Volume 45, Issue 3

The New Journal Volume 45, No. 3

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

Investigating 21st Century Prejudice in New Haven

December 2012

Publisher Whitney Schumacher Editors-in-Chief Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby Managing Editors Benjamin Mueller, Cindy Ok Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck Senior Editors Nicholas Geiser, Helen Knight, Nikita Lalwani, Sanjena Sathian Associate Editors Eric Boodman, Sophia Nguyen Copy Editors Cassie DaCosta, Justine Yan Staff Writer Caroline Durlacher Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh.

Friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

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Cover Image: Benjamin Mueller

Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

Vol. 45, No. 3 December 2012 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

FEATURES 18 Powered Down

A photographer helps capture the true picture of a contaminated plant.

by Ike Swetlitz

26 What doesn’t love a wall

A fence between Hamden and New Haven traps the city’s poor, exposing 21st-century prejudice.

by Benjamin Mueller

STANDARDS 6 Points of Departure 8 Profile Feed a Fever

by Katy Osborn

14 Snapshot Growing Up Eli

by Arielle Stambler

38 Verse Missed Connections Poetry

by Cindy Ok

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 2011 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. 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.

December 2012

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points of departure.

Paper Ghosts

Katharine Konietzko

Half of the New Haven Register press building, still occupied by the newspaper’s reporters and administrative staff, hums with fluorescent lights and muffled typing.

But in the printing area, the rooms are gapingly empty.

One room holds rows and rows of the Register’s characteristic red curbside newspaper dispensers.

Arranged in tight lines, they stand like grave-markers.

The two presses loom in another room; they stand twostories tall, as huge and silent as two dinosaur skeletons in a monumental hall. Cylinders that once whirred with heavy rolls of newsprint now sit empty. Their stillness feels unnatural.

“When the presses were running, it was a very busy, loud, mechanical operation, ” Ed Stannard, a long-time Register writer, told me. “When they were moving at top speed, there was a lot going on, paper flying through. It was very exciting.” The presses ground to a halt in March when, in an effort to cut back, the Register outsourced its printing from New Haven to a press in Hartford, hoping to sell the building and move downtown.

That is, until recently. For one weekend in October, Artspace, a local art venue with exhibition spaces across New Haven, filled the press rooms with art for its annual Alternative Space weekend. “We try to find a different

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vacant building, and a lot of times we try to find something that has some kind of cultural significance to New Haven. [Local artists] are interested in breathing new life into that and making the place come alive again, if only temporarily,” said Open Studios Coordinator JP Culligan.

On October 20 and 21, nearly two thousand visitors streamed around the presses, staring up at the machinery. Roughly 130 artists from around Connecticut contributed work to the show ­— canvases, frames, and

The two presses loom in another room; they stand two stories tall, as huge and silent as two dinosaur skeletons in a monumental hall. photographs filled the ink-stained walls with color. In one room, the empty newspaper dispensers were arranged into paths, guiding visitors from video projection to video projection. Push for Fire, a piece by local artist and Quinnipiac art professor Greg Garvey, showed a man’s bathrobe as it burst into flame. It crumpled into twisted black ash. A tie, a jacket, and a pair of leather shoes followed.

One room later, canvasses were displayed on makeshift walls that hung around the printing machinery.

Visitors ascended a stairwell filled with the singing of a young musician who crouched under the stairs, and they emerged onto a catwalk that surrounds the presses’ upper level. Ellen Hackl Fagan, a Harlem-based artist who lives in Connecticut, had provided visitors with label makers so they could adorn the presses’ expansive control panels. One visitor gleefully printed out labels to name one dial “happiness,” and another “madness.”

The Register hopes that after selling its current building, it can move from its fairly remote location on Long Wharf Drive to downtown New Haven “where we were born, and lived most of our lives,” as reporter Ed Stannard told me. The paper has big dreams of engaging more directly with the community, making the Register a public space with open news meetings and a “newsroom cafe.”

But the Register’s current location has been a New Haven landmark for many years. David K. Thompson,

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Katharine Konietzko

December 2012

Katharine Konietzko

a photographer native to New Mexico, was drawn to the possibility of using the Register for an installation.

“I wanted to interact with the machines themselves,” he told me. In his piece, titled Off Register in reference to a printing term for misaligned elements, a video projection played on the rhythmic copper slats of one of the presses. The metal shone with the light of the projector and a film of people moving shone on its surface. Artifacts of communication sat in front of the press — antennas, stacked television screens displaying static, speakers blaring mechanical noise, and a thick book bolted shut.

“The main motivation of this piece was to add a reanimation to the machinery here . . . to show some movement in there when the movement’s gone,” Thompson explained.

Some artists, including Thompson, created work informed by the decline of print. For Greg Garvey, the Register’s resident ghosts were ominous. “In the room where the video is being shown, there are all these newspaper dispensers, and I made an instant mental comparison to one of the final scenes in Citizen Kane, when there are all these crates and boxes in his mansion after he died,” he told me.

Noel Sardalla, a local artist, stood in a small, empty Register office as visitors to the exhibit streamed in and out. One by one, carefully, he threaded paper flowers from the floor beside him onto fishing line. Made from newsprint, the flowers were delicate and small -- each was only a few inches across. The line formed a net, attached to the ceiling, that hung a few inches away from the wall.

The flowers suspended within it seemed to float. The piece, titled The Paper It’s Printed On, contained the text of hundreds, thousands, of newspaper articles — nutgrafs and decks, all folded into one another, swinging gently in the air. The flowers moved slightly in the breeze of a visitor who walked by briskly, looking at the phone in her hands.

For a few days, light played across the press again.

The video room’s projectors threw shifting lights and colors onto the walls. Artists stood by their work, heads thrown back in laughter or bent in discussion with passing visitors. Guests walked by holding wine in a clear plastic cup. The rooms were loud, filled with the buzzing of conversation and the faint clicks and whirrs of audio installations. Faintly, in the background, I imagined I could hear the clamor of the presses as they churned out paper. “It’s unfortunate to see something like that disappear,” Culligan told me, “but at the same time, at least we get to throw a going-away party for it.”

– Madeleine Witt

Teaching Tongues In Navajo, the phrase “I want to weigh you” translates directly from English into “I want to hang you.”

Some elderly members of the Navajo tribe still laugh about the old misunderstanding, but for Chris Brown ‘15, it represents the need for doctors that speak the Native American language. When he was younger, Brown witnessed the poor healthcare his relatives, especially his grandmother, received on the reservation from doctors who did not speak the language. He resolved to return to a Navajo reservation as a doctor and help the elderly, many of whom do not speak English, receive adequate care.

Navajo is not taught as a language at Yale so Brown applied to Directed Independent Language Study, or DILS. DILS offers the opportunity for students to work one-on-one with a “language partner,” a native speaker that guides them through their independent study of the

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Katharine Konietzko

language. For two hours each week, Brown has a Skype conversation with his language partner Jolyana Begay, a professor at the University of Arizona.

Popular DILS languages are less widely useful than languages like Chinese or Spanish, and the languages that trend in DILS projects are telling of cultural and academic patterns at Yale, in New Haven, and in the country as a whole.

Trends in the popularity of languages taught in the classroom evolve slowly in response to changing political and economic balances between nations. Only the largest political and cultural shifts seem to make a mark. The popularity of Russian spiked during the Cold War. In the 1990s, students took interest in learning Japanese during Japan’s period of economic prosperity.

More recently, in the post-9/11 era, Arabic has become more popular.

DILS is a sensitive barometer that gauges the popularity of lesser-known languages, said Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl, director of the Center for Language Study.

The program is more responsive to micro-trends in the interests of the student body, and not necessarily sweeping geopolitical trends. After the Haitian earthquake, more students wanted to take Haitian Creole through DILS. Cantonese is currently one of DILS’ popular languages. According to DILS director Angela Gleason, a large number of students who grew up speaking Cantonese at home who have no other way to study the language. On a campus where many students are uncertain about their interests, DILS is a 6

small, self-selecting program.

Chelsea Wells ‘13 took Choctaw through DILS in the fall of 2011 as a way to connect to her heritage.

Wells’ motives for learning Choctaw reflects a larger trend toward the celebration and conservation of less widely spoken languages. Her language partner was a woman from her hometown in Oklahoma, and Wells said it was great to learn from somebody from the area in which the language was spoken.

“Very few young people in the Nation speak Choctaw,” Wells explained. Her great-grandfather spoke the language, but did not teach it to anybody because of stigma against Native American languages. Wells views her study of Choctaw as a way to affirm that the language is a positive part of the culture. Though she says her studies were not necessarily practical, they fulfilled her in other ways.

But some do choose languages to match specific professional goals. Justin Hunter Scott GRD ’13, an African Studies student, took Twi, a Ghanaian language, through DILS so he could travel to Ghana if his plans to do research in Nigeria did not work out. Similarly, Alexa Little ’15 is studying Nepali through DILS with language conservation in mind, since she hopes to pursue a career conserving endangered languages in villages in the Himalayas.

Gleason also explained that while selection of a student for DILS is based on merit, the number of students that can be accepted to study each language is somewhat dependent on the amount of money set aside for that language. European languages like Armenian The New Journal

and Hungarian tend to receive the most funding.

However, the logistics of tracking down native speakers of the language to serve as language partners can prove difficult. The partners are crucial since, as Ravi Pokhrel GRD ’13, a DILS language partner in Nepali, explained, DILS is less a class and more a series of conversations. Wells discontinued her study of Choctaw this fall because her language partner retired, and DILS could not find a replacement for her. Scott similarly had difficulty finding a Twi speaker to mentor

Alexa Little ’15 hopes to pursue a career conserving endangered languages in villages in the Himalayas.

the fall semester, meaning a lot of students do not know about the program until after the deadline, Brown said.

Students can only take DILS for four semesters while at Yale, an unfortunate limit for those trying to keep up with a language for a post-graduation goal.

If there is enough interest, languages offered through DILS can transition to Yale’s standard course offerings, though there are many other factors involved in that decision. In part due to a high demand for Dutch, the administration set up a program in the summer of 2011 and offered two levels of the language this fall.

Through DILS, students reflect a body of smaller, diverse interests and help Yale stay relevant.

And, as Brown knows, relevance is power. He hopes to make being a doctor on a reservation more relevant.

In the Navajo language, cocaine is represented by collage of words, a description of white crystals that you snort.

“A lot of elderly people see their grandchildren and stuff using cocaine. They might not know, if their doctor says “did they have crack” or something; but if their doctor says [the same thing] in a traditional method of explaining it, then it works out better.” Communication is key.

– Ariel Katz

his independent learning. The challenges of executing DILS limit who completes it successfully.

The small size of the program contributes to its low profile on campus. Applications for the spring semester are also due several months before the end of

December 2012

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profile.

Feed a Fever

A public health official dances to “infect” New Haven with good health.

By Katy Osborn

Photos by Brianne Bowen

O

n a Saturday evening in late June, a man dressed in flourescent tie-dye presses his thumbs together and curls over his fingers to form a flying heart. The Carolina Chocolate Drops is playing “Cornbread and Butterbeans” to subburned picknickers who skip and swing feverishly on the New Haven Green. Eric Triffin, with his tightly sprung coils, a receded hairline, and a full white beard, dances alone to the left of the stage. He wears a tie-dye T-shirt featuring a giant pink heart that cushions the rainbow peace sign strung around his neck. His dance moves are varied and interpretive, sometimes vaguely yogi-esque—he balances unsteadily on one leg and swims through the air; he runs frantically in place with limbs flying in all directions and he whirls around in a dizzy trance — but what he called his “visual applause” never falls short of euphoric. Eyes closed, smile bursting, he is a display so uninhibitedly outlandish — seemingly delirious, even — that I wonder if the high of summertime music can fully account for it.

To New Haven locals, Triffin, also known as “Trippin’ Triffin,” “Eric the TranscendDancer,” or simply “Carrotman,” West Haven Public Health December 2012

employee for nearly twenty-four years, is a celebrated local fixture. His infectious presence and psychedelic performances have been visible at local festivals and liveband performances for decades — including, as Triffin claims, over five hundred Mondays of Rohn Lawrence’s “Smooth Jazz” at Lilly’s Pad. He’s been known to make appearances in everything from a giant carrot costume to — as Toad’s bartender Aspen Powers confirms — full-body electroluminescent wiring that can strobe in beat with the music.

There’s no doubt that Triffin’s seemingly unhinged image can initially be perplexing. “From a distance,” Richard Borer, West Haven’s former mayor, tells me, “it’s easy to think he’s some burned-out hippie walking down Chapel Street.” Indeed, “hippie” is a title that Triffin himself fully embraces. In a voice full of whimsy, he tells me that his heart has felt the affirmation of the love generation at Woodstock.

Perhaps nothing is more perplexing than attempting to reconcile this image with Triffin’s professional career.

While Triffin claims that dancing is what he’s doing when he feels most alive, he knows what it means to “bring home the tofu.” He worked at West Haven 9

Public Health as Health Educator (1986-1990) and then became the city’s Public Health Director (1990-2010).

Triffin, who received his Master’s in Public Health from Yale School of Public Health in 1984, has secured West Haven hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal grants for everything from a “Childhood Immunization Registry and Tracking System” to “Bioterrorism and Emergency Response Preparation.” He implemented West Haven’s lead poisoning and childhood immunization programs, as well as initiatives to lower infant mortality in the area. He’s written at least nine opinion pieces and letters to the editor in the New Haven Register over the years, as well innovative public health essays such as: “Food-aGo-Go School Cafeterias: State of the Art Centers for Excellence in Nutrition and Hygiene.” On their 350th anniversary, Yale School of Public Health awarded him a place on the Public Health Community Service Honor Roll.

New England Division of the American Cancer Society has recognized him as “one of the most influential persons in the fight against tobacco during the last 25 years.” To top it all off, he’s fluent in three languages — French, English and Italian — and has a foothold in Spanish, Russian, and Sanskrit.

It’s an impressive resume, one that reflects what Robert Kilpatrick ventured to call Triffin’s “anything but disconnected” style. According to Kilpatrick, who worked for over thirty-five years with the Cornell Scott Hill-Health Center, it was this holistic approach to public health that brought Triffin to bat for the center when they struggled to open a branch in downtown West Haven back in 1995. A number of city council members were resisting Hill-Health’s proposal. “There was all this concern that there would be drug addicts lined up at the clinic door, causing a nuisance in the neighborhood,” Kilpatrick tells me. As West Haven’s liaison with Hill-Health and a staunch advocate of the clinic, Triffin was appalled. When he spoke about it, his voice lost its usual whimsy and his eyes narrowed. “It was unfathomable. These were sick people who needed healthcare.” Ultimately, Triffin successfully applied to have West Haven identified as a medically underserved area; a high-need, low-income designation that helped garner the funding and recognized the urgency for HillHealth to set up a clinic on Main Street.

Triffin’s work has not lacked style; Borer has called it

the “Triffin School of Public Health.” Chuckling fondly, Borer recalled how Triffin started doing outreach from a Volkswagen bus. A card-carrying vegan, Triffin began driving to local festivals, farmers markets and exhibitions in the bus, where he would don his “Carrotman” or “Snappy the Peace Pod” costumes to promote healthy living. It’s a tradition he eventually brought to the West Haven Green when he started their first farmer’s market, and one he continues to this day. “May peas be with you, may peas be with you,” he beams, almost manically, as he hands out snap peas to passersby.

“Now you may have peas within,” he says, and then, swirling around, ”You too can create whirled peas.” He ends with one final addendum, which he delivers with a hint of self-satisfaction: “But I’m just a hip-pea.”

Kilpatrick remembers Triffin in the midst of an ultimately successful campaign to ban smoking in public places in the state of Connecticut. “I was at the capital in Hartford at this conference, and when Eric’s turn to make a statement came, he went up and burst into song.” He laughs. “He had changed the words of…I’m pretty sure it was ‘Who let the dogs out?’” Triffin’s approach offered a proactive and creative influence against a material culture in which, Triffin argues, “We’re infecting kids with bad [choices].

Advertising is a vector for chronic disease.”

According to Borer, Triffin’s was a user-friendly approach that attracted people’s attention not only in a way they would remember, but in a way that would work.

“Eric’s very wise,” Borer tells me. “He’s the type of person who could communicate anything to just about anybody, whether it was some high-ranking official from the state of Connecticut or the federal government or it was a single mom on the streets who needed assistance.”

I can confirm this — Triffin, very effectively, explained the digestive system to me by starting with the assertion that a person is a lot like a donut.

As Borer puts it, “[his approach] wasn’t ivy-tower stuffy intellect, but a very down-to-earth, folksy, ‘this is how we’re going to get people healthy’ form of innovative brilliance.” And, he added, the nation should use this grounded innovation in the burgeoning field of public health. He recalls an old mantra of Triffin’s: “it’s more of what’s happening between your hands that will hurt you more than anything else that’s going on in the world.”

While Triffin claims that dancing is what he’s doing when he feels most alive, he knows what it means to “bring home the tofu.”

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Wearing his “Snappy the Peace Pod” costume, Triffin holds up snap peas at Edge of the Woods Natural Market.

When Triffin reflects on his unconventional approach to the role of Public Health Director, the deliberative nature of his genius shines through. “I may look like a fish out of water,” he admits, “but I’m more like a Shakespearean fool.”

I

meet with Triffin on a chilly October afternoon at Edge of the Woods, a vegetarian health food market on Whalley Avenue where he does twice-weekly food demonstrations — on this particular day he’s making hot malt cider. After a quick lap around the store, I spot him at the end of the gluten-free aisle with a fresh tray. It’s a natural fit for Triffin, who got his start in nutrition — in the seventies, he started New Haven’s first food co-op and a vegetarian restaurant with his brother Kerry called “Down to Earth.” For him, the appeal of the store has a lot to do with freedom — “freedom from mega food corporations, freedom from killing animals, freedom from packaging, labeling, advertising, and

December 2012

preservatives…” He does a little jig as he explains to a shopper (miraculously without a spill). “Why not live lighter, closer to the sun, and with less of a footprint?”

Graphic design student Benjamin Niznik MFA ’14 catches up to Triffin just before I do. “Eric! I’m doing this project and I want you to participate.” He peels a softball-sized orange sticker off a sheet and asks Triffin to wear it. “The project is all about health and positive energy,” he explains to me later. “That’s Eric, in essence.

The oranges are the equivalent of a virtual liking system in reality.”

Later, Triffin and I sit in the bakery café, sipping cider while he reflects on nearly six decades in New Haven. His narrative unfolds tangent by tangent, never lacking in intrigue or personal charm. With the exception of first grade in Paris and sixth grade in Rome, Eric grew up in New Haven, graduating from the Hopkins School in 1969 — the same year he attended “3 Days of Peace & Music” at Woodstock. His was a large, liberal family.

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“I think I was 5 or 6 years old, building fall out shelters,” Triffin recalls, his blue eyes lighting up as he ventures back into his memory. “My mother was teaching yoga to paraplegics in a cool atelier in Paris in the forties, and feeding us carrot juice and wheat germ and growing sprouts in the fifties and sixties. She was sort of on the spiritual side.” Triffin’s father, meanwhile, was Belgian economist and Yale professor Robert Triffin, who first proposed implementing a common currency to unite Europe. “My father was a monk in economist’s clothing,” Triffin laughs. “He always said ‘unity creates peace.’ He dissolved borders that had been fought over for hundreds of years.”

Eric recalls dinner table debates in the Triffin household where The New York Times was always on the kitchen table. “My mother was kind of on one side — very touchy, softy — and my father was on the other — more organized and theoretical.” The discussions drove Eric to seek out a middle ground, much like the one his career in public health seemed to epitomize.

His story is interrupted when a woman slides a business card across our table as she exits the café. On the back, she’s written a note asking Triffin to call her about speaking for a Sierra Bridge Club event to protest a coal plant in Bridgeport. A few minutes later, another graphic design student approaches, asking Triffin to discuss MSG for a film she’s making.

“You’re the third student to hit on me now,” Triffin jests.

“Somebody else just gave me a card for a photography gig!” In September, Triffin made his music video debut in Tori Amos’ “Flavor” video. Eric-fever is rampant.

excise all “violent” language from his vocabulary — he was frustrated by what he perceived to be a “militaristic” shift in the field of public health after 9/11, marking a turning point in his career. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave rise to concerns of bioterrorism, the prowellness, grassroots initiatives that had long characterized Triffin’s work were sidelined. “There would be powdered sugar on the street…and all of the sudden Eric would have to be dealing with anthrax,” Borer recounts. When I ask Triffin about this, he groans as he reminisces on “the absurd idea that Saddam would be infecting us with smallpox.” The Public Health Director’s job description seemed to include new defense initiatives, like establishing a position of Homeland Security Coordinator for West Haven and leading emergency preparedness exercises in the community.

Triffin became uncomfortable with the work, ultimately viewing it as an alarmist extension of a war effort he could not bring himself to support. His feeling was that the only effective way to disarm violence would be through promoting health. We should have been “exporting tractors… building wells and desalinization plants,” he explains.

Triffin’s disenchantment was evident to Borer, too. “I could always tell when Eric wasn’t buying something,” Borer tells me, “because he would suddenly get very quiet, purse his lips, and just sit there. That’s the closest thing to a negative reaction you’ll ever get out of Eric…

I could tell he was frustrated.” Ultimately, the Director handed in his resignation to the Department of Public Health in 2010. There are certain fevers Triffin cannot pass on. After all, he explains, “when you show up at a bioterrorism conference dressed as a giant carrot, there are people that simply don’t approve.”

Nowadays, Triffin has put a new twist on his work, focusing mainly on outreach and “edutainment” as he continues his twenty-five year side career as an adjunct Professor of Public Health, Wellness and Nutrition at Southern Connecticut State University. “For twenty-five years I contained contagion,” he says, dancing along to his own words with hand gestures. “Now I’m trying to spread contagions of caring and infect people with good health. Good food, good music, good energy, good

His feeling was that the only effective way to disarm violence would be through promoting health. We should have been “exporting tractors… building wells and desalinization plants,” he explained.

“I

ended up in Public Health,” Triffin levels, “because it was public and healthy, and not about working for the man.”

Triffin’s life philosophy is one of wellness and community, decidedly nurturing of freedom, knowledge, and love — not necessarily convention. “I’m all about cooking two casseroles in one oven, not killing two birds with one stone,” he tells me. It’s a simple and honest philosophy that seems to perfectly reconcile “Eric the TranscenDancer” with Eric the Health Director.

Given Triffin’s pacifism — he’s gone so far as to 12

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dancing, good friendships, and good exercise.“ He is a self-proclaimed player and performer, a seeming vector of love and energy. He gushes over an encounter he had at this year’s Gathering of the Vibes. “Someone came up to me said, ‘I think of you every day. Seeing you be free to do what you love makes me be more free.’ And then she disappeared off into the crowd.”

M

y phone buzzes one evening in early December to a text message from Triffin. Earlier that day, I’d called Eric to ask what his earliest childhood memory was, struggling to picture him at a time before he developed his energy and acute eye for the world.

His response had been hesitant — uncharacteristically uncomfortable, even — but he’d told me that I’d caught him on his way back in from a hike. He set in on a beautiful description of young summers spent on a bean and peach farm in Tuscany.

In the text message, Triffin reveals to me his actual earliest memory; that of being in utero, in the “womb room.” Amid severe complications with her pregnancy, Triffin’s mother had been advised to abort by the chief obstetrician at the American Hospital in Paris. Instead, she heeded the word of a midwife, staying bedridden through the final months of her pregnancy.

“Throughout my youth, I would feel this sense of, like, three atmospheres weighing on me. It would come over me a couple of times a year, only when I was very relaxed, and stopped entirely when I was about twentyeight. I could feel myself being breathed by an entity greater than myself, very protected and totally connected to everything around me.”

“I think it gave me a leg up in peacefulness, connectedness, and comfort with my environment,” he continues. “Perhaps my first dancing was in utero.”

It’s by far the strangest thing that Triffin has ever shared with me, and yet, I find it compellingly honest. Triffin’s self-conscious revelation is impossibly grounded, even in its visceral otherworldliness.

It reminds me of a comment he had shared with me just that morning: “Someone once told me that I danced in order to pretend that gravity affects me.”

W

hether he’s dancing with his feet or with his words, Triffin has a unique way of making sense of most things, revealing wisdom and truth to his audience just as Shakespeare’s fool does. But perhaps Triffin’s clearest moment is when he explains his own vibrant identity.

“Viruses are embedded in the DNA, the very fabric, of all life,” he spells out with a smile. “They’re the motivators that push us to look outside ourselves and to

December 2012

share, to learn, to explore beyond convention. Aren’t we all simply looking to find a host and connect?”

There’s a lot that can get lost in the unorthodox image of Triffin, but eventually, the beauty of his genuine substance sneaks up on you and forces you to think. My mind often flickers back to the festivitiesinfected New Haven Green, where I first met Triffin.

As I laughed and speculated where he missed the turn to Woodstock, he asked me, “What are you doing when you feel most alive?”

I should have sensed the contagion then.

TNJ Katy Osborn is a sophomore in Branford College.

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snapshot.

Photo courtesy of Amy Hungerford

Growing Up Eli 14

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For Yale kids, home is a public place.

By Arielle Stambler

E

ight-year-old Yaqub Bajwa is, on average, a foot shorter than his friends and ten to fourteen years younger than them. Their statures give them a bit of an advantage over him in volleyball, but he is their equal in games of Risk. Sometimes they talk about basic chemistry and other times they talk about Madagascar 3.

As a kid growing up at Yale, Yaqub regularly interacts with a world he is too young to fully participate in—or understand—but that doesn’t keep him from trying.

At 5:30 one evening, I see Yaqub saunter into the Timothy Dwight dining hall beside his mother Lisa Bajwa, TD resident fellow, who holds his two-yearold sister, Aya, propped on her hip. His father, Omer Bajwa, has some business to attend to tonight as Yale’s Muslim Chaplain, so it won’t be a full family dinner.

Yaqub runs into his friends as he meanders through the dining hall. When they ask him how his day is going, he launches into the saga of his extraordinary life: how his sister has recently learned how to turn doorknobs and keeps coming into his room to steal his stuffed animals, or how he hid a plastic spider in his teacher’s book as a practical joke. Yaqub knows how to work a room.

I catch a glimpse of Yaqub as he rolls his eyes at his sister Aya when he sits down at a table. She is pushing her toy stroller around the dining hall, but it won’t quite

fit between the packed tables and she is starting to fuss.

I sense his mom panic ever so slightly about a temper tantrum brewing. She placates Aya by promising her that she can draw with the sacred box of markers when they get back to the apartment.

Yaqub and Aya have to behave beyond their maturity levels because they spend so much time in public. Yaqub in particular has to assume two personas—one that’s playful and relaxed inside their resident fellow’s apartment and one that’s composed and wellbehaved around TD. “When we moved in, we sat [Yaqub] down and told him he had to have a certain respectful tone of voice in public,” Bajwa said. “You always have to be on when you’re out.”

Bajwa believes that his son has grown up a lot even in the few months since his family moved into TD. Since Yale students lavish so much attention on him, Bajwa sees what he calls their “emotional intelligence” beginning to rub off on him.

“My kids have become more socially mature and more sociable since coming here,” he said. “It’s noticeable. My parents have said it. My in-laws have said it.”

Being a Yale kid comes with perks. Clare Hungerford, the eleven-year-old daughter of Morse Master Amy Hungerford, and Marty Keil ’12, son of former Morse Master Frank Keil, both told me that one of the best parts of being a campus kid is the Master’s house. When Marty moved into the Master’s house at age eleven, he was most excited that it had the Game Show Network. When he went to dinner in the Morse dining hall at night, he could drink as much soda as he wanted.

Just like any Yalie, Yaqub has learned how to organize his social life around meals.

LEFT: Morse Master Amy Hungerford’s kids, Cy and Clare, enjoy Hounfest during her time as Calhoun’s interim Master.

December 2012

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Photo courtesy of the Bajwa family.

Yaqub and Aya Bajwa with their parents, who serve as resident fellows in Timothy Dwight College. Mr. Bajwa works as Yale’s Muslim Chaplain.

Clare gets to have a lot more sleepovers than before because the house is much more spacious than her old one in East Rock. When her friends come over on Saturday nights, they watch movies and talk and play, and marvel at the floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the lower level of the house that reflect the image of the living room at night. But her peers are conscious of the oddness of her home. “They think it’s cool, but they wouldn’t want to do it,” Clare said.

Having people in your house so much of the time takes some getting used to. A self-proclaimed dog person, Clare uses her new puppy, Toller, to help her integrate into social situations with older people. Her mom has noticed. “It helps her to feel like she has a role if she’s taking care of him in this context of a busy party,” Hungerford said.

Clare learns a lot from the guests and students she meets, but knows that she occupies a strange space at Yale. She’s not a peer, not a friend, but rather a fixture of Morse life. “Yale students are nice,” she said. “I kind of talk to them. But they talk more to each other.”

Ultimately, this place is a club to which she is occasionally given elite access and from which she is also occasionally barred.

That boundary between Clare and Yale students even exists for seventeen-year-old Kate Bradley, daughter 16

of Branford Master Elizabeth Bradley, despite her involvement in campus activities. She plays intramural squash for Branford, uses the library and the gym, goes out to New Haven restaurants for dinner with her brother, and gets advice from Yale students about what to study and what college life is really like, but Kate still knows that there is an invisible gulf between herself and the average Yalie. “A lot of students are only one year older than me, but it feels like there is such a difference between us,” she said.

During his seven years living in the Morse Master’s house, Keil took full advantages of those boundaries.

He said any student who happened to see him walking around Morse when he lived there would have thought of him as that “quiet Master’s kid.” He isolated himself from Yale student life, choosing instead to focus on the trajectory of his own life; it took him until senior year of high school to learn how to get to Old Campus from Morse.

His world felt a little more normal than many Master’s kids’ because most of his friends at Hopkins School were also connected to Yale. His good friend Joe Schottenfeld ’12, son of Davenport Master Richard Schottenfeld, is exactly Marty’s age. Joe had his bar mitzvah party in the Davenport dining hall. Marty had his eighth grade graduation after-dance in his living room. It The New Journal

was an unusual way to grow up, but they normalized the experience for each other.

At fourteen years old, Marty told the Yale Daily News that he was “definitely tired of Yale,” but now admits in retrospect that he did not really know the University until Bulldog Days, when he thought about it as a college option for the first time.

Clare is adamant about not wanting to go to Yale for college. “If I stay in one place and experience everything I have all over again, it’s not really a completely new experience or getting away from mom and dad,” she reasoned. Clare already overhears students stressing about midterms and congratulating each other on consulting jobs. She sees fliers for information sessions about studying in China and running HIV clinics in Ecuador. And she hears her mom get out of bed at 2 a.m. to break up parties, knowing that students are outside behaving in ways that she has been taught not to behave.

Amy Hungerford is not too worried about Clare observing those moments. “I am sort of fearless about knowledge in children,” Hungerford said. “There’s an occasion to talk about what they’re learning and seeing in the world.” These conversations happen very openly in Kate’s family as well. “When we talk about it, my parents treat me like an adult,” she said.

Since Bajwa is raising his children in the Muslim

faith, which prohibits drinking, college partying will eventually call for serious conversations as Yaqub and Aya get older. But those discussions are still a long ways off. “I think if my kids were teenagers and they were seeing kids partying on Friday nights, that would have been more worrisome for me,” Bajwa said.

The kids of Yale see hundreds of examples of ways to be in the world while growing up here. These kids are imagining how they will navigate their college experiences and, like the students, learning how to mold the people they will become.

As Yaqub and I walked out of the dining hall after dinner, he pointed to the lit windows around the TD courtyard to show me where all of his friends live.

He’s seen some of their rooms multiple times. He was sad that I had to leave, but he wanted to know what residential college I was in. Although he hadn’t heard of Morse before, when I mentioned that it was right next to Stiles, his eyes lit up. “My family eats in Stiles all the time.

Maybe I’ll see you there at dinner again.” Just like any Yalie, Yaqub has learned how to organize his social life around meals. I’m sure I’ll see him there soon, stealthily carrying a plate of French fries to his seat before his parents can stop him, and beaming with pride every time a friend puts out a hand to give him a low-five.

TNJ Arielle Stambler is a junior in Morse College.

Photo courtesy of the Bradley family

The Bradley family stands in the Branford Courtyard. Seventeen-year-old Kate, who perceives a gulf between herself and Yale students despite her similar age, is on the right.

December 2012

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Powered Down A photographer helps capture the true picture of a contaminated plant.

Photograph courtesy of Chris Randall

By Ike Swetlitz

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C

hunks of metal lie like carcasses on the grimy floor, and rust grows like mold on pipes in English Station, a non-operational coal and oil power plant sitting on a man-made dredge island in the middle of the Mill River. On October 2, New Haven resident Chris Randall ventured into its depths and returned with photographic evidence of a surreal landscape.

“It’s kind of like a ghost,” Randall said. While exploring the site, he imagined what it would have been like for people to work at the plant. It must have been noisy—not like the dusty silence he experienced. “I can’t go into a place like that and not try to envision what it was like when it was at its capacity,” he said.

Few have seen English Station’s interior for the past ten months; the property is contaminated with dangerous amounts of asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and no work is being done to remediate the site due to a cease and desist order issued by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).

Randall has lived on Lyon Street, about a mile away from the site, since 2000. He is the executive director of New Haven Land Trust, and he runs a photography blog, “I Love New Haven,” with 2011 New Haven mayoral candidate Jeffrey Kerekes. He posted a set of photos under the title “English Station Invasion (Part

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II)” in early October, and the New Haven Independent published six of those the next day. The newspaper had run photographs from his first expedition into English Station in March.

The trip into the station was motivated in part by a desire to expose its innards to the general public and in part by his curiosity. “I wanted to see what it looks like,” Randall said.

“This place is a big part of our historical narrative and we deserve the right to see what it looks like.”

A few days after he posted the pictures, he received an email from Lori Saliby, a supervising environmental analyst at DEEP. Saliby works with the DEEP’s storage tank and PCB enforcement unit.

“Well, shit, I must be in trouble now,” Randall remembered thinking.

Luckily for Randall, he wasn’t in trouble, at least not with the government. He was told that his health, however, might be in danger. Sailby said that when they spoke over the phone about his visit, she told him that he had potentially contaminated himself and his companions, and that he may have transferred contamination off the site. Randall said she seemed concerned about his safety.

Randall was not as concerned. “I guess that’s a risk I took,” he said. “Hopefully nothing happens.” The owners, however, don’t share his nonchalance.

“What he did was foolish, what he did was dangerous,” Uri Kaufman, real estate developer and consultant to the owners, said. “It was dangerous to him, [and] it was dangerous to others.”

Kaufman told me that the owners filed a criminal complaint against Randall for trespassing on the property. Randall said that he was unaware of any such action.

English Station’s complicated history of ownership

December 2012

and contamination includes battles between owners and local environmental organizations, cleanup attempts that have spiraled into stagnation, and an overall lack of access to basic knowledge of the situation.

Local residents are unable to navigate the bureaucratic mess, leaving them unaware of risks presented to public health and the local environment, especially as scavengers distribute contaminated materials from the site. The site’s potential hazards loom, but little is being done.

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urrently, English Station is off limits to its owners and their contractors because of the DEEP’s cease and desist order, issued in February. The DEEP is currently waiting for John Insall, who works with Stantec, a professional consulting service, to draw up a remedial action plan, Kaufman said. Kaufman said that the owners eventually want to redevelop the building, but declined to give specific information.

Most recently, English Station has been in the news because 24-year-old New Haven resident Sammy Gonzalez was arrested after being electrocuted when he cut through a power line at a UI substation at English Station. Even though English Station is no longer producing electricity, there is still an operational substation on the property. Roughly three thousand residents of East Rock were without power for three hours on November 29, and Gonzalez faces many criminal charges.

Dave Hartman, public information officer of the New Haven police department (NHPD), said that there is an ongoing investigation and that a motive has not been identified. According to an NHPD press release, Gonzalez “faces several criminal charges including burglary, criminal attempt to commit larceny and breach of peace in the first degree for the service interruption.”

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Photo courtesy of Chris Randall

Hartman said that Gonzalez is in critical condition, and is being treated for burns from electrocution. He said that, given the difficulty of accessing burn victims, it would be a while before they can establish a motive.

The interview process has not yet begun.

However, Hartman speculated about what Gonzalez’s intentions might have been. He said that it might have been one of three things: “stupidity at the grandest level, an attempt at sabotage…[or] the theft of copper.”

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n the nineties, while working as a freelance photographer for UI, Harold Shapiro photographed English Station when one of the turbines was being dismantled for cleaning. Shapiro is the head of the photo department at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street, a community art school in New Haven. An associate fellow in Jonathan Edwards College, Shapiro has worked as a full-time photographer since 1981, and started doing freelance work for UI in 1989. Shapiro photographed for internal publications and captured some images of the interior of the power plant. At the time, UI owned English Station, which it built in the late 1920s.

Ever since he was a child, Shapiro loved lighting and electricity. He was naturally attracted to power plants, which produced both.

“While I was taking pictures of that I was able to explore the cavernous beauty of the space,” Shapiro said. He was fascinated by the “accidental beauty” of the pipes and metal structures. “I also play woodwind

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instruments,” Shapiro said, “and the beautiful shape of the saxophone and flute…are reminiscent a little bit to me in the power plant.”

Shapiro’s photographs, in contrast to Randall’s, are mostly sharp and clean. They depict an English Station that is an object of industrial strength and power, not of decay. The plant was about to go offline.

In 1992, UI stopped power production at English Station and mothballed the plant, shutting it down in a manner that would make it easy to restart in the future.

It is unclear why UI shut down the power plant—local activists said that it was because the plant was inefficient, and UI declined to comment for this story.

UI transferred English Station in 2000, with about $4 million for remediation, to Quinnipiac Energy, LLC (QE). QE acquired English Station with the intention of opening it as a peaking plant, which meant that it would only generate power during times of peak demand like the summer months when air conditioning use was especially high.

The New Haven Environmental Justice Network (EJN) was formed in response to QE’s application, said Mark Mitchell, founder of the EJN. The EJN took issue with QE’s plan, since it would provide power to Fairfield County, which is in the 94th percentile of median household income according to recent census data, at the expense of polluting the low-income neighborhood of Fair Haven.

It would have been especially harmful for residents living in nearby public housing facilities, such as Farnam Courts, which is less than half a mile west of English

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Station. “They’re not allowed to have air conditioning in their units,” Mitchell said. “So they have to open the windows and get more of the pollution so that people in those suburbs can have air conditioning and not have to breathe the pollution.”

The DEP, an earlier form of DEEP, nearly granted the request. Perhaps it was a final review of the case, and perhaps it was fear of a lawsuit from then Attorney General of Connecticut and current US Senator for Connecticut Richard Blumenthal, who opposed the reopening of English Station. At the end of the day, in 2003, then DEP Commissioner Arthur Rocque overturned his staff ’s recommendation to grant QE the permit.

Three years later, QE sold the property to Evergreen Power, LLC and Asnat Realty, LLC. Kaufman is a consultant to both of them. Both are managed by Mehboob Shah, who lives in Hamden, according to the commercial recording division of the Secretary of State of Connecticut. Shah did not return phone calls requesting comment. According to the lawyer who represented the company, QE is now defunct.

The current owners have held the property since 2006, and, in the past six years, have made various attempts to remediate it. Most recently, they have been working with the contractor Grant Mackay Company, Inc. (GMC) to remediate the asbestos at the site. GMC started work in summer 2011, and worked up until the cease and desist order in February 2012.

Piecing together what happened between the summer of 2011 and February 2012 was difficult.

Everyone I talked to gave me a slightly different story, and I felt like the arbiter of an ongoing dispute, one in which it was impossible to differentiate fact from fiction or appearance from reality.

Domingo Medina, a 12-year resident of East Rock and immigrant from Venezuela, has frequently photographed English Station. He writes grants for and works with an indigenous group in Venezuela, and also photographs non-professionally. He took a particular photograph I saw, taken in February 2011 on a foggy morning. In the foreground, wooden docks float in focus on the gently rippling water. Power lines run from the upper-left corner of the photograph into the center, where they fade into a mass of fog, through which English Station’s stacks are barely visible.

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hen Joe McAllister got the news that the DEEP had issued a cease and desist order for Grant Mackay Company’s project at English Station, he traveled to Connecticut immediately. McAllister has

December 2012

been working for GMC for four years, and took his current position as general counsel in the summer of 2012. He describes himself as “the emergency guy.”

The cease and desist order “was a complete shock,” McAllister said. To this day, he continued, nobody from the DEEP has explained why the order was issued.

When I relayed this to Saliby, she responded, “Well, that’s a complete shock to me.” She said that she met with McAllister and engaged in many phone calls after the issuance of the order.

McAllister and Kaufman agree that GMC was hired and began its work in the summer of 2011. The original contract was for GMC to perform a demolition and to abate the asbestos. They would “make it a level, flat island, like there hadn’t been a building sitting there,” McAllister said.

Kaufman later requested a change to the contract.

Both hold the change came before the cease and desist order was issued by DEEP on February 8, 2012.

Kaufman sought to modify the contract and add an option for Asnat and Evergreen to decide if they wanted to change the work plan from a full demolition to an interior demolition. An interior demolition would entail removing non-structural metal, but would keep the building standing. In order for the owners to act on this option, they would need to pay GMC an extra $850,000 in cash. Barring the exercise of this option, GMC would proceed with the original plan and demolish the building.

Kaufman said that the application for the demolition permit was filed so that the owners would have the option to knock down the building if they wanted to. He said that, at the time the owners filed the application, they had not made up their mind about the fate of the building. It would be months before GMC finished the asbestos abatement and would be ready to commence demolition, if the owners desired it. But they were nowhere close to carrying out the action.

“It would be a shame if the cease and desist order were issued based upon a mistaken assumption that the building was slated for demolition,” Kaufman continued.

Kaufman said that the decision to demolish either the interior or exterior of the building could have gone either way, but that it was dependent on the city approving the demolition permit. President of the New Haven Urban Design League, Anstress Farwell, said that since English Station is listed in the local historic resource inventory, the submission of the demolition permit triggered a ninety-day delay of demolition ordinance process. If a demolition permit is filed for any building listed in the local historic resource inventory, the state register of historic places, or the national

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register of historic places, ninety days must pass before the demolition permit may be granted.

“The whole purpose is not simply to delay someone for ninety days, but to create a period of time when you can hopefully and reasonably seek out alternatives to demolition,” Farwell said.

The filing of the demolition order set off a chain reaction. Over the next three months, Farwell gathered her forces, contacting partner organizations like the EJN and the New Haven Preservation Trust. They contacted city officials and helped coordinate the appointment of Robert Smuts ‘01, chief administrative officer in New Haven, as the point person for the English Station at the city level so that someone could coordinate the response across the relevant departments.

The goal? “Get the site cleaned up and preserve the building,” Farwell said.

The City of New Haven never approved any demolition permits for English Station, said Andrew Rizzo, a building official with the City of New Haven.

It is likely that this chain reaction made it all the way up to the DEEP. Saliby said that GMC’s demolition application triggered the order, and that DEEP received documents submitted by representatives of the property to the City of New Haven that described the methods of demolition. Saliby didn’t know how these documents came to the DEEP, but she did know one thing – they specified that the demolition would be an implosion.

“If this site was not cleaned up and you implode the building, then all the contaminated debris, just like in the films at 9/11 with the dust cloud coming down the street…is going to fly all over the neighborhood and the river,” Saliby explained.

McAllister argued that GMC had not decided on an implosion, calling Saliby’s fear a “red herring.”

Furthermore, the application for the permit to demolish, filed in Rizzo’s office, did not make any mention of methods for demolition.

“The cease and desist order is a solution looking for a problem,” McAllister said.

A hearing pertaining to the cease and desist order was held by DEEP on October 1 at which Attorney Alan Kosloff, counsel for the owners, did not contest the order. Because the owners were unable to provide GMC with access to the property, the contract is terminated, as far as GMC is concerned, said McAllister. However, GMC is continuing to be involved in the situation only to the extent necessary to retrieve its equipment from the property. The company continues to pay $20,000 a month in rental fees for equipment that is sitting on the site. McAllister estimated that the company has lost over

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$3 million since July 2011.

Kaufman said that the owners have filed a lawsuit this November against GMC, believing the company to be in default of the contract.

“They have a responsibility,” Kaufman said. “They don’t have the right to walk away from this.”

Insall is working on a remediation plan to submit to the DEEP. Kaufman said that the goal of the plan that Insall is working on is to clean up the PCBs in the soil, and also to get permission for the owners to return to the site to finish the asbestos abatement.

McAllister made it clear that GMC would not be returning to the site, regardless of the owners’ plan.

“Grant Mackay will never do work on that site again,” McAllister said. “Or for that owner. Or in the state of Connecticut. All three.”

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n a Monday afternoon last month, I was walking with the area with Randall, the photographer. At around 2:30 p.m., I turned and saw two men close the trunk of a car that was parked at the gate in front of English Station. Lines of barbed wire ran above metal sheets a few feet taller than myself, and signs on the sheets warded off trespassers. In a small public gravel lot between the site’s gate and Grand Avenue, two men jumped into a Lexus SUV, and the driver started pulling into the road.

I ran and tried to flag the car down. The passenger opened the window, but when I began to introduce myself, rolled the window up as the car sped away.

Randall said that he recognized one of the men.

When Randall had been inside English Station, Randall had seen one of the men scavenging five pounds of copper. At the time, he told Randall it was “so he could eat.”

With the cease and desist order, there is limited security at the site, leading to increased scavenging of raw materials. Some of the scavenging is legitimate, conducted under the approval of the owners, while some of it is not.

Brendan Regan has been the owner of Regan Metals, a scrap metal company less than a mile away from English Station, for the past thirty years. The 125year old company was hired by QE to take scrap out of the site between 2003 and 2005. Regan described the situation at English Station at the time as “weird” and “bizarre.”

Many people claimed that they owned the property, Regan said. QE would grant his company permission to scrap at the site, and then other people would arrive, claim they were the owners, and tell Regan Metals

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Photo courtesy of Harold Shapiro

Above: Harold Shapiro photographed English Station in 1990, when he worked as a freelance photographer for United Illuminating; previous: Chris Randall photographed the inside of English Station, potentially exposing himself to a variety of dangerous and highly toxic chemicals. that they were not allowed to collect scrap metal. One time, some people who claimed they were the owners attempted to take some of the generators out of the plant. “[They were] going to take the big giant generators in there and ship them off to Africa,” Regan said. His reaction to the situation: “Ok, let’s just get the hell out of here.”

While Regan’s company was working to collect scrap metal at the site, they would often see or hear evidence of scavengers. Kicked down doors lay flat on

December 2012

the floor and windows and locks were broken. Other times, they would hear foreign noises while doing their work; noises came from other sections of the building and gave away the presence of people who were not supposed to be there.

“People would break into that building every single week,” Regan said. “They’re still breaking in there today.”

On the afternoon I visited, the men I saw might have been scavenging, but neither Randall nor I could see. A trespasser was arrested in October. While these

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Photo courtesy of Domingo Medina

two incidences might not have involved stealing scrap theft, those who do scavenge play an important role at the English Station. Not only are they trespassing on the site, stealing scrap metal and financially damaging the owners, but they also may be harming themselves through exposure to asbestos and PCBs, and spreading PCB contamination in the community.

Saliby said exposure to PCBs is associated with reproductive disorders, infertility, small head circumference in newborns, neurological problems such as ADHD, and cancer, specifically tumors of the thyroid, liver, and kidneys. It is unclear how much exposure the surrounding neighborhoods experience. The PCBs at the English Station won’t go anywhere unless they are moved by a disturbance. Trespassing, she explained, therefore creates a problem for local residents.

She added, “It is possible for contamination from the site to migrate to nearby surface water as well as groundwater.”

McAllister told me that asbestos-related dangers to those who enter the plant have been compounded by the scavenging activity. When people remove metal from English Station, they might also rip into the insulation, which releases asbestos, he said, freeing it into the air where it can be breathed.

Even before GMC came on the scene, scavengers caused asbestos problems. Regan said that, although the boiler house, which was filled with asbestos, was locked, people would often break into it, and his company

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would have go in to secure the room. “It looked like a winter wonderland. It was freaky, man. The stuff was just hanging from the ceiling.”

Kosloff said that his clients are working with DEEP to develop a site security plan, which is in progress.

Saliby detailed some of the security measures currently in place. They include a locked gate, barbed wire, razor wire, large warning sings about PCBs, and a surveillance camera. These are not associated with the plan that Kosloff mentioned.

In addition to harming themselves and possibly their community, scavengers are taking income from whoever cleans up this site. Remediation of sites like English Station is paid for in part by selling some of the material on the site for scrap. Scavengers stealing metal make it less financially viable for a contractor to clean up the site, since they reduce the amount of metal available to sell for scrap and cover the cost of remediation. McAllister is also worried that GMC’s tools and equipment, which it has not been able to access since the cease and desist order was served in February, may be—or have already been—vandalized or stolen. The contamination poses a danger for many parties involved, but it seems only a major act of intervention can completely solve it.

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nglish Station is one of more than 284 brownfield sites in Connecticut, according to DEEP as of October 2011. A brownfield, according to the website of the US Department of Housing and Urban

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Development, is “an abandoned, idled, or underused property where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by the presence or potential presence of contamination.”

The Government Accountability Office estimates that as many as 425,000 brownfields exist in the US. Redeveloping brownfields can provide economic benefits. According to the website of the EPA, brownfield redevelopment has created over 5,500 jobs in the 2012 fiscal year alone. To that extent, New Haven sees English Station as an economic opportunity.

New Haven has partnered with a local economic development organization to facilitate economic growth along the Mill River. The city may be interested in including English Station in specific plans in the future, said Tony Bialecki, deputy economic development director for the City of New Haven.

However, because of the current environmental issues, the city has not been able to develop a strategy for addressing it.

Preserving the building as a historic site might also be economically beneficial.

John Herzan, preservation services officer for the New Haven Preservation Trust, said that he hopes English Station can be placed on the national register of historic places. “We hope that this designation would provide economic incentives for reusing the building rather than demolishing it,” he said.

Residents would also like to see English Station brought back to life. Aaron Goode, who is on the steering committee of the EJN, said that English Station “fell on hard times, like the rest of New Haven. I sincerely hope that it can also be part of New Haven’s renaissance.”

But he qualified that statement, adding that this is possible “if we do the right kind of intervention.”

Randall is lucky that it only took him minutes to get out; it has taken me on the order of a hundred hours (and nearly as many phone calls), and I still haven’t found my way out. Some of the other actors haven’t been able to get out for years and years. The current owners have held the property the six years and counting, and residents have been saddled with the toxic site for much longer.

The toxicity of the site comes not only from its physical contaminants. The property is also contaminated with rumors that have been accepted as truth, a history of miscommunication, and a general lack of accurate information. Confusion amongst the official actors – the local, city, state, and private entities – trickles down, leaving the public puzzled and therefore frustrated. The complicated interplay between actors leaves everyone with a complete and accurate picture of the situation.

With his DSLR camera, Randall captured several different exposures of the same scene using slightly different settings. He then layered the photos on top of each other using a digital image editing program, with a process called high dynamic range imaging.

“You’re basically able to emphasize or deemphasize certain components or features of those exposures in the final image,” Randall said.

“I guess it’s a philosophical thing whether or not that’s an actual representation of reality or not,” Randall said. “To me, it is. To me, the process adds something that wasn’t there. To me, it almost makes it look more real.”

Randall’s photographs depict English Station as a dilapidated industrial graveyard and Shapiro’s photographs show a once clean building. Just as it is hard to believe that they were photographing the same building, different people tell me stories that, while not necessarily opposing, appear to contradict each other.

Randall’s photographs present an eerie, unsettling view of reality. But, as McAllister and Regan described, English Station was not what it first appeared to them to be.

Other times, they would hear foreign noises while doing their work; noises that gave away the presence of people who were not supposed to be there.

T

he first time Randall entered English Station, he wanted to get onto the roof. He went up with a friend, and took some sunset pictures.

As it got dark, Randall decided that it was time to come down. But he couldn’t find the way out.

“There’s really no logical sequence to get from one floor to another,” Randall said, speaking about one particular section of the building. “I was using my flash as a strobe to see. It took us forty-five minutes but we found our way out.”

December 2012

TNJ Ike Swetlitz is a sophomore in Silliman College.

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Photos by Benjamin Mueller

What Doesn’t Love A Wall

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The New Journal

By Benjamin Mueller

A fence between Hamden and New Haven traps the city’s poor, exposing 21stcentury prejudice.

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ale-barked branches dip over the fence between Hamden and New Haven like old arms. Separating Hamden, a working-class suburb, from three public housing projects in the neighboring city of New Haven, there is a 12-foot tall fence. Five-inch long silvery, bolted strips link sections of the fence. Its thick metal grating fractures views of neighbors’ homes ten paces away. Added-on pieces of fence drop into vacant spaces among tree roots, screening even squirrel-sized holes. The projects are walled off on three sides. Across the street from the fence in Hamden, a racially mixed neighborhood where the median income is $71,358, a green Jaguar rests in the driveway of a boxy, colonial home next to two decorative Christmas deer. In the New Haven projects, where average income is $12,989 and almost all residents are black, low-slung apartments decay between patches of broken pavement.

Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson calls the fence a relic from the past, a barrier that allows Hamden residents to ignore the aspirations of people in the projects. “It’s about preserving a mythology,” Jackson told me. “The myth is that the people living on the New Haven side will be fundamentally different from people on the Hamden side.”

Jackson, a tall, slender man of 40 and Hamden’s first black mayor, can be accommodating, speaking in cool, vetted sentences designed to repel searching questions. But he’s also a performer conscious of his iconic status, relishing occasions to enlarge his small office. “It is not enough to be right; it is our duty to be righteous,” he told a Hamden crowd on January 15, 2010 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Jackson declared that 1960s-era segregation was not long past. Its villains, he said, practiced a “hate based on whispers.” He hoped his sons would grow up in a nation renewed, defined by the promise of

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an “American dream, unrestrained.”

But that hate seems to linger – perhaps in few places more visibly than in the town Jackson now leads. Hamden’s fence prohibits access to public roads on three sides of the projects. Over 3,500 feet long, it assures that the one road into the projects is also the only way out.

Residents hoping to buy groceries at a Hamden shopping center three miles away have to travel into New Haven to get around the fence, a 7.7-mile trip that takes two buses and up to two hours to complete. In the case of a flood or fire, emergency vehicles have to travel around the fence to help residents in the projects. For Jackson, the fence proclaims a prejudice against the poor that middle-class neighborhoods across America already whisper.

Hamden built the first version of the fence in 1966, a fourfoot tall chain link fence intended to keep crime out of an aspiring middle-class neighborhood.

White, working-class families were fleeing the city projects, leaving behind densely concentrated poverty. Drug activity and violence rose, sometimes spilling into Hamden. Crime was so bad that residents say the New Haven Fire Department refused to enter the West Rock projects without a police escort.

By 2005, those dangers had disappeared. The New Haven Housing Authority had cleared the Brookside and Rockview projects in preparation for remodeling, leaving only the elderly and disabled residents of Ribicoff in the West Rock area. Crime dropped dramatically in the empty communities as new, mixed-income housing units rose. But that same year, almost four decades after it first built a fence, Hamden responded to holes in it by erecting a second, parallel fence, adding a sturdier barrier around the city projects’ three edges that rises in places to 16 feet.

This fence is now the focus of a fight over its removal that may be more complicated than anyone is willing to admit, confounding simple race and class divides. The fence turns neighbors into opponents and stereotypes into reality, chaining both communities to a past they want to escape. For Mayor Jackson and others, the question is whether the myth that one town’s success requires the other’s demise will endure in 3,500 feet of metal.

ackson hoped to begin dismantling that impression at an August 29 public meeting in Hamden. New Haven

Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. and representatives from the New Haven Housing Authority were on hand to present plans for the new projects. Housing Authority representatives came prepared to explain that new homeownership units and market-rate rental homes would diversify the projects and decrease crime. They hoped to tell Hamden residents about a pilot program offering job training and education to residents of the projects who committed to becoming self-sufficient within seven years, effectively imposing term limits on subsidized living. New Haven officials brought a traffic study showing that removing the fence would not add significant clutter to any new intersections. Jackson hoped his constituents would listen to the evidence and talk like neighbors.

But instead of civility, Jackson was met with rage. Any pretense of cordiality or common concern disintegrated. Under the fluorescent lights of the Keefe Community Center gymnasium, where three hundred people were packed into a space meant for one hundred, Hamden residents slung insults at New Haven. Stocky men lined up two deep along the walls and young couples craned their necks in the doorway as residents whispered talking points about crime and traffic into each other’s ears. An angry, unbridled Jackson emerged.

Jackson was still introducing the proposal to tear down the fence when one man called out, “It’s not going to happen!” The crowd’s whoops drowned his pleas for civility. “We’re here to talk. We’re here to talk. We’re not here to yell, alright?” he shouted, eagerly at first, then in desperate whines.

Anger and fear trampled conversation. Hamden residents described the robberies and traffic overflow they said would result from opening the fence.

“Keep Hamden in Hamden and keep New Haven in New Haven!”

“That’s their choice to live by a fence.”

“You put a street through, you’re jeopardizing every single person in this entire room’s life.”

Mayor DeStefano, who is white, told me that “nowhere in history” have good fences made good neighbors. At the meeting, hoping to mend the developing rift between Hamden and New Haven, he rose to boos, spoke through insulting chatter, and ended by tabling his request for the fence to be torn down in favor of a year of dialogue between residents from both communities.

Mike sleeps with a Browning high-powered 9 millimeter gun under his bed. Marilyn sleeps with a Smith and Wesson 357 Magnum.

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Near the end of the evening, Jackson was asked what he thought of the fence. For three years, since his election in 2009, Jackson had defended the fence.

“Particularly as an iconic mayor in some ways, it was very important to me to listen more than I talked,” he explained, referring to his status as Hamden’s youngest and first black mayor. But now Jackson, ineffectual and exposed, let himself speak. “I don’t like the fence, but I understand it,” he said to more boos. He meant he understood people’s old fears of crime from the projects, but denied that walls were the answer. One woman stood screaming rejoinders at him from a distance of a few feet until police nudged her away.

More than the meeting’s result, I puzzled over the mood in the room that night. Residents of Hamden, black and white both, hurled invectives against New Haven residents charged with a dangerous sort of animosity.

The fence was more than a bulwark against crime and traffic. Something about those people in the projects needed to be contained. It wasn’t race; the Hamden crowd was at least half black. It wasn’t simple geography or class, either; the crowd seemed to fear more than that in its neighbors. Something was amiss. “It did not feel like a safe meeting,” the Hamden town planner, Leslie Creane, told me. The gym was choked with a tension that seemed primed to explode.

It nearly did when Mike Hutsell, who lives near the fence in Hamden, stood to ask his question. He charged Jackson with forgetting constituents’ problems with crime. “How many times have you had your house broken into?” Hutsell demanded.

Jackson began to answer, but Hutsell interrupted, saying he wasn’t finished, and soon Jackson was pointing his left index finger at Hutsell and moving towards him, his eyes splayed wide and his shoulders hunched in tension as if restraining his body. “You ask the question, I answer,” Jackson yelled, angry that Hutsell spoke over him. Then again, without restraint, “YOU ASK THE QUESTION, I ANSWER.” Two people grabbed hold of Jackson’s shoulders and pushed him into the hallway.

The demons Jackson once described on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day had come out to play in the town he now ran and they chased him from the gym.

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few weeks after the meeting, as Jackson sat behind his desk on the third floor of Hamden’s Government Center, I asked him what made him lose his cool.

“I just, I didn’t like the tone,” he said before trailing off. “Let me see if I can find something real quick.”

Jackson turned to his computer monitor. I guessed he was searching for a nasty constituent email or a December 2012

recording of the meeting. “Sometimes being a student of this stuff makes it a lot more challenging than it probably needs to be,” he mumbled.

“Alright, this is a good one,” he said finally. Jackson turned his computer monitor around. On the screen was a photo in which two thickly clad firefighters turn their hoses on a black woman crouching against a lamppost in the 1960s. “In 2012 we can clearly look at that picture and say who’s right and who’s wrong. Clearly.” He said he felt for the firefighter who rested his head on his pillow every night knowing he was the bad guy. “Being on the wrong side of history is something that I find to be just the worst possible way to look back at the way I have done my job. I prefer to be ahead of the curve of history.” The fence, a relic from a time when certain people couldn’t choose where they ate or made their homes, was well behind that curve. Bringing the fence down, he said, was the right thing to do—or would one day be seen that way. “In fifty years, one hundred years, somebody’s going to think this is right.”

Then who were the people from Hamden standing against Jackson, the people whose grudge against the projects resisted the tide of history and overwhelmed politicians? Jackson explained that they are working class and many are black. Some grew up in the projects. They go to church with people from New Haven. Jackson said the piles of media reports he’d seen painting his constituents as out-of-touch elitists had gotten it wrong in a reach for the obvious story.

People in Hamden weren’t quite keeping out a social class or set of values, it seemed. They were shutting out something harder to define, a mentality feared and unknown, a lifestyle of limited possibilities and government handouts not so distant from their working-class suburb.

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t took me only a few minutes in the home of Mike Hutsell, the same man who clashed with Jackson at the meeting, to realize that those fighting to maintain the fence aren’t exaggerating their fears. Hutsell lives with his wife Marilyn on Woodin Street in Hamden. They’re a black, working-class couple, and they keep a baseball bat by every door of their home. They said they’ve had two cars stolen and their house broken into once, incidents they blame on New Haven criminals who they say crossed into Hamden before the second fence was raised in 2005. Mike sleeps with a Browning high-powered 9 millimeter gun under his bed. Marilyn sleeps with a Smith and Wesson 357 Magnum. Before he goes to sleep Hutsell enables five locking devices on his Dodge minivan. “That’s because the government can’t or won’t protect us,” he said. “That fence is our security.”

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Benjamin Mueller

Some Hamden residents worry that tearing down the fence will lead to crime by increasing contact with residents of the Brookside projects.

Marilyn led me to a dining room attached to the side of her home draped in red and gold cloth. A wreath hung on the wall and the table was set permanently for eight, plastic leaves scattered among gold plates and thick candles. Sheets of wood made up the walls. It looked like a life-sized construction project, and I wondered why Marilyn had chosen this setting. Suddenly she blurted its purpose. “We built this room by hand.” The dining room was a monument to the value she most wanted to impress on me: the Hutsells were self-made folks.

Marilyn said the difference between people in Hamden and the people in New Haven’s projects is work ethic. When Marilyn had a heart attack at age sixty, she ignored doctors’ advice and returned to her job at a law firm. Mike has two bad knees and a bad back but drives 30

an oil delivery truck during the week and works at a security firm on weekends. “This is what you achieve by pulling your own self up. We’re not for entitlements,” Marilyn declared. She said people who claim that there are no jobs available, even in the projects, aren’t trying.

“All you have to do is just look for it.”

Marilyn said she feels proud driving down Woodin Street. “They are the homes of working class people.”

They don’t have junk in the yard and if they do, it’s about to be cleaned.

The Hutsells said they supported the fence because they wanted to rest without worrying their things would be stolen. But their anxieties weren’t all so basic.

“I don’t want to see the thugs, as my husband said, with the pants hanging down and the stuff that comes out of their mouths,” Marilyn explained. When I asked her The New Journal

Brianne Bowen

The newly constructed projects, now called the Brookside Estates.

to describe the connection between home invasions and people in the projects, she hesitated, her nervous eyes searching the ceiling. She stammered: “Someone that is of another culture or another, I don’t know how to say this respectfully – someone being thuggish – has this idea, ‘Oh, if I rob this person I can make money.’ That’s crazy.”

When I asked her what troubled her about the projects, Marilyn didn’t seem most concerned about physical crime. Instead, she complained about “people in grocery stores with food stamps and you know they don’t need them.” She said people invented hardships to hoard handouts and turned down jobs to qualify for free oil. She seemed almost to be replaying the critique of “welfare queens” that Ronald Reagan delivered in his 1976 campaign, poor blacks cheating the middle class

December 2012

of their wealth. Working-class Marilyn was a rung above those black people.

Marilyn’s fear of thugs and food stamps wasn’t far from a caricature of anti-poor prejudice, but it also wasn’t far from human. Like many middle-class Americans, the Hutsells say their work doesn’t guarantee them the comfort it once did. For the first time since the 1920s, median family income has dropped substantially over a decade. Family income last year was eight percent lower than it had been in 2000, compared to what is usually a thirty percent rise during eleven-year periods. The Hutsells are worried with reason, delaying retirement while they watch tax dollars go to the poor.

But the Hutsells’ argument was still aggressive and apocryphal. In their minds, food stamps weren’t a consequence of economic decline. They became the cause

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The Hutsells at their home in Hamden.

of that decline. The middle class wasn’t struggling because globalization and automation were raising demand for skills and pushing down pay. Social programs for the poor were driving middle-class hardship.

The Hutsells saw poor people as perpetrators in this system. They weren’t poor by circumstance, but because of insufficient work ethic, a condemnation almost as permanent as one based on race or ethnicity. The kind of person who chose to be poor deserve to be fenced in. As Marilyn said, “If you don’t want to get a job and

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you want to live in low-income housing, that’s on you.”

But people like the Hutsells were intensifying New Haven residents’ dependency, stranding them on a walled-in peninsula far from jobs and public services. I asked Marilyn how she’d respond to people in the projects who felt penned in. “If that fence makes you feel insecure, then you come and live where middle class America lives. On the other side of that fence. And you take on some of the responsibilities that middle class America has taken on and cherishes.”

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Jackson isn’t unaware of the Hutsells’ fears. Back in his office, he told me the difference between Hamden and New Haven is stark. Hamden residents have spent years getting up for work every morning. Life in the projects, where jobs come and go and apathy and anger reign, is hard to imagine. But Jackson said Hamden had a choice.

“Do you establish public policy out of fear or out of hope?”

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n the newly redesigned Brookside projects in New Haven, brightly colored homes are still being built.

Sidewalks, trees, and spaces between homes have been planned to make the projects safer and friendlier. One hundred subsidized housing units are already occupied, along with two home-ownership units. Omar Ursini, 41, a new resident, was hopeful about the changed community but worried the fence would obstruct growth. “It’s a cage,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

In practical terms, the fence terrifies Leslie Creane, Hamden’s town planner. She worries Brookside will have more difficulty filling its middle-income units and home-ownership units as long as the fence stands, keeping poverty concentrated and raising risks of crime.

Connected streets are also safer streets. In the case of an accident or tornado, emergency vehicles from Hamden would reach the projects faster without a fence.

The New Haven Housing Authority built the West Rock projects in the 50s after more desirable public housing plots were exhausted. In fact, the land on which the projects were built was once Hamden property. On maps, it looks as if someone cut into Hamden’s otherwise smooth border with a scalpel and heaped the dirty plot into New Haven. The land had been a pig farm before the projects were built, undesirable from the start. “New Haven clearly found the most remote corner to put lots of poor people,” Creane said.

By 1992, unemployment was 88 percent in Rockview and 76 percent in Brookside. Jesse Phillips, whose aunt lived in the old Brookside, told me as a kid he found bodies lying in the road. Ursini, the Brookside resident, said residents in the old Rockview rolled dumpsters filled with burning trash into the street so police couldn’t get inside.

Bus routes used to stop passing through the proj-

ects at 5 p.m. Even now, Creane asked, do residents want to risk getting home late from work and walking from the bus stop to their homes down a haunting stretch of dead end road? “It’s a perfectly plausible survival skill.

This has nothing to do with not wanting to work. This has to do with infrastructure and public policy deliberately conspiring against you.”

In Westville Manor, a public housing project farther from the fence in West Rock, drug deals still happen on the purple playground slide. Candace Jones, who helps run a youth organization there called Solar Youth, has had her offices broken into three times this year. When a New Haven police officer arrived to respond to one break-in, he told Jones, “I don’t even know why you help these people. Don’t you know who you’re working with?” She said buses are often late and the drivers don’t seem to care. After all, people in the projects have nowhere to be.

Jones recounted a conversation with an eleven-yearold student who had been excited to join the local drill team, but decided not to try out. The girl’s reason? “My mom has applied to so many jobs and she doesn’t get any. I’m not going to get it either.” Jones said she wished it was as simple as ‘just get up and get a job,’ as the Hutsells demand. But hopelessness is infectious, and dreams shrivel quickly. She said children in the projects don’t have the “drive that I can get out there and be somebody” because they are confronted with barriers, not opportunities.

“In the civil rights era, you didn’t allow folks to figure out on their own how not to be racist.”

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rom the back doors of their homes on Thorpe Drive in Hamden, residents can walk six steps and touch the fence. Harvey Massey, 73, and his wife Miriam, 72, white residents of Thorpe, opened the first door I knocked on. They spoke to me through their screen door, but knew what I wanted. “I’ve been broken into four times and robbed twice,” Harvey said immediately, as if reading a script all of Hamden knew. He said the crimes took place in the seventies.

“It’s not like we’re all white, but we’ve all worked for what we have,” he said when I asked what distinguished people in Hamden from people in the projects. “We deserve security, we deserve the comfort of being in our homes without someone breaking in.” Harvey told me he grew up in the Brookside projects and didn’t want to let that way of life into Hamden.

I was confronted with the same attitude that appeared in the Hutsells’ dining room, but this time I didn’t 33

have to go searching for its troubling undercurrents.

“I felt like I was raped,” Miriam blurted, unprompted, referring to the break-ins. “I felt absolutely violated.”

Her words were charged with a disgust that signaled something uglier than the considerable distress a robbery might provoke. Robbery became rape, a personal violation, perpetrated not just by any criminal but by an Other whom she hated.

“It’s a pig pen,” Miriam said later of Ribicoff, unprompted again, seeming repulsed. “It’s dirty.” But Ribicoff wasn’t a pig pen until it was fenced in. And it didn’t become “dirty,” a stain on the clean suburbs, until neighbors like Miriam called it a pig pen. The fence helped people in Hamden weaponize their words, turning the projects into a pen and making the projects’ residents dirty.

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arnell Goldson, former alderman for New Haven’s West Rock neighborhood, is one of the few public officials who has never equivocated on the fence. “In the civil rights era you didn’t allow folks to figure out on their own how not to be racist,” he said, explaining that he hopes someone challenges the fence in court. “You forced the issue.”

Sitting at a Popeye’s chicken restaurant, Goldson said the fence is a reminder that racism still fouls American cities. After Hurricane Katrina, a group trying to evacuate New Orleans was stopped on a bridge by police officers from neighboring Gretna, Louisiana. Officers fired warning shots at the group and told them they wanted “no Superdomes” in Gretna, “code,” one evacuee wrote in a later account, “for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River.” The Gretna police chief told the San Francisco Chronicle that his officers had been ordered to seal off the suburban city.

Goldson explained: “If you can put a fence to stop people from looking for a job, go shopping, go visit their aunt who lives in Hamden, what’s to stop you from putting up a fence across a bridge when there’s a disaster in the town next door and there are folks that you don’t want to see in your town?”

In a 2005, a group of black public housing residents from Baltimore sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging racial segregation and discrimination in the city’s public housing system. One of the offenses they charged was the construction of a

fence separating the public housing development from a predominantly white community nearby. The judge ruled that the government did not violate the Equal Protection rights of the black residents because the fence was motivated by concerns about crime rather than race.

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oldson’s counterpart in Hamden, its strident citizens’ most loyal supporter of the fence in city council, is Mike Colaiacovo. Colaiacovo passed out nine hundred and fifty flyers telling residents about Hamden’s August 29 meeting. Residents skeptical of all levels of government reserved only thanks for Colaiacovo. He was a responsible man serving a responsible citizenry.

Colaiacovo ignored my twice-daily calls to his home and cell phone for two weeks. I left messages telling him his constituents trusted him. Would he please answer a few questions?

Finally, I drove to Colaiacovo’s home and knocked on his door. It was 5 p.m. on a Friday. The blinds were drawn and the house looked dark. His nephew, Mark, twenty-one, answered the door, eyes droopy and shoulders slouched. Was this Mike Colaiacovo’s home? Mark pointed behind him towards the kitchen, where a short man in gray, cotton shorts and a baggy sweatshirt stuck his face out from around a corner. Colaiacovo shook his head and slipped back behind the corner. Mark told his uncle again who I was. Colaiacovo’s face reemerged, glassy eyes on a small, weathered face beneath a mop of black curls. He disappeared again into the kitchen.

I had the sense that something was wrong, but Colaiacovo slowly dragged his body forward. “Come in.” I asked him about his defense of the fence. “We’re used to Brookside neighborhood and gunshots and, you know, stuff like that, you know, and so they’re very, uh, how could I say it, scared, scared, scared of what’s gonna happen there, you know?” What about the August 29 meeting? “Crazy,” he chuckled. Mayor Jackson’s outburst? “Disappointed.”

Colaiacovo’s eyes were bloodshot and he fidgeted his fingers nervously in his lap. He asked me whether I wanted a drink. His voice slipped between registers and his eyelids drooped. Mark, more alert than his uncle, finished his sentences and reordered his words. “Do you have concerns about how the fence affects people in the projects?” I asked. Colaiacovo shrugged, his eyes search-

The fence helped people in Hamden weaponize their words, turning the projects into a pen and making the projects’ residents dirty.

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ing for focus while his eyelids shuttered again. “It is what it is,” he slurred. He was drunk, and I left.

Colaiacovo told me later that he had been celebrating his nephew’s 21st birthday. But even if he had succumbed to nothing worse than a few moments of selfindulgence, the visit was troubling. While his constituents blamed New Haven’s poor for failures of discipline they said justified the projects’ enclosure, Colaiacovo, buttressed by a status quo that gave him an advantage, enjoyed a consequence-free afternoon of excess.

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hen I met New Haven’s Mayor DeStefano in his downtown City Hall office, one of the first things he expressed was his pride that New Haven welcomed six hundred Hamden students into its schools every day as part of an inter-district program. But he said none attend Catherine Brennan School in West Rock even though it posted the largest testing gains in the district last year and is close to Hamden students’ homes.

“You know why?” DeStefano asked. “It’s got a rep.”

He pointed to a nine-foot-tall map on his wall showing the West Rock projects sticking out of New Haven like a lonely peninsula. He said the school was a proud place, “but because we allow it to be separated and isolated— particularly from Hamden which surrounds it on three sides!—it’s got a rep. It’s not based on a fact, it’s based on an ignorance.”

The fence kept Hamden from getting to know the school; its physical isolation reinforced its bad reputation. The school’s reputation, in turn, reinforced its isolation, keeping Hamden students away even as the school made gains. As long as the fence remained, homes would be harder to fill and crime more likely to rise. Suddenly the projects’ reputation becomes reality and Hamden has a reason to stay away.

DeStefano said Hamden residents don’t know about life on the other side of the fence because they don’t want to know. “They’re getting to keep their fears because they are refusing to hear anything else. It’s how we could kill each other in the name of a loving God. All over the world.”

“Look at Israel right now,” DeStefano continued.

Israel and Gaza, kept separate by a blockade, had just completed seven days of fighting in which six Israelis and 158 Palestinians were killed. “People and missiles can go over fences,” he said. “Ultimately you’ve got to solve the problem of making sure you have healthy communities.” DeStefano saw fences not as a response to crime, but fundamentally as a response to unhealthy communities. Crime doesn’t emerge out of thin air; it grows out of deeper problems like unemployment, poor infrastructure, and too few jobs and resources. DeSteDecember 2012

fano said fences only intensify animosities. “If you leave that fence up with this new community going in there, you’re sending a direct message about how I feel about you.”

DeStefano cited recent efforts by the New Haven Housing Authority to redevelop housing projects like Quinnipiac Terrace and Monterrey Place as evidence that mixed-income developments reduced crime and improved community life. Hamden’s Police Chief, Thomas Wydra, agreed, calling the fence “failed public policy,” a symbol “none of us should be proud of.” He told me the fence makes crime reduction more difficult. Dead ends attract criminals who like operating out of sight.

Police response times improve without the fence.

DeStefano said the fence reminded him of Jim Crow laws, but didn’t think people would soon see it with the same starkness. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be embarrassed by it,” he said. The fence, he seemed to recognize, was based in complicated class prejudices that were harder to interpret than their racial antecedents.

“Why do people hold onto their fears and ignorances?” DeStefano asked. He said economically insecure Hamden residents wanted to feel superior to lower-class residents of the projects. But, he continued, everyone has the same self-interest in healthy communities. Ideally, the projects would improve, the fence would fall, and Hamden would benefit from new commerce. But neither community will get there without exposing itself to injury. Hamden has to trust New Haven to build a better project. New Haven has to trust Hamden to open its borders in good faith. Both communities will have to let old wounds heal in full public view.

“It means we’re going to have to take chances on one another. How is that different from falling into a relationship with another person? You take a risk.”

From the Ribicoff projects in New Haven, Mark Grant, thirty-four, understands why people won’t take risks. He stood on a grassy hill picking leaves out of his two-year-old son Israel’s cornrows. Thick clumps of hair stuck out from his head and scars rested above both eyebrows.

“This is checkers,” Grant told me. “Everybody got a bunch of kings on the board jumping all over the place. You don’t want your king to get lost, so you go jump him way over here so I can’t take him no more. I’m gonna move mine because I’m not gonna let you take mine. So we’re sitting here with a bunch of kings moving around trying not to get jumped.”

Nobody was willing to expose himself. Each hoarded his wealth. Mike Hutsell couldn’t let down his guard until New Haven built a better project. New Haven couldn’t build a better project until Mike Hutsell let 35

down his guard.

Grant continued: “It’s detrimental because now I feel like this” – he pointed towards Hamden – “is more sacred than this. You get the children underdeveloped over here because of how strongly these people feel about them. Now they feel alienated, segregated, belittled.”

Grant wiped away the last shreds of leaf from Israel’s cornrows. “Keep everything off your head. Don’t put anything on your head, man,” he pleaded kindly.

“You’re talking about generational wealth and generational curses,” Grant said. “This right here represents a generational curse.”

I asked him what sort of curse the fence represents.

“You can be president one day,” Grant taunted sarcastically. “The kids can’t appreciate that. That’s what it represents because now you talk about your parents and grandparents saying to our parents and grandparents, ‘Your children can’t come amongst our children. You can’t ride up the street and see our holiday decorations when the snow falls.’”

I asked Grant about his neighbors, women who, like a number of other residents of the projects, told me they wanted to let the fence be. “If we care about our mothers, give them what they need. They need it down.

So we broaden them.” The fence, he suggested, needs to come down because some people in Ribicoff aren’t sure whether it should come down or not. That’s the project life that Candace Jones lamented, a life so thoroughly integrated into the oppressive ideology of its power brokers that people don’t care whether they can walk on the same streets as the privileged, catch the same buses to the same shopping malls and the same schools.

The simplest recipe for prosperity, Grant said, was to open the border. People would move freely, crime would fall, and Hamden would become a more desirable location.

Yet some mixture of hate and fear – not quite of race or class but of a lifestyle terrifying in its quiet subjugation to the nasty, inertial laws of a life of poverty – maintained the divide. In Hamden, the hate was coded in concerns over traffic and shootings. Elsewhere in America, it might take the form of a zoning regulation mandating a Spanish tile roof that adds $30,000 to construction costs. Or a minimum one acre zoning ordinance. Everywhere were erected invisible walls to hold poverty at a distance.

What, in the fall of 2012, kept this tiny, fractured community from mending its wounds? Racial integration had won in Hamden; a black mayor was elected.

Smart housing policy had won in New Haven; the projects were being rebuilt. But the fence remained. Its mon36

strous metal sliced open two communities to expose prejudices not less nasty than 1960s-era racism thriving on the weak minds of angry men, preying on the holy heads of innocent boys.

In some ways, Hamden and New Haven are locked in a battle more complex than previous generations knew. Hate has entangled itself in the homes of the black Hutsells and the white Masseys without regard for color or class. Old hatreds have been encoded in a language of crime and government handouts, language becoming more inscrutable the more it’s used. Mayor Jackson and Mayor DeStefano fight villains that are difficult to name. Walls multiply and hope loses to fear.

I

asked Mayor Jackson to visit the fence with me on a cold Thursday morning. He’d been tiring of talking about the fence, and I hoped visiting it would reawaken his resolve. I was wrong. “I’ve already used up my annual allotment of emotion on the fence,” he said when we arrived. The only memory he could stir was of the one time he’d seen someone crawl out of the projects through the fence. It wasn’t a thief or drug dealer. It had been a black woman in a business suit, made up as if heading to work, leaving through a hole in the pre-2005 fence.

As Jackson and I spoke, a woman who lived on Thorpe Drive, across from the fence in Hamden, stopped her Jeep as she drove by and leaned out an open window. “Mayor Jackson, when we had that meeting about the fence and it was a big uproar, I want to say that I really did respect your honesty.” Jackson, bundled in two jackets, was taken aback. Jackson knew the woman supported the fence, and had appeared ready for a confrontation. Instead, the woman explained that she had four kids and she had put herself through nursing school, but could still identify with people in the projects. “If I lost a month’s worth of pay check,” she said, gesturing towards New Haven, “I could easily be on that side of the fence.”

Jackson thanked the woman as she drove away, shining a bit from the praise. “For a moment – for a moment – she had faith in somebody,” he told me. “At some point, I will capitalize on that. We will capitalize on that.” In that moment, the thin line between the impulse to reach out and the impulse to lash out –between scared people trusting someone and scared people hurting someone – appeared to shift towards trust. Two communities seemed to rest in the balance as one woman reached over the fence.

TNJ Benjamin Mueller is a senior in Berkeley College and a Managing Editor of the New Journal.

The New Journal

December 2012

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verse.

Missed Connections Poetry: New Haven Edition Compiled by: Cindy Ok The Have Cave has always been a city of connection, since even before its Puritan times. People pair up here constantly—for the night, for a year, and, not infrequently, for their lives. It can happen in a freshman entryway or at Toad’s, and in Claire’s Corner Copia or on the Green. But these can also be, and often are, momentary couplings. The following poems are entries on the “missed connections” section of the New Haven Craigslist page from November, with added line breaks and titled by listing headings.

oh. wow. well then

Guy with dad at Yale Hospital I saw you in the waiting room with your dad, I believe he had an oxygen tank. He said, “I’m a regular here” to a woman talking to the both of you in a wheelchair. We made eye contact a few times, you had brown hair that went around your eyebrows.

let’s not talk of love or chains or things we can’t untie better yet, let›s not forget how much cooler it would have been had i met you at 28 and not 18.

Waiter at Miya’s Sushi To the cute waiter at Miya’s sushi I hope you see this!

(We made a lot of eye contact but I was with my friend and I didn’t want to be rude.)

or if there were only a 12-year age difference and not a twenty-plus difference.

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The New Journal

Missed you at the meeting

food vendor

Saw you at the technology meeting yesterday.

Sitting along the wall, you had a blue shirt and dark pants while I had short hair and was dressed in a tan shirt and sipped a small coffee, seated with the group on the large table. I could hardly keep myself from looking at you the whole time which was likely obvious to you. We walked out the door together but I missed the chance to speak to you even as we walked down the hall next to each other. I followed you down the stairs and as you exited the building we separated.

We appear to be partners in related organizations and I would really like to find out who you are.

10AM most weekdays. I walk by.

Most of the warm days you were outside and we said hello. Occasionally a brief conversation.

Sometimes I thought that perhaps you were waiting for me.

But now it is cold and you are working inside. Makes sense to me. I see you but I don’t get to say hello. If you would like we could meet somewhere after work.

A drink or some coffee. We could say hello.

One time you mentioned your weekend job.

Let me know what that is so I know it is you.

I can’t seem to stop thinking about you.

December 2012

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