Volume 51 - Issue 4

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 51 / ISS 4 / FEB 2019

THE NEW JOURNAL

PIKE’S PATTERN OF NEGLECT

MONEY TROUBLE

HOT AIR BALLOONS

RISING SEAS

editors-in-chief Annie Rosenthal Mark Rosenberg managing editor Arya Sundaram senior editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Robert Scaramuccia associate editors Laura Glesby Max Graham Rachel Koh Sohum Pal Elliot Wailoo

copy editors Kofi Ansong Yonatan Greenberg Sofia Laguarda Sara Luzuriaga Eliana Swerdlow design editors Merritt Barnwell Anya Pertel Meher Hans Sam Oldshue Rachel Wolf photo editors Robbie Short Vivek Suri web developer Philippe Chlenski

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Lincoln Caplan, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, The time? April 2015. The place? Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Dazed by the floodlights overhead and the pearly-white smiles of our high-achieving peers, we wandered the extracurricular bazaar at Bulldog Days. Ballroom dancers besieged us. We could have become stars of the polo team. Every single improv group wanted us, bad. Instead, we each ended up at a table in the back staffed by scruffy-looking representatives of an unregistered organization who had snuck their way in.

The nice people at The Magazine About Yale & New Haven poured us the Kool-Aid: smart, people-centered storytelling about the place where we’d spend the next four years.

They had quite a legacy to point to. The oldest longform magazine at Yale, TNJ has been pumping out stellar journalism for fifty-one years. A few weeks ago, we put our entire archives up online: 250 issues, thousands of stories, a massive trove of Yale and New Haven history. (Read away at issuu.com/thenewjournal.)

In our latest, we’ve got some truly great reads: an investigation into alleged negligence by one of New Haven’s largest real estate companies, the madcap world of hot air balloonists, everything you need to know about Connecticut’s fiscal crisis and New Haven’s plan to fight global warming, plus a century-old hat store and literal human brains, Yalies who just want to be good people, and Yalies who just want to get drunk at Union Station.

Thank you to the members of our alumni board for their wise advice, high standards, and unfailing faith in this publication.

And eternal gratitude to the members of our editorial board, who each spent 180 (!) hours of the past year locked in the living room of 216 Dwight St., feverishly inputting edits on a diet of pure coffee and carbs. Together, we’ve birthed five beautiful issues. As an independent, nonprofit magazine, TNJ is completely made up of its people –– and you guys are the best.

Finally, thank you, readers, for reading. We hope you’ll write. Can’t wait to see what’s coming down the pipes.

Signing off, Annie and Mark anna.rosenthal@yale.edu mark.b.rosenberg@yale.edu

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 51 issue 4 FEB 2019

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover PIKE’S PATTERN OF NEGLECT Student tenants claim that Pike International, one of New Haven’s biggest real-estate developers, has failed to maintain their homes.

Candice Wang

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feature ROBERT ZIRPOLO’S FLYING MACHINE A hot air balloonist soars high above Connecticut.

Robert Scaramuccia

standards points of departure 4 A GOOD HAT IS HARD TO FIND — Beasie Goddu HOW TO SOLVE EVERYTHING — Eli Mennerick MIND MATTER — Matthew Kleiner 10

poem WHAT YOU TOLD ME ABOUT THE FIG TREE — Rachel Koh

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snapshot IN THE RED — Conor Johnson Can Ned Lamont save Connecticut from a staggering budget crisis?

16

snapshot FACING THE FLOOD — Sarah Adams As seas rise, New Haven enacts an ambitious plan to combat climate change.

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endnote FIVE BEERS DEEP AT THE UNION STATION SBARRO — Mariah Kreutter A discount at a train station offers an evening of intoxication.

P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

A GOOD HAT IS HARD TO FIND New Haven’s lone hat shop recalls a bygone era.

Beasie Goddu

“A

hat is a timeless piece,” Ben DelMonico declares. The manager of New Haven’s DelMonico Hatter sits across from me in Java Café with a mint tea, tapping the visor of his grey wool baseball cap. His hat — a Wigens, he informs me — complements his crisp button-down and grey wool sweater. Ben chooses his words carefully, massaging one hand with the other as he focuses on a point over my shoulder. The 44-year-old New Haven native isn’t used to being interviewed. The last news coverage of the business was in 2017, when the New Haven Independent showed up to document an unusual customer: a possibly-rabid possum, which Ben had to call the police to remove. The possum might have made a good hat, but it certainly wasn’t going to buy one.

In the early twentieth century, there were twentyseven hat stores in New Haven. Now there is only one. Established in 1908 by Ernest DelMonico,

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senior, DelMonico Hatter sits at 47 Elm Street, a block southeast of the Green, between a menswear shop and a rubber stamp store. Ben is part of the fourth generation of DelMonico hatters –– his father and grandfather spent their whole careers behind the counter. As a young boy, Ben helped out in the store over the Christmas holidays, but he didn’t return to it until about five years ago, when his father, Ernest, asked him to come home to help run the business.

Since Ernest’s death last year, Ben has taken charge.

From the street, you might mistake the store for a tea parlor. A large, colorful sign graced by an enthusiastic Mad Hatter hangs in front. Displays of carefully-posed hats in the windows hearken back to a time when one may have casually left one’s derby on the dressing table or one’s bowler on the baby grand. DelMonico’s stocks forty-seven types of hats, from sombreros to skullcaps.

You, too, can suavely drop their names (Tricorne, anyone? How about a pork pie?) by consulting the store’s newly updated online glossary, designed to act as translator for a younger crowd unfamiliar with hat lingo. When you do, you will learn, shockingly, that the first incarnation of a beret debuted in the Bronze Age, and, less shockingly, that “the core purpose of the helmet has remained the same, to protect the head from injury.”

Ben’s desk is at the back of the store, behind labyrinthine rows of hat racks and hatboxes.

DelMonico’s assistant manager, Christina Urdanivia, and retailer, Vijor McCray, huddle around a countertop computer opposite him. All three are on the phone with customers. “What was your last size? What color?” they ask. One hat is going to South Africa.

When she finishes her call, Christina offers to show me the back of the shop, where they resize, steam, and flatten hats. Behind Ben’s desk, we enter a museum of perfectly preserved millinery equipment. Lining one THE NEW JOUR NAL

wall are small wooden busts of head circumferences, disk-shaped, almost like tree rings. Christina points to the hat-steaming machine, a voluminous, aluminum mushroom cap connected to a shaft. They don’t do as much in-store repair work, she tells me; they don’t do much in-store business, period. Ernest DelMonico wisely embraced the dot com boom in the early 2000s, ahead of the curve for the hat world. Most of their sales are online, with clients from out-of-town and abroad.

People just don’t wear hats the way they used to, Ben explains. The turning point for hat culture in the U.S., he says, was January 20, 1961: John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Kennedy was the last President-elect to emerge from his motorcade wearing a top hat. After he was sworn in, Kennedy, one of the most photographed men in the country, seldom donned a hat. The public subsequently christened him “Hatless Jack.”

The majority of American men put their hats on the shelf, and the industry petered out. Now, hat-wearers in America are an eclectic group, equal parts ardent traditionalists and bold statement makers.

Ben manages DelMonico’s daily operations, and Christina, a five-year veteran of the industry, provides abundant enthusiasm. (She tells me, “You need to find the right hat for the shape of the face, but also the right brim, the right color.”) Vijor, age twenty-two, is the entrepreneur. While I talk to her, she deftly runs through shipping receipts, organizing and cataloguing them. She’s wearing a sleek black tracksuit and her hair is pulled into a neat ponytail. It’s only her fourth day on the job, but she’s already cased the joint, and she has ambitious plans for the business’ future. “Our new photo shoots are going to be bold, daring,” she says decisively. “I think hats, all different kinds, should appeal to a younger clientele.”

The homburg, for instance, may be staging a resurgence. It has a tipped-up brim and a defined center dent. First popularized in the 1890s by King Edward VII of England, it is known as the “Godfather Hat,” after Marlon Brando in the movies. It’s also the hat of choice for one of DelMonico’s most loyal customers, Ramblin’ Dan, a popular Connecticut bluegrass player and the proud owner of a DelMonico white straw homburg with a small feather in the cap. He wears it all the time, according to a post on his blog. When he first left the store with it, he reports, a man across Elm Street shouted “NICE HAT!” Dan isn’t the only local celebrity who gets his headwear from DelMonico’s: Mayor Toni Harp has been in a few times, usually to buy a Betmar, Ben tells me. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut’s third district, recently purchased a Borsalino. On one occasion, Yale President Peter Salovey dropped in to FEBRUARY 2019

buy a traditional straw-brimmed Panama hat.

Local customers are appreciative of the store’s history. That’s what matters to Calista Washburn, Ben DelMonico’s niece, who will start college at Yale in the fall. She helped out over the Christmas vacation, the store’s busiest time of year. “So many people came in and told me about buying hats from my greatgrandfather,” Calista tells me over the phone. I ask her if she wears hats herself. “To be fully honest, I don’t like hats. Maybe the odd baseball cap,” she confesses.

“My grandfather, though—now there was a gentleman who really wore hats.”

A happy customer leaving DelMonico’s has to weave through rows of classic hats –– a reminder that they’ve just bought into a history of sophistication and elegance. Walking out, I think of Rosalind Russell, the 1940s film star in “His Girl Friday.” She plays a gutsy female reporter with a silk-padded chevron-striped top hat — one I could see on a bolder version of myself.

– Beasie Goddu is a firstyear in Silliman College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

HOW TO SOLVE EVERYTHING Yale’s effective altruists strive for an ethical lifestyle.

Eli Mennerick

F

rankie Andersen-Wood stood beside a projected cartoon of a light bulb with its filament twisted into the shape of a heart.

In front of her, five Yale students sat along one side of a seminar table. Upbeat pop music played in the background.

“Effective altruism isn’t something you can just learn about in two hours,” said Andersen-Wood, co-president of Yale Effective Altruism (YEA), going off-script from her presentation at YEA’s spring information session. She spoke quickly and in a soft English accent. “If that were the case, then the world would be solved.”

A social movement that emerged in the late 2000s at the University of Oxford, effective altruism aims to quantify and maximize the positive impact of individuals’ lives. In practice, this means identifying the world’s most urgent issues—those chosen by adherents include global poverty, animal suffering, climate change, and artificial intelligence—and recommending the most efficient responses. The movement recommends careers based on their social benefit and assesses charitable donations based on their impact and cost-efficiency.

The most active local effective altruism groups— YEA among them—are at elite colleges like Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, or in large cities like London and Boston. According to Andersen-Wood, the YEA mailing list includes about seven hundred students and recent graduates, although only twentyfive are actively involved. YEA hosts speakers and career workshops, holds social events, and runs a semester-long fellowship designed to introduce Yale students to effective altruism.

A week before her presentation, I met AndersenWood at Blue State Coffee on York. She sat in an armchair by the window, balancing a balsamicglazed tofu sandwich on her lap. Andersen-Wood is vegan and majoring in political science. This is not an unusual set of characteristics for Yale’s effective altruists (or, as Anderson-Wood prefers, “aspiring effective altruists”). Many follow animal-free diets; the majority study political science, philosophy, or a STEM field. Effective altruism also influences other 6

illustration by Sam Oldshue

facets of Andersen-Wood’s life: “what I buy and what I don’t buy, where I donate, if I donate, how often I donate, how much I donate, career choices.”

Aaron Gertler, who graduated in 2015, founded YEA during his senior year at Yale. Now, he works in communications at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He also keeps a personal blog, where he publishes his charitable donations; he gives ten percent of his income to charity every year, primarily to effective altruism organizations and the Against Malaria Foundation.

Joshua Monrad, the former co-president of YEA, arrived at Yale planning to study psychology. But under the influence of effective altruism, he switched majors to Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and now hopes to work in public health after college.

“I think I would have grown frustrated if I had felt like I wasn’t in the best path for helping others,” he told me over Skype. Monrad is from Denmark, but this semester he’s studying abroad at Oxford, the philosophy’s birthplace. Still, he acknowledges that being a perfect effective altruist is an ideal, not a reality.

“As an international student, I fly all over the world, which is expensive and emits a lot of carbon,” he said. “There are a lot of things that I own, that on a very extreme conception of effective altruism, I maybe didn’t have to own.” Effective altruism, he said, encourages him to think more about these issues, and to try harder to mitigate them.

The effective altruists at Yale seem wary of their public perception. In an email responding to my interview request, Monrad warned, “I have a tendency to be quite careful about how I represent effective altruism,” citing experiences with “unfortunate misconceptions about what the broader effective altruism movement is and what it involves.”

One point of controversy is effective altruism’s relationship with “earning to give,” the strategy of pursuing a high-paying job in order to donate more to charity. Especially early in its development, the effective altruism movement gained a reputation for recommending careers on Wall Street. But according to Sebastian Quaade, YEA’s strategy advisor, effective THE NEW JOUR NAL

altruism has since reduced its emphasis on earning to give. An article published in 2015 on the website of 80,000 Hours—an offshoot of the Centre for Effective Altruism named for the average number of working hours in a person’s life—clarified the organization’s stance, asserting that earning to give is only one effective path among many. That attitude seems to be reflected across YEA: Quaade is interested in economic development, and none of the other five current or former YEA board members I talked to planned to pursue consulting or finance.

Shelly Kagan, a Yale ethics professor, outlined a more philosophical question the movement faces.

Since governments are better than individuals at enacting change, he wrote in an email, some might argue that effective altruists should focus more on government reform than individual actions.

“Roughly, politics, not charity,” he wrote.

Another criticism focuses on the fact that effective altruism attracts a disproportionate number of white men. Two thirds of the 2,607 respondents to a 2018 demographics survey on the Effective Altruism Forum were male. Seventy-eight percent were white, down from a staggering 89 percent in 2017.

The 2018 survey notes that the drop was likely due to an increase in people who opted out of the question, not an increase in people from underrepresented groups.

FEBRUARY 2019

Eui Young Kim, a board member of YEA, acknowledged this problem. The movement has historically attracted people from “quantitative subjects, like cognitive science or math or physics or artificial intelligence,” fields that are “not exactly diverse,” Kim said.

Diversity seems especially important in a movement that aims to decide which problems are most pressing—a point Monrad acknowledged.

Diversity helps “avoid blind spots and reduce the risk of overlooking important causes or approaches to doing good,” he said.

Jessica McCurdy, the other co-president of YEA, said that YEA’s members are the type of people who enjoy confronting uncomfortable moral questions.

She described late-night discussions about the trolley problem and outlandish moral thought experiments.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, how do I actually feel about that?” she said. “How many chickens is a human life worth?”

According to Andersen-Wood, effective altruism isn’t a philosophy or a set of answers, but a shared project. She and the other effective altruists at Yale find a unique home in YEA: a secular congregation examining the meaning of a moral life.

– Eli Mennerick is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

MIND MATTER Yale neuroscientists are probing the human brain for the secrets of consciousness.

Matthew Kleiner photo by Yehia Elkersh

K

ate Christison-Lagay grabbed a rubber brain off a countertop in the basement of Yale School of Medicine’s library and pried its two halves apart so that we could have a look inside. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Hal Blumenfeld’s research lab, Christison-Lagay studies sensory perception, which she and her team believe can provide a model for human consciousness. She speaks seriously and energetically about brains, and clearly knows her way around one. After separating one of the lobes, she pointed to a small area marked in purple. “Here’s the first stop when someone sees something: the primary visual cortex,” she said. As she traced her fingertip forward through the cerebral cortex, I realized that the image of her moving finger was travelling down the very same pathway inside my own brain.

Behind glass panels lining the walls around us, hundreds of other brains—real human brains— floated in jars of formaldehyde. Many were whole; others had been sliced to pieces like melons. They all 8

shone a ghostly white through the ambient yellowish solution. A century ago, these brains belonged to some of neurosurgery’s first patients. Once transferred into jars, they experienced second lives as a reference library for brain researchers and doctors. In their current incarnation, they form the centerpiece of a one-room museum dedicated to the man who originally operated on them, and collected them from his deceased patients: Dr. Harvey Cushing.

“He was a really big deal,” Christison-Lagay said, leading me through the Cushing Center, as the eerie underground space is known. “He was able to reduce the mortality rate associated with brain surgery from around 80 percent to 10 percent.” In addition to the brains, the Cushing collection includes thousands of glass-plate photographs, microscopic slides, and journal notes, testaments to the doctor’s meticulous research practices—and the many advances he pioneered in modern medicine, both at the operating table and in the laboratory.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

A couple of weeks after our visit, I sat in a small basement room across the street from the Cushing Center, staring at a computer screen full of static.

My chin and forehead rested on padded bars, while a pair of adjustable lenses held my gaze from across the table. The robotic device, called a pupilometer, was learning to read my mind.

Christison-Lagay and her colleagues in the Blumenfeld lab are working on solving one of the brain’s greatest mysteries: the physical basis of consciousness. They haven’t cut into any actual heads; rather, with the help of advanced imaging technology, they’ve been able to pinpoint electrical activity within the brain almost down to the level of individual cells. About a year ago, they published results from a breakthrough experiment, which involved flashing faces onto a computer screen and recording participants’ brain activity in response to the visual stimulus with an EEG (electroencephalography) test.

The researchers are worried, however, that they may have switched on more of the brain than they intended to. They had asked participants to press a button indicating whether or not they had noticed the faces popping onto the screen. As a result, the researchers can’t be sure how much of the brain signal they recorded came from the simple visual perception of the face, and how much came from the participants mentally preparing to report what they’d seen.

“We’re potentially conflating two different events,” Christison-Lagay explained.

The set of trials I was taking part in was supposed to help lay down the groundwork for an improved experiment, which the team has dubbed “the no-report paradigm.” Through a stream of white noise accompanying the fuzziness on the screen, I strained my ears to listen out for fleeting sounds, like a whistle, a water droplet, or a laser zap. I pressed a button whenever I heard something. In the meantime, the pupilometer kept tabs on my eyes. According to Christison-Lagay, “our pupils change size clearly in response to light and the things that we’re seeing, but they also change based on our physiological arousal state.” In other words, by comparing my pupil dilations to the responses I was giving on the keypad, the pupilometer was figuring out whether I’d had a conscious experience without me having to report it.

Hal Blumenfeld has spent most of his career working with epileptic patients, performing surgeries and helping to develop treatments. Epileptic seizures often involve a disruption of consciousness, and Blumenfeld believes that insights into the workings of healthy consciousness can “point the way toward possible therapies for when consciousness is abnormally FEBRUARY 2019

affected by disease processes.” If a conscious network is shut down by a seizure, for example, doctors may be able to electrically stimulate that area if they know exactly where it is, and turn it back on.

In 1934, Harvey Cushing retired from medical practice to New Haven, and brought his brains with him. He died four years later, but neurosurgeons continued to consult his data base for decades. Once CT scans and MRIs hit the scene in the nineteenseventies, however, the brains were relegated to cramped storage shelves in the basement of the School of Medicine dorms, where they received only late-night visits from thrill-seeking students. In 1994, a Ph.D. student named Christopher Wahl approached his advisor about writing a thesis on the historical legacy of the brains, and administrators again took interest in Cushing’s materials. Since 2010, the collection has resided in its quietly lit, wood-paneled basement gallery, a kind of portal back in time to when humans’ most advanced knowledge of the brain came from hand-drawn sketches, photographic negatives of misshapen heads, and the organs themselves, spookily suspended in formaldehyde.

Our current understanding of the physical basis of consciousness is equally primitive. The split-second examples of sensory perception that Blumenfeld and his team have studied are a far cry from what we consider to be the essence of human consciousness, what truly makes us who we are. Even when Blumenfeld’s researchers move on into the next areas they hope to explore, like motor planning—the processes that make us kick a foot out reflexively or decide to raise an arm—their findings won’t begin to describe the limitless complexities that add up to how we each think and feel. Cushing taught modern brain researchers that progress comes gradually, through careful record-keeping and rigorous analysis. “The plan is hopefully to understand as much as possible in space and time, what happens during a conscious event,” Blumenfeld said. “To drill down to the level of hundreds—tens—of milliseconds in order to see exactly which neuronal populations are involved in a conscious experience.”

If there’s ever a museum built to commemorate the early days of consciousness research, I hope my pupils can be found in there somewhere, perhaps floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

– Matthew Kleiner is a sophomore in Saybrook College.

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what you told me about the fig tree first the story: mark and the others chanced upon the tree, but it did not bear fruit. so the disciples went hungry, and jesus cursed the tree, and the fig tree withered and died. second: you are the impotent tree, the circumstances the winter, and i am mark, who will not be fed. you tell me at some point you will bear fruit but just not now. the time is not right, and the shape of our surroundings is not right, and your mind is not in the right place, only i’ve heard this all before. third: i am the fig tree that wants to bear fruit for the hungry disciples, circumstance reprises its role as winter, and you are jesus, withering me down for something i cannot help or control. and now i am punished and will never bear fruit again even when winter is gone. does it make you feel better to turn abandonment into a parable? because you have not called once. you said you hope beyond what hope permits that we will bear fruit again, but you have not called, once. so tell me now what i am: jesus, mark, or the tree, or something else in the story, another disciple, an unmentioned bird, the ungiving earth, a shadow at the side?

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– Rachel Koh is a junior in Silliman College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

illustration by Matt Reiner

FEBRUARY 2019

11

SNAPSHOT

In The Red

Can Ned Lamont save Connecticut from a staggering budget crisis?

Conor Johnson

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

O

n September 17, at the Shubert Theatre, two blocks from Old Campus, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ned Lamont took the stage for his second general election debate. Dressed in a crisp suit, not a hair astray, Lamont looked equal parts politician and businessman. Standing in front of televisions emblazoned with a large American flag, he battled Republican nominee Bob Stefanowski for almost an hour. Lamont fielded jab after jab about his privileged upbringing and his similarity to former governor Dannel Malloy, who left office with a 24 percent approval rating, but he remained undeterred. Despite the debate’s laser-like focus on Connecticut’s economy and budget, Lamont did not offer any specifics about how to solve the state’s fiscal crisis. Instead, he spun a cohesive narrative about his business acumen, a philosophy of inclusive governance, and a promise to fix Connecticut’s ills.

On November 6, Lamont beat Stefanowski by forty-four thousand votes. He now faces a state budget $2 billion in the red, with billions more of debt anticipated in future years. Although the state’s economy has improved since the Great Recession, it lags significantly behind other New England states.

How did Connecticut end up in this fiscal predicament? And what, if anything, can Lamont do about it?

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Connecticut’s economy shifted from manufacturing to finance. Companies like General Electric and Aetna, as well as more than four hundred hedge funds, fled bigger cities for Connecticut’s green pastures and favorable business climate. By some measures, Connecticut became the richest state in the nation.

But as the economy boomed, irresponsible money management doomed the state’s financial future. Connecticut’s public pension program was established in the late 1940s, but administrators didn’t add a single penny to it until 1971.

When the state income tax was instituted in 1991, none of its revenue was used to pay off the state’s pension debt. Today, Connecticut’s program is the fourth-most underfunded of any state, and accounts for the majority of its debt.

David Schleicher, a Yale Law School professor who studies state finance, said that Connecticut politicians have long adhered to a “let-the-good-times-roll” philosophy, failing to fund benefit programs and assuming that continuous economic growth and a robust tax base will allow the state to catch up later. Today, “unfunded liabilities” — existing debts from state employee pensions, healthcare plans, and other debt bonds — account for more than half of Connecticut’s budget, and their cost is growing. According to Bruce Alexander, former vice president of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, these liabilities now total around $100 billion, while Connecticut’s annual revenue is only $20 billion — the fourth worst pension underfunding in the country.

“The people who ran Connecticut for decades didn’t pay for the services they received,” said Schleicher. “If I could wave a magic wand, I would make people angry at the politiFEBRUARY 2019

“The people who ran Connecticut for decades didn’t pay for the services they received,” said Schleicher. “If I could wave a magic wand, I would make people angry at the politicians representing their parents. That’s who did it.” cians representing their parents. That’s who did it.”

As debt continued to climb, the 2008 recession hit Connecticut’s economy hard — Malloy advisor Roy Occhiogrosso described the recession as the ‘icing on the cake’ of the state’s budgetary problems. Connecticut has raised taxes three times since 2009 in an effort to raise revenue; today, it has the second-highest amount of overall taxes per capita in the country.

But the plan has backfired. According to statistics from the Department of Labor, Connecticut’s total economic output has declined by 3.3 percent since 2010. New York and Massachusetts both saw growth rates of over 10 percent during the same period.

In response, people and companies fled. Three billion dollars’ worth of citizens’ income left just between 2015 and 2016, and high-profile companies like General Electric have exited the state. This exodus has led to a decline in tax revenue, forcing Connecticut to chop subsidies and economic programs. Today, the state has the second-widest income gap in the country. For the past twenty years, Connecticut has consistently ranked among the five states with the fewest jobs created. And it now faces a $4.2 billion biennial budget deficit.

Joe Brennan, the CEO of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) pointed to the budget as one of the main drivers of business exodus from the state. “The biggest single factor has been the state’s fiscal condition — we’ve had ongoing budget issues with recurring deficits in the billions 13

of dollars,” he said. “That makes it much more difficult for investors to have confidence in Connecticut.” In short, Connecticut cannot improve its economy until it gets its budgetary house in order.

Among many areas where the deficit has forced cuts is the state’s education system. In 2017, the Connecticut General Assembly reduced education spending for the first time in over a decade. A Connecticut Mirror analysis revealed that over 1,700 school district jobs were cut statewide that year.

New Haven Superintendent Carol Birks, appointed in 2018, was immediately tasked with closing a $19.3 million deficit.

She initially planned on firing around 1,000 part-time employees but after a public outcry, she instead laid off twenty-eight full-time employees. With Connecticut’s budget deep in the red, the situation statewide looks grim.

----Enter Lamont, Greenwich cable television entrepreneur and twice-unsuccessful Democratic candidate for statewide office. Lamont is a man of contradictions. He’s played the political and business underdog, the leader of the last-seeded team who defies all odds to win, and yet he possesses a privileged background few can match. He is a fourth-generation graduate of Exeter and Harvard, the progeny of a long line of successful financiers. Following a brief stint after college as the editor of a small newspaper in Ludlow, VT, Lamont attended Yale School of Management and then made a fortune as the founder of Campus Televideo, an upstart college campus television company. Throughout the campaign, he framed his start in business as a David and Goliath story: the little guy took on the monopolized industry titans — and won.

Before he was elected governor, Lamont had held political office for just two years — from 1987 to 1989 — as a member of the Greenwich Board of Selectmen. But he has im-

mersed himself in Connecticut politics over the past twenty years. Breaking away from his old-money Republican family, Lamont registered as a Democrat. In 2006, he challenged U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman from the left in the Democratic primary, relentlessly criticizing Lieberman’s support for the Iraq War, and shocked everyone with a win. Headlines hailed Lamont as a progressive darling, but Lieberman ran as an Independent and avenged his primary loss in the general election.

After an unsuccessful run for governor in 2010, Lamont entered the race again last year and, in some sense, won by default. Although more than twenty-five candidates ran, few prominent Connecticut politicians were on the ballot, likely because of the tremendous financial difficulties and unpopular decisions any new governor would confront. Lamont was a popular face, and he poured $12 million of his own money into the campaign, cruising to victory.

Now, with the state’s economy reeling, the future of Connecticut and its residents may depend on the budget for the next two years, which Lamont is scheduled to present to the legislature by late February.

What options does Lamont have to confront this crisis? According to Colin McEnroe, a radio host and political commentator on Hartford-based WNPR, Lamont has three ways to balance the budget: increasing revenue, cutting spending (which could mean scaling back crucial social services), or reworking contracts with state unions to cut back the pension and healthcare plans that remain woefully underfunded. “No responsible governor can tackle a problem of this magnitude without playing with all three of these dials,” said McEnroe.

During his campaign, Lamont avoided budgetary specifics and relied mainly on rhetoric. He touted his private-sector experience, arguing that he knew how to foster public-pri-

“Lamont is a man of contradictions.

He’s played the political and business underdog, the leader of the last-seeded team who 14

THE NEW JOUR NAL

vate partnerships and negotiate financial deals. In practice, though, Lamont’s options are extremely limited. “It’s going to be really painful,” said Schleicher, the Yale Law School professor. “There’s no magic bullet for the fiscal problems of Connecticut. There’s just a lot of suffering.”

Following the election, Lamont selected Melissa McCaw, who previously oversaw Hartford’s budget as the head of the Office of Policy and Management, as his budget director.

Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz, a former state representative from Middletown who served as Connecticut Secretary of State from 1999 to 2011, said that she and Lamont are devising “creative solutions” to put Connecticut on sound fiscal footing without increasing taxes. She pointed to marijuana legalization and sports betting as two potentially significant sources of revenue, estimating they could together bring in $175 million every year. This sum, however, is an order of magnitude lower than the roughly $2 billion needed to close the deficit.

Bysiewicz also pointed towards a number of progressive policies — paid family leave, a $15 minimum wage, equal gender pay — that she hopes will attract young people to the state and revitalize the economy. “I’ve worked in Connecticut all my life. My two kids are in New York City,” she said. “We need to find ways to attract young people to the state.”

Lamont and Bysiewicz are searching all over for places to reduce spending. In his first State of the State Address on January 9, Lamont indicated he may try to seek big savings by regionalizing some services, such as fire departments, that are currently provided by each town; cutting state aid to cities; and attempting to rework the aforementioned state union contracts. When Bysiewicz and I spoke, she outlined a series of proposals to cut costs, including seeking more competitive contracts for state construction project bids, implement-

ing policies to reduce nursing home costs, and continuing ex-Governor Malloy’s “Second Chance Society” program, which sought to reduce Connecticut’s prison population by lessening penalties for drug possession and enacting more lenient protocols for people charged with nonviolent crimes.

It remains to be seen whether Lamont’s business experience will translate to efficient government management and spending, as he has long promised. However, he has already shown some ability to negotiate deals with the private sector.

During the recent government shutdown, he set up a partnership with local banks to provide interest-free loans to federal employees. Balancing the budget for current and future cycles may be prohibitively difficult, but Lamont has repeatedly pledged to do it. “I will present to you a budget which is in balance not just for a year, but for the foreseeable future,” he said in his January 9 address. “I come from the world of small business where the numbers have to add up at the end of the month or the lights go out.”

Lamont is slated to present his first budget on February 20, but much about its specifics are still unclear. The only thing we know for sure is that Lamont is taking on a crisis decades in the making, one fueled by incompetence, a lack of foresight, and decades of politicians kicking the can down the road. He has made a career of defying the odds, from the unlikely success of his telecommunications startup to his unexpected Senate primary victory in 2006. It remains to be seen whether the self-proclaimed underdog can pull off his biggest upset yet.

– Conor Johnson is a sophomore in Davenport College.

defies all odds to win, and yet he possesses a privileged background few can match.”

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SNAPSHOT

FACING THE FLOOD As seas rise, New Haven enacts an ambitious plan to combat climate change.

Sarah Adams

“T

his house is 115 years old,” Sal DeCola said as he guided me into a bright sunroom overlooking deep blue waters. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, clear skies, and low tide. We stood in DeCola’s home in Morris Cove, a neighborhood on the east bank of New Haven Harbor that he represents as an alder. The waves pushed up against a dark concrete barrier extending below the other dozen houses along the beach. DeCola patted the wall of the house and grinned widely.

“It made it through the great storm of ’38, and all of the other ones in between to Sandy.”

Not all of Morris Cove has fared well in foul weather. “When it floods, water runs along Lighthouse Road and Townsend Avenue,” DeCola said, holding out a map of the Morris Cove ward. He pointed inland from the shore, gesturing toward the center of the neighborhood.

“And then there’s Dean Street—used to get so bad you could row a rowboat up Dean Street.”

In Fair Haven, just north of Morris Cove, historic sections of the neighborhood regularly flood during heavy thunderstorms. Places near the Mill River, like Criscuolo Park, are especially at risk. “My friends brought their kids to the playground, and water was covering the whole area—a whole foot of water,” Chris Ozyck, a resident of Fair Haven, told me. “The playground was built just last year.” Other floods have blocked off some of Fair Haven’s nine points of entry, Ozyck said, forcing vehicles to take longer routes.

Hurricanes along the Connecticut seaboard cause storm surges—temporary rises in sea

16

photos courtesy of Ian Christman

level—in the Sound. The worst flooding occurs when they coincide with high tide. New Haven dodged a bullet during Hurricane Sandy: the peak storm surge happened just two hours before high tide. “Had Sandy arrived two hours later, we would have had an extra two feet of water.” recalled Giovanni Zinn, head of the city engineering department. “We would have been in really deep trouble.”

For coastal communities like New Haven, flooding is the most urgent threat of climate change. Rising sea levels and increased rain and snowfall overload drainage systems, especially in places at low elevation. In 2016, residents and more than thirty coalition groups concerned about climate change petitioned Mayor Toni Harp for the city to update its 2004 Climate Action Plan, which focused only on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. In January 2018, the city adopted a much broader plan called the New Haven Climate & Sustainability Framework. Over thirty residents and stakeholders participated in six focus groups—on electric power, buildings, transportation, materials management, land use and green infrastructure, and food—that worked to address climate change and other sustainability challenges facing the city.

While the plan doesn’t enforce policy changes or increase government funding, it provides a wide-ranging set of recommendations. The authors advised the city to adopt a tax or ban on single-use plastic items, hire an energy expert, and implement a new ordinance to incorporate green building practices. The document also

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“Had Sandy arrived two hours later, we would have had an extra two feet of water,” Zinn said. “We would have been in really deep trouble.” details ways residents can contribute, such as riding mass transit and decreasing outdoor water use. “It’s not just a plan for what municipalities should do,” Zinn said. “It’s really a plan for what the community at large can do.”

Like the 2004 plan, which was partly spurred by the U.S.’s decision to back out of negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, New Haven’s 2018 plan responds to federal environmental policy— in particular, President Trump’s decision to back out of the Paris Agreement. “Municipalities

FEBRUARY 2019

and state governments need to, and—in some cases—are stepping up,” Justin Elicker told me during a meeting at Yale’s Kroon Hall, where the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies is headquartered. Elicker served on the Board of Alders from 2009 to 2013. For the past five years, he directed the New Haven Land Trust. In midJanuary, he entered the 2019 mayoral race with environmental concerns as a key plank of his platform.

So far, the framework has inspired some action.

Over two hundred bioswales have been installed in the regions of downtown sloped towards the water, which are most prone to flooding. These colorful three-by-five foot patches of sidewalk, filled with clusters of flowers and green grass, filter stormwater and reduce the rate at which it enters the sewer system. Additionally, with an $8 million state grant, the Long Wharf and East Shore neighborhoods are each establishing “living shorelines,” which combine intertidal

17

marshes and rock sills to reinforce the fragile coast.

But some residents and groups expected more from the city’s new plan. “It’s not just a ‘report,’” said Chris Schweitzer. “It’s meant to be implemented.”

Schweitzer is a local environmental activist and lead organizer of the New Haven Climate Movement, a grassroots organization that strives to raise awareness about climate change and call residents to action. When I met with him in mid-November, snow was falling fast outside. “Even this amount of precipitation, this early on in the year, is abnormal,” he noted. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, annual precipitation in New Haven has consistently exceeded the national average since the nineteen-eighties. From 2010 to 2014, Connecticut experienced a higher number of extreme precipitation events — defined as storms with over two inches of rainfall — than it had in any five-year period since NOAA began recording state data in the nineteen-fifties.

Schweitzer believes the city’s current efforts are only a start. “I don’t have a problem with bioswales—they’re great things,” he said. “But we need to have an equally robust response to greenhouse gases.” The framework includes an interim goal of reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions to 55 percent of 1999 levels by 2030.

The city will need to enact aggressive policies to meet this goal. Money is a limiting factor. Installing smart electricity meters in buildings, expanding sidewalk infrastructure, creating a revolving fund in the city budget for energy efficiency projects—each suggestion requires significant funding. Although bioswales in New Haven cost only $15,000—half

“Long Wharf, Union Station, and IKEA are under medium blue color. English Station, the old power plant is dark blue— gone.”

18

the cost in New York City—even relatively small expenditures are a burden for a city $1.5 billion in debt.

“A lot of it is waiting for disaster to happen, then funding happens—a somewhat reactionary of looking at it,” said Zinn, the city engineer. The floodgates at the dam of Morris Cove account for sea level rises of only thirteen feet. If the tides rise higher, the neighborhood could flood. Just last year, a seawall collapsed in Quinnipiac River Park at the eastern edge of Fair Haven. The area subsequently flooded.

Elicker has several ideas about how the city could better address climate change. Encouraging Yale to pay money into the CTtransit system instead of maintaining its own shuttle system could eliminate a redundant transportation system and increase overall ridership. Elicker sees this as an environmental issue on top of a social justice issue. “It’s unethical that you have Yale shuttle, that brings all of the Yale-affiliated people to their destination.” said Elicker. “And then overlapping many of those routes is CTtransit, which is for everyone else.” Establishing internal carbon taxes, which charge departments based on their monthly carbon emissions, could incentivize municipal departments. Elicker also points out that New Haven could join cities throughout the country, from Ann Arbor to New London, CT, which are divesting from fossil fuels.

As a climate activist, Schweitzer said he is frustrated by the general lack of awareness and participation by the community. In September, 350 CT, the New Haven Climate Movement, and other Connecticut environmental organizations held a climate rally on the Green to demand environmental justice and renewable energy. “There were 250 people total at the event.” Schweitzer shook his head. “250 people, 2018. Do people not get it?”

Elicker acknowledges Schweitzer’s frustration, but also recognizes that “people are worried about putting food on the table, getting a job, crime in their neighborhoods, and climate change is not on the forefront of their mind as an issue.” Still, he says, climate change is “the crisis of our time,” and city officials “need to play a leadership role in thinking both short-term and long-term.”

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As our meeting ended, Elicker showed me a map published by the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental nonprofit, projecting future sea levels for New Haven in 2080. On the map, dark blue, light blue, and lighter blue-green pixels scatter along the coastline and spill over the banks of the city’s rivers. The darker the shade, the higher the flooding levels estimated for that area. Long Wharf, Union Station, and IKEA are under light or medium blue. English Station, the old power plant, is dark blue—gone. Across New Haven Harbor, Tweed Airport, Morris Cove, and Fort Hale Park are also under a layer of dark blue, as are the Port of New Haven’s petroleum tanks, the city’s wastewater treatment plant, and Route 1, all east of Downtown.

Consequences of a storm event in that area could be catastrophic. “The amount of pollution that would go into the harbor…” Elicker’s voice trailed off.

In Morris Cove, DeCola and I stepped outside onto the porch for a better look at the waters. He

FEBRUARY 2019

took a deep breath of air and sighed. “It’s beautiful when the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing the boats,” he said. So far, the residents that live in houses along the cove have been lucky: the storms that have threatened in the past haven’t coincided with high tide. Although disaster prevention measures, like seawalls, may keep the city dry for now, New Haven and other coastal cities around the world are depending on large-scale emissions reductions to stay afloat. Below us, the waves gently lap against the concrete wall. As DeCola reminds me, “It’s all about the timing.”

– Sarah Adams is a junior in Morse College.

19

SNAPSHOT

PIKE’S PATTERN OF NEGLECT Student tenants claim Pike International has failed to maintain their properties.

Candice Wang

photos by Robbie Short

The boiler at the Pike-owned Theta house on Crown Street has been malfunctioning since December.

O

n the evening of June 26, Erika Lopez was curling up on the couch to watch TV after a day of work at the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan when her phone buzzed. The words that flashed across the screen made her stomach drop. Jheri Richards, Lopez’s off-campus housemate, had frantically texted her that a Yale student staying in New Haven over the summer had been walking past the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house at 277 Crown Street, where Lopez and Richards live during the school year, when he noticed that the windows had been smashed in. Panicked, Lopez called 9-1-1. When police arrived on site later that night, they found that the windows had only been partially shattered. No one had broken in.

Relieved, Lopez contacted Pike International, the

20

real-estate company Theta rents from, asking them to replace the broken windows. On July 5, Sol Lipschitz, one of Pike’s housing managers, sent an email promising to replace the windows. After three weeks of silence, Lipschitz emailed on August 1 saying he had ordered new windows. The repair didn’t take place until late August. The windows had remained broken for nearly two months.

This event only pierces the surface of Lopez’s discontent with Pike. Today, walking through the Crown Street house, you’ll encounter orange stains and holes in the ceiling, doors that don’t close properly, and a malfunctioning boiler. A year before the window incident, the lock on the front door broke while the house stood empty for the summer. When a Theta employee visited

THE NEW JOUR NAL

for a routine check-up on the house, he found several strangers squatting in the foyer.

According to Lopez, Pike has consistently failed to respond to these issues in a timely fashion. I interviewed six student tenants renting from Pike for this story. All six cited issues with the company, from unresponsive property managers to withheld security deposits, continuous leaks, and broken heaters. After two rounds of responses to general questions about long-term business goals and the number of units they own, Pike representatives did not respond to multiple inquiries about tenants’ complaints.

“Do not rent from Pike,” said Lopez. “That’s the moral of the story.”

----A five-minute stroll through the periphery of Yale’s campus along Lynwood Place, Crown Street, and Edgewood Avenue reveals countless Pike logos, plastered on brick walls and hanging over doorways. Pike owns eight hundred units throughout the city and commands a small army of around fifty direct employees, one hundred indirect contractors, and around fifteen maintenance employees from the company’s compact office at 19 Howe St. Pike was founded in 2000 by Shmully Hecht, who

is also one of the founders of Shabtai, a Jewish secret society at Yale. After the 2008 recession, which increased the unemployment rate in New Haven by around 40 percent by 2010 and left 1,800 properties vacant, Hecht and his employees went on a property-buying spree, purchasing foreclosed buildings, refurbishing them, and leasing them to Yale students and New Haven residents.

In a 2011 article in the New Haven Independent, editor Paul Bass wrote, “Pike is increasingly determining where New Haven sleeps, eats, and works.”

According to Lipschitz, the Pike property manager, the company rents to “many hundreds of Yale students, faculty, and employees,” and has custom designed and built fifteen “luxury houses” for members of the Yale community. Lipschitz emphasized Pike’s dedication to historical preservation and customer service. Their mission, he wrote in an email, involves “providing a local charm, respect for historic architecture, and the best customer service in New Haven.”

In 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency charged Pike for violation of lead-safety rules. In fourteen different rental units, Pike failed to disclose information about the presence of lead-based paint, which contains a neurotoxin that stunts children’s mental development.

A door at 277 Crown Street.

FEBRUARY 2019

21

“No matter how serious Pike’s neglect of student rental properties has been, David Corliss believes that New Haveners have it worse.“ According to the Independent, at least one child living in a Pike apartment on Chapel St. had significant levels of lead in their blood. Pike agreed to a $121,000 settlement with the EPA. John DeStefano, who served as New Haven’s mayor from 1994 to 2014 and is now a political science lecturer at Yale, told me that Pike’s business strategy is to target the significant population of Yale students moving off-campus. According to the Yale Daily News, about 25 percent of upperclassmen lived off-campus in 2009. The proportion increased to 34.1 percent of upperclassmen––43.5 percent of seniors and just under a quarter of juniors––by the fall of 2018. “Pike has made

a market decision to invest in properties adjacent to the campus or to the Yale shuttle stops,” DeStefano said.

Lipschitz said that Pike staff help orient students, who are typically first-time renters, to the leasing process.

“Our leasing dept [sic] has over one hundred years of collective experience assisting first time renters transition into their first private dwelling space,” he wrote.

Lopez and her housemates received no assistance of that sort.

----At 9 a.m. on a crisp Tuesday morning in January, I perched on the kitchen stool at the Pike-owned Theta house while Lopez fried eggs on the stove. After breakfast, she took me on a tour of the property, her heeled black boots echoing throughout the home.

We started at the top floor of the spacious three-story home. Next to a skylight, an approximately four-footlong, mildewy orange water stain scarred the third floor ceiling. The stain, presumably caused by a roof leak, first appeared nearly a year ago. Lopez said that Pike has repeatedly promised to fix it and then failed to appear.

Passing through the living room, we descended to the boiler room in the basement. Surrounded by crumbling

A ceiling stain at the Crown Street house.

22

THE NEW JOUR NAL

brick and cobwebs in the hot, humid darkness, I felt a drop of condensation drip onto my cheek. “It’s literally fucking Stranger Things down here,” said Lopez, laughing.

The heat has been spontaneously shutting down several times a month for the past year. Lopez first emailed Pike about the heat on Saturday, November 11, 2017. Pike promised to have the heater fixed on December 4. On December 5, Carroll Yanicelli, a Theta-employed liaison between the students and Pike, emailed Lopez and told her that Pike had sent an employee to fix the problem.

“There should be steady and ongoing heat,” Yanicelli wrote in an email.

In late December of 2018, the boiler began to shut off sporadically again. Whenever this happens, Lopez has to go downstairs every four hours to reset the heat. The issue has yet to be resolved, despite repeated emails from Theta to Pike’s representatives. Raphael Ramos, Deputy Director of the Livable City Initiative, a city housing agency, said that when tenants repeatedly reset their furnaces, it can increase the risk of a small explosion.

----No matter how serious Pike’s neglect of student rental properties has been, David Corliss believes that New

Haveners have it worse. In the summer of 2016, Corliss, then an attorney at Flood Law Firm, moved into a Pike apartment leasing for $900 a month on Chapel Street. In November, as temperatures dropped, Corliss tried to turn on the heat. But the radiators stayed cold.

Corliss bought a space heater and wrapped himself and his cat in layers of blankets and comforters. He called and sent multiple emails to Pike, but they never came to make repairs. After a week of unbearable cold, Corliss took a day off from work to go to Pike’s office. He stood in the lobby until an administrator confirmed that a contractor was going to fix his radiator. Only then did a Pike employee visit his apartment to repair the heat.

A week later, the radiator broke down again. When Pike failed to respond to his messages and calls, Corliss, frustrated, decided to withhold his rent. “I won’t pay rent for an apartment that doesn’t have heat,” Corliss said.

Pike responded with a warning: if Corliss didn’t pay his rent, he could face eviction. In February, only seven months after moving in, Corliss vacated the Chapel Street apartment.

The legalities of housing may appear murky even to experienced renters like Corliss. Yonatan Zamir, a staff

Another ceiling stain at the Crown Street house.

FEBRUARY 2019

23

“They say, ‘You trashed the place, and I had to spend $1,000 cleaning it up,’” Zamir said. “Next thing you know, your security deposit is gone.” attorney at New Haven Legal Assistance who specializes in housing cases, said that tenants don’t receive enough information on the renting process. “People don’t necessarily know what their rights are,” said Zamir. “That applies to the student population as well. No matter how educated you are, you may not have ever been educated about entering a new lease.”

According to Zamir, the most common mistake tenants make is withholding rent. “Don’t withhold your rent until you’ve gone to great lengths,” he said. “A lease is a contract. If you don’t want a landlord to come after you in court, and sully things up for you legally, you want to avoid that by protecting yourself.” When issues arise, tenants should keep paying rent and screenshot relevant emails, save letters, and take photographs for evidence, Zamir said. If the problem persists, tenants can go to small claims court with proof.

The most common form of tenant exploitation, Zamir added, is withholding security deposits. New Haven’s apartments have a high turnover rate, and some landlords try to squeeze extra money from their properties by unfairly withholding security deposits after tenants move out.

“Turnover is a great way to make money in the housing market,” Zamir said. “They say, ‘You trashed the place, and I had to spend $1,000 cleaning it up.’ Next thing you know, your security deposit is gone.”

Taylor, a Yale senior, signed a lease on a Pike property for last academic year. (Taylor uses they/them pronouns.

Their name has been changed.) In August of 2017, they entered a house in disrepair. No hot water came from the taps for the first two weeks, the stairs were “falling apart,” and by spring, rats had infested the kitchen.

Last July, after their lease had ended, Taylor emailed Lipschitz about their security deposit of several thousand dollars. Lipschitz promised that the funds would be returned within the next few days. Two months later, on September 23, Taylor emailed Lipschitz again. That day, Lipschitz responded that he would look into the matter.

Since then, Taylor has had no contact with him. Pike still has not returned the security deposit.

In August, Taylor began renting a house from Farnam Realty Group, a real estate company that manages around six hundred properties and was founded by former Pike employee Carol Horsford in 2014. “In some ways,” Taylor

24

A hole in the ceiling at 277 Crown Street.

said, “[Farnam is] the opposite of Pike.”

Before Horsford gives tenants their keys, she makes them sit through a brief PowerPoint presentation about their leasing rights. The presentation includes three sections, titled “Basic Home Maintenance,” “How to be a Good Tenant,” and “How to be a Good Neighbor.”

Student tenants who rent from Pike, such as Melissa, a Yale senior, say their experience with Pike began very differently. (Melissa’s name has been changed.)

“I don’t think they did anything instructive,” Melissa said. “There was a lot of negotiation with the lease because we didn’t want the wool to be pulled over our eyes.”

Melissa said her housing manager told her Pike plans to increase the rent on her apartment by 10 percent next year. She’s moving out, but she is certain that another group of unknowing Yale students will move into the apartment, even with its malfunctioning heating system, perpetually clogged drains, and raccoon infestation. She herself had ignored friends’ warnings to stay away when she started leasing from Pike in August. Melissa said she felt she didn’t have much choice, given her budget. “Pike is going to find people who are gonna pay for it,” she said, “and the whole cycle is going to continue.”

– Candice Wang is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

A hot air balloonist soars high above Connecticut.

Zola Canady Robert Scaramuccia

ROBERT ZIRPOLO’S FLYING MACHINE

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

FEBRUARY 2019

29

M

ost flying machines are undeniably cool. Jets, sleek and swift, play chicken with the ends of runways to earn their ascent. Helicopters, brash and insectile, thump the earth from their skids with blades that whir with lethal intent.

But humanity’s earliest aircraft is different. The hot air balloon has never been much more than a flammable fabric sack, connected to an equally flammable wicker basket, powered by a giant flamethrower and stuffed with passengers whose quarter- to mid-life crises aren’t severe enough to justify skydiving.

As instruments of travel, balloons leave a lot to be desired. They can’t even be steered—or, at least, they don’t come with flight sticks. Learning to fly a balloon begins, as all fun things do, with a physics lesson: hot air rises over cooler air. From their baskets, pilots manipulate the fire burning above their heads; igniting it elevates the balloon, while extinguishing it allows the craft to descend. As the balloon climbs and falls, it gets pushed around by wind patterns that split the sky like layers in a cake.

Because open flames and gusts of wind are lessthan-exact control mechanisms, balloons don’t have dedicated runways or helipads. Any flat patch of dirt or asphalt has to suffice as a landing spot.

That’s exactly how Robert Zirpolo, a veteran balloonist, likes it. He has flown tours over Connecticut for the past thirty-eight years, cultivating over that time a cloud-gray moustache that overwhelms his upper lip and short gray curls that poke out from the baseball cap covering his mostly-bald head. Zirpolo can fly single- and multiengine planes, too, but he prefers balloons. He remembers what a pilot friend told him years ago: “The best part about ballooning is, it makes no sense at all.”

— Perched in his wicker basket, Zirpolo reaches up toward an oxidized metal burner and flicks open its blast valve. Liquid propane shoots from fuel tanks nestled near his knees, through thick black tubes wrapped around arched bamboo rods, and into the burner’s vaporizing coils. A jet of dragon’s breath erupts into the October air, burning blue, white, and orange-yellow as it smothers the surrounding area in soupy heat.

Then Zirpolo shuts the valve, choking the flame.

The 7 a.m. air reverts to a biting 38 degrees. His fiery engine, hotter than a thousand ovens, is ready; the rest of his balloon, scattered on the dewy grass of 30

a private airfield in Bethlehem, Connecticut, is not.

Using a ripcord-powered industrial fan, Zirpolo forces one hundred and five thousand cubic feet of air into the massive nylon balloon, which is patterned with gold, scarlet, and dark-green arrowheads arranged against a blue background.

The open-bottomed bundle of fabric grows from the ground like a bulbous blister, its ribbed surface rippling in the breeze. Once taut, it looks like a hundred-foot lightbulb turned on its side. Having tethered the balloon to the bamboo rods, he leans his basket over, aims the attached burner into the balloon’s mouth, and blasts fire into it until the entire apparatus stands upright.

Zirpolo has spent the past week studying weather reports, memorizing wind patterns, and staking out possible landing spots. He’s sent up a small test balloon that morning to see where the wind is actually blowing. And he’s watched less-experienced pilots—whom he calls “the real test balloons”—take off from an adjacent airstrip and disappear over the trees. He’s ready to launch.

In the sky, he’ll keep track of a fuel gauge, an altimeter, a vertical speed indicator, and a pyrometer, which measures the temperature inside the balloon. He’ll relay his location to his ground crew, and adjust the open flame above his head so that his balloon doesn’t drift toward a major city or out over the Atlantic. “Nothing is automated whatsoever, so your brain is constantly engaged in what you’re doing,” he said. On different flights in the past, he’s done all this at eighteen thousand feet, at 115 miles per hour, and at 27 degrees below zero.

Once, after he landed in a schoolyard in Ireland, a student walked out from the assembled crowd and whispered to Zirpolo, “Tell the teachers there’s no homework today.” The pilot proceeded to announce that, according to American custom, all homework was to be suspended upon the sighting of a hot air balloon. He hit the blast valve as the students cheered and the teachers’ smiles dropped.

There are ways to have fun that don’t involve barreling through the air in a craft cobbled together from fabric and wicker and fire. And there are certainly more efficient forms of transportation. So why become an aeronaut?

Part of the answer might be temperamental.

Ballooning is a study in iconoclasm: its history is full of wanderers, thinkers, tinkerers, failures, loafers, coasters, charmers, schemers, pathbreakers, and one intrepid Frenchman who tried to inflate a balloon with combustible gas he had extracted from fecal THE NEW JOUR NAL

matter.

But sometimes Zirpolo talks like there’s something transcendent about the whole thing. Like when he was chopping garlic in his central Connecticut home, and I asked him over the phone about the kinds of sensations he can only feel in a balloon.

He stopped the slicing, thought for a second, then answered by telling me what he tells nervous potential passengers: “This is what it feels like to be in a balloon. Sit in a kitchen chair, next to a window. Look out the window, and your eyes can see—but your body does not feel—the ground move away from the building you’re in. There’s no rocking sensation. You just look out the window, and you’re watching the ground move away. You don’t feel that the building you’re in is now moving one way or the other. It looks like somebody just, very slowly, picked it up—you didn’t feel them pick it up, it just happened, and all of a sudden the ground started moving underneath you.

“If I sit you in a balloon basket,” he continued, “and put a blindfold on you, other than the fact that you hear the burner roaring above your head, I can make it so you couldn’t even feel yourself leaving the ground. You can’t get that feeling anywhere else, with anything. Airplanes, helicopters—any other flying machine besides the balloon makes a hell of a racket.”

Zirpolo is flying in the age of Icarus while the rest of us are flying United.

— Joseph Montgolfier, the inventor of the hot air balloon, was such a layabout that his descendants call toilet paper papier de Joseph the way the rest of France calls hot air balloons montgolfières. “A dreamer and a maverick,” Charles Gillispie called him in his history of ballooning, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation. “The very type of the inventor, imaginative with objects and processes, impractical in business and affairs.”

In 1782, stricken with boredom while attending a “diploma mill” in Avignon, Joseph built a threeby-four-foot thin wooden frame, stretched a piece of taffeta cloth over it, and lit a few scraps of paper underneath. The lighter-than-air contraption hit the ceiling. He immediately wrote to his brother, Etienne, “Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.”

Joseph and Etienne, inheritors of a paper mill, soon became the Wright Brothers of ballooning.

They started on their path to national acclaim in FEBRUARY 2019

“THE GOLDEN AGE OF PROFESSIONAL BALLOONING ENDED JUST NINETEEN MONTHS AFTER IT BEGAN, WHEN THE FIRST AERONAUT DIED A FIERY DEATH AT SIX THOUSAND FEET.”

31 31

Undergraduate Judaic Studies Conference Sunday, February 17, 2019 Bingham Hall • Comparative Literature Library • Yale University

keynote speaker

Against Wissenschaft

susannah heschel Eli Black Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program Dartmouth College

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at

Dartmouth College. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany as well as edited volumes, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism and Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Cape Town, Frankfurt, Edinburgh, and Princeton, and has held research grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and is studying the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam.

Her first book on that topic has just been published in German, Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung. She has also just published a co-edited volume with Umar Ryad, The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism.

undergradjudaicsconference.com

the summer of 1783, which they spent terrorizing the French countryside with experimental balloons.

Powered by burning straw, their unmanned paper constructions almost always incinerated upon returning to earth. The few that didn’t suffered at the hands of peasants who thought the glowing, zigzagging orbs were the work of the Devil.

The montgolfières caught the attention of the French crown, however. At Versailles, King Louis XVI, suspecting a flying ball of fire might have some military applications, watched closely as the Montgolfier brothers exhibited their invention with appropriate pomp and circumstance. At the first cannon blast, a sheep, duck, and rooster marched into the balloon basket; at the second, the animals ascended six hundred meters in the air and absconded from the royal palace. Impressed, the king thought prisoners should be sent up next.

One observer of the Versailles test was JeanFrançois Pilâtre de Rozier, a twenty-six-year-old who had already made his name in scienceobsessed Paris, the Silicon Valley of its day. During public lectures sponsored by the king’s brother, he wowed Parisian elites by exhaling hydrogen onto a candle and breathing fire. He also tested a self-

“ON DIFFERENT FLIGHTS IN THE PAST, ZIRPOLO HAS DONE ALL THIS AT EIGHTEEN THOUSAND FEET, AT 115 MILES PER HOUR, AND AT 27 DEGREES BELOW ZERO.”

FEBRUARY 2019

made respirator by lying on a pile of dung for thirty minutes. After watching the montgolfière drift away, Pilâtre followed the quacking and crowing to a spot in the Wood of Vaucresson, three and a half kilometers from the launch site, where he found the royal animals alive and relatively unscathed. Soon afterwards, he volunteered for the Montgolfiers’ first manned experiments. Pilâtre hoped ballooning would increase his standing in a nation captivated by scientific spectacle.

— A hundred ninety-seven years later, in 1980, Robert Zirpolo got into ballooning to impress a girl.

He was courting an airplane pilot-in-training, and thought a balloon ride might be his “in.” He was wrong. “It bored the crap out of her,” he said. Their first time as passengers, there was little wind, and lots of heat. They hovered in place, landed in the woods, and had to haul balloon and basket a hundred yards to the nearest road.

Zirpolo was in his early twenties at the time.

He worked at an oyster bar in Kingfield, Maine, a ski town at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain.

Kingfielders didn’t plan their social calls; everyone bumped into everyone else on the mountain. Most mornings, he’d ski down gently curving slopes and take in the beauty of his chosen home, a world away from his native Queens. “I miss that like nobody can understand,” he said.

He kept ballooning after that first flight, learning how to fly from a master in Portland. At least, he tried to. Flying, according to Zirpolo, involves skills and instincts that develop over years, even decades.

“When I started flying, nobody told me I was ever going to start landing in cul-de-sacs with belowground power lines, or on a street, or a backyard, or a front yard. That wasn’t part of the training,” he said. “Good experience is obtained through bad decisions.”

In 1981, Zirpolo injured his knee as a passenger in a single-engine plane crash, and had to recover at a friend’s house in Southington, Connecticut. He brought his balloon with him. Walking long distances was challenging, but he could still stand in a basket and operate a burner. One of the first people to fly over the state as commercial ballooning took off in the ’80s, Zirpolo attracted emergency responders concerned about his fire-breathing flying machine, including, once, a Waterbury cop who arrested him after landing because, Zirpolo remembers the officer saying, “this must be illegal.” (It wasn’t; Waterbury police quickly released him.) Yet the unusual craft 33

also drew plenty of spectators—and a few interested passengers. After enough people asked for rides, the pilot realized he could make a business out of a favorite hobby, and maybe earn enough money on summer flights to afford winterlong vacations on Sugarloaf. Soon after, he founded Berkshire Balloons.

Few aeronauts joined Zirpolo back then, but ballooning, both as a tourism business and as a hobby, has grown ever since—partly because Zirpolo is around to train new pilots. Now, when he’s floating above the Farmington Valley west of Hartford, his passengers preoccupied with the fall foliage, he can chat on a long-range radio with a few of the Connecticut Lighter than Air Society’s fiftyodd members.

Berkshire Balloons has never really paid the bills.

It’s more like a “bad habit,” something he hopes will pay for itself even if it can’t support a family. During the week, Zirpolo, now in his sixties, directs pilot training for Gama Aviation, which charters private jets for corporate clients. (“I fly a desk,” he said.)

On weekend mornings, weather permitting, he flies balloon tours, clocking about a hundred flight-hours a year.

“The job is not flying,” he said. The job is attracting customers and repairing balloons. Flying—eyeing the pyrometer and manning the blast valve while passengers FaceTime their children from the sky— is the “cake of the job.”

“The best part about this business,” he said, “is that I get to go every time.”

— On the airfield in Bethlehem, Zirpolo’s balloon is ready to ascend. Two twenty-something brothers, along with a man celebrating his seventieth birthday, join the pilot in the basket. It’s a snug fit.

The balloon could maybe accommodate another person, but Zirpolo isn’t about to offer me a free ride in front of passengers who paid almost $300 for this early-morning flight. He unleashes a burst of flame—the last bit of heat needed to make the air inside the craft less dense than the air outside. The balloon detaches from the Earth.

The free ride I am offered gets fifteen miles to the gallon and remains woefully earthbound.

Zirpolo has left me behind with his chase crew: longtime friend Jude Russell and Kristen Brighenti, his partner of almost two decades. The three of us will tail the balloon in a seventeen-year-old, twelveseat Chevy Express, ready to disassemble the craft wherever it happens to land. With the burner still in 34

“ROBERT CAN LAND ON A POSTAGE STAMP,” BRIGHENTI TELLS ME.

earshot, we hop inside, rattle past a turkey, and start pursuing the aeronaut.

An hour later, we’re idling on a bridge in a small town north of Waterbury. Zirpolo, suspended somewhere in the foggy south, is checking in with Brighenti on his long-range radio, trying to decide where to land. He wants to know where the chase crew is. Brighenti brings the microphone to her mouth and tells the balloonist that we’re parked by a seafood shack called Crabby Al’s. She knows he has no idea where it is; she just finds the name funny. Russell, helpfully, chimes in with a nearby highway exit. That satisfies the pilot, who goes back to charting his course.

From the title “chase crew,” I’d expected a high-stakes hunt. Instead, I get a tour of central Connecticut, with highlights like Red’s Hardware, Jillie’s Ice Cream Parlor, and the ESPN broadcast headquarters in Bristol. While heat blasts from the dashboard, I learn that Russell is both an electrical engineering consultant and a yogi; I also learn that Brighenti once got a concussion while competing in a curling match. We pass the engineering plant where Russell used to work. There’s a nearby sign reading “Jude Lane”; she’d like to steal it someday.

Above us, Zirpolo looks down on suburban developments that used to be farmers’ fields. Lifelong Connecticut residents, gazing upon their state for the first time, often tell Zirpolo they’re surprised to see so many trees. He tells them to imagine taking an eraser to all the subdivisions built in the last twenty years. “Then you’d say, ‘Wow, there sure are THE NEW JOUR NAL

a lot of trees here,’” he said. “I look at it as, ‘There sure is a lot of development here.’”

Not that those developments impede Zirpolo’s flying. “Robert can land on a postage stamp,” Brighenti tells me on our ride. He likes to set targets on his flights, aiming for landing spots other pilots would have a hard time hitting. The other balloonists who took off from the airstrip that morning have all put down near Thomaston, avoiding the fog.

Zirpolo’s nowhere near finished. While we’re by Crabby Al’s, his voice crackles over the Motorola.

What sounds like static is actually the intermittent roar of the burner—he’s gaining altitude. Zirpolo says his “declared goal” is to fly over Mount Southington and touch down in a ski area called Panthorn Park, about twenty miles east of the launch site. Russell pulls into the street while Brighenti retorts: “Crew’s declared goal is to get there sometime today.”

— Pilâtre de Rozier, the man who discovered the royal animals in the woods, was flying with a moron.

It was November 21, 1783, and he and François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, were floating over the French countryside, becoming the first men to fly in the process. All the pair had to do to keep their montgolfière afloat was shovel straw into an enclosed flame between them. But the Marquis wasn’t doing his job; he was too busy waving his handkerchief at the speechless crowds below. The balloon was losing altitude and drifting toward a thicket of windmills.

“You’re not doing a thing, and we’re not climbing at all,” Pilâtre snapped, as Laurent later recounted in his journal. “Pardon,” he responded, pitchforking a bundle of straw into the fire.

The launch, from the residence of the royal children, had started off auspiciously enough.

Sure, the resplendent blue-and-gold montgolfière, emblazoned with Louis XVI’s initials, developed a few holes that needed sewing on the launchpad.

And a few people, upon witnessing the ascension, vomited with anxiety. But thousands simply watched with awe, including Benjamin Franklin, who, when asked about the use of this fledgling machine aérostatique, reportedly answered, “What’s the use of a newborn baby?”

After twenty-five minutes, Pilâtre and Laurent crash-landed in the countryside. When Pilâtre emerged from the half-wreck, peasants fought over shreds of his coat. What contemporary author Horace Walpole termed “balloonomania” soon erupted across France, with balloon-shaped dresses dominating fashion and dozens of amateur FEBRUARY 2019

scientists imitating the machine’s design. Scholars predicted that the unwieldy montgolfière would soon be followed by fleets of deadly airships piloted

by France’s finest aéronautes. Man would soon dominate the air.

French citizens looked at the invention with patriotic pride, seeing it as an equalizer that could bring fame to second-rate papermakers and perennial tinkerers, elevating them above terrestrial aristocrats. As Kim Mi Gyung described the atmosphere of the era in The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe, “Everybody was equal in the air.”

The ambitions of liberation partly inspired by this balloon frenzy lasted for years, eventually coming to a head in the French Revolution. But the golden age of professional ballooning ended just nineteen months after it began, when the first aeronaut died a fiery death at six thousand feet.

A national hero, Pilâtre de Rozier had set his sights on a new goal: crossing the English Channel.

With a pension from the crown, he designed his own flying machine, the rozière, by placing a hydrogen balloon on top of a traditional montgolfière. (Because hydrogen is lighter than air, hydrogen balloons can ascend without added heat.) People told Pilâtre his invention wouldn’t work. Intent on proving them wrong, the irrepressible entertainer started out over the Channel in the hybrid machine.

Within minutes, it burst into flames. “For a few moments,” Gillispie wrote in The Montgolfier Brothers, the pilot “hung motionless as the upper module became a globe of fire.” Spectators found Pilâtre’s body as the remains of his rozière washed ashore.

Balloonomania came to a decisive end; balloon bonnets were no longer in fashion. Etienne Montgolfier thought Pilâtre’s death might prove useful, pivoting public attention from spectacular demonstrations to a consideration of the technology’s practical applications. Unfortunately for him, balloons had none. The same craft that mesmerized Paris proved useless for transporting goods, bombs, or soldiers. “Balloons have always moved minds better than they’ve moved bodies,” Jason Pearl wrote in the Atlantic in 2018. France’s balloon dreams died alongside its first pilot.

— Zirpolo won’t make it to Panthorn Park—the winds on this side of Mt. Southington are too variable.

He’ll have to find somewhere in the suburbs to land, and “might have to drop the drop line,” which, if 35

Russell’s hurried driving is any indication, isn’t a good sign. Without a ground crew to help stabilize the hundred-foot balloon as it descends toward grasping tree branches and looming power lines, any number of things could go wrong—especially if the wind picks up.

Russell rips down suburban streets, slowing at intersections to try to spot the surprisingly hard-to-find balloon. Then, we see it, an upside-down polychrome raindrop in the overcast sky. Russell starts hunting for a route to Zirpolo, avoiding cul-de-sacs and swerving past gawkers braking in the middle of the street.

We come to an intersection that looks to be all dead ends. Russell slows, almost stops—then Zirpolo squawks over the radio: “Make that right.” He’s spotted the Chevy from above. Russell turns down Pacer Lane; a throng of pajama-clad parents and kids, awestruck by the balloon floating a few dozen feet over their heads, come into view.

Brighenti is almost out of the van by the time Russell pulls it to the curb. “Hurry up!” Zirpolo shouts as the crew snatches onto the drop line, a sort of elongated seatbelt hanging from the basket. The balloon, lilting toward a roof, steadies to a hover. When Brighenti runs under the basket to strategize with the pilot, he yells for me to help Russell. I grab the drop line and tug.

Zirpolo lays off the burner for good. His cooling craft alights on the asphalt. “I’m Robert Zirpolo,” he announces to the children inching toward the balloon, whose skeleton and princess pajamas aren’t nearly warm enough for the 10 a.m. air. “How are you all doing?” The giggling kids scatter as Zirpolo opens a vent at the crown of the balloon, beginning its deflation.

The pilot conscripts parents, passengers, and children to pack up the balloon, which transitions from a mythical object to the world’s largest heap of laundry. We all stand in line and wait to stuff our handful of heavy fabric into a large brown sack.

Zirpolo and the kids sit on the sack, flattening it so that it can fit in the back of the van. Then in goes the sack, the basket, Zirpolo, Russell, Brighenti, the brothers, the septuagenarian, and me. The doors clatter shut. We drive back to the launch site, retracing the arc Zirpolo flew over state forests and golf courses.

“We were only going fifteen miles per hour. I wanted fifty,” the aeronaut says. He reacclimates to life on the ground as the van gets stuck in a narrow Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru. Russell has to turn onto an empty dirt lot to escape.

Back at the Bethlehem airfield, crew and pilot lay out a champagne-and-cheese breakfast, including bread 36

Zirpolo baked at 5 a.m. that morning. He hands me a champagne glass with a miniature balloon etched on its surface. “We don’t care how old you are,” he laughs.

– Robert Scaramuccia is a senior in Trumbull College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Boutique Co-Working Private Offices & Desks With Amenities 142 Temple Street, New Haven, CT, Olympia Building, floor 3 Website: networknewhaven.com

SEPTEMBER 2018

37

ENDNOTE

FIVE BEERS DEEP AT THE UNION STATION SBARRO A discount at a train station offers an evening of intoxication.

Mariah Kreutter

R

ight outside the Sbarro, near the bottom of the escalator in New Haven’s Union Station, tucked around a corner like a rarelyplayed side quest in a video game, is a sign from another universe. It says, “Buy 4 Beers, Get the 5th for a Penny.”

Now, I can imagine a universe in which I would order one beer at the Union Station Sbarro. A universe in which it’s a quarter past five, say, and my train home is delayed by yet another hour, and all I’m looking to do is numb the existential anguish of being an Amtrak customer. Then I might walk past Sbarro — a pizza chain that has gone bankrupt twice and is best known for its omnipresence in mall food courts — and think, “Huh, I guess they have beer.”

And then, maybe if there was a two-for-one special, I could, under extreme duress, be convinced to order a second.

But five beers—again, at the Union Station Sbarro, a restaurant even more depressing than a regular Sbarro—is crazy. It is, in my view, the absolute saddest experience one could have in a train station, up to and including being struck by an actual train.

From the moment I learned of this special, I knew I could not die without trying it.

I finally got the chance one bone-chillingly cold MLK Day, when my friend Julia and I trekked all the way to the train station for that very purpose. I brought Julia for two reasons. One, because I needed a second person to carry on valiantly in case this stunt killed me. And two, because everyone should have a friend they immediately identify as the ideal partner for getting belligerent at a Sbarro, and Julia is that person for me.

Icicles spiked from dead tree trunks like an early 2000’s hairstyle. The temperature hit negative three.

I was genuinely thrilled to reach the relative warmth and comfort of Sbarro. The walls were the bracing greenish-yellow of an overboiled egg yolk. At the counter, we immediately fucked up by ordering draft beers, which are apparently not subject to The Deal. The cashier—a no-nonsense guy, which must

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Illustration by Sam Oldshue

have been tough when confronted with two people as committed to nonsense as we were—eventually relented. In a transaction I still don’t fully understand, he charged me $16 for a solo cup full (and I mean full) of beer, with the understanding that the payment entitled me to three more refills and eventually a can or bottle for “free.” That was disappointing, since I really wanted to buy the fifth one with a ceremonial penny.

We sat at a table in the back corner. When I set my Allagash down it trembled and then spilled over the lip of the solo cup, pooling weakly on the marbled vinyl of the tabletop.

To my surprise we were not the only ones drinking in Sbarro. A balding Jason Statham–type sat down across from us and tucked into a slice of sausage pizza and two miniature bottles of red wine, one of which he poured into a plastic cup with “Miller Lite” written on its side. I heard a woman ask, “If I get a beer do I have to drink it right now?” Two women wearing pom-pom hats—one said “BRUINS” on it—sipped from solo cups.

At 5:42 everyone left except for us.

At 5:43 I mentioned I was “feeling it” and Julia called me a lightweight.

When we finished our second round we went back to the counter and discovered there had been a shift change. The new cashier, Oscar, was friendlier and younger, with arms coated in tattoos. We tried to explain what we had paid for, what we had received, and what we were still owed. We mostly failed, but somehow each ended up with the rest of our beers anyway: a Half-Full Pale Ale, a Blood Orange Pale Ale, a Shock Top Belgian White, a Modelo, a Two Hearted Ale, a Fat Tire Pale Ale, a Corona, and a Lagunitas 12th of Never Ale. Sbarro, I must say, has a shockingly extensive beer selection. I asked Oscar how often people do The Deal. “People do it a lot.

Especially on Fridays,” he said. Then he sold Julia a slice of pizza that normally cost $6.50 for $4.

“It’s crazy when chains make deals with you,” Julia said as we sat down with our bounty. “Like, this

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Sbarro is so off-grid that they’re just like, ‘I’ll give you this for $2.50.’”

By now I thought I had a sense of the place: patrons came and went according to the rhythms of the train schedule, and plenty of them were down to indulge in a drink. What I didn’t see was anyone sticking around long enough to drink five beers. Most only stayed for twenty minutes.

Time passed. We drank our beers. A woman next to us asked how Julia’s Fat Tire was. I went to the bathroom, which smelled like candy and the memory of vomit. I heard the loudspeaker announce a train to Boston South Station, and I thought about how easily I could get on it and go home. I ate a slice of pizza soaked through with grease. I watched The Bachelor on the wall-mounted TV. And I talked to Julia: about food and sex and insecurities and our families. It turns out getting drunk at Sbarro isn’t that functionally different from getting drunk anywhere else.

Eventually the place started to clear out. “I hope they don’t close on us,” Julia said. “I want them to kick us out for drunk and disorderly conduct.”

At 9:48 a security guard sat down and asked what we were working on. “I’m writing a piece about getting drunk at Sbarro,” I said, and then we all tried to determine if The Deal was a good deal or not. He thought that it probably was. I finished my last beer at 9:50. We had been at Sbarro for more than four and a half hours. Shifts changed, customers came and went, but we stayed on. We might have scammed them. I’m not really sure.

– Mariah Kreutter is a junior in Berkeley College.

39

Truth History Democracy Hear from some of the most outstanding journalists in the world and gain insight into the media and its role in contemporary culture. poynter.yale.edu 40

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