Volume 52 - Issue 2

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

E R

VOL 52 / ISS 2 / OCT 2019

THE NEW JOURNAL

E H T CH T A M

editors-in-chief Laura Glesby Max Graham executive editor Elliot Wailoo senior editors Lily Moore-Eissenberg associate editors Hailey Andrews Beasie Goddu Alejandra Larriva-Latt Helena Lyng-Olsen Jack McCordick Eli Mennerick Trish Viveros Candice Wang copy editors Jisoo Choi Elena DeBre Matthew Kleiner Yonatan Greenberg Nicole Jefferson Sofia Laguarda

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, 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

creative director Chase Westover design editors Rebecca Goldberg Meher Hans Zihao Lin Sam Oldshue photo director Vivek Suri photographers Nico Taylor Ryan Fuentes web developer Andrew Sheinberg

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 2019 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.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 52 issue 1 SEP 2019

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

cover 22 THE INCUMBENT

After a decades-long career in politics, Toni Harp reckons

with her first-ever electoral loss.

Eli Mennerick 27

THE CHALLENGER With the mayor’s office in sight, Justin Elicker works to win New Haven’s trust.

Mara Hoplamazian

standards 4 profile

IN EARNEST—Hailey Andrews

Urn Pendragon exited New Haven’s mayoral race, but she hasn’t given up her cause.

7 poem

THE REVOLUTION OF THE LEFT HAND—Meera Rothman 8

points of departure SEAMS OF THE SELF—Lakshmi Amin UNDERTAKING EQUITY—Abby Steckel KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON—Ko Lyn Cheang

15 poem

NAKED FOR EDVARD MUNCH—Daniella Cohen

16 profile

STAR TREATMENT—Katherine Yao

A day in the life of the Yale School of Medicine’s very own Netflix celebrity.

34 endnote

LOCAL HAUNTS—Isabel Kirsch

A first-year student tries her best to get in touch with New Haven’s paranormal

residents.

OCTOBER 2019

3

PROFILE

IN EARNEST Urn Pendragon exited New Haven’s mayoral race, but she hasn’t given up her cause.

HAILEY ANDREWS

A

fter her fourth night of troubled sleep, Urn Pendragon decided to run for mayor of New Haven. She had been weighing the prospect since a public hearing at City Hall on February 21, when hundreds of community members congregated to discuss Yale’s failure to fulfill a promise it had made in 2015 to hire 1,000 New Haven residents. Pendragon had mulled over the testimonies of her fellow New Haveners for days. After nearly two years of organizing in New Haven, this was the moment that “set me over the edge,” she recalls.

At 48 years old, Pendragon felt “political” for the first time. Up until then, she experienced life through a “mental fog” that obscured any motivation to engage politically. She attributes the alleviation of this fog to her gender transition, which acted as a kind of biological and spiritual solvent, dissolving the haze through which she had lived her entire life.

Pendragon’s relationship to her trans identity is “unique,” in her words, and arose unexpectedly.

In her mid-40s, Pendragon was diagnosed with Klinefelter syndrome, which affects individuals with two or more X chromosomes and a Y chromosome. She decided to undergo hormone replacement therapy, coming out to friends and family as a trans woman. The result was instant: the fog lifted.

Before her transition, Pendragon experienced a severe bout of clinical depression linked to overproduction of estrogen and testosterone—a result of Klinefelter syndrome. “For me,” Pendragon began, “because I couldn’t focus, because of my anatomy—you’re withdrawn from the things that you truly want to do or how you want to behave.

You’re stifled.” Yet Pendragon is cautious not to universalize her experience. Although her navigation of gender has been intimately linked with biology, she acknowledges that the two “can be both separate and intertwined.”

4

As a local activist, Pendragon seeks to “fix the problems instead of trying to outlive them.” She has lobbied in front of the General Assembly for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage and served on the Affordable Housing Task Force; she supported local civic action events, like the Stop & Shop strikes that resulted in better pay and healthcare coverage for workers; she participated in negotiations over renewed police contracts; she advocated for a state bill that created a paid family and medical leave system.

When I asked Pendragon where she wanted to meet, she invited me to a meeting with Mothers and Others for Justice, a group of New Haveners who gather to build community through activism and legislative action. Pendragon attends these meetings every month in the basement of Stepping Stone Transitional Housing on Winchester. Having taken the Yale shuttle as far up Winchester as the route allowed, I found myself before a sienna brick building, with windows partitioned into triptychs, and an ecru set of double doors that looked more decorative than functional. Following the rasp of skateboard wheels on asphalt, I wound around the building to a ramp leading into a basement, where I would find Pendragon, wearing a Nike t-shirt and pale denim, doling out side-hugs and balancing a plateful of food.

Pendragon’s eyes glowed with the phosphoric glaze of the fluorescent lights. The tendrils of wavy blonde hair that evaded her studded silver headband fell leisurely onto her face. When I asked Pendragon why she wanted to meet here, she scanned the room. There was a communal heap of rotisserie chicken and coleslaw by the door, and Audre Lorde quotes framed in the menthe construction paper that decorated the walls. Fellow activists chatted at tables, forming a ‘U’ shape around the room.

Mothers and Others was the first community in which Pendragon encountered unwavering

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Photo by Vivek Suri

acceptance—where her serious involvement in grassroots organizing began. Here she met people who, like her, had experienced homelessness and food insecurity. Taking a swig of apple juice, she said, “It was a really great fit for me, but also, I have a lot of friends here.”

Pendragon was born in Lansing, Michigan, and was less than a year old when her mother divorced her father. Together, she and her mother moved often across the Midwest and South. Her most salient memories linger between St. Louis, Tulsa, and the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina.

Yet she couldn’t identify with the places that raised her. “It was like taking a New Yorker and shoving them in the middle of the country,” she remarked.

Pendragon moved to South Windsor, Connecticut, after graduating from SUNY Stonybrook with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology over ten years ago, and she has stayed in the state ever since. She worked for Cablevision for five years but was one of six hundred employees laid off when the company was bought out. After taking a moment to reflect on what came next for her, Pendragon looked at me and said, “The cards stacked up in just the right order.”

Shortly after, Pendragon discovered she was eligible for a state program that subsidizes higher OCTOBER 2019

education for recently laid-off workers. She made an early withdrawal from her (401)k to buy a car. She arranged to live with one friend in New Haven during the week and with another in West Haven on weekends so she could attend class at Southern Connecticut State University.

Pendragon was determined to get her Master’s in Political Science; she couldn’t see herself studying anything else. “Politics touches every part of our lives,” she remarked, “and I’ve been running with it since then.”

The central policy goal of Pendragon’s mayoral campaign was the implementation of an inclusionary zoning ordinance that would require 20 to 22 percent of units in new housing projects to be affordable housing. As of April 2019, she said, “twelve out of the fifteen towns in the New Haven region dip below the 10 percent threshold for affordable housing.” Pendragon presented the inclusionary zoning initiative, paired with city advocacy for solar farms, wind turbines, and other forms of sustainable energy, in her “New Haven Green Deal.”

When I asked Pendragon why affordable housing is so central to her campaign strategy, she told me that she sees housing as “the central issue of our lives.”

5

“You spend anywhere between 30 and 60 percent of your money to put a roof over your head. If you’re paying more than you should, which is anywhere between 25 and 30 percent, there is such a discontinuity,” Pendragon tells me.

Her hands fiddle with the tassel of her purse. “For those of us who are between homelessness and being able to afford housing…it’s really no way to live.”

In the middle of the Mothers and Others for Justice meeting, Pendragon pushes her chair back and stands to make an announcement: she has decided to withdraw from the mayoral race.

Justin Elicker, who had won the Democratic primary days earlier, shares many of Pendragon’s policy priorities, such as inclusionary zoning and a bill to combat homelessness. After his victory, Elicker asked Pendragon to join his administration in an “amalgamated” position that would combine policy-making, city-planning, and economic development. Pendragon tells the crowd that she accepted Elicker’s offer. The room swells with applause.

As I walk with Pendragon to her car after the meeting, I anticipate a cast of disappointment to undergird her attitude toward Elicker. But any mournfulness she feels about the race is overshadowed by an excitement to develop an affordable housing plan under Elicker’s tenure.

I ask her if she thinks it would have been possible for her to win the race with her background. “Of course!” Pendragon declares. I notice the solar panels that shimmer on the roof of her car under the opal light of the moon. She gushes to me about an idea she has: a collaboration with a local artist to create wind turbines that could contribute aesthetically to the city and reinforce New Haven’s commitment to sustainable energy.

When I ask Pendragon why she ran for mayor in 2019, she explains, “the timing was not right before.” Prior to getting her Master’s, Pendragon lacked the theoretical framework to articulate her own experiences, something she saw as essential to her candidacy. However, even with a graduate education, Pendragon’s entry into the political sphere has presented formidable challenges.

“Filling out the forms at the City Clerk office was very easy to do. That’s always accessible,” Pendragon says. But the race’s accessibility is also contingent on factors such as exposure, personal experience, and connections, Pendragon explains.

6

Lacking in any of these areas could be devastating to a campaign, even for candidates who consider themselves “qualified.”

I think about what it means to be qualified.

Is knowing how to navigate the bureaucracy and formalities of politics what makes a person qualified? Or is the stake a person holds in the issues they are fighting for, and an intimate knowledge of those issues, also of value? Pendragon’s mayoral run carried a personal urgency missing from her former competitors’ campaigns; she and her community are the ones primarily affected by the consequences. This is where the power in her activism lies. For Pendragon, waiting to outlive these issues is not an option.

– Hailey Andrews is a sophomore in Pierson College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Illustration by Sam Oldshue

POEM

the revolution of the left hand MEERA ROTHMAN

stuck in the shadow she rests and plays dutifully trudging forward she rests again tilts her head and listens la da da, doom doom! he is captivating and she has nearly missed her cue she journeys onward, driving up crescendos into chords when he gets lost in trill, she grabs him by the hand and pulls him to his feet it has always been this way what way?

a marriage?

a friendship?

a partnership? sometimes they touch in the middle but it is fleeting and he is first to leave, scaling back upward to melodies she could only dream of and applause that drowns her out still she listens thoughtfully and watches carefully and waits for her turn.

– Meera Rothman is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College.

OCTOBER 2019

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

SEAMS OF THE SELF A local designer stitches a new philosophy of fashion into his “wearable art.”

LAKSHMI AMIN

T

yrone “Tea” Montgomery has one guiding principle of style: to dress according to how he feels. I met him on an uncharacteristically warm September afternoon, seated in Koffee next to a garment bag containing a riot of colorful clothing. “I can’t really say that I’m into fashion, so I can’t tell you the brands and the trends or things like that,” he explained, “but what I know is style.”

He wore a white t-shirt, a snapback hat, and crisp custom-made tracksuit joggers sharpened by contrasting grey and white patterns. Striped socks wrapped up his look with a hint of color.

Frustrated by a lack of originality and variety in the clothes he found at stores, Tea decided that if he couldn’t find the garments he wanted, he’d have to create them himself.

So he started Threads by Tea—a one-man business that sells “wearable art,” specially customized apparel designed and crafted by Tea. The start-up operates out of Tea’s New Haven studio and reaches customers through word of mouth, his “organically grown” local network, and social media platforms; he plans to expand soon to an online store.

Tea doesn’t work from a catalogue. Instead, he provides clients the space to express themselves through clothing designed specifically for them. As he explains it, his process of getting to know customers is simple: “First, tell me how you want to feel,” he said during a presentation reported by the New Haven Independent.

“Then, tell me how you want to look.” Tea’s end goal is to make a garment that’s not just aesthetically appealing, but that captures the essence of a customer’s personality. Less 8

interested in building pieces around his own style or brand, he custom-designs clothes to enhance the confidence of the people wearing them.

Tea exudes a sense of ease with himself.

He recalled how he got his nickname: “As I grew and discovered myself, I recognized how people naturally feel calm and safe around me.

I noticed how, much like a tea bag in water, I change my environment for the better.”

As he enters an industry ruled by trends and characterized by a preference for models who look alike, Tea is determined to spread his commitment to self-expression. In just two years since generating the idea for his business, Tea has not only taught himself how to sew, but also welcomed others to join him as clients and collaborators. Threads by Tea’s Instagram and Facebook accounts brim with quotes set against its logo, a spool of thread spilling out of a teacup.

The posts are punctuated by characteristic “.. .” dots, meant to act as both Tea’s signature and a pause for the reader—a brief “moment for thought,” he explained.

Tea prides himself on the fact that his business draws people from all walks of life; the typical Threads by Tea customer does not exist. “Regardless of what they do,” he said of his clients, who range in age from 4 to 70, “they want to make some noise in their worlds.”

This past spring, Tea eagerly took on his first large-scale project for Tia Russell Dance Studios: creating costumes for the Shubert Theatre’s summer production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He had little experience in constructing dancewear and only two and a THE NEW JOUR NAL

half months to complete the commission. Still, he tirelessly pushed through trial and error to create fifty-four costumes full of whimsy and color.

When we met at Koffee, Tea unpacked his overflowing garment bag and handed me a plaid snapback. The shimmering, sleek underside of the hat, lined with a trimming I could imagine on the hem of a dress, took me by surprise.

Tea sifted through his collection of jumpsuits and two-pieces: a patchwork of paisley squares popped against black knit pants, floral pinks met geometric reds and blues, and patterns exploded with each shifting hem.

Tea, looking up from his clasped hands, said that he was born and raised in New Haven.

“I left for school and such, moved away a couple of times, but I always come back,” he said. A Bachelor’s in Marketing at UC Berkeley, a Master’s in Entertainment Business Management at Full Sail University, and an unfulfilling position in sales and hospitality led him back to his hometown. After returning to New Haven, he said, he set out on a “journey” to discover “how to use my real talents and abilities to make a living my way.”

Tea had mentioned that he incorporates music into his practice, so I clicked through his SoundCloud page, where he sometimes refers to himself as “Montgom’ry Tea.” The page’s description muses: “An artist’s journey...is to teach themselves to the world.”

Scrolling through track after track, I saw Tea reappear on each album cover. On one, he is accompanied by ghostly cartoon characters splattered with purple and green at a table littered with doodled bottles. On another, he beams in sunglasses and an elegant black blazer.

I click on a song entitled “I Guess,” not knowing what to expect. Diana Ross’s booming intro to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” merges with Tea’s rapping and an echoing melody. I can sense the same impulse to fuse Diana Ross with Tea’s own voice in the collision of fabrics in a single garment. His plans for a Threads

by Tea showcase within the next year or so include five collections, each accompanied by a corresponding EP album.

As his philosophy of individuality continues to steep and spread in the communities he works OCTOBER 2019

with, Tea encourages his customers to wear their personalities boldly on their sleeves. Artist and educator Meghan Shah was struck by Tea’s ability to create statement pieces that empower his clients. She remembered several instances in which strangers approached Tea and told him they would never have been able to pull off his look, but Tea makes it his mission to encourage these same people instead to embrace these outfits in what Shah calls “accessible” clothing.

Since their meeting, the collaboration has “developed a voice of its own” through a mixture of Shah’s fabric and Tea’s clothing design, with her textiles set to be included in an upcoming line of his clothing. They even worked together to fuse Shah’s purple, blue, and white pattern with Tea’s vision in a tunic made especially for her. “I felt like I was all that,” Shah laughed as she fondly recalled the process of making the overcoat with him. Above all, she admires Tea’s ability to dress for himself, not for the occasion.

– Lakshmi Amin is a junior in Branford College.

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NST HOOFT D E P A R T U R E SPNOAI P

UNDERTAKING EQUITY Howard K. Hill leads a movement of black entrepreneurship—one funeral home at a time.

ABBY STECKEL

O

n the wall of Howard K. Hill’s office hangs a framed poster with a quote that begins: “THE FUNERAL helps confirm the reality and finality of death.”

But while Hill owns a funeral home, he doesn’t just serve people at burial time. He encourages people “to prepare not just for death, but to prepare for life.”

Howard K. Hill Funeral Services first opened its doors in 2004. Fifteen years and two new branches later, Hill is well-established in the business. “As a funeral director, you have to entrench yourself in community in order to remain relevant,” he told me, settled in a highbacked leather chair. Hill wears elegant suits, has a shiny bald head, and maintains a thin, neat mustache. He talks slowly and evenly, and moves with practiced calm. Glass plaques on a table in his office commend his leadership, and one declares him Humanitarian of the Year.

Hill bought his Chapel Street building—a three-story, nineteenth-century house with a red awning—from Monahan, Cox, Smith, & Crimmins Funeral Home, which has since migrated to Wooster Square. Hill said the business moved “because the population shifted.” According to Hill, his predecessors served mostly Italian and Irish families and left the neighborhood when their clients did. Today, many of Hill’s neighbors are Yale-affiliated renters who don’t bring much business. “Yale clientele are not necessarily dying; they’re not necessarily from here; and they come here very temporarily,” he said.

Most of Hill’s clients are black families who 10

attend church in the surrounding Dwight neighborhood. “They may live out in the suburbs, but they come to church here,” said Hill, who participates in church events. “So when something happens, they know me.” He emphasized that segregation in the funeral business is by no means organic—his difficulty attracting white customers has deep roots in historic prejudice. While white funeral directors have been able to “serve the black community with ease,” Hill has had difficulty expanding his client base. “Do I want to serve in other communities, white communities? Absolutely I do. I’m a business person,” he said.

Hill pointed out Gerry Brown, an older white man and funeral director. Hill hired Brown about ten years ago “for the specific reason” of developing stronger ties to New Haven’s white population. “It was in my original business plan that I want to be the first African American funeral home that routinely serves in white communities,” he said. “It still hasn’t worked.”

Brown remains involved in community outreach. He helps host death preparedness “seminars” at churches, community centers, and senior centers, assisting families with funeral arrangements in advance of any deaths.

Hill sees his limited market as a symptom of the challenges that black-owned businesses encounter.

Following legally mandated integration, many black-owned businesses were wiped out by their white-owned counterparts, and these businesses are again in decline, Hill said.

In 2014, his concern about this trend prompted him to found the Black Business Alliance, which coordinates networking, training, and technical assistance for black entrepreneurs in New Haven, Hartford, and Fairfield counties.

Early in his career, Hill noticed that many families struggled to cover funeral costs. He integrated financial advice into his funeral consultations, speaking about savings and investments, life insurance, and how to preserve wealth across generations. He often buries multiple family members, so he tries to help people make financial plans from one funeral to the next.

Hill even hired one former client, and later helped her start her own business. After Sandra Watts, the daughter of a woman Hill had buried, THE NEW JOUR NAL

lost her job, Hill hired her as the funeral home’s chaplain. It was her job to provide mourners with emotional support. At Hill’s encouragement, she also arranged flowers in the funeral home’s basement. When a local florist wanted to sell their shop to Hill, he signed the lease on Watts’s behalf.

Watts had never owned a business before, but she “trusted [Hill] because he was proof that it could be done.” Now, she has a storefront on Shelton Avenue in New Haven, and another space on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden. Her shop is called Remember the Lilies, after her mother, Lily.

Moved by the financial insecurity he witnessed in his customers, Hill started a fund to help cover end-of-life ceremonies. This organization, now called The Prosperity Foundation, evolved to support organizations that serve Connecticut’s black community with services that include college and career preparation, culinary education, and

support for people experiencing homelessness.

As he supports other black businesses and organizations, Hill is also expanding his own franchise. In addition to existing locations in Hartford and Bloomfield, he is purchasing another funeral home in New Britain. He wants his branches not only to provide services for the dead but to spur economic prosperity among the living. In Hartford, for example, he is advocating to redevelop the area around his funeral home as a shopping district for the local community. “This is my community change model,” he said. “It’s reserved specifically to impact black communities, starting with an aggressive funeral director.” As Hill models it, this “aggressive funeral director” is someone who is determined to make change— someone who leverages the business of death in order to enhance community life.

– Abby Steckel is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College.

Design by Rebecca Goldberg Photo by Nico Taylor OCTOBER 2019

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

KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON

Design by Chase Westover

Bob Bublitz sits at the source of Yale’s power.

KO LYN CHEANG

T

o an uninformed observer, Bob Bublitz looks like he might be in the belly of a ship. He sits behind an array of computer monitors in the control room of Yale’s Central Power Plant on Tower Parkway, watching red and green indicators blink at him like boats passing in the night. Bublitz has a white sailor’s beard, cast-iron shoulders, and forearms as thick as pipes. He served six years in the Navy, attaining the rank of Petty Officer second class by the time he left. When he first joined at eighteen, eager to continue the Bublitz family tradition of military service, he wanted to be a machinist. The only opening was for a boiler technician. “So into the pit I went,” he says.

Working amid steam vapor in the hull of a navy ship, Bublitz was reminded of the steampunk adventurers in the novels of Jules Verne and the boiler room where Jack and Rose share a kiss in the Titanic. He was in love. And the object of his passion was steam-powered machinery.

He stayed in the business of harnessing energy from steam after he was honourably discharged— first, in a boiler room in a Hartford firearms factory, then at Yale. He hasn’t been in the Navy for more than two and a half decades now. And we are not in the belly of a ship. We are in the 65,000-square-foot plant that keeps the lights on, the heat running, and the air chilled for the 25,000-odd people who live and work on Yale’s central campus and Science Hill.

At 7 a.m., as students and faculty stir in their beds, flip on the lights and turn on the shower, the 12

engineers and mechanics and oilers at the plant come in for their shifts. Those who worked the night shift shuffle bleary-eyed out of the plant. On Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving and New Year’s, every hour, every day of the year, every year, the machinery churns on.

Outside the control room, the gas turbine grumbles constantly and loudly (at around ninety decibels), forcing the plant workers to stuff their ears with foam plugs to prevent hearing damage.

Plumes of pale steam waft between serpentine pipes. “Victory Energy, Full Steam Ahead!” is emblazoned on the side of a boiler. The plant compresses and burns natural gas that is piped in, producing electricity and waste heat in the process.

The waste heat boils water into ‘free steam’ in these boilers. Pregnant with energy, the highlypressurized steam flows over and spins the turbine’s blades. The steam feeds everything—the heaters in the winter and chillers for air-conditioning in the summer. Delicate cables housed in silver metal conduits branch out from the plant beneath the streets of New Haven, around cemeteries and

No one even noticed the explosion. “All the students slept through the night with a smile on their face,” Bublitz said.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

dorm rooms, carrying electricity to bedside lamps and lecture halls.

When Bublitz walks through the plant, he listens for problems. After twenty-five years of working here, he knows the sounds of the machinery like a parent knows their child’s cries.

Pings are comforting; gurgling is not a good sign. The sound he dislikes most of all is water hammer—the banging noise produced when steam barrelling through pipes contains water droplets that collide with difficult-to-navigate pipe corners. Like bullets in a body, these errant water particles can seriously damage the equipment.

The turbines and gas compressors and boilers are housed within a neo-Gothic brick structure that is over a century old. Natural light floods the ground floor, where most of the vital machinery hums along. Elegant floor to ceiling windows belie the fact that the building is explosion-proof, a feature that is particularly important given that the plant is surrounded on all sides by people, living and dead. Bublitz’s colleague jokes that we are sitting on ancient burial grounds: across the road is Grove Street Cemetery; the bodies of the “unholy” who died by suicide are rumoured to have been buried underneath at the edge of the cemetery, underneath our very feet.

Bublitz tells me wistfully about the artistry of the century-old architecture. When he arrived, the plant still proudly bore the original pumps, brass whistles, drip canisters, and brick-set Bigelow boilers. Wrought iron handrails lined the machinery. The year was 1994, but the atmosphere recalled the golden age of steam, the age of Nikola Tesla’s electrical dreams.

In those days, the boilers weren’t lit by the flip of a switch but by a guy with a torch. In the mornings, Bublitz’s team would send someone to light four of the boilers with a six-foot steel rod wrapped in asbestos cloth, drenched in diesel oil and fired off with a zippo lighter.

“Instead of a computer judging when to add more fuel or air or dampers we did it with our brains,” Bublitz tells me.

Thermally inert and non-flammable, asbestos seemed like a match made in heaven for insulating boilers. But between 1979 and 2000, hundreds of deaths due to asbestosis and mesothelioma, a type of cancer, were reported in Connecticut. The Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance lists Yale power plants as one of the job sites where you may have OCTOBER 2019

been exposed to harmful asbestos. Bublitz insists that as long as the asbestos was soaked, there was no danger—it’s when the toxic chemical turns into a dust or powder form that you have to be worried.

Bublitz’s recollections seem almost mythic to me as I walk through the power plant on a Wednesday morning in September. The asbestos torches and brick-set boilers have been replaced by computerized signal systems and Italianmade gas turbines. The fluorescent strip lights lining the walkways will soon make way for more environmentally-friendly LED lighting. The only continuity is steam. For as long as these energycharged vapours continue to spin turbines, Bob Bublitz’s steampunk dream hums on.

In the plant, there is no room for error. In the winter, the stakes are even higher. One day in

The Yalies and faculty who depend on the plant never give it a second thought, in much the same way that we never consider the unceasing palpitations of our own hearts.

January 2008, it was 7 degrees and bitterly cold.

A line ruptured in Gas Turbine Number Two. Bublitz, at that point the oiler, was in charge of turning valves and checking equipment. He was warming up two back-up boilers when an alarm pierced the frigid air. His shift partner went to investigate. Before he even got to the unit, it exploded.

But unlike a lot of companies that operate with a tight bottom-line, Yale spends money to have extensive back-up systems. “Within seconds of the explosion, the built-in fire suppression system kicked in and the fire was out. By the time the fire company came, there was no actual fire,” Bublitz recalls.

There was another problem, however: all three turbines were out of commission. Bublitz and the 13

team fired up two temporary boilers to keep the heat and electricity running to campus. Working for hours through the night, they saved valuable equipment from freezing and averted a possible crisis of hypothermia. No one even noticed the explosion. “All the students slept through the night with a smile on their face,” Bublitz said. I could find no news on the event dating back to the time, although the plant records confirm that it happened. For Bublitz, it is a point of pride that his work is unnoticed. It means that nothing has gone wrong.

The plant manager takes me up several flights of stairs to the roof, where water spray swirls in white clouds. Eight chiller towers remove heat from the air-conditioner water returning from campus.

Two brick smokestacks reach like armadillo tails to the pale summer sky. In the age of catalytic converters, the name “smokestack” doesn’t mean what it used to; I can see no smoke billowing from these towers.

The floor vibrates like the chest of a great beast.

Big white fans on the roof pull the water toward the sky to dissipate the heat, before sending hundreds

14

of gallons back down across chevron corrugated plates. I am standing before a great industrial waterfall.

From the roof, I can see the lamp-lit windows of the Sterling Memorial Library stacks and students zipping on bicycles between their classes. The Yalies and faculty who depend on the plant never give it a second thought, in much the same way that we never consider the unceasing palpitations of our own hearts.

“Though we are never seen, we know that we have an important function,” Bublitz tells me later.

“I may never be a great writer or politician or lawyer, but I bet I kept a few warm and the light on they studied by.” Behind the tall brick walls of the plant, seated in the control room, Bublitz monitors the machinery at the core of Yale’s operations. When dusk falls, his shift will end and his colleagues will take his place to keep the flame burning through the night. He is hidden, exactly as he thinks he should be.

– Ko Lyn Cheang is a junior in Grace Hopper College

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Illustration by Hailey Andrews

POEM

Naked for Edvard Munch DANIELLA COHEN

She sits on the white cot, barelybreasts splitting her sternum and a little rippled baby fat above the hands, splayed to cover the parts now in formation— that darkness about her— the muck of Puberty encroaching as if a shadow cast in the mirror She stays still a long while.

OCTOBER 2019

– Daniella Cohen is a senior in Timothy Dwight College

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STAR TREATMENT

PROFILE

A day in the life of the Yale School of Medicine’s very own Netflix celebrity.

KATHERINE YAO

T

he lobby of the main entrance to Yale New Haven Hospital’s Saint Raphael Campus was cold and quiet. I was there, waiting for Dr. Lisa Sanders, at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday morning—early for the average person, but normal, if not late, for the average doctor. Aside from the security woman leaning absent-mindedly on a stray podium in the farleft corner, I was alone. The occasional pack of medical residents rushed by with crisp white coats and Starbucks coffees, but they were gone before I could even register their faces. Bursts of energy followed by stillness.

At exactly 7:30 a.m., I looked down the hallway to find a woman whom I assumed to be Sanders walking briskly towards me. If not for our direct eye contact, she would’ve been just another white coat rushing off and away. But as the sound of her clicking heels came closer, I was sure that the journalist-turned-doctor-turned-Netflix celebrity was approaching.

Sanders has the focus of a doctor and the attitude of a television star. She features in Diagnosis, a Netflix docuseries, which aired this summer.

And that’s just her latest media success; the new show is based on both Sanders’ book by the same name and her column for The New York Times.

The column, which crowdsources diagnoses for perplexing medical cases, also inspired House, the popular Fox series about a doctor who brilliantly (if overdramatically) solves medical mysteries. Her gripping narratives and investigative expertise— evidence of her background as an English major at William & Mary College and Emmy Awardwinning journalist at CBS News—have garnered a cult-like following. The numerous media projects Sanders has undertaken have been immensely popular, and yet, as I follow her into a dated family care room, I’m reminded that she is, first and foremost, a doctor. As a writer and an aspiring doctor myself, I’m eager to see how her perspective 16

as a storyteller informs her medical practice.

Beneath Sanders’ white coat, she wears a bright red dress, accented by a scarf and matching red, pointed heels. She has double ear piercings— pairs of pearls and gold seashells—and rimless glasses that are as gentle and keen as the face they sit on. Two pens, a thin stack of notecards, and a phone rest neatly in her front coat pocket, and her pixie cut gives off what I can only describe as cool-mom vibes.

We walk over to join her team outside the room and I’m introduced to the two residents, two interns, and lone medical student in Sanders’ service for the week. A few residents stop to give her hurried, only semi-coherent updates, and I learn afterward that they haven’t slept in twentyeight hours. Sanders begins every day at 5 a.m.

In the room, case after case is reviewed to prep before rounds—a ritual in teaching hospitals like Yale New Haven that gives residents and medical students an opportunity to present a patient’s case to senior physicians. Stacks of paper are balanced on books balanced on legs, phones sit precariously on knees, laptops and iPads teeter on the arms of chairs, and small notebooks are held up with whatever limb is not occupied. The mood is lighthearted and calm, reminding me of the countless scenes from House where Dr. House, the protagonist, casually pours himself coffee while discussing the near-death of a patient.

A man was brought to Yale New Haven last night after overdosing on opioids. He’d likely be dead if his friend hadn’t immediately administered Narcan and brought him to the hospital. An overwhelmingly complex narrative unfolds before me as the medical students talk. Heroin. Cocaine.

Marijuana. Cigarettes. Released just last Friday from prison. A fifteen-month-long sentence for a ninety-milligram possession charge. Light banter and the occasional laugh punctuates the story.

Someone pulls out a granola bar and takes a few THE NEW JOUR NAL

As I follow Sanders into a dated family care room, I’m reminded that she is, first and foremost, a doctor. bites. History of Hepatitis C. Diabetes. I learn that during the first week after release from jail, drug overdose mortality rates are significantly higher.

“Policy failure or policy success?” a resident jokes, in response to this fact.

Sanders sits quietly on a worn couch at the end of the room, legs crossed in a gesture that suggests both ease and acute awareness. “He’s lucky to be here,” she says. Her words cut the room. For a second, the sleep-deprivation-induced relaxation dissipates as Sanders reminds everyone that last night, someone almost died.

As the team begins to formulate a plan of action, a resident asks how best to ask a patient for permission to administer HIV and Hepatitis C tests. Sanders never hurries to answer questions, always letting a mildly unsettling bit of silence hover in the room before giving her own thoughts.

But this time she jumps in. “Remember—you don’t have to get consent. You just inform and they can decline.” Put simply, her answer was a don’texplicitly-give-them-the-option-of-saying-no ploy.

And with that, everyone in the room knew that they would simply be “informing” today, telling the patient that they would be receiving a test, and waiting obligatorily for an answer that the patient likely didn’t know was an option.

She warns her team about the consequences of bringing patients to the Hep C clinic. The Hep C treatment program “takes real adherence,” she says. And from the patient’s perspective, “it’s hard with anonymous white guys telling [them] what to do,” she adds. The team eventually agrees on calling Addiction Services, a pilot program at Yale New Haven that launched in 2017 and seeks to treat patients’ addictions while they’re in the hospital rather than refer them to a treatment center after discharge, the common practice elsewhere.

They talk through a few more cases. One patient has had a potential stroke but is refusing to undergo a critical MRI because she is scared— not of what the test may show, but of the machine itself. Another patient refuses to leave despite OCTOBER 2019

being stable and cleared for discharge. A man who needs a right heart catheterization discovers his insurance has refused to pay for his hospitalization.

I feel behind and incapable of catching up, stuck processing for the first time things that the people around me have evidently encountered hundreds if not thousands of times before. I wonder if and when hospital workers became desensitized.

Before entering each patient’s room, the team huddles, like a high school soccer team before kickoff. Someone quickly runs over the game plan, and Sanders offers a few final words before letting her players loose.

She later explains to me that she thinks of her job as a supervisor to the residents the same way she thought of herself as a mother to her teenage daughters. For both, she says, “My goal was to allow them to have a wide variety of experiences, as long as they didn’t get hurt.” As the daughter of a mother who had the very same parenting approach, I knew exactly what Sanders meant.

The long pauses and quiet observation made sense. “They don’t have to do things my way,” she says. “As long as they aren’t going to do anything that hurts anybody.”

“But it’s very hard for me to shut up,” she adds.

For the patient who refuses to leave despite being stable and cleared for discharge, Sanders tells her team to focus on making the patient’s husband comfortable “because if he’s comfortable, she’s comfortable.” Sanders’ advice makes perfect sense, and yet, patient care can become so technical that some medical professionals forget that a patient is a human being, influenced by their surroundings and relationships. This woman likely trusts her husband infinitely more than she will ever trust a group of young, fresh-eyed budding doctors. Why try to win her over when he is right there?

Faced with the woman who refused to submit to an MRI, Sanders’s approach was strategic: emphasize how seriously we take the patient’s concerns, tap into your 7-year-old self manipulating your mom, and remember that it’s all about what the patient wants. Sanders ended by saying, “We sell the right thing to do while still telling the truth.”

Dr. Sanders credits her unorthodox literary background for her extraordinary ability to connect with patients. Studying the humanities as an undergraduate conditioned her to be “used to uncertainty”—something she says that many 17

doctors struggle with. In medical school, Sanders points out, students learn the science in black and white. They have to pass multiple-choice tests with right and wrong answers. But, as Sanders says, “It’s not that way in medicine.”

“Coming up with the right answer is meaningless unless you can make it make sense to a patient,” Sanders adds, reminding me of my former English professor who always advised me to “remember [my] audience” when I wrote. Sanders has mastered this storytelling technique both on and off the paper.

In the patient rooms, Sanders camouflages herself. She leans on the hospital room trash can near the foot of the patients’ bed and stands quietly behind her team as they take turns giving patients updates and answering questions from loved ones.

With her small stack of notecards in hand, Sanders jots down the occasional observation, shuffling cards as she goes. I later learn that she keeps these cards to remember ways her team could improve.

Her words cut the room.

For a second, the sleepdeprivation-induced relaxation dissipates as Sanders reminds everyone that last night, someone almost died.

When Sanders did talk to patients, I was struck by how blunt she was. It’s one thing to be straightforward with jaded, stubborn fourth-year residents, and another to be blunt with the person in the hospital bed. Looking straight into the eyes of the patient who had overdosed on opioids the night before, Sanders said: “You’ve used heroin for years, so you know: The goal of addiction medicine, and ours, is to give you the tools you need to get it under control. You’ve been in the business for a while now,” she said. “You know it’s not under control.”

Perhaps the most intimate interaction I witnessed between Sanders and a patient was with the man whose insurance refused to pay for his hospitalization. Hospital costs average $3,949

18

per day and each hospital stay costs an average of $15,734, according to debt.org. Both the patient and Sanders knew he couldn’t afford a stay. Sanders walked into his room, arms crossed and ready for what she would later tell me was a disturbingly typical situation. “Your insurance company is saying ‘Why are you in the hospital?’ I am going to wrestle them to the mat, but you have to be ready if I lose.” The patient was frustrated with a system that neither he—nor most Americans—could understand. If he could have jumped up from the worn, tattered arm chair beside his hospital bed, he would have. But he couldn’t. So he said aloud, to no one in particular, “I’m gonna fight. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be sick. I have a life to live.”

To anyone who has watched their fair share of medical dramas, that line may sound familiar. I grew up watching, reading, and hearing stories about this exact situation. Yet as it unfolded in real time right in front of me, I was taken aback.

Sanders was unwavering. She sat down on the edge of his empty bed, looked him in the eye, and firmly said: “I tell you this because I want you to know. I’m not the one who’s gonna end up with the bill. You are.” The patient fell silent after this, glancing away as Sanders sat with him, her legs crossed, hands rested over her knees, the sharp tip of her bright red stiletto heel barely touching the toe of his hospital-issued-sock-covered foot.

This was the uncertainty that Sanders, unlike many doctors, feels at ease handling. She shines in moments like these. I was reminded that, in addition to being a doctor, Sanders is a mystery hunter, writer, and solver.

After I told Sanders I hoped to be a doctor, she warned me of what lay ahead. “You don’t get through medical school unless you perform the way the system wants you to perform. So doctors, by the time they get through medical school, are specialists at identifying what is expected of them.

When you get paid more, that’s a way of telling you what you’re supposed to do.” She managed to avoid this path. But could I? For now, Sanders is focused on wrapping up what she calls her “Netflix elective.” When she’s done with that, she hopes to negotiate a sort of semi-residency with Yale New Haven Hospital’s dermatology department to increase her exposure to a field in which she has little experience. “I want to know more so I have more to teach…You THE NEW JOUR NAL

don’t go into medicine unless you’re committed to lifelong learning.”

As I gathered my things, Sanders repeated something she’d heard the Dean of Yale’s medical school say on opening day this year. “Fifty percent of what you learn in medical school is going to be wrong. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you which 50 percent.”

On television and in her writing, Sanders guides her readers and viewers through a search for the right answers to rare medical mysteries.

But in person, she seems more comfortable with not knowing all the solutions. She’s determined to make people realize that uncertainty is inevitable, and that we must learn to be content with that fact.

Photo by Vivek Suri

– Katherine Yao is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.

OCTOBER 2019

19

THE

RE

In 2013, Toni Harp defeated Justin Elicker to become New Haven’s mayor.

Six years later, after a stunning primary upset, the same candidates face a city that wants a change.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

Design by Chase Westover

MATCH OCTOBER 2019

 21

COVER

THE INCUMBENT After a decades-long career in politics, Toni Harp reckons with her first-ever electoral loss.

ELI MENNERICK

I

t’s Wednesday night and DJ Commander plays the music loud. I’m at the Elks Lodge on Dixwell, where Mayor Toni Harp’s supporters are hosting an appreciation day to celebrate her legacy in New Haven. Harp is scheduled to attend, but she hasn’t arrived yet. R&B floods the room, and people greet each other, hug, laugh.

The room keeps filling up. Then I hear some scattered applause from the hallway outside the room. The applause spreads inside, and suddenly everyone is cheering. “Toni, Toni, Toni,” they

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Photo by Vivek Suri

THE NEW JOUR NAL

chant. Harp enters wearing a black blazer and waves to the crowded room. Over the speakers, DJ Commander says, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mayor Harp!” The room goes crazy.

Two weeks earlier, Harp had suspended her mayoral reelection campaign after losing the Democratic primary to Justin Elicker. But tonight, she’s trying to rally the energy of the room, forcing her voice to be animated as she reminisces about her successes. Reading from a script, Harp recounts how she removed a controversial fence between New Haven and Hamden, revitalized the Long Wharf food trucks, restored College Street Music Hall, balanced New Haven’s budget, improved graduation rates, and reduced crime. Then she says, “I just want you to know that I am still on the ballot.” The audience erupts into applause, and then more chants of “Toni, Toni, Toni…” One man yells, “Don’t give it up!”

Harp grew up in Salt Lake City. She was the only black student in her middle school, and in her high school she was one of thirty in a class of 600. According to the CT Mirror, she said in 2013 that she “saw mistreatment as an African-American child in Utah.” She “realized that people mistreat people. And you have to rise above it.”

In 1974, Harp graduated from Yale with a Master’s in Environmental Design. She became an alder for the Dwight neighborhood, then a state senator for twenty years. In 2013, she defeated Justin Elicker in New Haven’s mayoral election. It was the first time a woman had become mayor of the Elm City, and the second time a black person had. Over the next six years, unemployment in New Haven dropped 50 percent and crime dropped to its lowest point in fifty years. High school graduation rates increased, and so did affordable housing. Harp won in 2015 and 2017 without much opposition.

And then, this September, she lost. Elicker took more than 58 percent of the votes in the primary.

Harp suspended her campaign but decided to stay on the ballot for the general election on November 5. It was her first loss ever as a politician, and it was to an opponent she had beaten six years ago, whose experience consisted of two terms as an alder and who led a nonprofit of five full-time employees.

The mood was more somber when I met Harp in her office at City Hall. She seemed sad. When she spoke, she looked around the room and rarely into my eyes. Harp is seventy-two years old. Her OCTOBER 2019

hair is a rich dark brown that verges on black, and it falls snugly around her head and onto her ears.

I asked her why she thought she lost. “It’s hard to say,” she said. Her voice was quiet and slow. “I don’t really know.” * Harp did say, vaguely, that some voters had concerns with her administration. That’s true.

The first signs of concern came in 2017, during the tortured process of hiring Carol Birks, a controversial candidate, as superintendent. Harp cast a deciding vote in Birks’s election at a Board of Education meeting where, according to the New Haven Independent, students walked out in protest, audience members stood with duct tape over their mouths, and one board member challenged another to a “duel.”

Then in 2018, Harp raised taxes by 11 percent to compensate for reduced state funding. And in November of that year, her administration relaxed lead paint inspection regulations so that the city would only be required to inspect the homes of children with at least fifteen micrograms per deciliter of lead in their bloodstream, rather than the previous, stricter standard of five micrograms.

Since May, the city has faced a class-action lawsuit representing around three hundred children who could be harmed by the regulations. And in June, the FBI subpoenaed records from the Harp administration, apparently to investigate its use of public funds. So far, the FBI hasn’t released any findings.

Elicker cited many of these events in campaign ads. He accused Harp of “corruption and mismanagement” after the FBI probe. He blamed her for the lead poisoning of three hundred children, and he even attempted to link her to a mass K2 overdose on the New Haven Green in 2018.

“She’s made mistakes,” Morrison said. “But she’s human; she’s supposed to make mistakes.”

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Harp’s supporters refute these allegations.

Jeannette Morrison, the President Pro Tempore of the New Haven Board of Alders, where she represents Ward 22, noted that the fact that the FBI is investigating an administration doesn’t mean that the administration is guilty. Former Harp debate advisor Alex Taubes told me that Harp had to prioritize the most severe cases of lead poisoning first because the city didn’t have enough inspectors. And Harp herself pointed out that New Haven’s emergency services actually won awards for their response to the 2018 overdoses.

Taubes and I are sitting on a bench in the backyard of Koffee. He’s wearing a suit without a tie, and his fine hair is streaked with gray. He speaks with passion but without hurry, lingering on his words when he likes them, gesturing with his hands, and leaning back on the bench with his eyes closed. Taubes says that Elicker’s campaign engaged in “character assassination” and got away with it because Harp is a black woman. Elicker employed the “stereotype of the corrupt black

“If you want me to be your mayor you’ve got to vote for me,” Harp said. “I’ve done my job.” mayor,” Taubes asserts. “He turned her into a caricature.” When Taubes speaks of Harp he seems to be in awe. He describes her prodigious knowledge of policy and how she tries to hide that knowledge so as not to alienate voters. “She could be on Ezra Klein’s podcast,” Taubes says. “It’s why she gets so much done. She’s a policy wonk, 100 percent.”

I asked Morrison, at her desk at City Hall, if Elicker had attacked Harp’s character unfairly.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,” she said. She wore a jean jacket and hoop earring, and she swatted at a mosquito while we talked. Elicker “definitely” treated Harp differently because she is a black woman, Morrison said. She claimed that Elicker wouldn’t accuse a white man of corruption and mismanagement without solid evidence.

Harp supporters don’t mention that her campaign 24

used plenty of attack ads, too. One flyer compared Elicker to President Trump, accusing both of “overconfidence and incompetence.” A television ad warned that Elicker planned to use drones to spy on New Haven residents. Harp’s former campaign manager, Ed Corey, even claimed that Elicker’s wife, Natalie, used her influence as an assistant U.S. attorney to have the FBI subpoena the Harp administration. Harp’s campaign called it a “political hit job.” Later, on a WNPR radio show, Harp admitted that her campaign’s attack on Natalie Elicker was “ill-advised ”and promised not to target Elicker’s family again.

Elicker and his campaign “started putting all this doubt in the minds of people, and so a lot of people just didn’t come out and vote,” Morrison said. She claimed that Harp isn’t corrupt. “She’s made mistakes,” Morrison said. “But she’s human; she’s supposed to make mistakes.” * Back at Elks Lodge, Harp approaches a group of reporters for a statement. One reporter asks about her prospects for reelection. “If people want to vote for me they certainly can,” she says, almost defiantly. “If you want me to be your mayor you’ve got to vote for me. I’ve done my job.”

The tables are almost full, and people eat fruit salad and meatballs from disposable plates.

At every seat is a flier. “The People’s Campaign to Re-Elect Toni Harp,” each reads, alongside a photo of Harp at her desk. “Vote November 5.”

Emma Jones, a prominent activist who fought for New Haven’s recently established Civilian Review Board, is here at Elks Lodge. She is the mother of Malik Jones, a young black man who was shot and killed by an East Haven police officer in 1997. After Harp’s primary loss, she and Taubes created the People’s Campaign for Toni Harp, a group of Harp supporters devoted to getting her reelected in November. As of October 12, its Facebook page had 308 members. Most of the posts are ebullient stories about what Mayor Harp has accomplished. One post, by Taubes, reads: “You Got The Lies. Now For The Truth,” along with a list of Harp’s accomplishments. Taubes told me that the group organizes phone banking and door-to-door canvassing. “We don’t have money,” he said, “but we want to let [Mayor Harp] know that you don’t need money if you have people.”

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Jones spoke to me with passion, and she emphasized her points by pounding one fist into her open hand. Harp was blamed for things that white mayors weren’t, she said—like lead poisoning, which has been a problem for decades.

“I don’t like it, and I have an obligation and a responsibility to stand up and say, ‘No. That’s not right,’” Jones said. The People’s Campaign fulfills that obligation. “I want to educate people, so that people have the real truth,” she said. “Let’s talk about this woman’s record.”

“Do you know how big it is that we don’t have to wake up and see there’s been another shooting in a high school community?” Jones added.

She was talking about YouthStat, a program designed to intervene with young people who are at risk of dying from gang violence. According to the CT Mirror, at least two young people were shot down on the streets within Harp’s first hundred days as mayor. So Harp brought together superintendents, principals, police officers, fire chiefs, and other professionals. They came up with criteria—grades, graduation, attendance, criminal history—for identifying the kids who were most at risk. Then they developed an electronic system to allow parents, social workers, teachers, and other adults to coordinate with each other to help the kids stay engaged in school. The resulting program was YouthStat, and since its creation in 2014, Harp told me, “We haven’t lost a kid.” * Harp seems torn about letting go. She told me she stayed on the ballot because she wanted to honor the Working Families Party’s nomination and give people another chance to vote for her.

“So many people who said they didn’t vote in September thought that the real election was in November,” she said. “So I wanted them to have an opportunity to either vote for me or vote for my opponent.”

But if she wants to give voters another chance, why not actively campaign? Her voice gained momentum as she told me that Elicker’s primary run was full of malice and viciousness. She didn’t want to go through more of it.

“He smeared me, smeared my administration— the people who work hard on behalf of the people of New Haven every day—and it was undeserved,” she said. “I wasn’t going to be a part of allowing OCTOBER 2019

“He smeared me, smeared my administration—the people who work hard on behalf of the people of New Haven every day—and it was undeserved.” that to continue.”

Harp didn’t say that Elicker ran a racist or a sexist campaign. “I’m sure that men are attacked too,” she said. But she also said she had never seen anything in New Haven politics as vicious as Elicker’s campaign. “And I do happen to be a woman and an African-American, so I don’t know what his motive was, other than to win,” she said.

Elicker’s campaign strategy seems to have worked. Sure, Harp doesn’t want to put herself through another round of his attacks. But maybe it’s also true that Harp won’t campaign because a part of her knows it won’t change the results of the general. Has she already let go? * Many of Harp’s supporters say they’re uncertain what would happen to New Haven without Harp as mayor. I asked Morrison how the city might change: “That is the biggest question that I have,” she said. She praised Harp for supporting the new Q House, a community center in Dixwell that opened in 1924 and shut down in 2003. Harp helped secure funding for a reopening of the center in 2020. “I am just so thankful to Mayor Harp for making Dixwell a priority,” Morrison said.

And Shaleah Williams, the YouthStat program coordinator, claimed that YouthStat was possible only because of Harp. “YouthStat is her baby, so to speak,” she said. She told me about a student who was disengaged from school because he needed glasses but didn’t have the means to get them. At a meeting, the school nurse told officials about the student’s situation. YouthStat assigned him a case manager, who spent almost 25

two months helping him. The case manager took him to an eye doctor, got a prescription, and let him choose his frames. After that, Williams said, the student engaged more in school, and his grades improved.

Williams, like Morrison, is apprehensive about the prospect of Harp’s departure. Harp “understands the youth in this city and what’s necessary to help them along,” Williams said. She worries that new mayors won’t “have the heart that she does.”

This might be Harp’s last term as mayor, but YouthStat and the Q House will outlast her. And maybe it’s some consolation to her supporters that institutions like these will live on as proof of Harp’s time in this city.

But what will Harp do if she isn’t mayor next term? She’s not quite sure. “I may do some of what you’re doing,” she told me. “I may write—memoirs or something—and it may be helpful to people.”

Harp seemed surprised—or maybe relieved— when I brought up her free time. She talked faster, unburdened by the thought of how her words might be used against her. I asked if she saw her children much. “My daughter lives with me, so I see her every day.” She laughed, one of the few times in our interview. “And that’s my first grandchild right there. He just turned a year and a half.” She pointed to a photograph on her office wall.

On Sundays she goes to Center Church on the Green with her daughters. She’s a member of groups that help “the city’s neediest.” She has two dogs, Ella and Cece, and she plays with them in her backyard twice a day. “So, you know, I have things to do with my time,” she said. And she laughed again, briefly.

– Eli Mennerick is a junior in Ezra Stiles College.

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COVER

THE CHALLENGER With the mayor’s office in sight, Justin Elicker works to win New Haven’s trust.

MARA HOPLAMAZIAN

A

few decades before Justin Elicker decided to run for mayor of New Haven, he stole a shopping cart. “I don’t know what we were thinking, but we stole a shopping cart and threw it in the woods,” he told me.

Elicker remembers lifting the grocery-store staple as a singular moment of rebellion in his sheltered young life in the wealthy suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut. “It was really exhilarating,” he reflected, smiling sheepishly. “I still feel bad about it.”

Elicker came of age in a community that regularly tops the charts for highest median family income in the United States. Just a fortyfive minute drive from New Haven, New Canaan is 95 percent white and looks strikingly different from the majority-minority city he’s hoping to run. “It was in one way very wholesome,” Elicker told me, “and in another way, devoid of a lot of the realities of the world.” Before moving to New Haven, he attended Middlebury College, then taught English in Taiwan, worked as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State Department, OCTOBER 2019

and taught elementary school, high school, and college in Connecticut. He moved to New Haven in 2007 to attend Yale’s School of Forestry and the School of Management, and graduated in 2010.

Now, nine years after graduating, he lives with his wife, Natalie, and their two kids on the top floor of a three-family house on Orange Street.

After outgrowing his days of snatching shoppingcarts, Elicker ran for mayor of New Haven for the first time in 2013, when he was 37 years old. He’d lived in New Haven for six years, and served as alder for the East Rock and Cedar Hill neighborhoods for four. His platform centered around “fresh solutions,” which he posted one by one for seventy-five days on his campaign website.

The solutions touched on everything from police reform to vocational training programs to the bureaucracy of the preschool enrollment process.

Hartford Courant reporter David Holihan wrote that he ran as “New Haven’s equivalent of Bernie Sanders, only younger and with better hair.”

He had big plans and not much experience. His relationship to the city was shaped by his time at Yale, and some constituents seemed to feel that he hadn’t spent time in the neighborhoods he was hoping to represent. The unions staunchly backed his opponent Toni Harp, a fellow Yale graduate and a popular state senator. At one debate, Paul Bass, editor of the New Haven Independent, asked Elicker how he would succeed as mayor with “no appreciable support” from people of color in the city.

In the 2013 election, his supporters looked very much like the people he’d grown up around: most of the 23 percent of the votes he accumulated in the Democratic primary came from the affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods of East Rock and Westville. After his loss in the primary, he ran 27

as an independent in the general election against Harp. She became the first woman to be mayor of New Haven; he went back to the drawing board.

Elicker’s 2019 campaign wasn’t entirely a departure from his campaign in 2013; both were grassroots-based and issues-centered. Each time, he emphasized his commitment to taking only donations that fell within the limit set by the Democracy Fund, New Haven’s public financing system ($370 in 2013 and $390 in 2019). But on the night of the 2019 primary election, something was different. An underdog from the beginning, Elicker won with 2,048 votes more than Harp.

In 2013 he won in just seven wards, five of which included East Rock, downtown, and Yale’s campus.

This year, he took fifteen. Though predominantly white neighborhoods remained a large portion of his support, New Haveners from all corners of the city turned out to vote for Elicker. At debates he received enthusiastic cheers. The city celebrated him. So what changed? * On a Monday night in the middle of September, one week after he’d come out on top of the Democratic primary that many doubted he’d win, Elicker threw a “campaign kick-off.” The mood was both celebratory and expectant. Supporters and friends from across the city filled the back room of BAR, a pizza restaurant on Crown Street.

Bro-hugs were exchanged and backs were slapped and kids were fed New Haven-style pizza. Gage Frank, Elicker’s campaign manager, took down names and emails as supporters filed in. Violet string lights gave the room an optimistic glow.

Many people at the campaign kickoff had voted for Harp in past elections, or had worked

But on the night of the 2019 primary election, something was different.

An underdog from the beginning, Elicker won with 2,048 votes more than Harp.

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with her in different capacities throughout her terms. Criticism of Harp was at an all-time high following her cost-cutting relaxation of lead paint regulations, her involvement in hiring an unpopular superintendent, and accusations of corruption in her administration. Maria Tupper, an Elicker supporter in attendance, said, “As a woman, it’s hard for me not to support another woman.” But, as many of his supporters agreed, the city needed transformation, and Elicker promised change.

By the time speeches started, the room was full. Ties were loosened; tables were packed; and those without seats stood. State representatives for Connecticut shared the stage, each talking for a few moments about their support for Elicker to gentle applause. Then Urn Pendragon, a former mayoral candidate, took the floor. “Unity is more than a five-letter word,” she insisted, and received a lukewarm “woo.” When Elicker stepped up onto the table and grabbed the microphone, he thanked every speaker. The crowd roared for each name. Tables shook. Kids stomped their feet.

Nearly a week after the event, when I walked into Elicker’s campaign headquarters on the first cold day of September, the room was quiet. It was the first floor of a small building on Whalley Avenue, nestled between an auto body shop and a hair salon. The bricks were painted daffodil yellow.

On the walls, butcher paper hung underneath a question: “What are your hopes for New Haven?”

“Equity in all schools for all kids,” one message written in block letters insisted. “Let’s start with honesty and transparency,” suggested another.

“Police accountability” huddled next to a large “Tax Yale,” with “I second that” and “So do I!” written carefully in faded green marker underneath. The WiFi password, NewLeadership2019, was pasted on each wall, along with a sign denoting how many shifts campaign volunteers and staff had taken for the week. “Justin: 18” was at the top of the most recent one. The only person who completed more shifts—his campaign manager, Gage—did so only by one.

Kevin Alvarez, Elicker’s field manager, greeted me with a warm smile as I walked into campaign headquarters. I recognized him as the “Kevin” from Elicker’s encouragements to “email Kevin” in the videos that he posts on Facebook, Beto O’Rourke-style, shot from the front-facing camera on his iPhone. Like Beto, Elicker demonstrates THE NEW JOUR NAL

Photo courtesy of Lukas Flippo/ The Yale Daily News

his fluency in Spanish in the videos—a skill he has mobilized to mixed responses while debating and knocking on doors throughout his campaign.

In the same tradition as Beto’s performance at the first presidential debate, Elicker’s willingness to speak in Spanish could be interpreted as a sign that he’s focused on communication and accessibility in governance—or, to some ears, it could ring as inauthentic.

One of the successes of Elicker’s 2019 campaign is the variety of ways he’s created relationships with voters. He engages with millennials online and with the elders of his city on their front porches.

And his willingness to reveal his personality in his public presence shows—from his SoundCloud cover of The Rainbow Connection in the style OCTOBER 2019

of Kermit the Frog, to his storied Justin Bieber impression the Independent deemed “credible,” to the way he gives out his phone number freely online and in speeches.

Elicker wore his signature cornflower-blue shirt and held a Klean Kanteen gingerly with both hands as we spoke. He had a bad cold, but he talked through it in a soft and serious way, stopping when a story he told made him chuckle.

I asked him why he would be the best person to be mayor. “I don’t think I’m the best person.

Barack Obama would be better than me,” he said solemnly. (Many supporters applaud his humility.)

He believes that the knowledge he’s gained over the past five years as executive director of the New Haven Land Trust and the perspective he’s gained 29

She saw Elicker get his hands dirty in gardens across New Haven, growing familiar with neighborhoods he hadn’t spent much time in before. from living in New Haven for more than a decade will set him up for success.

Elicker took leadership of the Land Trust, a non-profit organization focused on local land stewardship and environmental education, in February 2014. Around that time, an embezzlement scandal involving Elicker’s predecessor racked the organization. Elicker moved the Land Trust forward, spearheading a youth jobs training program, revitalizing Schooner Camp, and championing a series of community gardens— which, five years later, are going strong.

While sharing a beer with her wife at Elicker’s campaign kickoff, Sally Esposito, a former educator who has watched the Land Trust evolve under Elicker’s leadership, told me that Elicker has gotten to know the city through his work in community gardens. She recalled watching him turn the Land Trust’s struggling finances around and shift it from an organization focused on wealthy neighborhoods into one that served her neighbors in Fair Haven who needed more help. She saw Elicker get his hands dirty in gardens across New Haven, growing familiar with neighborhoods he hadn’t spent much time in before.

“I never knocked on doors in East Rock,” Elicker said about his most recent campaign. “I knocked on doors everywhere else in the city.” He found the process fulfilling, and it changed the way he campaigned. “It’s interesting how many things come up over and over and over again on the doors,” he said, mentioning affordable housing and free after-school programs as common topics of concern. The focus of his campaign shifted substantially from the neighborhoods that had supported him in 2013 to the neighborhoods he felt needed more attention, but his closest supporters remained committed—Elicker didn’t spend his 30

canvassing time near his home, but he attended fundraisers in East Rock, and stayed close to his friends and supporters there.

At the Land Trust, more than any place else, Elicker learned how to lead with his ears first.

“It’s really important to not just show up, even if you’re pretty sure it’s the right thing to do, not just show up and tell people ‘we gotta do this,’ but to listen, and engage, and build trust,” he said.

Elicker looked up at the ceiling quizzically while we talked, as if he were presently absorbed in the process of figuring out how he felt and what he should do. He repeated this gesture many times throughout our conversation, especially while reflecting on his relationship with one community gardener in particular, Alonzo Bryan.

Bryan (whom Elicker calls “Mr. Alonzo”) tended a community garden on Hazel Street in Newhallville, for which he’d been caring alone for a couple of years. When the Land Trust approached him to ask if other Newhalville residents could garden in the plot, Bryan felt frustrated. “And it was fair for him not to be happy about that,” Elicker said, gazing upwards. But Elicker, no stranger to distrust, was persistent. He felt that the community in Newhallville should have an opportunity to cultivate their own soil, and benefit from the harvest. “Over time, we developed a relationship with him,” he said. Then, recently, Bryan welcomed a woman and a group of young children to Hazel Street to garden alongside him.

Another thing that Elicker learned from his work with Bryan is that time can be an ally. “Things take a lot of time. And sometimes time is all it takes,” he said. Time has been good to Elicker; the six years between his campaigns account for half of his time living in New Haven. Part of his recent success is tied to the roots he’s put down in those years.

Elicker has worked in the past years to distance himself from Yale. But Elicker’s engagement with New Haven, like incumbent Toni Harp’s, has been shaped by his time as a Yale student.

When I asked him about how he would tax Yale, he paused, then placed two fingers on the table between us, in parallel lines. “What’s important is exploring those options at the same time that you build a relationship,” he told me. “Like two business that are potentially collaborating, but potentially competitive.” He turned a searching gaze upward once again.

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Elicker has an instinct for collaboration. “The way I’ve learned how to make those decisions in life in general is to incorporate other people who I trust,” he said. “I don’t think one person is ever good at making all the best decisions.”

Part of the shift in Elicker’s appeal from 2013 to 2019 is that he surrounded himself with a more diverse campaign team. “It was important to get leadership from many different backgrounds to be visibly part of the campaign,” he said, “both to guide some decisions on the campaign, but also to show the city that our campaign was inclusive of many people, and prioritize that.”

Elicker’s consciousness of the ways his whiteness has shaped his candidacy takes various forms. At worst, he seems prone to tokenizing the people around him. At best, his reflections encourage him to engage more humbly and more intentionally with the city.

“My administration will be really accessible,” he said with a hopeful smile. “A lot of people want to be listened to and want to be heard.”

Elicker proved throughout the 2019 campaign his chameleonic skill of shifting tactics in order to meet the expectations of the city he hopes to govern. He recognizes his blind spots. He pays attention to what New Haveners tell him they need, and incorporates their conversations into his platform. How he’ll transition into office, if elected, remains to be seen. “I think being mayor is a constant campaign,” Elicker told me. He’s been working to win the trust of New Haveners over the last six years; perhaps, come January, we’ll be seeing more front-facing iPhone videos and hearing more of his knocks on our doors.

– Mara Hoplamazian is a senior in Grace Hopper College.

OCTOBER 2019

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the chubb fellowship · timothy dwight college · yale university

The Honorable

Rosa DeLauro

Chubb Ad

U.S. Representative for Connecticut’s Third Congressional District presentation & discussion

Thursday, October 24, 2019 · 5:15 pm Levinson Auditorium Yale Law School 127 Wall Street, New Haven Doors open for seating at 4:45 pm

Admission is free and open to the Yale Community and the General Public.

No tickets are required.

For questions: email chubb.fellowship@yale.edu or call (203) 376-7444.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

paula hyman memorial lecture

america’s jewish question Lila Corwin Berman Professor, Department of History Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History Director, Feinstein Center for American Jewish History Temple University

Thursday, October 24

•

5:00 pm

Comparative Literature Library Bingham Hall, 8th Floor • 300 College Street

•

New Haven, CT

Reception to Follow

Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History.

She is author of Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (California, 2009) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago, 2015), and she is completing a book called “The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multi-Billion Dollar Institution.” Her articles have appeared in many publications, including the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, AJS Review, Jewish Social Studies, American Jewish History, Religion and American Culture, the Washington Post, and the Forward. Berman received her Ph.D. from Yale, where she worked with Paula Hyman and Jon Butler.

For information, please contact Renee Reed at (203) 432-0843 or renee.reed@yale.edu judaicstudies.yale.edu

OCTOBER 2019 this lecture is made possible by the paula hyman memorial lecture fund and sponsored by the judaic studies program at yale university

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ENDNOTE

LOCAL HAUNTS A first-year student tries her best to get in touch with New Haven’s paranormal residents.

ISABEL KIRSCH

W

hen I met Rose Porto at a strip mall Starbucks in Hamden, she had just come from the site of a potential haunting. Porto, a hairdresser by day, is the founder of Connecticut Spirit Investigators.

Her team of three mediums works mainly with people who believe that their homes are haunted. The mediums—one of whom is a New Haven crime scene investigator—say they are able to communicate directly with spirits.

When I asked Porto about her methods, she was quick to assure me that Connecticut Spirit Investigators “likes to find natural causes before [they] deem anything paranormal.” House visits include in-depth conversations with residents to gauge their emotional well-being and investigation of potential environmental causes of unusual phenomena. After ruling out natural causes, Porto’s team uses specialized meters to measure unusual atmospheric changes. Porto wasn’t able to share details for confidentiality reasons, but she said that she has investigated some “very haunted” locations on Yale’s campus—understandable given the institution’s age.

After Porto left, Olivia Clapp, a student at Gateway Community College sitting one table over, spoke up: “My friends and I are so into ghosts!” She recommended an old home in North Haven and a bridge in Wallingford as the most haunted places in the area. “My friend, she gets all the good stuff,” Clapp explained, describing iPhone videos with an eerie, unseen woman laughing in the background at an abandoned North Haven house.

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I decided to check out the New Haven ghost scene for myself. Along with my curious friend, Clarisa, I signed up for a tour with New Haven Ghost Walks, which is part of a larger Ghost Walks USA tour company that operates ghost tours in the unusual and unexplained combination of New Haven, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Palm Beach. A few minutes before 7:30 p.m., we cautiously approached a scattered group gathered outside the Starbucks on Chapel Street.

“Match or public?” asked our guide, Chrystyne McGrath, who waved as we approached the group. Clarisa and I must have looked confused, because she clarified: “There’s a Match.com tour tonight as well as our usual public one.”

She gave us an amused smile and turned to explain the same to a confused couple.

As newcomers arrived, two distinct groups coalesced. The Match.com group appeared almost entirely male, ranging from mid-20s to mid-50s, some sporting gold chains, others in New Balance sneakers. A few women chatted, one wearing black lipstick and a witch’s hat with shiny purple tinsel wrapped around it in the facsimile of a cobweb.

As more participants arrived, it became clear that the ghost tours are typically a couples, or perhaps aspiring couples, event. Besides me and Clarisa, the public group consisted of five couples and McGrath. One couple was in town from New Jersey to celebrate a birthday; three of the couples, who were all related in an unclear brother-in-law’s cousin’s husband kind of way, had won tickets at a charity auction; and the last pair kept to themselves, the husband anxiously checking the remaining time on their parking meter.

By the time we headed out, around twenty minutes after the scheduled start time, my earlier curiosity was already turning to skepticism. I’m THE NEW JOUR NAL

Design by Meher Hans

here for journalistic investigation, I reminded myself as the tour finally began. I did NOT sign up through Match.com.

“If you get hit crossing the street, come back on my tour next week,” joked McGrath as we set off across Chapel Street toward Old Campus.

McGrath has communicated with the spirit world since age 5, she told me, and has worked as a medium for over twenty-five years. While her website highlights her work for individuals and groups such as bachelorette parties, she also proudly discussed her participation in a study at the Yale School of Medicine that brings in self-declared mediums to analyze potential treatments for people with schizophrenia.

The tour had fifteen stops. It contained far more history, and far fewer ghosts, than I’d anticipated. We covered some more well-known parts of New Haven’s past: the former Winchester rifle factory, the landing of the Amistad slave ship, and Roger Sherman’s former home, now the Union League Café. But for the most part, the stories concerned ordinary people, albeit ordinary people who died gruesome deaths.

By stop fourteen, the New Haven Free Public Library, the tour had already gone forty-five minutes over the scheduled end time. One of the older women stifled a yawn, and the parking meter-concerned husband checked his watch.

On the steps outside the library, McGrath showed us the devices that Porto had described.

Nobody seemed as receptive to these tools as McGrath had hoped. But I could see why we weren’t taking the bait—after all, as a medium, she clarified that she doesn’t actually need the tools to identify paranormal activity. The tools included a glorified voice recorder attached to a microphone to pick up sounds beyond our auditory range, a trifield meter to show energy level changes, and a REM pod, which appeared to be a small antenna, to reveal surrounding energy. The REM pod lit up red at the touch of one of the women from the nebulous family OCTOBER 2019

group. “Apparently I’m a ghost,” she muttered.

Nick Grossmann of Ghost Storm, a Norwalkbased paranormal investigation group, told me that his team uses superior tools, most notably infrared sensors, to detect ghostly activity that other ghost hunters miss. His team has investigated supposedly haunted businesses and restaurants, most notably The Twisted Vine in Derby, Connecticut. “Once businesses call us in, their business usually goes up by 30, 40 percent,” he told me. The number of new customers drawn to a business with a confirmed ghost far outweighs the number of former customers who stay away. Grossmann linked this phenomenon to the growing popularity of ghost hunting, especially in TV shows, a trend that McGrath and Porto also mentioned.

Despite their shared recognition of surging interest in the paranormal, the experts didn’t agree on everything. McGrath told me that ghosts will appear stronger in pictures after your phone charges overnight, since ghosts absorb nearby energy. When I asked Porter to back up this point, she gave me a quizzical look. “I haven’t heard that before,” she demurred. There were also terminology differences between the experts; I’m still unclear on the technical difference, if any, between a spirit and a ghost.

In part because of the lack of agreement, the knowledge in the field felt disjointed.

There was one point on which McGrath, Porto, and Grossmann all unequivocally agreed: skeptics can only be convinced by seeing a ghost for themselves. So maybe I just have to wait.

—Isabel Kirsch is a first-year in Pierson College.

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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  36

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