Volume 50 - Issue 2

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

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VOL 50 / ISS 2 / OCT 2017

THE NEW JOURNAL

FROM THE GROUND UP

Domestic violence is on the rise in New Haven. Can a proposed center provide THE NEW JOUR NAL the support victims need?

editors-in-chief Eliza Fawcett Natalie Yang managing editor Victorio Cabrera executive editor Ruby Bilger senior editors Elena Saavedra Buckley Jacob Sweet Oriana Tang Victor Wang associate editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Mark Rosenberg Annie Rosenthal Robert Scaramuccia Arya Sundaram copy editors Philippe Chlenski Meghana Mysore Marina Tinone Amy Xu

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

managing design editor Julia Hedges design editors Steph Barker Hazal Ă–zgĂźr photo editor Elinor Hills web developer Philippe Chlenski

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 2017 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 50 issue 2 OCT 2017

SINCE 1967

www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover FROM THE GROUND UP Domestic violence is on the rise in New Haven. Can a proposed center provide the support victims need?

Mark Rosenberg

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feature THE PERIMETER With the opening of Yale’s new residential colleges, Dixwell sees another wave of change.

Amelia Nierenberg

standards 4

points of departure THE YALE HERALDRY — Nicole Blackwood GROWTH IN THE GREENHOUSE — Elaine Wang WHAT’S WITH THAT PAINTING? — Mariah Kreutter

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THE HOUSE ON ADELINE STREET — Laura Glesby

Yale School of Architecture students approach homelessness with high design 14 essay

ELEVEN HOURS — Dimitri Diagne

Grappling with loss in the shadow of the eclipse 23 poem

OLD LYME — Olivia Noble 34 endnote

FINDING LOVE AT YALE — Jacob Sweet

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

THE YALE HERALDRY

illustration fiona drenttel

Can a new coat of arms reflect changing times?

Nicole Blackwood

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opper College’s coat of arms, featured on a plaque above the dining hall fireplace, is hard to miss. The marine emblem, striking in its yellow and blue, seems anachronistic; the coat of arms looks too new and polished to appear fully at home against the wood paneling, stained glass, and chandeliers.

But this juxtaposition is not incidental. After Yale University decided to rename Calhoun College in honor of Grace Hopper in February 2017 and to open up two new residential colleges, Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray, it enlisted the Office of the University Printer to design new coats of arms. A little-known department, the Office is responsible for Yale’s visual identity, which, according to its website, “relies on the consistent and effective use of [Yale’s] branding touchstones.” Those touchstones include Yale’s logo, coat of arms, and typeface, all designed by an office of six but seen by millions.

School of Art graduate John Gambell, official University Printer and keeper of emblematic keys, described Yale’s visual branding as an asset that Yale entities use and return. “Every piece that comes out of Yale needs to be focused on an audience,” Gambell said, emphasizing that the graphics need to represent the culture of the university itself.

When Gambell began to design the new residential colleges’ coats of arms, his task was to both craft something new and pay homage to the old. In planning the Franklin design, Gambell initially hoped to utilize Benjamin Franklin’s family coat of arms, but found it was a “mishmash” of competing elements. “I looked at it, and it was not as good as any of the existing residential college coats of arms,” Gambell said. He began to

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draft a visual that would, somehow, reconcile the figure of Franklin as he appears in textbooks with a more modern “graphic dynamism.”

The Murray and Hopper coats of arms are similar tugs-of-war between past and present: Pauli Murray’s is inspired by elements of the Scottish Murray family coat of arms, while Hopper’s retains the colors of the former Calhoun coat of arms while adding a dolphin to represent Grace Hopper’s naval leadership. Some view the dolphin as representative of the new shields’ playfulness (“The humorous elements alone are a big breakthrough,” said Hopper Head Julia Adams). This begs the question: As Yale situates itself in a more inclusive era, how much traditionalism is necessary for a living, breathing university?

The University developed its own coat of arms long before those of the colleges, and, as one might expect of a heraldic practice fighting for its life in a digital century, the prominence of Yale’s coat of arms has diminished. The shield was derived from the Seal of Yale University and approved in the 1720s. It first appeared on Master’s Degree diplomas in 1749, when Ezra Stiles was President of the University. As a trademark, the coat of arms lost its branding pride of place in 2007, when former Yale Corporation Secretary Linda Lorimer and former president Rick Levin travelled to South and East Asia and found that Yale’s primary identifiers—the bulldog, the coat of arms—were not only unfamiliar but also THE NEW JOUR NAL

alienating to the general public.

The result was the development of Yale’s primary logo, the “Y.” “We thought very hard about what heraldry represents, and it is very Eurocentric,” Gambell said. “It was for people who were generally moneyed or had some military connection…There was a feeling that it’s probably appropriate for the general, international, broad audience, to really concentrate on our happy Y-A-L-E.” And yet heraldry at Yale still flourishes in the residential college system—that much is apparent from college t-shirts and lanyards alone. Most of the colleges’ coats of arms were developed in 1953 by Theodore “Tubby” Sizer, former Yale professor and Art Gallery director, to liven up Yale ceremonies, and were based upon the familial coat of arms of each college’s namesake.

Perhaps as a result of the new insignias’ playful and subversive elements, many view them as a connecting force between the traditional, elitist “Old Yale” and the modern, progressive “New Yale.” For instance, Pauli Murray’s coat of arms has what heraldic language calls a “counterchanged circle” to represent her “transgressive gender expression,” according to the college’s website.

Franklin Head Charles Bailyn called the emblems “a nice joining between ancient traditions of universities dating back a thousand years to our current place in the twenty-first century.” Murray Head Tina Lu echoed this sentiment, saying that a coat of arms is “an easy-on ramp to feeling like you belong to something that’s traditional” and stressed that the lighthearted use of the coat of arms—in t-shirts and temporary tattoos—links their traditional usage with a new era.

For some, the appeal lies in the coats of arms’ aesthetic ties to Old Yale and their embrace of the university’s pseudo-medieval identity. “I love how they look like they’re old, like they’ve always been in existence here,” said Franklin first-year Sylvia Kryszczuk.

But for Laura Maldonado-Rivera, a first-year in Pauli Murray, the coats of arms contradict the progress that the new colleges have made in rejecting some of Yale’s exclusive history. “I feel like the new colleges and Grace Hopper…should just embrace their new identity rather than try to even emulate the other colleges,” she said.

It’s possible that the coats of arms are meant as visual aids, a way to sustain the university as a symbolic, perhaps literal, cohesive whole, to reconcile Old Yale and New Yale and still draw some kind of distinction 5

between the two. But if a breakthrough is what was intended, Gambell’s task seems not only murky or paradoxical, but impossible—to design coats of arms that would fit neatly alongside their ancient, familial counterparts, blend into a residential college dining hall, and still symbolize progress.

Gambell himself acknowledged this tension.

“It’s almost like the idea of having coat of arms is sort of de rigueur for universities,” he said. “Almost ironically, the idea of [a] coat of arms…[gives off] a ‘high-level’—some people would argue slightly elitist—kind of impression.” However, he argued that students can embrace or discard their residential college coats of arms, as their essential function is solely within the gates of Yale’s corporate structure.

“It’s sort of arbitrary,” Gambell said of the residential college coat of arms. Arbitrary, even as his office bustled around him, endeavoring to keep the New Yale, Y-A-L-E, alive while it maintains some of the Old. “Heaven knows they can be changed, one of these fine days,” he said, “if the spirit moves the right people.”

– Nicole Blackwood is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.

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

GROWTH IN THE GREENHOUSE A program in Edgerton Park for adults with disabilities weathers the state budget crisis Elaine Wang

illustration hazal özgür

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t’s eight-thirty a.m. on a Monday in East Rock’s Edgerton Park and Steffen Moore is sweeping the greenhouse floor. Moore, who is 35, has already held more than seven jobs—at the Mary Wade Home, a New Haven-based home care agency, and various truck stops—but these stints were always short-lived. More often than not, he was among the 64.6 percent of workers with a disability who were unemployed in Connecticut. That is, until his caseworker at the Connecticut Department of Developmental Services (DDS)—which serves individuals with intellectual disabilities and their families—referred him to G.R.O.W.E.R.S., Inc. G.R.O.W.E.R.S. stands for “Growing Real Opportunities With Education, Relationships and Stability.” It’s a nonprofit designed to help New Haven adults with physical and developmental disabilities become self-sufficient through horticultural experience, occupational training, and education. The program runs every weekday from nine a.m. to two p.m. in the greenhouses and community gardens of Edgerton Park. G.R.O.W.E.R.S. employees pick up participants from their homes and assign them a flexible set of chores, such as cleaning up greenhouse shelves, raising plants for sale in the greenhouse, and maintaining the park. Some participants are also trained for landscaping and contracted to take care of private gardens.

“I’ve seen this program do amazing things for a lot of people,” said Scott Hickman, who founded G.R.O.W.E.R.S. in 2012. “I grew up in a greenhouse, went to school for it, but still can’t put my finger [on] how the greenery can

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be so transformative.” G.R.O.W.E.R.S is one of the three adult day programs for people with disabilities in New Haven, and the only one that provides services for those under the age of 60.

But Connecticut’s budget crisis has severely curtailed G.R.O.W.E.R.S.’s work. A similar program in the same greenhouse, called Greenbrier, shut down in 2011, after Connecticut’s $3.4 billion deficit forced it to cut funding to day programs. Hickman, who served as Greenbrier’s horticulture supervisor, rebuilt the program into G.R.O.W.E.R.S. He conceived of a more creative and specialized structure: the “Three Paths.” Clients would be placed into three groups based on their developmental and physical ability. Path One was designed for clients who wanted to enter the job market. The tasks they were assigned—landscaping a private garden, for example— would improve their job and social skills. Path Two was for individuals who needed more supervision, combining tailored instruction and paid work. Path Three would serve clients who required even more intensive support, focusing on horticultural therapy to increase overall well-being.

Connecticut’s budget crisis, however, also clobbered G.R.O.W.E.R.S. The organization, which is funded by DDS and rents its space from the Edgerton Park Conservancy, is only able to employ three full-time staff and depends mostly upon volunteers. It also had to effectively scrap the “Three Paths” program after Hickman realized the difficulty of housing more than one type of work in the location. It now accommodates mostly Path Two clients within its facility.

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But Hickman finds other ways to help his clients. Starting at one p.m. every day, Hickman and Raina Workman, the G.R.O.W.E.R.S. job coach, teach a combination of reading and life skill classes, designed so that their clients can be competitively employed and self-sufficient. The lessons range from plant identification and propagation to discussions of situational problem solving.

One Wednesday in September, Hickman conducted a discussion regarding bullying, with a focus on self-empowerment. “We sat and listened to the stories they had to deal with,” he said. “Even the quieter ones start speaking out after they see the others sharing.”

Hickman remains ardent about the program’s potential for building community among vulnerable populations even amidst funding difficulties. He wishes to expand the program, perhaps through a summer camp for disabled children in the greenhouse, with the participants acting as counselors. With a larger budget, he’d also love to start programs in retirement home complexes or transform abandoned greenhouses into storefronts.

For now, on most days throughout the fall, Workman leads a reading group on Stephenie Meyer’s young adult series Twilight, the most common gift to the local donation boxes. Sitting next to several pots of yellow chrysanthemums, the participants take turns reading, five lines at a time. They pause to discuss vocabulary like “prolong” and “unconditional.”

“If you’re religious, God’s love is unconditional,” Workman clarifies for the group. “Your human rights are unconditional.”

– Elaine Wang is a sophomore in Branford College.

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

WHAT’S WITH THAT PAINTING? The hidden story of the strangest painting in Berkeley’s dining hall Mariah Kreutter

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he Head of College portraits in Yale dining halls don’t usually register as art. Nobody shows up looking for them. Nobody gazes at them, trancelike, for whole minutes at a time. They’re just there, ubiquitous and inevitable. Like midterms or Yale Granola™. As is the case with so much public art, they have become part of the landscape.

One striking exception is the 2001 portrait of former Head of College Harry “Skip” Stout in the Berkeley College dining hall. By the admittedly staid standards of its brethren, it’s a radical piece. It has none of the standbys of the genre: no doctoral robes, no muted color palette, and certainly no slavish devotion to realism. Stout’s face is done in pastel pinks and greens, the paint so sheer that the pencil tracings underneath are visible. The background is a stark black, broken up only by a wobbly green stripe across the top of the painting.

A trio of projectile Berkeley shields race towards Stout’s head, complete with speed lines, resembling nothing so much as nuclear warheads.

In my experience, the portrait’s social good is its role as a reliable conversation starter between awkward firstyears. But student opinion remains divided on its particular merits: Anonymous Silliman Sophomore: “That shit is whack.”

Molly Ono, Stiles Sophomore: “Hey, I like it.”

Berkeley Student who later retracted his identity: “Honestly, just say whatever bad thing you want about that painting and give me credit for it, because it’s probably true.”

The painting has fascinated me ever since I came to Yale. Who painted it? Why is it so different from all the other portraits? Why the green stripe? Why the flying shields? And why is it so...well, ugly?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the painting wasn’t done by a professional portraitist. It was painted by Richard Beggs, an Academy Award-winning sound designer known for his work with two generations of Coppolas on films such as Apocalypse Now and Lost in Trans-

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illustration julia hedges

lation. While Beggs trained as a painter, receiving his MFA from the California College of the Arts, he quickly became disillusioned with what he saw as the hypocrisy, pretension, and infighting of the art world.

He spent a portion of his MFA grant money on audio equipment and more or less never looked back. By the time Stout asked him to do his official portrait, Beggs hadn’t painted seriously in years. So why did Stout specifically request him? “It wasn’t about his art, per se,” said the former Head of College.

A year before Stout became Head of Berkeley in 1990, Beggs’s daughter, Samantha, died in a car accident in the summer before what would have been her sophomore year. (The annual Samantha Landau Beggs Prize, awarded to a “first-year student whose presence is profoundly felt throughout the Berkeley community,” is named in her honor.) Beggs was made an Associate Fellow of the College and would visit each year, staying in the guest suite of what is now the Swensen House and striking up a friendship with Stout along the way.

Eventually, Stout returned the favor, visiting Beggs at his home in San Francisco. The way Beggs tells it, Stout was impressed by a series of portraits of wellknown composers Beggs had done during his grad-student days. But Stout remembers it differently: “I was struck when I got to his house that there were all of

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Through my conversations with Stout and Beggs, I finally know why the green stripe is there (to break up the black, and as a subtle nod to Stout’s love for golf).

I understand the shields, at least somewhat (they add dynamism and movement to the painting, and, at least according to Stout, evoke Star Wars).

And, more than I did before, I understand the portrait’s appeal. We’re okay with art that is strange and shocking being placed in museums. But because Beggs’s portrait is showcased in a dining hall, it’s branded as “ugly,” an oddity. But if Jeff Koons gets to stack two vacuum cleaners on top of each other and have people flock to the the Whitney to see it, then shouldn’t we be a little more open-minded about an unusual Head of College portrait? And maybe, in the end, the dining hall is the best place for the painting. At a gallery, it might be lost amid all the strangeness, but in Berkeley, it’s distinct, even endearing. After talking with Beggs and learning the human story behind the painting, I felt I appreciated it more. Maybe Duncan Robinson was right—the portrait seems to be growing on me.

– Mariah Kreutter is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

these half-finished paintings…He said they were unfinished portraits of his daughter, signifying her unfinished life.” After learning about his formal training in painting, Stout asked Beggs if he would do the official portrait, a custom at the end of a Berkeley Head’s tenure.

At first, Beggs thought Stout was joking; he was even more surprised when he found out how much money the Berkeley Fellows had raised to pay him for it. “I was like, are you fucking kidding me?” Beggs recalled.

But Stout wasn’t kidding, so Beggs took on the project. He was given very few constraints beyond making Stout recognizable in the portrait. In his early years as a painting student, Beggs drew inspiration from Abstract Expressionist and neo-figurative painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Francis Bacon. His take on Stout’s portrait was never going to be conventional: “I couldn’t do it any other way, and if they’d asked me to I would’ve said no.”

Stout remembers his reaction when he first saw the finished painting: “Who is that guy?” But he wasn’t disappointed. He doesn’t claim to know what the general reception was among the other Fellows, but the response from Duncan Robinson, art historian and then-director of the Yale Center for British Art, stuck with him. “He said to me, ‘Skip, you’re going to appreciate this more and more over time.’” Stout grins. “And I do appreciate it. It did grow on me.”

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SNAPSHOT

THE HOUSE ON ADELINE STREET Yale School of Architecture students approach homelessness with high design

Laura Glesby

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here’s a house on the corner of Adeline and Eddy Streets that doesn’t fit in. The rest of the block is lined with soft-colored clapboard houses with peeling paint or dented siding. Many are separated from the sidewalk by wire fences, some of which have begun to lean over or cave in. But 54 Adeline Street has stark-white wooden panels and a dramatic, sloping roof. Large, glossy, rectangular bay windows pop out from its sides. Its concrete porch contains a built-in metal flower bed. There’s no traditional front door; instead, an open space in the middle of the house beneath the roof serves as the entrance to its two apartments. One passing driver slows down to take a closer look. “That’s hot!” he calls, leaning out of his window.

But the house isn’t just an anomaly in appearance. It’s the final product of the 2017 Jim Vlock Building Project, a mandatory program for all first-year graduate students in the Yale School of Architecture. Last spring, students were tasked with creating a house for homeless city residents.

After they submitted proposals, their professors collaborated with Columbus House, a local nonprofit dedicated to reducing homelessness, to choose a winning design. Columbus House acquired the site, a lot in the Hill neighborhood, from the New Haven Housing Authority. The Architecture students built the house this past summer.

In part, the house at 54 Adeline Street was an intel-

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illustrations hazal özgür

lectual exercise for the students, an opportunity to test out concepts they had learned in class in the real world.

The assignment extended beyond just drafting plans for a house and seeing it built; students attempted to incorporate design features that would take the psychological needs of its new residents into consideration. Yet for its future inhabitants, this house will be a long-term home–– perhaps their first in a while. How easily can a home built to address the challenges of this transition become part of the neighborhood?

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t an evening ceremony on the first Monday of October, the sleek new house opened for the first time.

Over a hundred people walked in and out of the empty rooms, running their hands across the wood of the cabinets and the thin, white railing along the stairs. One roof extended over the gap between the house’s two units—a single-bedroom “efficiency” unit meant for one person or couple, and a family unit, which has upstairs bedrooms intended for parents and children. Each apartment has a dishwasher and washing machine. Big, spherical lights hang from the ground-floor ceilings. Only the lawn was unfinished, a plot of dirt waiting for grass.

Among the visitors were New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, Yale President Peter Salovey, and School of Architecture Dean Deborah Berke. In a speech in the backyard, SaTHE NEW JOUR NAL

lovey praised the project as a model for the University’s mutually beneficial engagement with New Haven.

In daylight, the house looked conspicuously modern and angular, its exterior startlingly clean. But as the sky darkened, there was something comforting about it, as light filled the windows and people chatted inside. The wooden façade glowed faintly blue.

Walking inside the house, it was tempting to picture what it would look like when residents move in a few weeks later. What the bed in this room would look like, what kind of food would be waiting in the fridge. Maybe a child would discover her favorite books curled up in that window seat. Maybe someone would lie awake in this bedroom, unable to sleep. Maybe the family would play board games on the kitchen table. Maybe, when it rains, they would leave their umbrellas to dry by the door. But it could also take a long time for it to feel like a home.

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n 1967, Charles Moore, head of Yale’s Department of Architecture––what would eventually become the professional School of Architecture––founded the Building Project. Moore wanted to give his students practical experience, but the project was also a response to the student activism that roiled Yale during the nineteen-sixties.

Moore hoped his students would recognize their respon-

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sibility as architects to address pressing social issues like poverty and homelessness.

For Dan Whitcombe, one of the student project managers and a member of the team that created the winning 2017 design, the educational aspect of the project was invaluable.

“Not for a while will you be able to design houses as you see fit and then have the potential to see them built,” he said. Kerry Garikes, the other project manager, said that the assignment helped her better understand the design potential and restrictions of space. There’s a big difference, she added, between creating a room on a computer and watching it materialize on a real block.

In past years, the Building Project has collaborated with organizations like Neighborhood Housing Services, Breaking Ground (formerly known as Common Ground), and Habitat for Humanity to connect the house with a family in need of affordable housing. The current partnership with Columbus House will last for five years— one house with two units each year.

Columbus House will select the future inhabitants of 54 Adeline Street, and like the residents of the organization’s other properties, they will contribute thirty percent of their income towards rent. A resident’s income could range from anything between $25 and $700 a month,

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according to Alison Cunningham, the CEO of Columbus House. She added that their clients are not simply assigned a housing unit, but work with the organization to find a home that best fits their needs.

Prior to starting the design process, the Architecture students visited a shelter run by Columbus House, as well

“THE PRESENCE OF THE ROOF IS ALWAYS FELT.”

as the homes of several formerly homeless people. Over the course of the semester, they met with social workers to discuss national and city-wide homelessness, and the psychological challenges of transitioning from a shelter to a home.

The students also spoke in small groups with Columbus House clients about what they most desired in a home. School of Architecture professor Adam Hopfner, who has directed the Building Project since 2007, said the

clients his students spoke to expressed two primary wishes. One was security: in Hopfner’s words, “the emotional state of being homeless, the feeling of exposure and vulnerability…runs fairly deep.” The other was a connection to the neighborhood: “having eyes on the street, being able to see one’s neighbors, being able to communicate with one’s neighbors,” he said.

To create a strong sense of safety and stability, Architecture students designed a roof that extends more than a foot beyond the house’s four walls. A sheltered space that is open to the street, it creates a buffer zone between the interior and exterior of the house. The slope of the roof is visible from the inside, too; even on the first floor of the two-story family unit, the ceiling above the staircase is at an incline. “The presence of the roof is always felt,” Hopfner said.

A porch with a built-in planter will curve around the house on both Adeline and Eddy Streets, allowing residents to participate in neighborhood life from a protected vantage point.

These aesthetic considerations cut both ways, Whitcombe said. “How do we integrate this person visually into this community?” he asked. “How do we make this house a part of the community, but also account for the fact that there are definite anxieties associated with being housed for the first time?”

photo Laura Glesby

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he Architecture students attempted to design a house that would give its formerly homeless inhabitants a pronounced sense of security, comfort, and agency. But they also wanted to create a home that would eventually integrate into the neighborhood without foregrounding its residents’ past. “We didn’t hold back at all and make it specifically ‘homeless person-oriented,’” Whitcombe said.

“I think any of us would be happy to live in this house.”

Yet the residents of Building Project homes aren’t always welcomed like any new neighbors. Since 2010, the Building Project has created homes in West River, Newhallville, Dwight, and the Hill. Columbus House originally hoped to build this year’s house in Prospect Hill, but

“HOW DO WE MAKE THIS HOUSE A PART OF THE COMMUNITY, BUT ALSO ACCOUNT FOR THE FACT THAT THERE ARE DEFINITE ANXIETIES ASSOCIATED WITH BEING HOUSED FOR THE FIRST TIME?”

it didn’t go over smoothly. According to Hopfner, some residents––including the local alderwoman––resisted the Architecture School’s attempts to move new residents in.

They didn’t want to have “homeless” neighbors—despite the fact that, of course, their neighbors would no longer be homeless, he said. The project ended up being relocated to the Hill, next to a preexisting Columbus House property, Valentine Macri Court, which contains seventeen units of affordable housing.

Usually, Columbus House aims to offer services to the entire homeless population of New Haven, regardless of a person’s criminal background or history of substance abuse. But when determining eligibility for the efficiency unit of the Building Project house, the organization will consider a person’s criminal background, given that children will likely live in the family unit next door.

Both Hopfner and Cunningham say that the Hill has welcomed the new house with open arms. “We are excited about the build[ing] of another Yale/Vlock project in the Hill and [Yale’s] partnering with the Columbus House,” a user named “Hill Resident” wrote in an online comment on a July article in the New Haven Independent.

“We look forward to welcoming the students during the build, and the tenants after the units are rented. This addition will be a wonderful addition to all the ‘good stuff’ that is happening and continues to happen in the Hill!”

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enito Romero, who lives around the corner from the new house on Adeline Street, said he has never spoken with the Architecture students and didn’t know that formerly homeless tenants would soon occupy the house.

As he washed his car on the street, he said that the neighborhood is not a close-knit community. “We spend all our time working,” he explained in Spanish. Romero commutes to New York City, where he works at an asphalt company. His work day begins at five in the morning and ends at ten at night. “We hardly spend any time chatting with people because we’re not here very often,” he said.

“We’re working a lot of the time.”

Keith Dowdy was sitting on a porch two houses down from the Vlock house. He watched as his nephew, a little boy who said his name was “Jacoby Flash Batman Superman,” ran back and forth between the front yard and the sidewalk. Dowdy said he had watched the house take shape over the course of the summer. “It’s a nice design,” he said. “Probably too much for this neighborhood. Like, a house with that design needs to be on a lake or something.”

The Architecture students were clearly visitors to the neighborhood, Dowdy said. “It’s part of their grade for their semester. Imagine a house in a neighborhood where all the houses are ranging from four-hundred to a half a million [dollars], and then you see that.” He pointed to a single-story house across the street, with a slightly dented metal gate. “It’s like, really? And that’s how [the new house] is, just the opposite.”

Dowdy mentioned that the School of Architecture built another house in the neighborhood—the 2010 Building Project home on King’s Place. It had looked jarring at first, but now seemed like a part of the neighborhood. “It’s older now,” he said. “It was just put up for a minute, and people lived in it. Once all the hoopla was over, it just started being a regular old house.”

– Laura Glesby is a first-year in Timothy Dwight College.

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E S S AY E S S AY

ELEVEN HOURS Grappling with loss in the shadow of the eclipse Dimitri Diagne

illustration hazal özgür

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leven hours. My grandfather is dead. Depart PDX 1:15, arrive PHL 11:57, with a brief layover in Minneapolis. Before that, three hours from Newport to Portland, and two hours for check-in. The bus picks me up from the Hatfield Marine Science Center dormitories at 6:00 a.m. Seven minutes of goodbyes to my thirteen fellow interns, plus twenty for breakfast, plus making sure I didn’t forget anything, plus five to rub the sleep out my eyes. Later, an hour-long drive from the airport back to the Philadelphia suburbs, through a balmy Mid-Atlantic summer night. Twenty-one hours. My grandfather is dead.

My mother and aunt were in Madison, Wisconsin, organizing the funeral. The service would take place at Milwaukee’s St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, where my grandfather had chaired the founding board. The funeral itself would take place an hour and a half south of Milwaukee, in Libertyville, a Chicago suburb and the center of American Serbdom. King Peter II, who died in exile during the Yugoslav years, was buried in the ornately frescoed church there, until his recent exhumation and reburial in Serbia. My grandfather would be interred outside, up the hill from his immigrant parents and all the other deceased relatives on my mother’s side. When my parents and I drive from Philadelphia to New York, I get a glimpse of the harbor from the I-95. I like to imagine those ancestors seeing the Statue of Liberty as their steamers approached Ellis Island. I like to think that they were overjoyed.

My plane reached Philadelphia a few minutes early, but my father had already parked the car and was waiting at the doors of the security area. He is used to long days of air travel, and wary of its unpredictable rhythms. I

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don’t remember whether he had a thermos of coffee in his hand, as he often does late at night. “Bonjour, mon fils.

Je t’aime,” he said, and we hugged. I told him it was good to be back, that I was very glad to see him, and I was. The next day, we would travel to Milwaukee for the funeral. I was relieved not to be going alone.

My father pulled the car into our driveway at about 1:30 am on August 25. My birthday was on August 21. My grandfather’s death was on August 20. On August 19, I went snorkeling. My marine biologist friends and I drove down to the jetty that lines the mouth of the Yaquina River on the Pacific Ocean. We followed the line of black boulders towards the ocean, trying to escape Yaquina Bay’s

BUT THE TIDE WAS GOING OUT, BRINGING WITH IT ALL THE SMALL CRUSTACEANS, ALGAE, AND DETRITUS OF THE FERTILE ESTUARY.

soupy waters. But the tide was going out, bringing with it all the small crustaceans, algae, and detritus of the fertile estuary. Below the cloudless sky, we put on our wetsuits and dove into waters rich with plankton, and undergirded by rocks covered in sea stars and anemones. We fought the tide, which was dragging us towards the ocean. After a half hour, our faces and hands began to go numb, so we climbed out into the warm air. We wrestled our wetTHE NEW JOUR NAL

suits off of our bodies, and walked back down the jetty.

Squinting under a constant volley of windblown sand and the reflection of the sun on the white dunes, I felt disoriented but relaxed, as one feels after waking up from a long and unintended nap. A half hour after we emerged from the water, my mother texted me that my grandfather was in the hospital, this time for something very serious.

THE SUN IS THE DIPLOMAT OF TIME. IT MAKES TIME TANGIBLE ON EARTH.

That evening, when my aunt realized he would not wake up from his afternoon nap, she held her cellphone up to his ear, and I offered him a final narrative of my life. I told him about swimming and running on the beach, and said that I was happy and that I loved him. At 2:30 a.m., I received the message. My grandfather is dead.

The next day, I walked through the marshes outside the science center, and went to my lab early. There, I raced to measure the weights of enough dried shrimp to complete my summer research project, but unlike the week before, I was not anxiously thinking of statistical tests or sample sizes or finding previous studies on parasitic castration. I had not been stressed about my research the day before, either, as I sat with my friends in a beachfront café, regaining the warmth stolen by pacific waters. Following my mother’s message, the impending death of my grandfather had become the only thing worth worrying about. By the next day, his death had removed even this concern. There was no more uncertainty, only a thick, dim sadness under which I strolled through the marsh and played beach volleyball after work, looking forward to tomorrow, when the sun would disappear.

August 21, the day of my twenty-first birthday, the day after my grandfather’s death, was also the day of the total eclipse. By luck, I was interning in a region of Oregon which lay right in the path of totality. To avoid the coastal fog of Newport, nine of the other interns and I headed East to the interior Willamette Valley on the night of the twentieth. At 9:45 a.m. the next morning, in Corvallis, Oregon, we walked up a forested hill, hoping to catch the first darkened sliver of the sun.

The sun is the diplomat of time. It makes time tangible on Earth. Flowers open and close with it. Insects, birds, and frogs time their calls to it. Air and water grow cold and hot, and the onshore wind becomes an offshore wind at dusk, vice versa at dawn. We sleep and wake with the sun, knowing that a day has passed. I have heard that people locked in a sunless room risk losing their sense of time. The constancy of the sun makes its disappearance, 15

and the ensuing twilight, jarring. Its authority over us is undermined—we realize that its presence is subject to something else, to the frail moon passing over it, suddenly converting day into dusk, exposing planets, dropping the temperature, and illuminating the headlights of cars on the highway below us. The sun’s temporal authority is toppled with seeming randomness, and the day and its inhabitants become liberated from time. Until we have forgotten the unmistakable shades of that late morning twilight and the sun has firmly reclaimed its reputation, the day is a free day, unbound from the laws of time. This is what I felt as we walked down the hill, picking wild blackberries from the brambles beside a path through a wide field. At 10:50 a.m., the sun had vanished, and a day before, my grandfather had died. What was I obliged to do, what could I do, besides enjoy the berries and the warm light of a cloudless sky?

My friends and I drove to a bar with a large patio and a DJ. Still there was no obligation to time—Monday, midday, and people were sitting at picnic tables, slouching over cocktails and beer, discussing, as we always have, the mysteries of the sky. Because it was hot and early, I chose a cider as my first legal drink. Before I could object, Dustin had ordered himself a cocktail and paid for both of us. As the others ordered, the two of us walked outside and claimed a table. I felt unusually calm, sipping my cider there. There was nothing more to worry about— not death, not the disappearing sun, not even handing my ID to a bartender. All of these had already happened.

My cider was light, I was content. The sun was warm. My grandfather is dead.

The sun was also warm in Libertyville on August 27.

At the cemetery, I carried the large white cross that in

WHAT WAS I OBLIGED TO DO, WHAT COULD I DO, BESIDES ENJOY THE BERRIES AND THE WARM LIGHT OF A CLOUDLESS SKY? Serbian Orthodoxy serves as a temporary grave marking.

Behind me was the priest, his censer perfuming the air with frankincense, his chanting amplified by that smell.

My father, my uncle, and the other pallbearers lay the casket on metal bars stretched across the open grave, and I propped the cross against it. My mother and aunt stood beside the casket, alone, as the priest recited prayers over it. The priest poured grain on it, in the shape of a cross.

He poured wine over the grain. The mourners dispersed and gathered around a nearby folding table that supported three bottles—one of brandy, one of the plum brandy sljivovica, and one of ginger ale—a baking pan of warm, sweet pogaca bread, honey, and a dish of koljivo, the THE NEW JOUR NAL

funerary wheat pudding adorned with raisins in the shape of a cross. On the suggestion of Kum Greg, my honorary uncle, he, my father, my Uncle Ken, and I each filled a shot glass of sljivovica and walked back to the grave.

Because my father is Muslim and does not drink, it was his job to pour his glass over the casket. The rest of us drank ours.

My grandfather is dead, and cannot drink. He is drinking sljivovica in heaven, Kum Greg said, with the warrior Drazha Mihaijlovic and the warrior-king Karadjordje Petrovic and the poet-king Petar Petrovic Njegos. Perhaps they are sitting in a valley between two jagged Montenegrin peaks, listening to the poems of a guslar and his onestringed lute drift over the hills. Here, in Libertyville, the songs are those of cicadas. They are singing because the sun is out. – Dmitri Diagne is a senior in Berkeley College.

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F E AT U R E

THE PERIMETER

With the opening of Yale’s new residential colleges, Dixwell sees another wave of change Amelia Nierenberg

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awn Slade knows everyone and everything on Dixwell Avenue. Walking up the street— which runs north from downtown New Haven and Yale University toward Hamden—one morning this past spring, she nodded at Lake Place, where many residents are Yale undergraduates.

“Look at them, on Lake and Broadway,” she said.

“You started to see them inching up. Inching, inching, inching.”

Born in 1960, Slade grew up in Dixwell and now lives in Beaver Hills, a nearby neighborhood. She is the cofounder and executive director of Nuts About Health, Inc., a nonprofit that promotes healthy living for lower-income families. She walks over a mile every Sunday to the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church­— founded in the eighteen-hundreds by former slaves and home to a pulpit from which Booker T. Washington delivered his final public address—which she attended with her grandmother every weekend during her childhood. Nine historically Black churches line the halfmile stretch of Dixwell Avenue from Lake Place to Henry Street.

For every storefront on Dixwell Avenue, Dawn has a memory: she would skip past this store on her way home from school; her grandmother’s friends would shop at that one; this was one of the first Black-owned businesses in New Haven. She remembers the tightly knit neighborhood community of her childhood in the nineteen-seventies, the crippling effects of the War on Drugs in the eighties, the vacancy and crime of the nineties.

Now, she watches the neighborhood change again, becoming more residential and less Black. Slade pointed across Dixwell Avenue at a Yale-owned parking lot.

“You can see them keep moving down, keep moving, keep moving.” She waved a long-fingered hand at free-standing brownstones and half-boarded-up businesses.

“Them,” for Slade and many other Dixwell residents, means Yale University. Dixwell has seen many changes

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in the past twenty years. In the past decade, as Yale has acquired properties in Dixwell and offered its employees financial incentives to move into New Haven, some Dixwell residents have felt as though Yale’s expansion benefits only the University.

Yale administrators are quick to point out that the University is New Haven’s largest employer, attracts millions of dollars worth of federal grants to the city each year, and has helped thousands of its employees buy their own homes in places like Dixwell through the Yale Homebuyer Program.

The University has over forty major properties in the Dixwell neighborhood but few on Dixwell Avenue itself, one of which is a residence run through Elm Campus, a real estate company that works on behalf of the University. Both properties are situated near the center of campus, right at the junction of Downtown New Haven and Dixwell.

“They have the resources to do it. All they’ve got is money and time,” Slade said, referring to the University’s influence in Dixwell. “This all’s going to be ‘Yalesville’ real soon.”

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nstead of the royal blue plaques that mark campus buildings, Yale’s presence in Dixwell has taken the form of the next-door neighbor. For example, Annette Tracey, who has worked in the Berkeley dining hall for decades, now lives in Dixwell. She bought her home behind the Payne Whitney Gym through the Homebuyer Program, which was created in 1994 to better integrate Yale with New Haven by partially subsidizing employees’ home purchases.

Tracey’s house is just a few minutes’ walk from Dixwell Avenue, which Slade calls “a main artery” of the neighborhood. The street is also a dividing line between what residents consider the two sides of the neighborhood: “up-the-hill” (“all of that is Yale,” Slade said) and “down-the-hill” which remains mostly Black, filled with rental housing properties. Up-the-hill is in Ward 22, down-the-hill in Ward 2.

According to the 2010 census, a little over 10,460 peoTHE NEW JOUR NAL

ple live in the half square mile that comprise the Dixwell neighborhood. Nearly sixty percent of Dixwell residents are Black. For comparison, the entire city of New Haven—nearly forty times the size of the neighborhood—has almost one hundred thirty thousand residents, only 35.4 percent of whom are Black.

A little further away from Dixwell Avenue, Prospect Street is growing into another artery in the neighborhood, one more populated by Yale buildings and students. There, on the southeast corner of up-the-hill Dixwell, Yale’s two newest residential colleges, Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray, opened this past fall to house two hundred new undergraduate students. Many permanent residents of Dixwell believe the new colleges will widen economic disparities between sites of Yale’s interest in Dixwell and, in particular, down-the-hill.

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n the early two-thousands, the University began buying properties near the Grove Street Cemetery, which sits in the southeast corner of Dixwell. In 2002, Yale purchased a commercial laundry facility north of the cemetery. In 2006, the Rose Center west of the cemetery opened on Ashmun Street, housing both the Yale Police Department and the Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center. That same year, the University pledged half a million dollars to revitalize Scantlebury Park to the north, just months after paying the city ten million dollars to purchase adjacent land.

In 2008, Yale publicly announced its plans to open two new residential colleges on that land. After a two hundred fifty million dollar gift from University alumnus Charles B. Johnson, the new colleges quickly took shape on lower Prospect Street, and are now part of the ebb and flow of daily campus life.

Planning for the colleges began in 2006 with an agreement between Yale and New Haven. After acquiring the property for the new colleges, Yale worked closely with the city on zoning and mapping around the neighborhood, said Bruce Alexander, Yale’s Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs in a videotaped press conference this past August.

“That was pretty good to get a unanimous vote out of the Board of Alders. That’s pretty hard to do in any event for almost anything,” he said. The vote in favor of this project in the board of alders was thirty to zero,

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illustration Marianne Ayala

he said.

There had been speculation about plans to open new colleges since at least 2000, when an article published in the Yale Alumni Magazine by Mark Alden Branch said that the area to the north of the Grove Street Cemetery might be “sites for new buildings to further populate the area—perhaps the pair of new residential colleges that have long been discussed but that are not on the immediate horizon.”

John DeStefano, Jr., who served as the mayor of New Haven from 1994 to 2013, worked closely with former University President Richard Levin to develop the University’s real estate focus over those two decades. “[Yale] had a plan that was developed by the late nineteen-nineties to outline campus expansion, particularly northward movement,” he said.

The plan to which DeStefano alludes is the University’s Framework for Campus Planning, envisioned in 1997 by New York-based architecture urban design firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners. The document, which was released to the public in 2000, outlines real estate and architectural plans to the north of the Grove Street Cemetery. In one map showing the areas around Yale, a sketch of future planning superimposes the word “resTHE NEW JOUR NAL

idential” over the area, although the buildings were, at the time, either vacant or unoccupied. Another part of the framework suggests that “joint efforts [between the city and the University] could make connections between Yale and the surrounding neighborhoods safer and more attractive.”

DeStefano knows this history first-hand. According to the Yale Alumni Magazine article, he suggested a joint project with Yale in the area. Lead architect of the firm Alexander Cooper is quoted in the article as saying, “The Mayor looked at the map and said that if you look at Yale as a clock, and if you observe that everywhere Yale goes, it improves the surrounding area, then what’s missing is the area from nine to twelve—the Dixwell

“BEFORE YALE BUILT THE RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES, IT BUILT THE PERIMETER.” neighborhood.”

“So although it was not directly articulated that way in any discussion I was ever in, there was a particular concern around edge neighborhoods around the campus,” he said. Dixwell was a target because campus expansion would “by definition” move into adjacent neighborhoods.

“Before Yale built the residential colleges, it built the perimeter,” DeStefano said.

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his “perimeter” effect hasn’t only been around the expansion of the new colleges—it has filled home vacancies in neighborhoods adjacent to campus. The Yale Homebuyer Program assists in this mission by offering university employees grants of thirty thousand dollars over eleven years if they buy homes in East Rock, Beaver Hills, Wooster Square, Dixwell, Newhallville, Dwight, the Hill, Fair Haven, or West Rock.

“The Yale Homebuyer program was created to encourage Yale staff and faculty to put down roots in New Haven and become part of the community,” wrote Karen King, a Community Affairs Associate with the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, in an email this month. “The Yale University Homebuyer Program strengthens [New Haven’s] tax base.”

Tom Conroy, Director of the University’s Office of Public Affairs & Communications, wrote in an email that the “Homebuyer Program is just one of the ways in which Yale contributes to the economic and social progress of New Haven,” also pointing to the New

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Haven Promise program. “Yale makes the largest voluntary payment of any university in the nation to any city in the nation,” he added.

Forty-four of the program’s homebuyers work in service and staff positions at the University and are members of Local 34 and 35, according to Conroy. This is more than the percentage of both faculty and also professional staff who have bought homes through the program. Collectively, Yale employees have purchased homes with a total market value of approximately two hundred five million dollars. Yale has spent more than twenty-eight million dollars on the program since 1994.

But since May 2002, in addition to the standard amount, the grant has included a five thousand dollar bonus in the first year for homebuyers in Dixwell—if they live up-the-hill. In fact, the description of the special incentive essentially stipulates that all homes eligible for the benefit must be within the limits of Ward 22.

This additional rebate was introduced six years before the official 2008 announcement that Yale would build new colleges on Prospect Street.

According to research at DataHaven, the 06511 zip code—which includes Dwight, Beaver Hills, Dixwell, Newhallville, East Rock and Wooster Square—had a twenty-eight percent increase in home values from 2004 to 2015, the largest in the state. The average single-family home in 2015 was worth $75,908 more than it would have been in 2004. By contrast, values in other New Haven zip codes remained relatively flat.

“At what point does it inflate housing values?” DeStefano asked. “You’re creating an artificial subsidy.” He paused. “One could suggest it is inflating values for other properties by introducing this subsidy that, if it wasn’t there, wouldn’t be elevating properties.”

Yet Conroy contends that the program and its Dixwell-specific benefit is simply meant to “focus on the neighborhoods that would benefit from increased homeownership.”

“We certainly reject [the] contention that the Homebuyer Program has been detrimental to Dixwell or any other eligible neighborhood,” he added.

When pressed about why only Dixwell has a special incentive, Conroy said: “It exists to attract homebuyers, and if it helps a Yale employee decide to buy a home there rather than outside the the city, that’s good for New Haven.”

Although it would be impossible to frame the Homebuyer Program as the primary cause of this increase in home value, Yale’s efforts to make New Haven more of a destination have undoubtedly impacted its housing market. Some people who have lived in Dixwell for decades are now moving out, unable to afford their rents or unsettled in a neighborhood that grows increasTHE NEW JOUR NAL

ingly unfamiliar.

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lade remembers the Dixwell of the nineteen-seventies as a vibrant and close-knit neighborhood.

“My grandma lived at 225 Ashmun in a highrise apartment building,” she said. “The place was immaculate. You could eat off the hallway floors. They called this ‘the projects,’ but we didn’t feel like we lived in the projects because it was community.”

World War I pumped capital into New Haven’s arms manufacturing sectors and the Great Migration brought Black southerners into northern cities. A popular community center called the Q House opened in 1924 on Dixwell Avenue, and historically Black churches like the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, which was born in 1796 and officially established in 1820, dot the street.

Dixwell also had a vibrant jazz culture. Every Friday and Saturday night, famous musicians stopped in the neighborhood on their way from New York to Boston, playing at famous jazz clubs like the Democratic Club, the Musician’s Club, and the Korners Club—all now boarded-up storefronts or delicatessens along Dixwell Avenue. Many elderly residents remember nights of dancing until sunrise or meeting some of the greatest musicians of the era in their own backyards.

In the following decades, manufacturing began to decline and New Haven entered a period of steadily rising unemployment. In 1954, thirty-three percent of New Haven residents were employed by the industry; by 1977, it was fourteen percent. White residents moved out to the suburbs and New Haven became a poorer, Blacker city, eventually becoming majority Black in 1990.

Speaking about the seventies and eighties, Slade began walking faster up Dixwell Ave., running her thumb quickly back and forth over her knuckles. She had spent time in the Elm Haven Housing Projects, which were managed by the New Haven Housing Authority. In the eighties, she witnessed the dramatic reduction of essential city services like neighborhood maintenance and policing.

“At the same time, New Haven is flooded with drugs, and employment opportunities dry up,” she said.

“These factors fertilize a breeding ground of decay and brokenness.”

During the War on Drugs, reports of violent crime increased dramatically. In 1960, there were 64.5 crimes per hundred-thousand; in 1970, there were four hundred; in 1980, there were over one thousand five hundred. According to research from the Yale Law School, the New Haven Police Department responded with brutal force, deploying a “beat down posse”—a street

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unit that focused on eradicating drug crime—mostly comprised of white officers. This group would bring dogs and white vans to Dixwell, targeting Black men and often arresting them on low-level drug offenses.

By the nineteen-nineties, New Haven was at its most economically desolate. In 1994, the same year that the Homebuyer Program started, GQ magazine published an enormous, inflammatory piece called “The Last Boola Boola,” describing New Haven as a “war zone of poverty, crime, and drugs as frightening as any American city.” In 1991, crime in New Haven touched the Yale community with the murder of Christian Prince, a student who was shot on Hillhouse Avenue.

DeStefano remembers “an extraordinarily large number of vacant properties” during those years. He said there was a strong desire on the part of both the city and the University to create the Homebuyer’s Program, which would hopefully make city blocks safer,

“BY THE TIME THE NINETIES CAME AROUND, NOBODY WANTED TO BE HERE. WOULD YOU?”

cleaner, and more inhabited.

“Good things don’t happen in vacant buildings,” he said.

Slade paused, looking down Foote Street towards Ashmun, where her grandmother’s apartment building used to be. Then she turned to walk up Dixwell again.

She remembered cuts to affordable housing programs, cuts to art programs in schools, and cuts to library budgets.

“You cut all that and then you make people live like animals. And only then do you ask, ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ What sent people out initially was just pure neglect,” Slade said, walking in silence for a while. “By the time the nineties came around, nobody wanted to be here. Would you?”

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ince the nineteen-nineties, crime, particularly in the areas of New Haven that surround Yale, has declined. Nationally, the economy has improved.

From the perspective of Richard Cleary, a white resident who has lived on Mansfield Street in up-the-hill Dixwell since 1979, Yale’s involvement in the neighborhood has yielded only positive effects.

Cleary served as a civil engineer for years and lives THE NEW JOUR NAL

in the upstairs apartment of a two-story home with a turquoise porch and tiled floors. “The street’s gone up and down,” he said. “Right now, it’s quite good. And of course, one of the reasons is that Yale has security types, uniformed security types around here.”

Cleary lived on Mansfield Street in the eighties and nineties, back when city residents called it “Manslaughter Street.” Cleary recounted an assault when he ran out to the street to protect his downstairs neighbor from a violent mugging. Now, he said, he feels much safer.

Over the years, Yale has paid special attention to Mansfield Street, which DeStefano called “clearly an edge street.” According to the website of Yale real estate company Elm Campus Partners, there are twenty-seven Yale-owned houses and rental apartments on that street, mostly populated by graduate students.

These properties join the commercial holdings at Lake Place and Dixwell Avenue, the Rose Center housing the Yale Police Department and Yale Health, and the new residential colleges. Altogether, it’s over forty real estate holdings.

DeStefano laughed dismissively at the implication of a causal relationship between Yale’s real estate development the area’s declining rate of crime.“It’s not like Yale bought some houses on Mansfield Street and the freaking crime rate dropped,” he said. “There’s a lot more going on than that.”

Cleary welcomes the increased presence of law enforcement officers. “It’s basically crime-free now,” he said.

Although he had not heard of the Dixwell-specific incentive, he knew of the Homebuyer Program. “Of course the University would want to have a solid neighborhood,” he said. “They’d want a border or a periphery around campus. Why? It’s so obvious. Why do you not want to be hit over the head? Why would you not want your students and employees to be safe?”

dents in the new colleges register to vote, this tilt will only continue.

Today, almost thirty years after the devastation of the nineties, vacancy is no longer a glaring problem in

“IT’S NOT LIKE YALE BOUGHT SOME HOUSES ON MANSFIELD STREET AND THE FREAKING CRIME RATE DROPPED.”

New Haven housing. In fact, according to real estate research firm Reis Inc., New Haven had the lowest apartment vacancy rate in the nation at 2.1 percent, beating out the notoriously oversaturated New York City housing market’s 2.4 percent vacancy rate. Fewer vacant apartments in New Haven drove up housing prices, pushing low-income residents into more expensive rentals or neighboring towns like Hamden or Bridgeport. Now, the issue isn’t vacancy. It’s the lack of affordable housing, pricing residents out of rentals and, as a result, out of Dixwell.

According to a 2016 Brookings Institution study of inequality in cities, New Haven was sixth on the list of all U.S. cities with the greatest gap between the richest and the poorest. In New Haven, the top earners had 15.3 times the income of the poorest residents. That

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lder Jeanette Morrison, who has represented New Haven’s Ward 22 since 2011, oversees all the parts of Dixwell covered by the extra rebate.

Before the construction of the Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin, Ward 22 already housed four residential colleges: Ezra Stiles and Morse to the West and Timothy Dwight to the East. The new colleges on Prospect Street will pump more than six hundred voters into the existing three thousand currently living in Ward 22, transitioning the electorate from majority permanent city residents to a constituency split between the two populations: students and permanent residents. Yale votes are becoming a greater component of Ward 22 votes, influencing up-the-hill Dixwell. As more stu 21

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same study found that New Haven’s income inequality gap has widened the fastest of any city since the Great Recession.

“Both the President and Vice President of Yale live in my ward,” Morrison said. “And you have some of the poorest in Dixwell, too.”

Considering rising inequality in the neighborhood, due in no small part to housing stabilization, DeStefano wondered about the intention of the Homebuyer Program’s special incentive in Dixwell. Mansfield is not exactly unstable at the moment, and neither is the rest of “up-the-hill” Dixwell. He pointed to the safer neighborhood statistics and over-saturated housing market.

“Are we trying to fill vacant housing?” he asked rhetorically.

That used to be the intention. But now?

“Well, to be honest with you, filling vacant housing is not a problem in New Haven at this moment,” he said. “Forget the downtown rental market, I’m talking about the neighborhood rental market.” He spread his hands wide. “It’s not a problem! So what are we trying to do?”

Despite what Slade describes as the “doom and gloom” of the period, the lower property values associated with Dixwell’s vacancies in the nineties allowed its poorer residents to keep living there.

“A lot of people are angry in feeling that Yale has their hands in everything going on and only does what is expedient for them,” said Bridgette Russell, who works for the New Haven Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), an organization that helps low- and middle-income residents of New Haven purchase homes.

“As Yale usurped more of the properties, the landscape was changing,” she said. “Those prices just escalated in the nineties as a lot of change started to take place.”

Russell, who has worked at NHS for over a decade, believes her job has become much more urgent since she started because the housing market in New Haven has become so constricted. She tells her clients to expedite their homebuying processes.

“You need to own. At least then you have some power. If you’re renting, there’s a greater chance you will be pushed out.” She paused and reconsidered. “In fact, if you don’t own a home, you’re eventually going to be pushed out.”

dio Apt.” And another: “FOR LEASE: 1000 sq. ft.” The house behind it has slats missing on the front, a boarded-up window on the second floor. A closed deli and grocery store are next door. According to Slade, this little brown building with the wavy glass window used to be the spot for jazz in Dixwell. Now, she’s heard rumors that developers are going to tear it down.

“New Haven is the tale of two cities,” Slade said as she walked away up Dixwell Avenue again. “The best of times and the worst of times. The home of the fit and the fat, the home of the have and the have-nots.”

Longtime Dixwell residents watching their neighborhood change say they feel left behind. Although the neighborhood has grown wealthier and safer during the past two decades, in part through the influence of Yale and city-wide policies, some residents see only part of that population—the up-the-hill, Yale part—reaping the benefits. It seems that the disconnect between the bell tower of the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue and the bell tower of Pauli Murray – Amelia Nierenberg is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.

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few blocks away from Cleary’s home, Slade stopped in front of a small, brown building.

Inside, behind windows made from squares of thick antiqued glass, there is a large, empty space. On the front, a rumpled yellow sign: “FOR RENT: Stu 22

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POEM

OLD LYME Olivia Noble Someone in the classroom has written their report on Lyme disease, and speaks with earnest gravity about prevalence, arthritis, the climate, guinea fowl.

Talented birds: they hunt lawns, peck at the stone walls, eating ticks like potato chips.

The presenter calls this the urban legend of Martha’s Vineyard.

Now we look back at the deer, all of the deer and dogs and white-footed mice.

We switch slides, go through our neighbors with the same afflictions, all watching the ground with sideways eyes.

Here they are: each the point of a decimal, a speck, discrete, a single bead, the low hell of them swung on the ends of heavy grasses, questing, with front legs up in passionate supplication.

They latch on as birthmarks, sit, and swell.

illustration fiona drenttel

– Olivia Noble is a junior in Grace Hopper College.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

FROM THE GROUND UP by

Mark Rosenberg illustration julia hedges photos mark rosenberg

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Domestic violence is on the rise in New Haven. Can a proposed center provide the support victims need?

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t took Valerie over three years to escape her abusive partner. “I moved three or four times,” she said.

“I had to start all over again.

I had to change my job, the vehicle I drove, everything.”

In 2013, Valerie’s partner began to act erratically and stopped taking his medications. (Victims’ names have been changed to protect their identities.) She met with her partner’s mental health counselors repeatedly to try to stabilize their relationship, but he began to make verbal threats against her. In July 2014, she contacted the New Haven Police Department, seeking protection for herself and her two children, both under ten years old.

An officer drove her to a police substation across the city from her home. But the officers she met there were unsympathetic.

“My very first interaction with them was awful,” Valerie said. “They were on their cell phones when taking their report. They talked down to me. They knew the person I was trying to get away from. Their response was, ‘What did you expect?’”

That July, Valerie filed for a restraining order, but her partner began to break into her home when she was out.

She contacted the State Police for help, but officers told her they couldn’t take action without concrete proof. By the year’s end, the situation grew dire. “He showed up to my house and said he was going to shoot his gun in my face so that no man would ever want to be with me,” Valerie said. “That was when I moved.”

For Valerie, the cops’ indifference was merely the beginning of an arduous search for safety. After meeting with the police, she went to the New Haven office of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, but the caseworkers there blamed her for parental neg 25

ligence; eventually, she found a caseworker in another town. It took two more visits from the state police before, in October 2015, Valerie got in contact with a victim advocate at the Superior Court on Elm Street who referred her to the Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services, the local support agency. The advocate offered to help Valerie move out of Connecticut to protect herself, but her partner further escalated his threats, promising to kill Valerie’s family one at a time and murder her when she came back for the funeral.

Fearing for their safety, most of Valerie’s family members got gun permits.

Later that month, the police set up a sting operation with Valerie to subdue and arrest her partner. She went back to the Superior Court to seek criminal charges, and, aware that he could be released at any time, sought to terminate his parental rights at the civil court on Church Street. This January, over a year after the arrest, Valerie

VALERIE’S KIDS DON’T PLAY IN THE SAME PARKS AS THEY USED TO. SHE NO LONGER SEES ANY OF HER OLD FRIENDS.

testified against her partner in court. After that last trial, he’s in jail for the foreseeable future. But Valerie’s kids don’t play in the same parks as they used to. She no longer sees any of her old friends. By the time her partner’s sentence ends, she expects to have changed her name, making her transformation complete.

Valerie’s case is, in many ways, typical. In Greater New Haven, it often takes a victim of domestic violence— THE NEW JOUR NAL

more than three-quarters of whom are female—at least twenty-five hours to meet with all of the advocates she needs to start the recovery process. Victims must set up appointment after appointment with law enforcement officers, lawyers, and counselors, often traveling to each one on slow bus lines over several days, just to begin to find a path to safety.

VICTIMS MUST SET UP APPOINTMENT AFTER APPOINTMENT WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT, LAWYERS, AND COUNSELORS, OFTEN TRAVELING TO EACH ONE ON SLOW BUS LINES OVER THE COURSE OF FOUR OR FIVE DAYS “Having to be referred to three or four different locations, do an intake three or four times, and meet with three or four different people, it gets to be a lot on your plate,” Valerie said. “It almost deters you to get the support you need.” For low-income victims working fulltime jobs, the hours required to see a case to its conclusion can be prohibitive.

This summer, local support providers and officials made a push to change the system. New Haven Mayor Toni Harp and newly-appointed Police Chief Anthony Campbell backed a plan to build a new facility called the Hope Family Justice Center of Greater New Haven, where victims of domestic violence would be able to access counseling, legal aid, law enforcement protection, and child care, among other services, in a centralized location. The family justice center model has helped victims in cities from San Diego to New York, and New Haven support advocates have been pushing to create one for over a decade. Project planners hope to open the facility in downtown New Haven, close to the city’s courthouses and along public transit lines, as soon as two years from now.

The facility could make it easier for thousands of victims in Greater New Haven to escape their abusers and establish a new household elsewhere. But in a city with rising rates of domestic violence, there are other issues the center may not be able to fix. Agencies are strapped for resources: legal advocates are overworked, shelters across the state are out of beds, and an outdated Connecticut policy often forces officers to arrest victims along with their abusers. The Hope Family Justice Center, when it opens, will be a safe space in the heart of the city. The question is whether it will be enough.

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At Home ven as violent crime rates in New Haven have plummeted during the tenures of Chief Dean Esserman and Chief Campbell, reports of domestic violence are on the rise. New Haven police made 943 arrests for domestic violence assaults in 2014, 1,432 in 2015, and 1,576 last year. “New Haven has one of the highest, if not the highest, rates of people being killed or injured from domestic violence, from what we know in reporting,” said Esperina Stubblefield, Director of the Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services.

Although efforts to combat street crime through community policing have worked, domestic violence— which usually takes place in the hidden confines of the home—requires a different approach.

The New Haven Police Department gets more domestic violence calls than any other kind of call. These situations are often volatile for officers. “Domestic violence is based on control,” said NHPD Detective Kristine Cuddy. “When an officer arrives on scene they’re taking that control.” It’s hard to predict how much danger a call will pose. On September 23, two New Haven officers were shot in the arm responding to a domestic violence dispute on Elm Street in the Dwight neighborhood.

If an officer is able to defuse the situation, the next goal is connecting the victim to help, a crucial step that changed dramatically five years ago. In the past, there was little coordination between cops and support providers in Connecticut. Police officers who responded to a domestic violence incident would simply hand the victim a sheet with an agency’s phone number. Nationwide, under this system, only about 4 percent of victims receive help or counseling.

In 2012, the NHPD distributed a placard with a series of eleven questions to every officer. “Has he/she threatened to kill you or your children?” “Does he/she have a gun or can he/she get one easily?” These questions comprise the Lethality Assessment Program (LAP), a protocol used to assess the degree of risk a victim faces.

The questionnaire includes one demographic question: whether the victim’s abuser is employed. “When an abusive man is unemployed, there’s both the financial strains of unemployment and the notion that unemployment takes away from traditional masculinities,” Chief Campbell said. In New Haven, domestic violence calls may be more frequent in low-income neighborhoods with higher unemployment rates like Fair Haven and the Hill, Campbell added—especially in summertime, when temperatures and tempers rise.

In every domestic violence call, the responding officer must ask all eleven questions. If, based on the victim’s responses, she is classified as “high-risk,” the officer

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dials the number of a support provider and hands her the phone. The Umbrella Center anticipates between fifteen and twenty LAP calls on a typical weekend.

By this fall, all of Connecticut’s local jurisdictions had implemented the protocol; Connecticut is the first such state. Across the country, in districts that have implemented LAP, the rate of victims receiving further help or counseling from support providers has soared from 4 to 70 percent.

BHCare Offices 836 Foxon Road, East Haven HCare, the local healthcare provider operating the Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services, occupies an office along East Haven’s main commercial strip. It’s a ten minute drive from downtown; the bus ride takes almost an hour. The center provides counseling, legal advocacy, law enforcement-based assistance, safety planning, confidential safe houses, and other services for victims in nineteen cities and towns, including New Haven. It’s the product of a support network that has taken forty-four years to develop.

In 1973, Yale Medical School student Anne Flitcraft and her husband Evan Stark started New Haven’s first domestic violence safe house, taking women and children on the run into their home in West Rock. Over the next four decades, community activists founded a shelter near the Yale hockey rink for twenty-five women and children, convened support groups, and staffed a hotline. In 1986, the New Haven Domestic Violence Task Force formed, and nonprofit support agencies were folded into the Umbrella Center. Now, resources that used to be uncoordinated or nonexistent are run by a single organization.

But support services remain scattered throughout the region, and some agencies are struggling to meet victims’ needs. Demand for beds at domestic violence shelters has more than doubled in the last eight years. In 2016, the state’s shelters operated at 125 percent capacity. “Victims are presenting with more acute, complex needs,” likely as a result of cuts to other service organizations, said Liza Andrews, Director of Public Policy and

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Communications at the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence (CCADV). “We’re seeing more victims with specific behavioral health problems, addiction problems, and serious medical issues.” These needs, Andrews said, have meant that more victims are living at shelters for months on end.

CCADV, which coordinates funding for eighteen partner organizations including the Umbrella Center, served almost forty thousand clients in 2016, but housed only one thousand clients (and twelve hundred children) in shelters. Yet shelter services make up the biggest chunk of the Coalition’s funding. Given the cost, some support agencies in Connecticut are no longer providing beds for victims, according to Karen Jarmoc, President and CEO of CCADV. Instead, they’re using the money to pay for victims’ first month of rent or transport them to a safer home.

With services spread thin, it can be hard to find help in Greater New Haven. Even if help is available, the time it takes to commute between agencies and wait for appointments, often with children in tow, creates a major burden for victims. But support providers believe a family justice center will solve that.

The concept of a family justice center originated in 1987, when Casey Gwinn, a prosecutor in the San Diego City Attorney’s office, was arguing hundreds of cases pertaining to child abuse stemming from domestic violence every month. Gwinn felt that legal action alone did not ensure victims’ well-being. Along with Ashley Walker, a survivor of sexual assault who was running the San Diego YWCA’s Services for Battered Women, and Gael Strack, a fellow prosecutor, he developed the idea for

Julie Johnson, the head of New Haven’s family justice center planning committee, at BHCare in East Haven.

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New Haven Chief of Police Anthony Campbell.

a single facility that would provide all of the services victims need. By 2002, San Diego had opened the nation’s first family justice center, housing 120 employees and volunteers, with overwhelmingly positive results.

“We had about a 90 percent drop in domestic violence-related homicides between 1985 and 2008,” Gwinn said. “It’s hard to explain that around anything but the

collaborative work we’re doing.”

In October 2003, President George W. Bush unveiled a national “President’s Family Justice Center Initiative,” to be helmed by Gwinn. The program allocated $20 million to develop fifteen centers across the country.

The family justice center model has since spread worldwide to a hundred thirty-seven communities in twenty countries. According to a 2013 CNN report, a victim will attempt to leave an abusive relationship seven times, on average, before she leaves for good. In communities with family justice centers, that number has shrunk to one or two.

New Haven’s committee plans to build an entirely

new facility large enough to accommodate at least half a dozen services. Stubblefield hopes to see the center running in twelve to eighteen months, while Gwinn predicted the center could be up and running in two to five years. With Yale only blocks away from the ideal site, there’s money to be mobilized, but fundraising has not yet begun.

CONNECTICUT IS THE ONLY STATE WHERE VICTIMS ARE ARRESTED ON A REGULAR BASIS. Given the tightening state and federal budgets of the Trump Era—the President proposed in his latest budget a $2 million cut to the federal Office of Violence Against Women—Jarmoc, the CCADV President, believes fundraising may prove challenging. “This is a time of uncertain resources,” she said. “A family justice center is a very extensive project. The question is how are you going to create it financially, and how are you going to sustain it.”

New Haven Police Headquarters 1 Union Avenue You might think it’s warm in here,” Anthony Campbell said to the crowd, beaming, “but that’s the Holy Spirit you’re feeling.”

The humidity of the warm June day had seeped into City Hall, and three hundred assembled New Haveners sweated in their dresses and suits. Even in the oppressive heat, Campbell was in high spirits: it was his eighteenth

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The headquarters of the New Haven Police Department on Union Avenue.

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IN 85 PERCENT OF FAMILYRELATED CASES IN CONNECTICUT, AT LEAST ONE PARTY IS SELF-REPRESENTED, MEANING LOWINCOME VICTIMS OF ABUSE OFTEN HAVE TO FIGHT FOR THEIR SAFETY WITHOUT THE HELP OF AN ATTORNEY.

wedding anniversary, and he was being sworn in as the New Haven Chief of Police.

A 44-year-old from Harlem, Campbell attended Yale Divinity School and planned to become a Jesuit priest.

But in 1998, he entered the New Haven Police Department, drawn to its policy of community policing, in which officers build ties with community members. By 2016, Campbell had risen to the rank of Assistant Chief.

After the departure of embattled former Chief Dean Esserman, Campbell was a clear replacement. Mayor Harp, who regularly worked with domestic violence victims in her twenty-seven years as a homeless services outreach advocate at Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, wanted to make the family justice center a focus of her reelection campaign. In promoting Campbell, she elevated an officer who shares her priorities.

At the ceremony, Campbell emphasized his support for the Mayor’s mission to combat domestic violence.

“Her commitment is unparalleled,” Campbell said of Harp, his voice soft and reedy. “She realizes we must bring domestic violence and intimate partner violence to a halt. She wants to bring a family justice center to New Haven.”

Since LAP was implemented in 2012, New Haven Police have been able to connect more victims to support providers, but that hasn’t addressed the true problem: domestic violence itself. Campbell sees community policing as crucial to keeping abuse at bay. “A big part of the pattern of domestic violence is isolation, whether it’s self-isolation or a control mechanism of the offender,”

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Campbell said. “Community policing is in direct contrast to isolation.” This fall, Chief Campbell is working with the police union to distribute department-issued phones to officers so that they can give their numbers out to residents on their beat.

Once the Hope Family Justice Center opens its doors, New Haven police will have an opportunity to build further trust. Former NHPD police captain Julie Johnson, leader of New Haven’s planning committee, said that in cities like Milwaukee, centers have become community institutions. “With a family justice center, you want your community to know it’s there,” Johnson said. “You want people to walk in off the street who wouldn’t call the police. It’s public knowledge.” The LAP and the family justice center model could work in tandem to connect victims to services more fluidly and provide community-based support.

But without changes in the law, all New Haven community policing initiatives may be for naught. In 1984, after the husband of a woman named Tracey Thurman attacked and stabbed her, Thurman sued the Torrington Police Department in Connecticut, claiming the police had disregarded the danger she faced in past calls to her home. The case precipitated sweeping changes to Connecticut’s domestic violence legislation, most notably through the Family Violence Prevention and Response Act, enacted in 1986. The act included a “mandatory arrest” provision for officers, requiring the arrest of alleged perpetrators “if there is probable cause to believe that person committed a family violence crime.” In cases

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where a victim uses physical force in self-defense, the officer, seeing signs that the abuser and the victim hurt each other, often has to arrest both. This practice, known as a “dual arrest,” can embroil victims in lengthy legal struggles.

All other states with mandatory arrest clauses, including New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island, have passed

ELIZABETH HADN’T FELT THIS TREATMENT QUALIFIED AS ABUSE, BUT THE SUPPORT GROUP CHANGED EVERYTHING. “I OPENED MY EYES UP,” SHE SAID. “IT WAS A HUGE TURNING POINT FOR ME.” “primary aggressor” legislation requiring officers to attempt to identify which partner instigated the violence and avoid arresting the other party. But in Connecticut, a 2004 General Assembly bill to implement a similar protocol was stripped of most of its provisions. The state legislature has acted aggressively in recent years to protect victims of domestic violence, passing laws requiring the subjects of temporary restraining orders to give up firearms and criminalizing nonviolent stalking behavior that causes severe emotional distress. But the Thurman Law, thirty-one years later, remains largely unchanged.

Today, Connecticut is the only state where victims are arrested on a regular basis. According to a February ProPublica report, the national dual arrest rate in domestic violence incidents is around 2 percent. Even though NHPD officer training emphasizes avoiding dual arrests, New Haven’s rate last year was almost 19 percent.

Gwinn, the founder of the family justice center model, said he hopes the New Haven center will be the impetus for change in legislation and practice. Even in the absence of new state laws, the New Haven Police Department could enact a primary aggressor policy at the local

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New Haven Mayor Toni Harp. level, he suggested. Unless this change is made, victims of abuse may hesitate to call for help at all.

New Haven Superior Court 121 Elm Street he New Haven Superior Court, where hearings of domestic violence criminal cases take place, is an imposing building. Six Ionic columns stand imperiously out front, and visitors are greeted with a metal detector when they walk inside. The sounds of murmured conversation and brisk footsteps echo coldly back and forth in the atrium.

At one domestic violence court session this September, a woman sat with two young girls, their hair in beaded braids, on either side of her. They leaned on each of her shoulders, waiting for the hearings to start.

The session opened at 10:30 a.m. In the thirty-eight minutes before the judge took the bench, a man sitting in the audience behind them grew impatient. “I lost like thirty hours of work already,” he said to the room. “I’m about to turn into the judge. Judge Harris says everybody get the fuck out of here. I don’t even want to go to work.

I just want to go home and go to bed now.” As the wait continued, a woman walked into the courtroom and sat in the front row. “Damn,” he laughed, loud enough for everyone else to hear. “Look at that bitch.” The woman and girls sat quietly.

Legal aid is a crucial part of recovery, in both shortterm survival and long-term safety, but it’s a complex process that can expose victims to traumatic environments like this. Victims often have to meet with victim

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advocates at the Superior Court to prepare for criminal trials, file for restraining orders at the civil court on Church Street, and seek help with divorce proceedings and financial assistance at the offices of New Haven Legal Assistance on State Street.

Legal advocates hope to locate New Haven’s family justice center as close to the downtown courthouses as possible. But Barbara Bellucci, the Umbrella Center’s Family Violence Victim Advocate Supervisor, wants to go a step further. “Victims often want to meet with attorneys personally. This often takes place at the [Superior Court], which is not a space that’s particularly trauma-sensitive,” she said. “I hope there will be space for advocates to meet at the family justice center, and a place for kids to play and be engaged while Mom talks to the prosecutor.”

Given the prevalence of domestic violence, New Haven’s legal advocates are perpetually inundated with cases. At the Superior Court, the Umbrella Center’s six Family Violence Victim Advocates received twenty-four hundred new cases in the last fiscal year. Around five years ago, funding cuts eliminated the two attorneys in the Connecticut Attorney’s Office strictly dedicated to domestic violence cases, placing even more strain on the system. Now, prosecutors and victim advocates hold quarterly roundtable meetings, and each Judicial District has a designated liaison prosecutor who receives additional training for domestic violence cases. But in 85 percent of family-related cases in Connecticut, at least one party is self-represented, meaning low-income victims of abuse often have to fight for their safety without the help of an attorney.

In recent years, support agencies have begun serving more undocumented immigrants, who often hesitate to reach out for help, fearing deportation. The Battered Immigrant Women Protection Act of 2000 established the U-Visa, which grants temporary legal status, with a pathway to citizenship, to immigrants who are victims of crimes. In situations where deportation is imminent, legal advocates can prioritize their visa applications.

But not every undocumented victim knows about the U-Visa, or feels she can safely apply for it. “We want to get the word out that whether a victim is undocumented

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Elm Street Superior Court in New Haven. or not, we will provide service,” Bellucci said. “We don’t want anyone to be isolated.”

Facing similar challenges, the Bridgeport Center for Family Justice started a legal incubator program this February, working with the Greater Bridgeport Bar Association to bring in low bono and pro bono legal services and providing office space for five attorneys to start private practices. “Attorneys come from everywhere,” said Debra Greenwood, Executive Director of Bridgeport’s center. “If we had the space we could have brought in ten.” Through a similar program, New Haven’s center could ease the burden placed on the Superior Court’s advocates. “We already have a relationship with legal aid, but if we get a center, we would try to increase that access, hopefully utilizing the many colleges and law schools in the area,” Johnson said. “There are just not enough free legal services.”

The Center for Family Justice 753 Fairfield Avenue, Bridgeport ohnson, Stubblefield, and other planning committee members for the Hope Family Justice Center of Greater New Haven have toured centers in San Diego, Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Bridgeport to piece together a plan for New Haven’s center. According to Johnson, the Bridgeport Center for Family Justice could serve as a model for the planning committee.

The lobby of the Bridgeport center is adorned with a brightly colored mural, the rainbow silhouettes of hands extending from the borders to the center. “Hands are not for hitting,” it reads. The first floor has a waiting room with a fishtank in the corner, a room for intake meetings with a box of tissues at the ready, and a forensic interview room for victims of child abuse. Downstairs are offices for attorneys, prosecutors, and law enforcement, along

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with a wellness room where clients take yoga classes.

Upstairs are rooms for support advocates to meet with clients, many of whom are referred by the center’s twenty-four-hour hotline or just walk in; a conference room that hosts self-sufficiency classes; and a children’s room with jungle murals painted on the walls, Halloween costumes lining two folding tables in the middle. Children of the fifteen clients living in Kathie’s Place, the center’s confidential safe house, often can’t go trick-or-treating elsewhere, so the center’s employees hold their own Halloween for the kids every fall.

Elizabeth, a victim who sought help at the facility while it was still the Center for Women and Children, said the support groups she attended there helped her recognize and recover from twenty years of abuse. For years, her ex-husband manipulated her psychologically, becoming furious when she served him the wrong dish for dinner or threw out leftover food, and forbidding her from leaving the house on weekends. Elizabeth hadn’t felt this treatment qualified as abuse, but the support group changed everything. “It opened my eyes up,” she said. “It was a huge turning point for me. I realized what I was going through.” Elizabeth is safe now. Last year, she got her Masters in social work, and she has begun working for a support agency, helping other survivors like her.

The Center for Family Justice is a beautiful facility, and above all, it’s efficient. For the typical first-time client, the intake process is just an hour long, enough time to choose the services she wants, fill out paperwork, and get immediate help if her needs are pressing. And every victim is guided through the center with an advocate at her side, making potentially challenging parts of the process, like meeting with law enforcement, easier to handle.

In New Haven, a key consideration for Johnson and

the planning committee is how best to incorporate police into the center. “Let’s say the victim comes off of the street or calls and comes by and says, ‘I need services,’ Johnson said. “One of the first things they’re going to be asked is whether they want to speak to law enforcement. If they say no, they’re not going to have any interaction with law enforcement.” Chief Campbell echoed Johnson’s pledge. “A Family Justice Center should not be something that when you say it, the first thing you think of is law enforcement,” he said. “The first thing people should think about is somewhere they can go to obtain resources that will give them a sense of stability and hope.”

Given the time and effort it took her to find that same sense of stability, Valerie is optimistic about the prospect of a family justice center in New Haven. “It’s just a lot of work to get support,” she said. “I’m hoping [this will make it] a simplified effort.” The planning committee has held focus groups with victims to come up with ideas for the center, which she views as a promising start.

“Talking about this is definitely helpful,” Valerie said.

“As long as you’re talking to the right people about this, this support will help people restart their lives.”

If it takes after Bridgeport’s center, the Hope Family Justice Center of Greater New Haven will be an island of calm, a place where victims have agency, even a pillar of the community. For victims, care will be readily available and accommodating of their needs. It will be some time before the center opens, and it may not solve all of the system’s many problems. But in a city where agencies are hard to reach, where shelters have no free beds, where legal aid is limited, and where victims are arrested along with their abusers a fifth of the time, it’s a start.

– Mark Rosenberg is a sophomore in Pierson College.

The Center for Family Justice in Bridgeport.

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ENDNOTE

Finding love at yale

illustration julia hedges

This one’s for you, Mom

Jacob Sweet Finding love at Yale is hard. Just ask my mom, who has had this explained to her at least twice a month for the past three years. How do you meet someone when everyone seems too busy, too hot, or too consumed with cultivating a hip but low-key Facebook persona to give you a chance? Don’t worry! I’m here to help. Below are some of the best places to find love at Yale!

1. A Dining Hall See a cute guy eating dinner alone? Ask if you can join him! Who knows? Maybe he’ll want you as dessert! Ha ha!

2. Bass Café That girl might seem busy, but everyone can use a break!

Strike up a sweet and spicy conversation about Bass Café’s Sweet and Spicy Chicken Sandwich with Harissa and Red Pepper Aioli. She will definitely send you a GCal invite for Friday evening! ;) 3. Yale Symphony Orchestra rehearsals between 4:00 and 6:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays in the Adams Center The Yale Symphony Orchestra—one of the finest undergraduate orchestras in the country—has plenty of talented and motivated bachelors with compassionate mothers who just want what’s best for them. The clarinet section, in particular, has three notable single men, one of whom is not necessarily opposed to having a girlfriend at the moment, but isn’t going to force it just to please his mother if it’s not in the cards.

4. Old Campus If you’re a first-year, there’s no better place to find a date than on Old Campus! Wait until it’s dark, put on all black, lay face down in the dirt, and wait for someone cute to step on you! When they realize what they’ve done and apologize, threaten to sue them! Do not back down until they agree to come with you to Vivi Bubble Tea. Chewy!

5. Lecture for Selfhood, Race, Class, and Gender in GR109 in Rosenfeld Hall MW 11:35-12:50 Looking for a woke lover who can describe each wave of feminism in comprehensive, intersectional detail? Or just a white dude who is trying his best? One noteworthy scholar, whose mother is just a little worried he is missing out on a really excellent time to meet a long-term partner, sits toward the back left of the room (closest to the Temple Street entrance). He is, again, not really going out of his way to find a girlfriend but wouldn’t really mind making the commitment for someone pretty who thinks Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak deserves more respect in the hip-hop community.

6. The gym The specific gym doesn’t matter. All that matters is you’ll find hard-working people who value their health! What could be better? Get on a treadmill next to a cute guy and run until muscle cramps seize your legs and send you flying off the machine. If he’s a keeper, he will fireman-carry you to Yale Health. It will be a great story to tell your children.

7. Grace Hopper College I21 Looking for a fun place to meet guys? How about a suite with five dudes and only one couch? Of the five, two are gay, one has a girlfriend, and one sleeps upside-down in his closet like a bat. The remaining suitemate—whose mother expressed only mild disappointment when she found out he was practicing clarinet on a Friday night instead of going on a date with any of a seemingly endless pool of smart, sophisticated women—is pretty busy, but can probably make room in his life for someone who still appreciates the novelty of Dippin’ Dots flash-frozen ice cream.

8. Blue State Coffee That cute guy across the room might have a latte on his mind, but did he just wink at you? Maybe you should give it a shot! Chai tea? More like Chai he better know what’s best for him and offer you a place to stay over October break! Ha ha! Success! Have fun meeting his parents!

– Jacob Sweet is a senior in Grace Hopper College.

paula hyman memorial lecture

american jewish men and the anxieties of breadwinning beth s. wenger

Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History and Chair of the History Department University of Pennsylvania

October 26

•

4:00 pm

Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale 2nd Floor Chapel 80 Wall Street • New Haven, CT

For information, please contact Renee Reed at (203) 432-0843 or renee.reed@yale.edu th i s lectu re was ma de possi ble by th e pau la hyma n memor ial lec tu r e fu n d sp onsore d by th e j u da ic stu di es pr ogr am 36 at yale u n ive rsity

image source: New York City (detail), 1936, Russel Lee (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Divisions, Washington DC)

beth s. wenger is Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton University Press, 2010). Wenger’s other works include The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America (Doubleday, 2007), companion volume to the 2008 PBS series The Jewish Americans, which was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist. She is also the author of New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise, (Yale University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Salo Baron Prize in Jewish History from the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Wenger is co-editor of several anthologies and collections, including Encounters With the “Holy Land”: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture (with Jeffrey Shandler) and Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (with Hasia Diner and Jeffrey Shandler). Her most recent anthology Gender in Judaism and Islam: Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage (coedited with Firoozeh KashaniSabet), was published in 2014 by New York University Press.

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Wenger is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History in New York. She has served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and the Association for Jewish Studies. She is also a founding historian of Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History.