibit, teachers whose students had contributed. Some viewers seemed to be more interested in the free buffet (the artists had planned a reception to kick the exhibit off) than in the art. Creating and publicizing art on this topic seemed cathartic and effective for the contributors involved, but I’m not sure how many new people it reached. Those who cared, it seemed, were already there.
“Through the Trees” asks how effective art can be outside the aesthetic realm. Can art change people that are far removed from it? Would a murderer shift his attitude after seeing these trees? Whether or not the answers are yes, it seems important to raise these questions.
John DeStefano Jr. was elected as the 49th mayor of New Haven in January 1994 and has held this office for 10 consecutive terms. In January of this year, however, he announced that his time in office would be over: He would not seek re-election.
In the wake of DeStefano’s announcement, several contenders stepped up to fill his shoes, but after the results of September’s primary, two candidates have risen to the fore: Toni Harp ARC ’78 and Justin Elicker FES ’10 SOM ’10.
Of the two candidates Harp is most often seen as DeStefano’s successor, both by her critics and champions. But after 20 years under one mayor, would a Harp administration mean more of the same?
According to her campaign, Harp’s platform rests on economic development, education reform and improving public safety.
For those looking for change, Harp promises to increase coordination between the mayor’s office and the Board of Aldermen and increase community involvement in public safety — both of which were not DeStefano’s top priorities, at least according to the senator’s camp.
But even within these issues, there are similarities in the rhetoric used by Harp and the mayor. Though their proposed ways of accomplishing them differ, Harp and DeStefano advocate for the same goals, and in almost the same language.
But in response to the criticism that she and DeStefano are similar politicians, Harp pointed out that change isn’t necessarily good for its own sake.
“I hope that when I’m mayor that people feel that same sense of stability,” she said.
Harp promises to be able to continue many of the mayor’s emphases, especially in areas such as education reform and public safety. According to Harp’s campaign, Harp has a lot of support from local politicians, especially the Board of Aldermen, because she knows the city just as well as the mayor does. But while this means that Harp, if elected, would have much of the support that ensured DeStefano’s longevity, for better or for worse, it also means that the city’s priorities wouldn’t be likely to change.
The Early Days
Harp first became active in New Haven politics when DeStefano was in office. She came to New Haven as an architecture graduate student almost 40 years ago and was elected as Ward 2 alderwoman in 1992. In 1993, she became state senator of Connecticut’s 10th district.
But Harp was not always perceived as DeStefano’s successor, or necessarily his ally.
Harp campaign manager Patrick Scully said the two were able to collaborate on some legislative goals when she first arrived, and resisted calling the two politicians rivals during the rest of DeStefano’s term because they’ve occupied different political spheres: Harp as senator and DeStefano as city mayor.
But during New Haven’s 2011 mayoral campaign, Harp made the bold decision to endorse Clifton Graves, who ran against DeStefano. In her endorsement speech, Harp advocated for a better solution to reducing violence in the city, citing the 23 homicides that had been committed already that year.
During that same election, Harp’s popularity was compared to DeStefano’s even though she was not running for mayor. A survey commissioned by DeStefano’s reelection campaign in 2011 analyzing voter preference between DeStefano and Harp ranked the state senator over the mayor.
Two Thumbs Up
Still, over time Harp has found support from many of the same people as DeStefano. And the most prominent of these have been the local unions.
Local 34 and Local 35, which represent Yale’s workers, endorsed her in June of this year, but she has also received support from over 10 other unions, including the New Haven Federation of Teachers, and the New Haven Firefighters.
These endorsements have become a major selling point for Harp, earning her an endorsement from the New Haven Register, which specifically cited her connections to the Board of Aldermen and to the unions.
DeStefano has stared down union demands in the past. In February of 2011, he fired 16 New Haven firefighters, a situation that led to a union protest and eventually escalated into a prominent court case: Ricci v. DeStefano. But even in the face of legal opposition, DeStefano continued to act independently.
President of “Yale for Elicker” Drew Morrison ’14 questioned whether Harp would do the same. He explained that many view Harp as beholden to special interests, given how much she has relied on union connections during the campaign process.
“[If Harp is elected] a lot of the ideas and decisions are not going to come from the mayor,” Morrison said. He argued that Harp is running from a “bully pulpit.”
But others see Harp’s connections differently: as a way for her to work more efficiently.
Scully emphasized that Harp would not be afraid to stand up to her supporters if she disagreed with them.
“She isn’t beholden to them by any means,” he said in reference to her union connections.
And Harp doesn’t just rely on unions. She has the endorsement of most New Haven Aldermen. Members of the board are happy to see a mayoral candidate who is on the same page as them, especially since DeStefano’s policies weren’t always coordinated with theirs.
According to Alderman Frank Douglass (Ward 2) and Jeanette Morrison (Ward 22), Harp’s hopes for New Haven are in harmony with the Board of Aldermen’s Vision Statement for 2013-2014.
Douglass has known Harp for a long time, and he believes she’s ready to work with the board. “Its personal between me and her,” he joked.
Personal might be a good watchword for the Harp campaign, at least according to Scully.
“DeStefano is more of a top-down type of mayor,” he said “Toni Harp is more of a bring everybody to the table leader.”
Getting Schooled
After being sworn into office in 1994, John DeStefano set out on the ambitious mission to renovate or rebuild every New Haven public school. Now New Haven schools, newly renovated, boast innovative designs: white concrete and glass at Hill Regional Career High School and curved brick at Truman School, to name a few.
Like DeStefano, Harp emphasizes education reform as one of her priorities. But where DeStefano emphasized infrastructure, Harp prioritizes reform in the classroom. One of her main emphases has been on expanding curriculum improvements such as tailoring content to the needs of the kids in the class.
Harp commended DeStefano’s work on public schools, but added that “we have to make sure that inside those beautiful school buildings we have a world-class education that works.”
Harp has found support for these policies among local politicians, and Douglass specifically commended her for moving in the direction that New Haven’s students need.
“I think she’ll play a big part in actually making sure that the school systems work as opposed to just having new facilities,” he said.
Many of those within the education system also seem to agree. As an educator at Gateway Community College, Alderwoman Morrison believes that Harp’s education policy would give more students an education that would prepare them for college-level classes, something that wasn’t the case under DeStefano.
Perhaps because of this difference, Harp said that she feels a sense of urgency when it comes to education reform. DeStefano’s policies, in school reform as well as construction, have worked so far, but she believes that there is more to be done, and that it needs to come quickly.
“We can’t afford to take years to create the change that these children need,” Harp said.
5-O on Your Block
The New Haven of the early 90s, when DeStefano first took office, was much different, and more dangerous, than the New Haven of today. It was the site of widespread violence, much of it caused by drug wars.
And even as much of that violence has disappeared, DeStefano has kept reduction of crime at the top of his priorities list.
In 2012, there were 50% fewer homicides and 30% fewer non-fatal shootings than there were in 2011. In 2013 to date, violent crime is down 10%. This change has been due in a large part to DeStefano’s efforts.
If elected, Harp promises to continue DeStefano’s public safety policies, but to focus on community engagement, specifically through community policing. Many concerned citizens of New Haven, she argues, would like to be more involved in their own security.
This model of policing relies more on neighborhood watches and officers on walking beats in New Haven’s neighborhoods. It’s good for community involvement, according to Harp’s campaign, but not New Haven’s traditional approach. According to Harp, at the start of DeStefano’s time as mayor, he was a proponent for more community involvement in public safety, but as he moved through police chiefs, the community-policing model fell by the wayside in favor of other priorities, such as targeting violent criminals instead of on-the-block policing.
Harp was the first to make a strong push for community policing in New Haven when she was the Ward 2 alderman and, while her emphasis isn’t the same as the mayor’s, her approach has local support. Current Police Chief Dean Esserman, according to both Harp and Scully, is on board with a shift in focus.
“Community policing is the linchpin of [Harp’s] public safety policy,” said Scully.
Two Chefs in the Same Kitchen
Although many parallels can be drawn between DeStefano and Harp, her supporters see her possible election as one that will bring about a lot of change. Connecticut congresswoman and Harp endorser Rosa DeLauro acknowledged that DeStefano was an “outstanding” mayor who brought a lot of good to the city. But she also said that she looks forward to Harp’s “historic” election. If she wins the vote, she will be the city’s first female mayor.
“She has a vision and understanding for the city, and the skills to create a great future for New Haven,” DeLauro said.
But some of Harp’s opponents worry that if elected, her similarities to DeStefano will result in stasis for New Haven. Since they share similar goals and work with the same coalitions, they argue the opportunity for change in New Haven would be limited. They want a new mayor, not another DeStefano.
But Harp supporters argue that differences do exist — especially in her willingness to try new approaches to old issues.
Douglass emphasized that, in the end, Harp and DeStefano would work towards the good of the same New Haven, though her proposed approach has a different flavor than the current mayor’s.
“I don’t see her as anything like DeStefano,” he said. “They wear two different aprons.”
