Volume 35 - Issue 2

PUBLISHER

Eric Rutlunu EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Daniel Kurtz-Phtlan MANAGING EDITORS ]~ Cohm, Matthnu Undnwood DESIGNER

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THE NEW JouRNAL

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TheNewJournal

Volume 35, Number 2 October 2002

FEATURES

12

The Long Road Home Two families face life after the shelter.

by Victoria Truscheir

18

We Built This City Can Alexander Garvin and his team of Yale graduates rebuild Lower Manhattan as the public envisiom it?

by Emily Lodish

22

Pinheads The competition is fierce, and the beer is stale-but New Haveners aren't bowling alone.

by Jacob Blecher

28

Organized Crime How a seemingly ineffective union demomtration turned a disparate workforce into a unified bloc.

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

STANDARDS 4

Points of Departure

25

Shots in the Dark: Fields of Dream by Anne- 'Webe-r

34 36 38

Essay: A Formal Feeling Comes by Flora Lichtman

The Critical Angle: Voice of America by Kathryn Malizia Endnote: True Blue by Ellm Thompson

Tua Nnr jOURNAL ;; published fi.., rimes during the academic year by TH£ NEW JouRNAL at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box .1-432 Yale Station, New Haven, Cf o6s20. Office addres.: 29-45 Broadway. Phone (20)) 4J1· 19S7· Email: rnj@yale.edu. All contents copyright 2001 by TH.l Nrw }OURNAL at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in pan without written permission of <he publisher and ediror-inchief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale CoUege srudents, Yale Universiry is nor responsible for its contenrs. Sevm rhousand fi.., hundred copies of each issue are disrribured fret ro memben of the Yale and New Haven communiry. Subscriprions are available to rhose outside the area. R.ares: One year, SJ8. Two years, $}1. TH£ Nrw JouRNAL is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; booldceeping and billing .ervi= are provided by Colman Booldtceping of New Haven. THE Nnr }OUitNAL encourages leners to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Wrire ro: Edirorials, .J.4J> Yak Srarioo, New Haven, Cf o6s10. Alllenttt for publication mwr include addres. and sigoaru...,. We reserve the righr to edit alllenen for publication.

0croBER 2002

3

Appraise and Fall IT HAS STOOD through years of KISS concerts, third-rate minor league hockey matches, and the debacles of Yale basketball-but for the first time ever, one day this fall, the main attraction at the New Haven Coliseum was the ill-fated Coliseum itself. The concrete and steel monstrosity was transformed into a hammed-up flea market, and everything, bolted down or not, was on sale.

To visualize the scope of the Coliseum's liquidation, imagine a behemoth grocery store. Replace the cereal boxes and soda cans with the turnstiles and popcorn machines of a professional sports arena. Instead of Wonderbread, row upon row of industrial-sized nacho cheese makers and two ten-foot tall Zambonis Hne the double-wide aisles thronged with crazed bargain hunters. Only one man, a fast talker in a suit coat, could make sense of it all: Welcome to a glorious junkyard auction.

"HEY and twenty-now-twenty-nowtwenty-now-thirty-do I have thirty-now.thirty-now-thirty-HEY! This is a fine piece of equipment folks .... Ifi owned a restaurant I'd buy it myself!" His motorized chariot glided down the aisles, pausing beside each token of the Coliseum's bygone grandeur in its turn. He and his assistant coaxed offers from the crowd with a steady stream of coddling and cajoling: A

4

Volkswagen-sized Hobart eight-slicer"Come on! Everybody needs one!"

Hands shot up and down so quickly that I could hardly tell who was bidding, much less against whom or at what stakes.

Shouts of: "hip! Hip! HIP!" acknowledged the bids. Some of the hipped were local business owners, others had come from as far away as Minnesota to outfit their ice rinks, and still others were just hoping to pick up a cheap television or computer and turn a quick profit on eBay. It was capitalism, unsheathed and unadorned.

Local business owner Robert Neubig saw not only hockey goals, deep fryers, cash registers, forklifts, and Choc-0-Jet hot chocolate makers, but fabulous opportunity as well. Two hours into the auction, he had already bought a nacho cheese dispenser for his 13-year old son-"He loves nachos!"-and a massive metal hot dog warmer to take to church picnics. "This is the ultimate wholesale," he said emphatically. "Write that down: the ultimate wholesale." Of course, he conceded merrily, it is a bit risky. The skill lies in learning to navigate the choppy waters between Treasure Island and the Bermuda Triangle.

"Some people go to the casino. This is how I get my fix; this is my gambling." Even his wife was forewarned that with her husband would come his auction addiction-some-

times indulged several times a month-and an old dairy barn's worth of prize finds.

As an infidel among auction-believers, though, I had to mention my amused skepticism. Robert would have none of it. "Do you have a hot dog maker?" he demanded.

I quickly double-checked my backpack before admitting I did not. "Do you know anyone who has a hot dog maker? Well, now I have one. So I have the opportunity to help out."

Auctions, Robert reflected, are a way of life. But not everyone checking out the siding on industrial strength cookware was so philosophical. Jim and Laurie Burwell of West Haven stopped by to see how they could .b etter outfit their Little League concession business. Pumping cheese onto nachos by hand and keeping coffee water hot in a crock pot can get to you after a while. "This will definitely be easier."

Easier, said the owners of the Connecticut Sports Complex in North Branford, if any of your new equipment actually functions once you get it home. "People don't realize a lot of this stuff is useless. It's really taken a beating."

The silver-tongued auctioneer taking bids on whole sections of stadium seats could overlook such minor derails, however. The company charged with extracting a fmal profit &om the Coliseum would slap a tag on anything in the building that was worth hauling out, and much that wasn't.

It was a strange scene, to say the least-which might explain why, as a firsttime security guard named Max observed in annoyance, "Everyone's got to touch everything." The day after the auction, one man was indignant upon discovering that the dolleys he had bought were being used by other buyers to gather up their own new treasures. Another proud purchaser gave a dry snort of amusement when reminded that he had purchased only the paper advertising the Sports Haven athletic goods store. Someone else had dibs on the frame and glass. Both the Zambonis had sold without incident, one for $6ooo. All four scoreboards went, as well as the floodlights on the ceiling and the illuminated THE NEW JouRNAL

Coliseum advertisement visible from the freeway.

Who made off with that thing, and for what purpose? The Thomas Auction Company does not name names, but one official offered this reassurance: "For the guy who bought it, it was a good price."

So it went at the auction, where nacho cheese makers fetched $85 and the city, like its landmarks, was deconstructed but not destroyed, its refuse given a new lease on life.

The inevitable nostalgia did not last long. Even a 13-year veteran Coliseum employee refused to lament the building's passing. "I try in life to cry as little as possible," he said, directing newcomers to the back offices and equipment rooms where their new possessions awaited them.

"Everything's got to end sometime." And the cycle, as always, begins anew: The man who paid $6ooo for the Zamboni has already offered its old driver a job at his rink.

-Paige Austin

Peculiar Institutions THE MAN SITriNG NEXT TO ME pushes his rimless glasses farther up his sunburnt nose, his graying blond hair flipped across his head. Under a navy cardigan, his starched t-shirc is emblazoned with the words "REPARATIONS Now!" He is one of about a hundred attendees of the "Yale, New Haven, and American Slavery Conference." Co-sponsored by the Yale Law School and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the conference brought together top scholars from September 26TH to the 28TH to explore how slavery "shaped local experience in New Haven," and to "examine ... the contemporary implications of the history we in New Haven and at Yale have inherited."

This topic .echoes the title of last summer's controversial report on Yale's connections to the institution of slavery: "Yale, Slavery, and Abolition." Authored with the OcrosER 2002

support of Yale's labor unions by doctoral students Antony Dugdale, JJ Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, the report sparked a furor of national media attention. It pointed out that initial funds for Yale's first scholarship and endowed professorship came from slave-trade money and that seven of Yale's twelve residential colleges are named for slave owners-including former Vice Presidem John C. Calhoun, who considered the phrase "all men are created equal" to be "utterly untrue." The authors called upon Yale to use the occasion of its 300TH anniversary to revise its public reputation as an institution with a "long history of activism in the face of slavery," as purported in its brochures. The authors urged Yale to acknowledge its connection to slavery-and, most importantly, to consider paying reparations to descendants of slaves.

Robert Forbes, Associate Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, described Dugdale, Fueser, and Celso's paper as "not a sophisticated piece of scholarship," but conceded that their "work is an excellent launching pad." Organizers repeatedly acknowledged that the graduate students' findings triggered the initiative for the conference. "Without provocation this conference would not have been conceived and we owe a debt to that paper," said Yale Law School Dean Anthony K.ronman. Forbes stated the connection more explicitly. After the publication of the report, trumpeted by blaring headlines in The New York Times, Forbes received a call from Yale President Richard Levin's office. "They weren't interested in a quickie response," said Forbes, but instead a "serious scholarly conference that engaged the specific questions of the report" and "obligations of institutions . Âť across orne.

Though conference coordinators felt indebted to the graduate students for, as President Levin put it, "bringing ~ational attention to something we often ignore," they did not include them in the planning process. "My invitation to the conference arrived in the mail two days after the deadline for registration had passed. This was the first time either Antony, Celso, and I

were contacted by conference organizers," Fueser told me.

Despite the political demands of the grad students'. report, the conference was conceived as a dispassionate, scholarly examination of a complicated history. In his opening remarks, Dean K.ronman defined the conference as "an academic evem [that] belongs to the world of scholarship not the world of politics." David Davis, Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, asserted that this was "a scholarly conference that is in no way meant as a reply to [the graduate students'] paper."

The conference certainly succeeded in bringing star scholars to Yale to evince the hard history of slavery in the North, and to discuss the philosophical hurdles of monetary compensation for pa$t wrongs. David Blight, an award-winning historian who will join the Yale faculty next January, delivered the keynote address in which he probed the difference between history and memory. The panel charged with examining "The Moral Claims of the Past: Justice Across Time" included Princeton Professor Anthony Appiah and former Solicitor General Charles Fried. Fried expounded on the problems of "attenuation" and "calculating the half-life of injury" in relation to slavery reparation claims. He asserted that all that was due was an "inquiry into the uuth ... that above all is what is owed and that is a debt this conference is paying."

Several attendees did not concur, and criticized the conference for being overly scholastic. Warren Kimbro, who runs a half-way house in New Haven, knocked the conference as "just another academic exercise," another instance of "white liberals leading us down the road of reparations. . . . I'd like to see Yale do a conference on why there's a generation of young black men in prison." Reverend Eric Smith of the New Haven Reparations Coalition reiterated Kimbro's worry tha~ the conference, and Yale's stand on reparaci~ns, was merely academic. "Generations of school children will learn about the Yale, Slavery and Abolition report and about this conference," he said.

"If nothing gets done they are going to ask

5

why and you can't help bur wonder how they will feel about this conference, Yale ... and¡ about their world."

Blight opened his speech with a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, describing Marquez's portrait of a world without memory as one where "people lost their identity in the anarchy of ignorance." But perhaps knowledge roo can create a kind of anarchy, one in which a muddle of phrases like "notions of memory" and "the half-life of injury" distract institutions from their practical responsibilities.

-AnaMufioz

eye without going blind. When a penis is inserted in a man's anus, thar is a total ... I don't even know how to describe it ... it is so abnormal."

Strangely, this logic is often shunned by scientists, who manage time and rime again to overlook the simple facts. For example, even Alvin Novick, a professor of biology and public health ar Yale-also, incidentally, a physician, a scientist, a past editor of the AJDS and Public Policy ]ourna4 a co-founder of many AIDS programs in New Haven, and a consultant co organizations like the Centers for Disease Control-fails to grasp the finer points of

IT's A GOOD THING CoNNEcriCUT has at least one candidate in November's congressional election with the answers to one of the 21ST century's most pressing crises. A global disaster like the AIDS epidemic calls for an informed and clear-sighted leader like Joseph A. Zdonczyk, who hopes to represent the Concerned Citizens Party in the coming election.

Zdonczyk doesn't resort to quick-fix solutions to the epidemic like promoting safer sex ("You can ask anybody. It adds to the spread of the HIV virus.") or increasing funding for AIDS research ("Let's consider how much money is being spent on developing a cure for Hrv compared to the real killers.") And as for those "concoctions" scientists keep testing? It's simpler than that.

Unlike any scientist ro date, rhe Concerned Citizen knows the single formula that "stops mv in its tracks." The key, he recognizes, is simply "to remain true to your state of life." And remaining true to your state of life means heterosexual activities only, no "extracurriculars." Because, the aspiring public official explained, "All the stuff I've read leads me to believe; look, if you're doing something abnormal, you have to expect consequences."

Though Zdonczyk is the first to admit that he's not a scientist, his position is strongly supported by a few of his own scientific theories. "Your human anatomy is made to function in a certain way," he explained carefully. "You can't twist your arms in the back of you without breaking your arms. You can't stick a thumb in your

Zdonczyk's theory. Scientists like Novick go so far as to insist that "disrespect" for homosexuals spreads the scourge like wildfire. Anne Williams, a nurse practitioner who works with AIDS patients in New Haven, subscribes to this same fiction.

"The stigma," she claimed, "still keeps people from care or sends people to care that's not cutting-edge."

But facts are facts. And the intolerance for immorality that Novick and Williams call stigma is for Zdonczyk nothing more than good, old-fashioned virtue. Afrer all, Zdonczyk's theories are backed by historical evidence as well as Sunday School teachings. According to Zdonczyk, the first cases of AIDS occurred in gay men. "It was originally in the homosexual community.

Now it's in the heterosexual community," he explained. "It wasn't there and now it is.

What kind of conclusion can you draw?"

Of course, Zdonczyk concedes, we really don't have enough information to make a definitive link. "You'd have to have

Anal Attentive

6

Joseph A. Zdonczyk

someone with medical research experience conducting tests," he acknowledges. But let's be honest with ourselves. Is that really necessary? "Sometimes," Zdonczyk says, "you can look at circumstantial evidence and draw a conclusion." Zdonczyk didn't draw that conclusion without reading between the lines of the history books. "Do you know what they used to call AIDS?" he asks. "GRIDS: Gay-related Immune Deficiency Syndrome." Why the name change? The little-known explanation lies in the subversive influence of the gay population. "The homosexuals must have put pressure on the physicians and medical community so that the name was changed to AIDS." Since it's common knowledge that "the homosexual community is very, very politically and monetarily powerful," it's a wonder the scientists don't see it. Afrer all, Zdonczyk points our, homosexuals "don't have families to raise, expenses that married people have."

But for some reason, Novick and others who claim expertise in the field reduce AIDS to a "medical and public health problem," and refuse to acknowledge that the cure for AIDS lies in assigning blame.

Novick isn't even satisfied with the enormous funds the epidemic has already sapped from more serious projects--even in Connecticut, where he claims AIDS programs are among the world's best. "The best isn't good enough," he said. Evidently nor-not for the selfish, that is.

Zdonczyk's perspective on this issue is broad-minded and compassionate, and at that, a welcome deparnue from common misconceptions. Zdonczyk sees this funding for what it really is: a "serious injustice" that can kill innocent people. ¡ By enabling those who contracted HIV to succumb to their "appetites," he laments, "you are actually contributing to the deaths of many who are victims of cancer." And victims of cancer, Zdonczyk points out, are not the only ones to suffer at the expense of the gay community.

"Now," he said sadly, "we see AIDS spread about the world and millions have died and probably millions will die." What's more, "the homosexual community is using those other people as an excuse to demand additional funding." As if medical funding weren't enough, Novick and his colleagues also fight for education programs, to prevent AIDS by teaching "safer sex." Zdonczyk

THE NEW JouRNAL

I

sees the danger in this scheme as well. That sense of "Hey, you're gonna be safe," that green light to engage in homosexual activity, Zdonczyk explains, shows us why such •hackneyed, trite" solutions are actually contributing to the spread of the AIDS virus.

Let's take Zdonczyk's lead and stop pretending. "If we only look at the situation and be honest with ourselves, we know what the causes are and we know what the remedies are." T hat's the kind of fresh insight we need in Congress. We need a Concerned Citizen. It's high time Connecticut has a leader who recognizes the remarkable simplicity of this global crisis once and for all.

-Erica Franklin

The Feminine Critique WHEN SH E TAKES THE FLOOR in

the elegant atrium of Beinecke Library, Yale Provost Alison Richard reminds us of a recent past that nonetheless feels as ancient as the library's volumes. "When I came to Yale in 1972," she begins, "there were six tenured women faculty. Now every year there are more and more women. But I am not going to spout statistics at you."

She does not need to. Tonight's audience speaks for itself. Almost a hundred women have come together under the auspices of the Women's Faculty Forum (WFF) to welcome new women faculty and administrators and to recognize women who have recently received tenure. These newcomers are now part of a community of L48 female faculty members, nearly twice the number of ten years ago.

T he Forum came into existence during preparations for the Tercentennial last year. Professors, thinking it would be a temporary group, planned a series of events to chronicle the effects of coeducation at Yale and the growth of scholarship related to women since the 1970s. But despite the prevailing optimism of the series, the women involved also became more acutely aware of how many problems remained. In the wake of their success, the group secured a charter extending its existence for three more years, resolving to make sure that the University kept increasing diversity and that scholars kept addressing women's

issues.

0cro&ER 2002

The group got to work identifying what needed to change in order for more women to get tenure. After looking into the question , they decided that their top priorities were childcare and parental leave policy. Elizabeth Dillon, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, spearheads the WFP investigation into parenting faculty needs. "T he biggest issue is that people can't find childcare and they cannot afford it," says Dillon. "To get a place in a · Yale-affuiated child care center, Assistant Professor of English Amy Hungerford had to start paying a thousand dollars a month to secure a place. T his was before her kid was even born!" Coming to Yale with two young daughters, Dillon found herself spending two thirds of her salary on childcare alone. "The problem is that by and large these people are junior faculty members. At the time that you are trying to really struggle to get tenure is also the time that you are struggling to care for your children." Not just policy, but attitudes need to change. In the eyes of some colleagues, Dillon explains, "there is a way in which you become body and not mind when you are pregnant." Strategies that women have developed to cope with these obstacles can have unforeseen consequences. "(Some junior professors] are putting it off until they get tenured, and then often times they are no longer able to have kids," she laments. "The shape of the academic career is based on an old model, that of a male head of household and a wife," Dillon says.

"The entire society needs to think through a new model of family life and work life." · By and large, however, Dillon is less worried for women in the humanities than for those in the still overwhelmingly male disciplines like math and science. Megan Urry, Professor of Physics & Astrophysics and the Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, agrees that women in the sciences face more problems balancing career and family. "Younger women are coming to me worried that they have to c:hoose between being a mother and having a career," she says. She identifies with some of their fears. "When I got pregnant, I was afraid to tell people. I thought they would write me off."

The WFP aims to eliminate these obstacles for future generations of female faculty. In the coming year, they will continue sponsoring events and programs and

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searching for solutions for parent professors. Only after we build such new models of motherhood, Dillon argues, can the young women of che current student population reach che heights they have been raised to believe they deserve: "We need co chink up the changes that will make possible che kinds of lives that Yale students expect to lead, both as care-takers and as people wich careers."

-Sophie Raseman

Old Man River SPORTING A FADED BLUE SWEATER, worn jeans, and scuffed white tennis shoes, Pecer Davis could almost pass for the average New Havener. That is, until I spot the halffilled eight-gallon oil can in his hand, its contents clearly visible through che plastic.

His brow furrowing, he cells me, "I just

city life. These days he ceaselessly patrols the screecs and riverbanks for illegal dumping. He claims to have collected 14 million pounds of debris over the past 16 years.

Davis's newest nemesis is a particularly nasty post-industrial eyesore on the Quinnipiac riverfront: che Lloyd Terminal Company in Fair Haven. "Don't get me wrong," Davis says of the company's operations, "''m not against the principle of scrap metal recycling in general. But I am against what hurts our wildlife and our community." Davis claims chat tO save money and escape financial trouble, Lloyd Terminal has piled its barges so high that debris falls off in co che river. This flotsam is more than just the standard fare of rotten shoes and discarded milk cartons that litter any urban river: Davis has found needles, wheels, half-filled oil cartons, car axles, traces of asbestos, and an entire piano.

With rain and high tides, che waste spills

An overflowing barge on the Quinnipiac River

picked this up ceo minutes ago on Chapel.

Sometimes I just don't understand people."

Originally from the Hill neighborhood, Peter Davis has long deale with the environmental dilemmas that plague industrial cities like New Haven. 16 years ago, however, Davis decided that he and his hometown had taken enough of a beating. The result has been what friends and foes alike term a "one-man crusade" against environmental injustice--and environmental apathy. A major breakthrough carne in 1994, when he established Canoe New Haven, a youth program intended to provide the children of some of New Haven's poorest neighborhoods with a scenic escape from

8

into the river and spreads.

Davis gestures anxiously at a photograph of a boy splashing in the Quinnipiac with his dog. "There are people who fish in this river, who make their living from it.

And despite the water warnings, people will swim in the water-like chis kid. Eight gallons of oil pollutes roughly 1000 gallons of water. And I've found thousands of discarded oil cartons on these streets and river banks." Davis considers Lloyd Terminal's repeated violations of metal crushing regulations co be dangerous not only environmentally but symbolically as well. He attributes the recent rise in local illegal dumping pardy co Lloyd Terminal's setting

a bad example. H e laments, "Once these companies get a government permit, they do anything they want, and the people start to chink they can do che same thing."

T hanks in large part to his efforts, however, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has fined Lloyd Terminal repeatedly. In May of 2002, the state ruled that Lloyd Terminal could continue to transfer irs remaining scrap, but suspended indefinitely the company's right to crush additional scrap metal.

According to Davis, however, the issue remains unresolved, and Lloyd Terminal has continued its metal crushing operations despite the impositions of the DEP and the local police. As we drive to the site in his pickup, Davis tells me that he has received a call from a local fisherman, his "eyes and ears," telling him that the Lloyd Terminal machines have been pounding metal all day. As we pull up to the site, a bright yellow scrap metal machine is squatting in the middle of a towering mound of refuse. Less than 30 feet downstream is a fisherman playing his trade. Workers from the Lloyd Terminal site begin eyeing us, and Daviswho's already slapped the owner of Lloyd Terminal with two lawsuits for personally threatening him--decides it's time to go.

As the smokestacks and rust of industrial Fair Haven blur by us, Davis points out the pristine oudine of East Rock to our right. "The contrast is unmistakable," he says. "The people of Fair Haven want what's over there over here." What Davis has in mind is a confluence of New Haven communities through the "natural greenways and natural blessings" of New Haven: the Mill River, the West River, and the Quinnipiac. When I ask him about . the reality of his vision in light of his tussle with the Lloyd Terminal Company, his weatherbeaten face twists into a wry smile.

He assures me that the gradual return of wildlife to the area is a sign that his efforts have not been fruidess. He also praises the efforts of Mayor DeStefano, who "has seen the vision" and is now fully behind Davis' efforts to battle Lloyd Terminal. "I'll never give in," Davis asserts. "My sons would never forgive me. They expect me to come back covered in mud."

-YusufSamara

THE NEW JouRNAL

It Takes Two ON A BRIGHT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I find my way to the Educational Center for the Arts and stand in the doorway ready co watch the free tango session offered as a part of its quiet reopening celebration.

Several people mill around, but no one makes eye contact. The only person in the room, a man with two large tufts of beard growing down from either side of his chin, notices the awkward crowd and walks toward che door. He claps his hands and smiles. "Come into the ballroom.

Welcome. I am Willie." We all smile shyly and step in. I wouldn't call this a "ballroom," but I'm glad Willie does. The afternoon light casts pink and yellow rectangles on the black dance floor through arc-deco stained glass windows. There is something hushed about the room, the students, the pre-class atmosphere. Then Willie pushes a button and lush tango music fills the cavernous room.

"Lee's start," Willie says, surveying us.

"Can everyone please find a parmer?" The pre-class eye aversion is no longer acceptable. To my lefr is a pot-bellied man in his thirties who, with his baseball shire and torn jeans, would look infinitely more at home in a sports bar. The man to my right is young and well above six feet tall. His gende smile surprises me as he offers me his arm.

WJlie instructs us to walk with our partners in beat to the music. I would have to crane my neck to make eye contact with my partner, so instead I stare ac his torso.

He smells slighdy of sweat, but for some reason it doesn't bother me. Perhaps it's something about the small cimid steps he takes, and the frequency with which he clips my toes. Then Willie calls ouc that we muse switch partners.

Now I find myself next to a chubby litde boy wearing an over-sized collared cshirt with a large stain in the middle. He won't make eye contact with me. "What's your name?" I ask, smiling. He mumbles his name; I still have no idea what ic is.

"I'll lead, okay?" The boy nods. The music starts up again. I notice that my young partner has begun co stare at me in dumb &scination as he shuffies rhythrrJessly along the dance floor. Feeling slighdy awkward, I decide to make conversation with him in order ro break his penetrating OcroBER 2002.

stare. My attempts are met with monosyllabic answers, and I stop trying. The stare continues. I get used co it, and even scare to find it charming.

My partner for the double-time exercise is Susan, Willy's assistant. She wears a red dress with large purple Hawaiian flowers and smiles at me without showing her teeth. She is straight-spined and tenselimbed. I like dancing with her; she is very certain abouc each seep. I glance toward the door and notice a small crowd hovering there, watching us. I sense that all the other tango students feel the same smugness I do--no hovering in the doorway for us.

We're on che dance floor.

And stay we do, through all of the forward and backward and double time exercises. Suddenly ic's the last dance, and I'm back with my firsc partner. The music starts up again. AH of the couples move counterclockwise. Halfway through the song I can feel that the cwo of us have found the rhythm. He's noc taking those ciny steps anymore. We are together, striding in rhythm. After a moment we lose the beat, and he seeps on my roes.

When the song ends, everyone stands in a circle, looking openly at one another.

Willy thanks us, claps his hands, and dismisses the one and only free afternoon tango class. I consider sticking around and talking to my fellow students, but somehow I can't bring myself to stay. Walking quickly down the staircase, I realize that it's because I want them tO remain exacdy what they have been for the past hour: strangers who are willing to spend a bright Saturday afrernoon learning how to look other strangers straight in the eye.

-Helen Phillips

has the name and visage of a trolley, complete with red and green old-time shell and clanging bell, its heart is an electric hybrid bus, built especially for the New Haven Trolley Line by the EBus Corporation of California.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. opened the Trolley Line this summer to surreal fanfare.

At the opening ceremony, DeStefano announced, "The charge is not ten dollars, its not five dollars , its not even one dollar.

It's ... " At this point he opened his arms to a crowd of city, business, and arts community officials. O n cue, they all yelled, "Free!"

Well, not quite. This year's great white elephant was funded by $2.50,000 from the Transportation and Community Systems Preservation Pilot Program, $x,ooo,ooo from the Federal Transportation Administration Bus Program, and approximately $2.50,000 from the New Haven community, including the Greater New Haven C lean C ities Coalition. And when the federal money for the "preserved trolleys" begins to run dry, New Haven will have to turn to the trolley's passengers to foot the bill.

The boy, his guardian, the conductor, and I were the orJy passengers on the trolley that Saturday afrernoon. We were on the financial leg of the trolley's route, a loop that demarcates downtown New Haven: up Whimey to Orange and State, up Chapel, then down York, Elm, and back to Whitney.

"Those buildings have lots of squares!"

The boy pointed over my shoulder at the banks on Whitney. "Oh, yes. Buildings do have lots of squares," replied the old lady dreamily. "I am so glad we took this trolley.

We're so tired and it'll take us home. A free

Blunder Bus NEVER BEEN ON A BUS BEFORE!" said the red-haired toddler seated across from me.

He got up and sat down again on the wooden bench in excitement. "It's your first trolley ride," corrected his companion, a srout black woman . She dabbed her forehead with a handkerchief. But the toddler was right. Though the machine " I'VE

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ride back to Grandpa's house. Oh, this is a lifesaver." The trolley let the old lady and her grandson out at the corner of Audobon and O range. "This was fun. Say goodbye to the trolley man," she said as she stepped off. The boy stood on the corner and waved to the conductor, who rung the trolley's bell three times in response. "That's a loud one, huh?" he asked the little boy paternally, before closing the doors and continuing down Orange.

I slid up front and struck up a conversation with the conductor. Frank was happy to talk and, in a slow drawl, began to tell me about life on the trolley. We turned left back onto Elm, right on State Sueet, and left on Chapel. We passed six trolley stops withou t another rider. I asked Frank how many people he sees on a typical day.

"Usually in eight hours on a Saturday you do 6o to a hundred people," he told me.

"Which is not a lot. You get a lot of kids with their grandparents, with mothers and fathers. They're the biggest riders." T he trolley is currently free, but Frank expects that when the weather changes, more people will start riding, and he will have to ask passengers tO deposit their quarters in the fare canister by the door.

The trolley pulled up to the corner of College and Chapel. Another elderly woman and her ten-year-old granddaughter got on. They sat across from me and I asked them why they were riding. "Oh, for sightseeing," answered the grandmother.

The granddaughter told me she's never ridden a trolley before. (Well, she still hasn't.)

After rounding York and Elm, we stopped at the corner of Elm and Temple. On the curb, a portly man with a thick black moustache smiled, reached in the air and pumped his arm, the universal gesture for 'pull the bell, buddy.' Frank stepped on the bell pedal. Ding-dong. The portly man and the rest of the crowd at the bus stop cheered and got onto their bus.

The bus blew past us towards North Haven, emitting diesel fumes from its tail pipe. I wondered what that $1.5 million might have done had it been put towards cleaning up the real mass transportation of New Haven.

Like the trolleys themselves, the dream behind the trolley was hybrid: an anem pt to marry cooked-up memories of New Haven's booming past with a m uddled future of economic renewal and environ-

mentally-friendly technology. It's sweet and benign, but its nostalgia is no more than novelty, and its green goals stretch only as far as its route around an apathetic Yale campus and a gentrified downtown.

"How long we riding this?" the granddaughter asked her grandmother, as she curled up in the crook of her heavy arm.

"Till we get back to where we got on." The granddaughter pulled on her grandmother's arm. "Please can we stay on here till four o'clock?" The trolley pulled back up to their stop on the New Haven Green and the grandmother got up and walked to the opening door. "I don't wanna go, I don't wanna!" the granddaughter called out mischievously. The grandmother glanced back and stepped out the door. "Come on," she said. The girl bounced on the seat two more times, popped up and scampered out the door. "Thank you, thank you!" she called out to Frank, who smiled and waved.

I was once again alone with Frank. As we rounded Chapel onto York, Frank asked me how many times I planned on riding the trolley. A little taken aback, I replied that I'd be getting off soon. " It's okay," he said apologetically.

"We're only allowed to go around with somebody once. I didn't know either. I went with some old guy for seven trips the other day. It was raining, and I don't think he had anywhere to go. My supervisor met me at a stop and he says, 'Forgot to tell you, but people can only ride once.' It being free and all."

I got off at the corner of York and Elm. Frartk rang the bell and floated away alone.

-Christopher Heaney

THE NEW JouRNAL

The Master of Jonathan Edwards College and the Dean of Engineering Invite you to attend the Yale Enginee ring Sesquicentennial and Tetelman Lecture Synthetic Gene Delivery Systems 4 pm Wednesday, October 16, 2002 Davies Auditorium 1 5 Prospect Street The Master's Tea A Conversation with Mark Davis 4 pm Thursday, October 17, 2002 JE Master's House, 70 High Street Self-Assembly in the Synthesis of Pourous Materials 4 pm Friday, October 18, 2002 160 Sterling Chemistry Laboratory 225 Prospect Street coffee and tea at 3:30 pm Mark E. Davis Mark Davis is Warren and Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering and Executive Officer of the Department of Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology. Both his undergraduate and graduate degrees are in chemical engineering and from the University of Kentucky where he was awarded a Ph.D in 1981. He is widely published in the areas of zeolite and molecular sieve synthesis and catalytic application and is currently investigating new materials for drug delivery. His research accomplishments have been recognized by many awards, including the first award to an engineer of the NSF-Alan T. Waterman Award, and a number of distingu ished university lectureships, five in 2002 alone at University of Colorado, Boulder; University of California, Berkeley; University of Notre Dame; Purdue University; and Carnegie Mellon University.

Professor Davis is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Synthetic Gene Delivery Systems Traditionally, small molecule drugs have been derived from natural products (plants, microbes. and marine organisms). With the explosion of genetic information. the creation of nucleic-acid based therapeutics is now advancing at a rapid pace . These so-called gene therapies translate knowledge acquired on the genetic bases of diseases into treatments for humans. Unlike small molecule drugs that can passively move into and throughout cells, macromolecular therapeutics must actively be transported. With nucleic-acid-based drugs, the active transport involves penetration into the cell and movement to the nucleus. These demands take drug delivery to new heights by now requiring not only control of the level and location of the drug within the body, but also intracellular trafficking to a specified sub-cellular locality (nucleus). Efforts to design and prepare new synthetic materials for gene delivery are increasing, and an example highlighting the use of intelligent materials will be presented.

OCTOBER 2002

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flipping mealy Bisquik pancakes. He is used to cooking for his fa.tl)ily; his mother Mary Anne is blind in one eye and reeling from respiratory disease. Poppo drenches three half-cooked pancakes in syrup for Mary Anne, who is sitting on a sunken couch, the only item of furniture in their stark living room. His sister Anna sleeps on a :mattress on the floor rather than share a barracks-style bunk-bed with her two brothers in the bedroom.

Mary Anne needs some luck right now. She lives.with three of her four children at Christian Community Action (cCA), a homeless shelter in New Haven. Unless she can find an affordable apartment by October 15, her shelter cut-off date, her family will disintegrate. The Department of Children and Families (ocF) will seize her two youngest children and send them to live with strangers in foster homes. The arrangement would be temporary-if Mary Anne could find an apartment, she would regain custody-but she dreads the prospect of losing her kids. To pay for an apartment and keep her children, she needs a Section 8 voucher, a bond that the state pays to a landlord in place of rent. But the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers is more than 500 names long. Securing a voucher, though possible, could take several years.

Down the street, Jennifer and J ubi are fighting over green apple lip gloss. They are four and five years old respectively, and homeless.

P

OPPO IS STANDING BAREFOOT IN. THE TINY KITCHEN,

on But their lives are more cheerful and comfortable than Mary Anne's.

Jennifer got the lip gloss for her fourth birthday, along with a Momt~rs Inc. video, which she and her six brothers and sisters have watched three times in two days. They live at another CCA shelter with their mother Didi. Didi found a job last week: She is now a manager at Sam's Club, and her kids rave about her accomplishment. Money is obviously tight, but her family went to Chuck E. Cheese last weekend, and the job will help Didi provide her children with food and shelter.

Both of these families, mired deep in poverty, are reaching on their tiptoes for the bottom rung of the economic ladder. But their stories will likely diverge. While Didi is on her way up, Mary Anne has litde. hope of escape. This is the story of two families struggling to find homes, and the obstacles in their way.

1 HE MOST PROMINENT FEATURE IN MARY ANNE'S LIVING ROOM is

'1 a cylindrical oxygen tank with a breathing tube that she inserts in her nostrils. She removes it to yell at 15-year-old Anna and 13year-old Joey, who are alternately hiding in the closet and chasing each other around the house. "What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Stupid assholes!" Her voice is dry and gracing, and yelling seems like it hurts. Mary Anne was in the hospital with pneumonia for three weeks in May and had to return several times

Two families

face 1ife after the she1ter

12

THE NEW JouRNAL

in June. She cannot work, and though Anna plans to find a job when she turns 16 next month, their only source of income at the moment is welfare.

Mary Anne's eldest child Ginger is 25 and slightly mentally retarded, or, in her mother's words, "slow." She lives in an institution down the road but comes home to visit regularly. Ginger calls Mary Anne "Mommy," and Mary Anne dotes on her. They were "hospital buddies" this summer, when Ginger had a shunt put in her liver. The shunt makes her constantly nauseated. As she shovels pancakes into her mouth, she suddenly gags. Mashed pancake bits, stuck in her teeth, threaten to explode out of her mouth. "Do you have to throw up, Ginger? Try to get to the coilet," her mother tells her. Still chewing, she turns towards the bathroom, pauses, and sits back down. "I'm okay."

Today, if Ginger's feet don't hurt, they will walk co a local church soup kitchen , as they do on most Sunday afternoons.

Sometimes they walk to Store 24, where the kids buy slurpees and Mary Anne relaxes with a cup of coffee. She hates going down there when she doesn't have money, "cause you can't buy anything and it's all there." Today she didn't have money for the New Haven Register, which Poppo reads to her. He looks through the classifieds for housing and a job for himself, since he just turned 18 and got his GED. Mary Anne was evicted from her last apartment, on Chapel

Street in Fair Haven, when the building was condemned. H er apartment alone had 45 code violations, and the 82-year old landlord never touched the building. The family moved out less than 24 hours after receiving an eviction notice and dragged their belongings to a park. They stayed there all day, from 7 AM to 6 PM, until their social worker put them up in a motel. Anna had to leave behind two beloved cats and a guinea pig she had owned for four years. "She couldn't part with them. She was very depressed, and DCF made her leave them in the park," Mary Anne recalls.

After their last apartment, the CCA shelter, with its back porch and open spaces, was a welcome relief Sometimes the churches down the street have services in Spanish, and Mary Anne likes to sit on the back porch and listen to the music. She is worried about her impending deadline, though. "The people are great, and I love being here, but I need to get my own apartment. I would take anything right now. I'm pretty depressed," she says. Her blind eye is always watery, but now her good eye tears up as well.

Both CCA and the city's social services agency are trying to help.

"I have two good social workers on my side," she says; they are doing what they can. The OCF can make special arrangements to find her a voucher, but that may take months. Depending on cCA's assessment of the situation, Mary Anne may be granted an extension to stay two more weeks in the shelter.

By Victoria Truscheit â&#x20AC;˘,

0croBER

2002

13

New Haven has taken heat in recent weeks &om homeless advocates and protesters camped out in the tent city on the New Haven Green for imposing 90-day length-of-stay requirements in city-run shelters. But family shelters have had cutoff dates for years. "For individuals whose lives are unstable, sometimes in the shelter a complacency or a comfort level sets in," Bonita Grubbs, executive director of CCA, tells me. "The cut-off dates are not intended to be punitive. If we don't give them some benchmarks, they'd be perfectly content to stay here. There's no rent, no electricity or gas bills, none of the economic strains that come with renting an apartment. This is a really comfortable environment where a family can catch ics breath."

But Mary Anne needs to do m'ore than catch her breath. I mention the tenacity of the protesters on the Green; cold weather is . co·ming soon, I say, and they will still be out there. "I might be one of them," Mary Anne jokes. But then she laughs and waves the thought away.

·c

PROVIDES 60-DAY temporary shel. ter for 17 families in buildings on Sylvan Avenue and Davenport Street. As family shelters in New Haven always are, these 17 CCA apartmentS are full.

Shelter caseworkers turn away many more families than they are able to accept. Life Haven, Inc., a shelter for women and children, turned down 28 families in August alone. The state has no legal obligation to provide for them. Unlike other state constitutions-New York's, for exampleConnecticut's constitution does not guarantee the right to housing. The state's homeless population has risen significantly in the past year, and shelters are running out of resources. Most shelters in New Haven do receive money from the state, but they still have to stay on their toes.

Earlier this summer, the state cut a chunk of itS social services budget, which includes shelter funding. At the last minute, someCA

one discovered extra money and restored funds, but CCA was up to lose $2o,ooo.

"This p roblem has been coming for awhile," says Grubbs. "In 1980 the state supported affordable housing to the rune of $125 million. Now it's like $5 million, and the freight train is going down the hill. I think we're going to be in this crunch for a while."

Didi · makes . sure her kids are fed. •I•m willing to eat dirt as long as they have eggs, • she vows.

No one can defmitively explain the increase in homelessness. The factors overlap, forming a complex web of stories that eventually sound the same: they foreclosed on my apartment, slumlords let my building go to hell, minimum wage isn't enough for New Haven rentS, I can't find a job, I can't feed my kids and pay rent' too. And welfare reform, for its part, has knocked several thousand Connecticut families off the dole and onto the street in the past year alone. Many of them are tired of imposing-dumping their kids on friends' couches, crashing at a brother's house.

Unlike the city's single homeless population, homeless families tend to be lifelong New Haven residentS. "Some families may never have been to a shelter before, but maybe they haven't had a permanent address in two years," explains Rachel Heerema, executive director of Life Haven.

The phenomenon of the working homeless is more common than one might

think. Jose, Didi's boyfriend, has had the same job for eight years but does not make nearly enough to provide for the nine people his wages need to support. 18-year-old Michael lives with his mother, Valerie, down the hall from Didi at CCA. "You're not looking for a job. You're looking for a career," he says. "I don't see any moms over here with careers. I see moms working at Dunkin DonutS, Kentucky Fried Chicken -those are teenager jobs. They're busting their asses, doing it the best they can, but they can't keep up."

Substance abuse preventS much of the single homeless population &om escaping their situation, but none of the parentS I met had a drug or alcohol problem. "With families, it's a different kettle of fish.

ParentS have an amazing capacity to keep it together for their kids, and children are an incredible motivator," says Heerema.

When addiction does become a problem, shelters call the state child welfare agency to intervene, and children are put in foster care. Parents then have to move out of the family shelter. But the incidence of addiction is low among homeless families with children. The causes of their homelessness are much broader.

When minimum wage won't pay the rent, people turn to the government. "The city bears the major responsibility to house ics own folks. Do they have the funds for that? Not really. Who does?" asks Grubbs.

Grubbs is clearly frustrated with the city's impotence. "Maybe the dry's trying to do something about it with their initiativd.

But my fear is, with aU the attemptS to stabilize the dry, we might lose sight of individuals that are looked upon as a drain on the city's resources. Someone has to take care of them. What is being done to make living in this city affordable?" The homeless mothers I have met tend to lash out at the government in urgent, immediate anger.

Mayor DeStefano's recent salary increase has been fodder for protesters on the Green. Grubbs, however, seems torn,

TaE NEW JouRNAL

unwilling to point fingers but overwhelmed by the scope of the problem.

Money helps, of course. But no one, anywhere, seems to know what to do with homeless families. New Yorkers shook their fists this summer when Mayor Bloomberg, faced with the specter of 300 families sleeping on the floor at the city's homeless intake center, herded them into an abandoned jail. Inspectors found lead paint in the jail a few days later, and officials hastily moved families with children under seven back to the intake center. Bloomberg was pummeled for his handling of the situation, but even after the public outrage, a better solution was hard to come by.

24 SYLvAN AVENUE, where Didi's family lives, is a nondescript building, across the street from an empty lot, with two security doors and a faded "No Loitering" sign. The block, littered with candy wrappers washed up from the sewer, is especially ugly on rainy days. Inside, apartment numbers are handwritten in permanent marker on sour green doors.

The building hums with the sound of TVsets, hairdryers, and thumping hip-hop music. Downstairs, a bulletin board is covered with Christian inspirational messages, including a letter from Satan thanking readers for succumbing to his temptations.

"Jennifer, let me do your hair," Didi calls. She begins to wrestle Jennifer's hair into a little afro puff-a long, difficult-

1

process that involves a lot of gel. Angel, Didi's oldest boy at II, lets out a whoop from the couch as he beats his younger brother AJ at a Sega game yet again. Didi calls Angel an "old soul." Under long eyelashes his brown eyes seem to be pondering measures of weighty importance. He has a collection of about 20 cos, all hip-hop, and spends every spare moment dancing to Ja Rule and Bubba Sparxx. Angel takes pride in running errands for his mom, bringing her the phone and borrowing eggs when she asks. When he thinks no one is looking, he combs back his hair with a pick he carries in his pocket.

Angel wants to be a "child doctor," like Benjamin Carson, whom he heard speak at Yale last year. Didi brags that AJ and Angel both get straight A's in school. AJ is visibly embarrassed and tells her he hates when she says that, but he smiles. Angel mentions several times that he reads at a ninth grade level.

The amount of food this family consumes is astonishing. AJ has made himself a sandwich with bologna, cheese, and the heel of a loaf of bread. Sandwich bread, among other things, disappears quickly in a family of nine. Didi lets Jubi sip from her coffee mug. "I need my coffee," she confesses. In an apartment this chaotic, I can see why. "I tell people I have seven kids.

Everybody asks me, 'Are you crazy?' But they keep me going," she says.

Though he says none of his friends

care that he lives in a homeless shelter, Angel hates staying at CCA. "The shelter sucks. It's annoying. There's no privacy," he says. But it is clean and well-maintained.

Didi's last apartment was much like Mary Anne's. "I was living on the Boulevard in a three bedroo~ apartment. T here's rats the size of raccoons in our apartment, and they see this, and they say it's liveable. Roaches crawling in your refrigerator. The judge said it's not worth it to be condemned, and there's much more they could be doing to that apartment. But the landlord's not doing anything! Why don't you take it away from him?" she asks, her voice rising in frustration. Didi fought with her landlord for four months and withheld rent until he threatened to evict her. Unable to find another apartment, she left on her own terms and moved in with her brother until she found space in a shelter. "The beautiful places, they're bOarded up. And if they're not, they want $1,500 for a 4 bedroom. How are we going to afford that on a $6.50 an hour salary?"

Didi and her family have lived at CCA since mid-August. She quit her job at Dunkin Donuts in March, when she went to court to gain custody of her sister's children, who were destined for foster care.

Ana, Tani, and Roy have lived with them since. Though Jose holds a steady job in landscaping, the economic strain of one less job in the family and three more mouths to feed was overwhelming. And now they have to find a home.

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Amazingly, though, Didi has found friends in high places. She is constantly on the phone, calling friends, calling the city, calling anyone willing to give her a hand.

Some of her more creative schem es have been successful. At the opening of Ashley's Ice Cream last month, in front of TV cameras, she told her youngest daughters to ask Mayor DeStefano to read them a book.

The girls' pictures appeared in the New Haven Register the next day, and DeStefano called Didi back. He found himself a lifetime supporter: Didi wants to work for his next reelection campaign.

This morning, she has prom ised to make breakfast for Ana and Tani, who have spent the night at a fami ly friend's apartment. That family friend is Andrea Pizziconi, a Yale graduate working for Yale University Properties, and a jackpot connection for Didi and her children. Ana and Tani met Chris Alexander-who is married tO Bruce Alexander, Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs-as part of the · New Haven Reads program, which Chris runs. In the past few months, she and Andrea have enrolled the kids in Neighborhood Music School dance classes; introduced them to the Yale Book Bank; helped six of them switch from their failing neighborhood school to Cath erine Brennan Elementary; and showered them with gifts. The kids have also posed for many a Yale PR photo. For now, though, the older girls are belting out Nelly songs in Andrea's living room, and Didi is frying bacon.

Didi makes sure they are fed. "''m willing to eat dirt as long as they have eggs," she vows. She fills plates even for the older children, making sure they get enough. Bottles of Kool-aid, once opened, must be finished. Didi prods Roy to finish his pancake, then lifts up Angel's shirt and pats his little belly, pronouncing him healthy. Later, she returns from running errands with a ~urprise birthday cake for Jennifer, who turned four yesterday. The older kids, warned to keep Jennifer away from the kitchen while Didi puts candles on the cake, whisper conspicuously and try not to smile in anticipation. D idi blindfolds Jennifer with her hands, and they waddle down the hall together. As soon as Didi uncovers Jennifer's eyes in front of the cake, six voices break into a passionate rendition of 'Happy Birthday.'

THE NEW

JouRNAL

J.

IDI AND HER CHILDREN-by "the grace of God," Didi reminds me--are making progress. Didi's earnings at her new job will not be enough for most apartments in New Haven, but it's income nonetheless.

Her kids have practically moved in with Andrea, and she and Chris are using every resource they have to find Didi housing. A Habitat for Humanity house, a Yale job for Jose, and the Yale Homebuyer program are being discussed, and Andrea fields calls daily from people wanting to help. When their CCA cutoff date rolls around, Didi and her family will certainly have somewhere to go, whether that will be a temporary apartment or Andrea's loft. In a few months, they may even have permanent housing.

Mary Anne, on the other hand, does not have Didi's connections. She might very well be on the street in two months, depending on her 18-year-old son for support. Affordable housing is only a distant hope, and an apartment of her own is probably beyond reach. Mary Anne has tried to follow the traditional avenues out of poverty-applying for the vouchers they told her to apply for, scrimping to put food on the table--but those avenues are many miles longer than she can bear. Mary Anne needs more than motivation and government aid-she needs people to bend the rules for her. For Mary Anne and Didi the system has failed. And when a system fails, people like Mary Anne have two choices: to work outside the system, as Didi has, or to suffer within it.

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In the small lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMoc) office, Alexander Garvin is ever the professor. In the conference room, Garvin, Vice President for Planning, Design, and Development at the LMDC, gestures out the glass window overlooking Ground Zero. He could be pointing at a chalkboard as he traces his finger in the air along the subway platform that will someday stand next to the footprints of the Twin Towers. The view is like a slide in one of his classes, only the buildings and the people swarming below are in the here and now.

Sporting his characteristic bowcie, which mirrors the symmetry of his equally distinctive, flyaway eyebrows, Garvin demonstrates how to look critically at Lower Manhattan. For Garvin the act of teaching never ceases, which is ironic since he never intended to teach (or become a public official for that matter, though he also serves on the New York City Planning Commission). "I was convinced I would be an architect and that life would be very simple," Garvin says, "My life did not turn out that way."

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Life has not been simple, in part because Garvin is also an Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning and Management at Yale, teaching courses in Yale College and the School of Architecture.

Garvin's occupations often coincide, however; as a guiding force at the LMDC, he is responsible' for hiring the staff--one third of whom are Yale graduates. Among the staffers with Yale dipomas are Brandon Smith, Hugh Eastwood, Brett Rubin (who all graduated in the last three years), and five others, including two LMDC vice presidents and one board member. The large number of Yalies on the staff is a joke around the office, repeated enough that it almost seems serious. Says EB Kelly, a Yale senior who worked as an intern under Garvin this summer, "No one will rat us out until we redevelop Lower Manhattan in the shape of a big Y." The coterie ofYale graduates helping to make this possible are all "Garvinistas," as the professor's ~scipies are affectionately called.

The label comes from a baseball cap Garvin wears on occasion, with "Soy un Garvinista" across the front. A present from a former stu-

THE NEW JoURNAL

Can Alexander Garvin and his team of Yale graduates rebuild Lower M anhattan as the public envisions it?

By Emily Lodish dent, the hat provides a name which sticks to Garvin as steadfastly as Yalies do. But the number of former Yale students Garvin employs stands in stark contrast to the corporation's democratic intentio ns. T he LMDC was formed after September nth by Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani "to oversee and coordinate the revitalization and rebuilding of Lower Manhattan south of Housto n Street." A central factor in their mission is a commitment to an "open and inclusive p ublic process." (Garvin would be sure to add dedication to skillful planning and innovative design. In his words, "This is New York. Nothing less is acceptable.") In fact, the future of Lower Manhattan seems not co rest in the hands of the public but in the laps of a hand-picked group of Ivy-Leaguers. Yet, while Garvin's reliance on his Yale connections may have undermined the project's initial mission, in the end it just might save it.

T

HE ATrRACTI ON BETWEEN YALIES AND GARVIN IS MUTUAL: He can't stay away from them either. "Garvin insisted on continuing his teaching when he cook on the Lower Manhattan project," said Yale college Dean Richard Brodhead, "and I'm pleased that he has found so m uch talent for this project in the Yale ranks." Garvin, who began teaching at Yale immediately after completing his third Yale degree--he graduated from Yale College in 1962 and received degrees in Architecture and Urban Studies in 1967-has not missed a year since. This year, even with his added involvement in the LMoc, has been no exception.

Working with a familiar staff ofYalies, Garvin has created an extension of his classroom. "Thank God!" he exclaims, "New Yorkers are getting their m oney's worth, and more." Because his students have learned firsthand from Garvin the inner workings of urban planning, Garvin does not have to train them on the job. As a result, the I.MOc runs efficiently. T he Yale-laden infrastructure of the LMOC is as func tional and well crafted as Garvin's vision for a list Century Manhattan.

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2002

Garvin's students, in turn, are graceful for the exposure to the world of high-powered urban planning. Kelly remarks chat Garvin is an institution unto himself, and Smith calls him a "black hole of movers and shakers" in the urban planning world. The sheer number of people who are both "magically very powerful and successful in urban planning" and have an affiliation with Garvin boggles Smith's mind. And it is decidedly so: A colleague of Garvin's from the Yale School of Architecture, David Childs, is currently redesigning the Art and Architecture building on the Yale campus. Childs, along with the designer of the new H istory of Art building, Richard Meier, is among six fmalists selected by the LMDC to participate in a design study of the World Trade Center site.

While bringing Yale ro the LMDC is an effort of Garvin's that Smith characterizes as "very conscious," it is also one that Kelly feels is ultimately irrelevant. For her, the Yale connection just means Garvin knows what each employee is good at, and is able to organize tasks accordingly. For this reason, she feels she was given m o re responsibility this summer than she would have been given at another internship. It may seem that Garvin, by hiring his former students, has created an environment where his ideology is rarely challenged. Garvin counters without hesitation that he chooses only the best people for the job.

In keeping with the LMDC's "open and inclusive" approach, the community does have a great deal to say about the goings-on in Lower Manhattan. "My fellow citizens want their city back, and they want it back now," Garvin says. Thanks to the LMDC 's website, where the public continues co register thousands of comments, and to an ongoing process of public hearings, Garvin and his colleagues at the LMDC receive constant feedback. Finally able to participate in the redevelopment process, however, the public found they could only respond to plans that had already been conceived. At times, the community's ideas have departed radically from the six conservative models presented in the LMoc's Preliminary Urban D~sign

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Study, suggesting that public comment should have been solicited earlier in the process.

A common criticism was the general lack of innovation and boldness in the designs. Among the dissenting voices was The New York Timels architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, who wrote in July that "as a starting point for public discussion, the plans have little to recommend them."

Muschamp criticized the LMDC itself for its "breathtaking determination to think small." Even Eastwood, who helped produce the study, identifies with this disapproval. "Putting out four of the first six plans hurt my heart," he says. Smith agrees, and goes on to say that the LMDC needed to tread lightly in its conception of the first six plans, since accommodating all the participating interests seemed nearly impossible.

Some, like Smith, think building the tallest building in the world would be the best approach to redevelopment; others want the footprints of the Twin Towers left untouched. Garvin certainly recognizes the variety of players with a stake in the redevelopment process-not only those with significant financial interests, the list of which is long and varied, but also members of the public. "They have a great deal to say about where we go," Garvin says, "Is it bolder designs? We bring them bolder designs. Is it something in the skyline? We get them something in the skyline." Garvin understands that there would have been criticism no matter what was first put on the table. "This is New York, that's what you do."

While staffers like Eastwood note the initial sting of negative criticism, Rubin reiterates that the LMoc's all-inclusive planning process "is the right thing to do ... If we received only one great idea from public input that would not have o therwise been realized in closed-door sessions, then it was all worth it." Garvin adds, "Serious citizen participation in planning is essential. . .. The trouble is that democracy is a messy business. It takes time and patience."

He yields {a rare oc<;urrence) to Churchill: "Democracy is the worst forni of govern- :1 ment--o:cept for all the others."

Nonetheless, the feedback Rubin and Garvin discuss came after the plans had already been conceived. The public could only resp2nd to these final proposals.

Garvin takes the recent criticism in

THE NEW JouRNAL

stride, however, exhibiting a buoyancy that Kelly describes as "resilient" and "optimistic." This outlook, which may yet restore integrity to the project's democratic intentions, Garvin ironically attributes to his years in the Ivory Tower. It was at Yale that he feels he developed a "willingness to listen to people who think differently than myself, to argue and to disagree, but to value what they had to say as something that might be as valid as what I have to say." And listen he did when he heard that designs weren't inventive enough. "We hired half a dozen new design teams," Garvin says, "who are going to provide, I hope, some of that boldness." In light of this, even Muschamp seems to have backed off from his earlier, harsher remarks. He wrote on October 1, "If the public keeps its eye on the ball, the Development Corporation's latest effort could change the course of cultural life in New York." That is precisely what Garvin intends to do.

He envisions a 21St century downtown where people not only work, but also live and hang out, and the market-driven policies he advocates support this. He adheres to this philosophy because it works; he is not interested in idealistic or utopian visions. Understandably, on this front, there is little dissent from his former students now at the LMOC. As Eastwood says, â&#x20AC;˘planning involves the real, the possible, not the utopian."

Similarly, Garvin's genius, which lies in combining architecture and planning, presupposes "a rejection of utopian dreams and the insistence of looking at daily life in neighborhoods." Garvin draws a stark line between his two disciplines, saying, "Great architecture has nothing to do with planning." He promised early on that there would be great architecture on the World Trade Center site, but "planning," he says, â&#x20AC;˘is a completely different function." The distinction between the two is one which he believes is often unappreciated by the public and the press. "The public demands great architecture," he says. New Yorkers clamor to have their skyline repaired. They want tangible and immediate evidence of progress. But, in urban planning, progress happens over the course of time, in complex stages that are decidedly less immediate. It is here diat Garvin's dual lines of work reinforce one another. He takes care of what people don't know they need in

0croBER

2002

order to give them what they want. He has taught his students to do the same. As Rubin says, "Especially with the monumental task ahead of us with the World Trade Center sire, planning and design need to exist hand in hand."

S

Garvin recalls his high school prom in New York. At two in the morning, he stood at the base of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, looking up at 38 floors advancing skyward, absolutely straight. This was the building that most impressed Garvin. Reminiscent of the Twin Towers, the Seagram Building is a glass-covered, high-rise office building in midtown Manhattan. "Wow," Garvin remembers thinking, "How could somebody do that?"

Today, Garvin can imagine people looking at what he does, at the level of responsibility he carries on a daily basis, and asking a similar question. For Garvin, though, it is just what he does. He must fulfill his duty to his fellow citizens, who "aren't going to tolerate waiting around until there is a consensus," he says. But like the Seagram Building, which was three decades in the making, rebuilding Lower Manhattan will take time. And now Garvin faces further delays which could have been avoided by soliciting public comment earlier. Still, he moves forward with confidence. Once completed, the Seagram Building was an instant classic. Garvin believes that another wiJI rise out of Lower Manhattan.

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21

By Jacob Blecher

T

HE NIGHT I MET BoBBY SPEERS at the Circle Lanes in East Haven, he was holding a bowler's cocktail: lukewarm beer in a large plastic cup. I could see why he needed it. The windowless building reeked of stale cigar and pipe smoke, and the neon ceiling lights bathed the alley in a harsh, sterile light. "I've had better nights," he sighed.

Indeed.

Bobby was actually referring to his score, but he might as well have been hinting at something more. He did not look like a man who was having, as he described it, "a fun night out." For one thing, he was just standing around, idly sipping brew, fretting over the game at hand. For another, he was playing on a pretty lousy bowling team-the Metal Masters II-with men at least 25 years older than himself (he is about 40). Bobby and elders Keith, Vinny, and Lou had lost the first two games of the set, and they stood to plummet further toward the basement of the rankings if they couldn't set their acts straight in this, the final game. Their league is called the Four Horsemen; the apocalypse comes every Thursday night.

It was time to turn things around. Bobby lumbered over to his ball, picked it up, and gazed menacingly at the ten pins standing 6o feet away. With a quick grunt, he lurched forward and launched the ball down the right side of the lane. Bobby is actually quite skilled for an amateur. He doesn't just roll the ball. He spins it-violently. as the ball seemed about to veer off into the right gutter, it left and smashed into the front pin, dragging down the rest its wake. A big "x" flashed on the screen, and Bobby pumped his in triumph.

It may be hard to believe, but men from all over New Haven ~umrv flock to the dingy Circle Lanes each week to play in the Horsemen, which is reputed to be one of the most comperitournaments around . The top prize is $6,ooo, and the second third place finishers also rake home purses. The prizes are actua little deceptive, because each player on the winning team only home $1,500 and pays more than $700 to play in the 36-week IDlltmamtent. But $8oo is not chump change to the bowlers in the As Bobby put it bluntly, "The common worker, that's who here." Bobby is himself an employee at a nearby tool and die """npany, and most of the teams, including Bobby's, bear the names local industrial and service businesses. "New Haven Truck," J'alll'l1'1nr1r Paving," "Olympia Diner," and "Turbine Jets" were also that night.

Bobby sat down with his beer, now half empty, for so.me "side -poker. At least that's what Bobby called it. It was really like solitaire, since Bobby was the only one playing. "If you a strike, you take a card," he explained, flipping one over. he was the only person on his team bowling consistent strikes, one else was taking cards. Keith, Vmny, and Lou were clearly -hteres:ted. "A full house!" he cheered.

Bobby looked up at me: "You know, some of the guys here just for the recreation. Myself, I come here to play for money." I tell-why else would he spend a whole night in this dump?

But I also stifled a chuckle; his words sounded like a line straight out of a movie. And as a bowler, Bobby is positively cinematic: He's a dean-cut, moustached man with a sizable paunch {tonight restrained by a green bowling shirt emblazoned with his team logo), and he plays our of pure love for the game. In fact, he used to be literally addicted to bowling: At one point in his life, he played in seven different tournaments simultaneously. The membership costs caught up to him, though. Now he can only afford to bowl in one league at a rime.

As the next several frames passed, it became dear that Bobby was bowling a spectacular game. He told me that he was on track for a score of 279-just 21 points shy of a perfect game. He was even attracting a bit of a crowd at this point. Well, not a real crowd, but one whale of a man dressed in black whom Bobby seemed to know.

They started talking, and the conversation apparently had to do with the ins and outs of kicking someone's ass. "I bet that guy over there with the grey hair could kick your ass," Bobby joked. His friend seemed to find this funny. They made plans to go hang out at the Chili's restaurant next door after the match ended.

Bobby finished the game with a score of 248-he faltered in the final frames-but his above-average performance led the Metal Masters n to a solid gold finish, 830-739. Alas, it hardly mattered: The weak showing earlier in the night assured the team of yet another week of mediocrity. But Bobby was in higher spirits. How could he not be? It was rime to leave.

B

OWLING, BEUEVE IT OR NOT, is the most popular sport in America. According to the National Sporting Goods Association, 40.3 million Americans bowled lase year; the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association estimates the number at 55¡5 million. Bowlers outnumbered baseball, football, and soccer players more than two to one. Still, one can't help but ask the inevitable question: Why do so many Americans hit the lanes day in and day our, even when that means spending innumerable hours of their lives in dystopic surroundings, playing for meager prizes, and drinking cheap, warm beer?

Twenty lanes down from Bobby and the Metal Masters, I had another chance to find out. Here was the Yale league, a crew of middle-aged employees of the University and Yale-New Haven Hospital. Despite the assurances of Paul Minore, the vice president (every bowling league has a governing board), that "we just come here for a friendly game after work," the competition was fierce.

Paul's team, the Green Machine, was neck and neck with another team called the Coasters.

Paul doesn't look like a typical bowler-he's slender and bearded, and he was dressed, in typical Yale fashion, in ~akis and a dress shirt-but he's as much a devotee of the sport as any. He's a w-year veteran of the league. Tonight, he announced, was his best performance of the season. Apparently, this was due to a stellar day on the job. "If you have a really good day at work, you have a really good night of bowling," he told me. Then he added: "Of course, if you

his whom the league screwed over. "The league kicked a teammate of mine out of the league for not paying his dues," he said, disgusted. "But my teammates and I paid for him. It really didn't make any sense."

By now, it was the seventh &arne of the final game, and it was too close to tell whether the Green Machine or the Coasters would come out on top. Jeff seemed nervous. He was still hanging out away from his team, still smoking up a storm. But he was definitely concentrating on the game. "Yes, we'll definitely take that," he muttered to himself as one of his teammates knocked down nine pins.

Paul stepped up to the foul lirte and

have a really shit day at work, you also have a really shit night of bowling."

The wholesome Yale league purports not to play for money--only trophiesbut behind the innocent exterior is a rougher side: an informal gambling ring.

Tonight, a dozen¡ or so guys, in.cluding Paul, were contributing to the pot, which usually tops off at $20. In this respect, the middle-class Yale employees differed surprisingly little &om their counterparts at the other end of the building: They both treated the bowling alley as a casino. I won. dered why so many bowlers feel compelled to bet on their games. Is the sport in itself that meaningless?

A dwarfish man named Jeff, another cog in the Green Machine, approached me and struck up a conversation. Jeff doesn't work at Yale, but the league recently let him in because his wife does. As he chainsmoked against the back wall, he seemed excited about the game at hand.

Others, however, were decidedly less enthusiastic about his presence. "My team is kind of pissed that they're letting nonYale people in," Glen, a member of the Coasters and an x-ray technician, complained. Glen is a burly Asian guy, and he is the star of the league. He once bowled a perfect game. He had other complaints about the league's oppressive tendencies.

The league uses a handicap system based on a bowler's average to equalize scores, and Glen thinks that this leads some bowlers to cheat. "Sometimes, people dirt their average and then bowl well when they need to," he whined. "It's a real problem of this league." He also sniveled about a friend of

readied himself to bowl. Paul, it turns out, is not quite as good a bowler as his devotion to the game might lead one to believe.

He averages consistently over roo, and his style is amateurish: He rolls the ball straight down the middle of the lane. He only knocked down eight pins with his first ball, he completely botched the spare. He frowned and stomped his foot on the ground. Jeff sighed.

The match was coming down to the wire. By the tenth and frnal frame, both the Green Machine and the Coasters had combined scores just above 900. I asked Jeff who was going to win. "They won it already," he sighed. I asked how he knew, since the scores were nearly identical. He didn't respond-maybe he didn't hear me.

But Jeff's pessimism was proven true: A guy on the Coasters team bowled a final strike and the team sailed to victory, 948-934.

"Talk about giving them the game on a

platter," one man snapped. Glen, ever the competitor, was ecstatic. He stood up and bowled a ball between his legs, just for the heck of it. Paul seemed down. "Technically, we gave it to them," he told Jeff and packed his things up to leave.

A

I found myself at the Hamden Lanes on Dixwell Avenue.

The Hamden alley is an identical copy of its East Haven counterpart (they're both owned by the same company). The place was teeming with league action. It was a stark contrast to the dark and deserted exterior. A tournament called the Barbara Fox Classic had taken over 32 lanes, leaving only a half dozen or so for regular customers. Men and women of all ages were participating. Some sat and watched, others wandered and chatted.

In the gloomy bar, a half dozen rueful souls were silently slumping on bar stools.

A baseball game blared on a television in the corner, and their eyes were transfiXed on it. I tried to imagine where these people came from and why they had come here, of all places, on a Friday night. And then it hit me: these were the true slouches of the bowling world. Bobby, Paul, Glen, and Jeff, at least, had had the guts to create their own drama.

WEEK LATER,

]ac~b Bkch"- a junior in Davmport College, is associate editor forTNJ.

THE NEW JouRNAL

1

Fields of Dream

By Anne Weber

OcroBI!R 2002

',

25

N

orfolk, Connecricur-popularion 2oo-lies somewhere berween New york and Boston, nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires. Its landscapes reflect its geographical posicion, caught berween what is pristine and what is man-made.

These photos explore the nature of that tensionboth in the land and in the minds of the people whose lives it shapes.

THE NEW JouRNAL

Ann~ ~ber is a

OcToBER 2002

smior in Timothy Dwight Co~.

27

ORGANIZED THE NEW JouRNAL

HOWA SEEMINGLY INEFFECTIVE

UNION DEMONSTRATION TURNED A DISPARATE

WORKFORCE

INTO A UNIFIED BLOC.

BY DANIEL KURTZ-PHELAN

I

N THE DAYS BEFORE 675 PEOPLE WERE arrested on College Street, New Haven's labor unions prepared for action. At the First Methodist Church , 100 students, workers, and interested community members listened ro the instructions of Steve Thornton. Thornton is a veteran national labor activist who calls himself a "non-violent direct action civil disobedience organizer." This means that he trains people to get arrested for the cause as quickly, painlessly, and effectively as possible. His tone was curt as he reeled off advice: wear comfortable shoes and eat something beforehand, since "getting arrested might be a time commitment." Meanwhile, a handful of union employees distributed "pre-arrest cards." Committed arrestees, they instructed, should submit their names, addresses, dates of birth, and social security numbers to the New Haven Police Department before the mass arrest. That way, the cops could pre-prim tickets and distribute them efficiently. With careful planning, they could make a forceful but orderly point.

The group broke into drills. They lined up in "hassle lines," with half the

OcroBER 2002

group in arrest formation-arms linked in a long ch ain-while the other half acted like hecklers. Then roles reversed. This time, instead of hecklers, participants were supposed ro impersonate journalists, asking "hard questions about why they're out doing what they're doing." With any luck, their answers might in a few days end up on the from page of The New J0rk Times.

Union headquarters, meanwhile, buzzed with activity. Organizers shouted into phones over the drone of copy machines running overtime to produce recruitment materials for potencial arrestees and pamphlets for the hundreds of witnesses expected to show up for Wednesday's event. The conversations consisted mostly of gentle persuasion. "Getting arrested will be a fine experience," an organizer explained. "Fill out the card and the cops will have a ticket right there waiting for you. There's a fine of $30 or $40"-it turned out to be $88-"bu t you can do, like, eight hours of community service instead, and we're also selling t-shirts to set up a fund for people who can't pay."

Periodically, someone stood up waving a

stack of papers and yelled victoriously, "I got another committed"-moving closer, signature-by-signature, towards their professed goal of orchestrating "the biggest civil disobedience since civil rights."

Around New Haven, similar conversations were taking place in churches, community centers, coffee shops, and classrooms. I was riding with one organizer as he sped between T hornton's training session and a prayer meeting at a local church, where labor activist preachers were invoking the light of the divine to boost numbers on the arrest tally. Every few minutes, a colleague checked in via cell phone to give an update or announce another small victory.

20 people came forward in a rousing "altar call" at a Fair H aven church; at another church, a man had come to a prayer meeting just to watch but "was so moved by the spirit there" that he signed a pre-arrest card before he left.

One union organizer summed up the hopes for the event to me with a sly pitch: "You know, this is the one time when your body being on the right side of the line makes a huge difference. The possibility of

averting a strike is directly proportional to the number of people who get arrested on Wednesday."

A

NO

so

WENT THE RECRUITING LINE:

#-\AFter months of increasingly acrimonious-and, by this point, stagnatednegotiations between the Yale administration and Locals 34 and 35, the unions that represent the University's clerical and maintenance staff, the labor community needed to send a stronger message to the administration in hope of breaking an apparent deadlock and avoiding a University-wide strike. While University spokesmen had uttered their typical line about the continuing progress of bargaining, union leaders had grown pessimistic.

Their demands, it seemed, just weren't getting through to the administration; they needed some new way to communicate if negotiations were to continue.

Recent media attention had focused on the negotiators' inability to reach an agreement on bread-and-butter issues, but the more fundamental, and more nebulous, concerns of the unions had not even been addressed, especially the organizing rights ofYale graduate students and workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital. District 1199 of the Service Employees International Union and the Graduate Employees and

30

Students Organi~tion (GESO) are working to unionize hospital workers and graduate student teaching assistants respectively, and have united with Locals 34 and 35 under the Federation of Hospital and University Employees. Each is demanding that its employer accept what is known as cardcheck neutrality-impartiality in the organizing stages and official recognition once more than half of each workforce has signed cards expressing solidarity with the union. Both 1199 and GESO report that more than 6o% of their workforces have signed such cards. For months, Locals 34 and 35 have made the University's acceptance of these signatures a basic condition for the signing of a new contract-an allegiance that is surprising to many given the disparate characters that make up the four groups.

The recognition of these groups as unions is not the only sticking point in talks. To Locals 34 and 35, however, Yale's stubbornness on this front reflects its general inability to see the need for a "fundamental change" in its relationship with its employees. "The situation with GESO and the hospital cuts to the heart of how Yale thinks of and treats people who work here," union spokeswoman Deborah Chernoff said. "If you take away the hoopla, GESO and hospital workers are just saying to Yale,

'Let's sit down and have a real talk.' That's really what we're all saying."

In September, Yale President Richard Levin distributed a letter to the community that criticized unions for their confrontational stance and tendency to "demonize" Yale. For many union organizers, Levin's harsh new tone signified that an amicable outcome to negotiations was all but impossible. So they set a date: September 25. That day, provided no contract had yet been signed , union forces would mobilize for a mass arrest.

From that point on, recruitment was frantic and planning was meticulous.

Having inflated the public's expectations, organizers h ad to ensure that the actual numbers would back them up.

Originating with the central committee, union networks extend like tentacles into every segment of the Yale community.

When lead organizers first announced the action, the message traveled to unionized clerical and maintenance employees, hospital workers, embattled graduate students, the clergy, local politicians, and activist undergraduates at a remarkable pace. The strategy was to work through existing relationships: a history graduate student would approach another history graduate student, a minister would preach politics to his congregation.

THE NEW JouRNAL

Passed along like this, the recruitment line was retooled for the recipient every time it was uttered.

The night before the event, the Reverend Scott Marks, a prominent figure among labor leaders and the activist clergy, held a sort of prayer meeting for students in the heart ofYale's campus. Marks is built like a linebacker, sp eaks in the cadence of an old-time preacher, and once justified his political involvement to me by bellowing, "I am a stickler for prayer and worship, but when you're done praying, you have to get off your knees." But that night, with fifty Yale students crowded around him under the lights of C ross Campus, he ended his pleading and sermonizing with a hollow appeal to self-interest: "You are not doing this for the people of New Haven. You are doing this for yourselves."

B

alJ the elements were in place. The unions had the signatures of some 700 people, from all camps and all backgrounds, committed to being arrested. The police department, working closely with union organizers, had devised a fail-safe plan to ensure that everything lVent smoothly. T he media, of course, was y THE NEXT MORNING,

alerted.

With such perfect orchesuation, the event went off without a hitch . Hundreds

0croBER 2002

carne to witness, hundreds to paroc1pate.

Linked arm in arm , they were a microcosm of the New Haven commwliry and reflected the incongruous alliance that makes up the local labor movement. The line included not only union workers but also 200 GESO members, 65 undergraduates, 35 clergymen, four aldermen, and three State Representatives. Photographers and journalists swarmed around them. A squadron of New Haven police officers had prepared the scene earlier that afternoon. They had readied barricades to redirect uaffic when the arrest line crossed the busy intersection of College and Elm Sueets. As the 675 participants filed across the Green, Andrea Cole, an organizer for Local 34, soberly directed the crowd of witnesses as if reciting a dialing menu on an automated answering service: "I need you to listen very carefully to these insuuctions. We are asking every person to maintain order and respect." After the participants were warned by the police and then arrested, they lined up to collect their citations at tables that had been set up beforehand.

The cops thanked union leaders for cooperating so well. "We couldn't have asked for a better time. Everything went very sm oothly and everyone was very helpful," said one department spokesman.

All had gone according to plan. But

the next day, press accounts focused largely on the orchesuation of the even t, foregoing any substantive discussion of the underlying issues for accounts of its overt theatricality and barely veiled criticisms of its flat tone. Labor leaders must have reacted with some dismay when The New 10rk Times scoffed, "the two-hour spectacle ... looked like a cross between a voter regisuation drive and an arts-and-crafts fair."

T

Yale's lefr-wing community was convulsing over another, more distant cause: the use of sweatshop labor in Cenual America and Southeast Asia to manufacture Yale clothing. In the debate over what course of action to follow-more protests, a mass public arrest, a hostile take-over of an administration building (as Harvard living wage activists did last year, generating a month-long national media frenzy}-the fall of 2002 became a central concern. Even then, those in the know were anticipating a serious showdown over labor issues-which would, naturally, demand impassioned involvement by committed students. " Don't go and get arrested now," one savvy veteran of the activist scene cold me somberly. "You have to save yourself for 2002, when the conuacts are up. That's when shit will really get crazy."

HREE YEARS AGO,

31

This divide-and-conquer strategy misses one thing: The alliance is as much pragmatic as it is ideological.

As recently as last spring, however, both union leaders and the Yale administration were heralding a new era in labor relations at the University. In his Tercentennial address a year ago, President Levin effectively staked his legacy as a New Haven visionary on the outcome of negotiations: In the years ahead, I hope that we can achieve the sacne kind of progress with our labor 路unions, whose members make an essential and valuable contribution to 路the life of the University. We are eager to work with Locals 34 and 35 to find a new way of structuring our relationship, relying on day-today collaboration rather than periodic confrontation. Just as our work with the city of New Haven required participants on both sides of the town-gown divide to cast aside long-held prejudices, working collaboratively with our unions will require participants on both sides to overcome years of distrust.

While the gulf between the union and administration on issues like GESO and the hospital workers was obvious to anyone who looked beyond the fulsome headlines--one organizer referred to it as a "media love fest"-union leaders look back on that time as one of sincere hope.

"People really expected something when President Levin talked about collaboration and change," Chernoff said.

But Locals 34 and 35 had also learned some crucial lessons since the last time the labor battle flared up, with a brutal twomonth strike in 1996. Now, union leaders look back on that action as largely a failure.

They ceded to the administration the right to sub-contract jobs in new buildings,

which would have otherwise gone to union members. A year later, when Levin announced the start of a capital campaign and one of the most ambitious building sprees in the University's historf, union leaders felt they'd been tricked.

Subcontracting embodies the greatest threat to the survival of unions: irrelevance.

On a national level, organized labor has struggled to adapt to an economy in which service jobs outnumber those in traditionally unionized industries, and union membership has plummeted to 13% of the workforce. At Yale, the administration's decision to subcontract directly undermined the leadership and negotiating power of Locals 34 and 35 by slowly starving them of members.

Taking up the cause of graduate students and hospital workers, therefore, fit into a deeply pragmatic calculation: If successful, the organizing drive would increase union membership at the University from 4 ,000 to 8,ooo. "The secret's out: The unions want to grow," Chernoff explained.

"We can do things better when we represent more people." Yale, meanwhile, has refused even to engage negotiators from 34 and 35 in a dialogue about GESO and II99, issues that they dismiss as immaterial to bargaining. In the case of the hospital, the University has long disavowed an actual institutional connection-despite the fact that President Levin sits on the hospital's board and has the power to appoint several of his fellow board members-and has said that it has no jurisdiction over the hospital's union-bashing administrators. Work floor managers at the hospital are notorious among workers for their chilling intimidation tactics: "You come out of there scared shitless," one employee told me. Last month, eight people, including two Yale graduate students, were arrested while leafleting in front of the building. Yale administrators have also resisted GESo's

attempt to gain formal recognition. In their most recent move, they have suggested holding a National Labor Relations Board election while acknowledging that they would forestall a final decision through years of lengthy appeals. Since the alliance between these aggrieved groups and the established Yale unions started taking shape, the administration has repeated to the 4,000 members of Locals 34 and 35, as University spokesman Thomas Conroy did again after the arrests, "What the University hopes is that the Yale unions' support for other unions that are trying to organize workers does not delay contracts for Yale employees." This divide-and-conquer strategy, however, misses one thing: that the alliance is as much pragmatic as it is ideological.

E

the unions and the administration jointly hired John Stepp, a labor consultant who served in the Department of Labor under President Reagan, to make negotiations more productive and more personable.

Stepp's goal was to make each side better understand the "feelings" of the other, so that bargaining would include more of a "non-traditional, problem-solving process" and less bickering. He conducted some 100 interviews with everyone from rank-andfile union members and University middle managers to President Levin and New Haven Mayor John DeStefano. The consultant-speak report that emerged was deeply damning of Levin and the Yale negotiating team, which soon relieved Stepp of his services. It delineates "a highlY adversarial and dysfunctional relationship.! non-productive at its best, but ofteD destructive, and ultimately, demoralizing for both union and management." It is dot路 ted w~th phrases like "caste system: "underclass," "union ghetto," and "disdaiD 路 for working people."

ARLY THIS YEAR,

THE NEW JouRNAl-

At the end, Stepp lays out a set of bullet-pointed recommendations. First, the University must understand "the union's long-term need to grow its business"-in uanslation, it must come to terms with the expansion of unions to previously unorganized communities, like graduate students and hospital workers. It also calls for "a profound change in the way the University manages irs non-academic workforce and the union's role in representing it." After sounding the call for this "profound change," the report ends on an ominous note: "If the next bargaining round were conducted in a traditional manner ... a great opportunity would be missed and the residual negative climate would make the launch of a new relationship highly unlike-

ly."

As negotiations break down into squabbling over percentage pointS and pension numbers refined to meaningless abstraction, union leaders talk more and more about this "profound change." ·union members came to the bargaining table with the expectation that there would be some fundamental change," said Chernoff. "That has nothing to do with x and Y percent. We want to be looked at as assets, not just numbers." I asked Chernoff to explain in concrete terms what this fundamental change might look like. She offered a few case-specific examplestraining time for clerical workers, advancement opportunities for the custodial staff-but then ironically slipped into the same platitudes that Levin continues to express in his public statementS on Locals 34 and 35, mentioning "partnership" and "collaboration." Finally, she concluded, "I don't know how possible it is to do that."

But then a few minutes later, she backtracked. "Actually, this is what it is: the University accepting that there's nothing fundamentally different about workers from any other segment of the community."

The University's official recognition of and 1199 is inseparable from basic respect for irs employees as equal members of the University community. If the administration were truly serious about a partnership with irs workers, union leaders ask, why would they so underhandedly try to derail every n~ effort to organize? "Yale has never committed co making people who devote their life to working here fed GI!SO

OcroBER 2002

trained and respected," Andrea Cole charged in the week after the mass arrest, as negotiations plodded along in typical fashion. "Once they decide to sit down and talk in a real way, I have no doubt we ~n make progress. But up until now, they haven't been serious about talking at aU." But Yale, after the arrests more than ever, has emphasized irs adherence to business as usual. As Conroy said, "We think that the focus should be on the bargaining table, and now that the demonstration has been held ... we can get back to business and continue negotiating." But when I asked Conroy if a strike can be averted, he hesitated and tepidly responded, "There's still some hope. There's certainly some." Locals 34 and 35, for their part, along with members of GESO and organized hospital workers, have voted to authorize a strike--a decision that will likely go into effect this fall if this round of talks fizzles.

Before the mass arrest, union organizers offered a range of purposes for the event. First, they highlighted the need to make the Yale administration listen to a point "that they were just not hearing."

This point was often cast in terms of union expansion and uaining opportunities, but had more to do with the murky concept of "fundamental change." In the weeks since, union leaders seem to have recognized their failure to get this message across. But the more cenual purpose of the event may have been internal, and may explain why union leaders have convinced at least themselves that the bad press and dismissive attirudes in the wider community do not matter.

"We have learned not to focus on what the media says," Cole said. Instead, she pointed to the effect on union members themselves. "It's strengthened the conviction of those who participated. They did something they were aftaid of, and they came through on the other side. That's very powerful." At the moment when 675 people linked arms on College Street, the most important point may have gone unstated: The unions are ready for a strike.

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33

A Formal Feeling Comes T

EVERYWHERE-popping out from behind doors, ~t down from walls, scattered on tables. This carcoony triptych was the spokes picture for Yale's "September II th, One Year Later" programming. It was printed on every poster, flyer, and handout advertising the memorial events scheduled a year after the attacks.

The logo consists of three pictographs-the first in red, the second in white, and the third in blue. The first image is an abstraction of the Twin Towers-and by abstraction, I mean two off-kilter rectangles that look like an overly starched pair of pants, ready to drop. The second picture is an aerial view ofThe Pentagon-represented by bold lines and cracked into pieces (an image probably obtained from the same clipart b~k that provided the rectangular pants). The third is the outline of an airplane in a nose-clive cowards the bottom of the page. The cockpit has already been swallowed up by a grass-green border below the logo. On the larger posters there is a yellow half circle behind the figures-it looks like the outline of a giant asteroid. Under it all: "To commemorate the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Yale is planning a series of educational and memorial events to be held on September IOTH and nTH. The panels and concerts are open to the general public." It sounded like a birthday invitation and looked like one coo.

At first I thought that the goal of the 9/n triptych was co capture 9/11 without sugar-coating any of the horror of the day-no patriotic God Bless America testimonials, no waving flags, no "don't mess with us" Maybe it was supposed to be grotesque and brutal just like 9/n, the more graphic the better. Then where are the bodies? The arms and legs sticking out of gutters? The people falling from the IIOTH floor, enveloped in flames? Where is the plume of smoke and human ash?

Broken buildings and shattered machinery were the least horrific part of the day. If the designer was confined co clip art (as the triptych suggests), he could have at the very least plunked in some stick figures with x's for eyes, staring out the windows as the plane crashed to the ground. But maybe it wasn't about horror. Maybe the designer had something else in mind. Maybe the object of this graphic was to summarize the events that took place lase year, in case somebody had forgotten. The logo clidn't even get that right.

The twin towers clidn't fall over like a sec of blocks. The Pentagon clidn'c crack like broken place. We remember it better than that.

Every time I see one of those posters, now fallen, trodden on, and clirty, I am sad. I expected to have things figured out by the time this anniversary rolled around. But I haven't. And if I couldn't on my own, I was counting on somebody else to explain it. Neither HE. LOGO WAS

34

has happened, and I'm not ready for logos or triptychs or slogans or birthday invitations. I need the unabridged explanation first.

Guns blazing, I confronted the designer of the graphic. Peter Johnson grc:eted me with a firm handshake and a smile, armed with a folder of his sketches and a few different copies of his graphic. He wore khaki pants and a plain, collared shirt. His hair was grayish blond, combed neatly to the side and his thin white moustache bobbed up and down as he spoke. "It was kind of an impossible cask," he said quietly. "Most of my work has been Yale directed, but this is a world crisis, a human event, and it definitely put me on the edge of my chair. I'm used co areas of imagination, but this was beyond imagination." His deep voice began co waver. I put the guns away.

Suddenly, I could imagine being in his shoes. I wanted to understand how he went about tackling what seemed like an impossible task. "Almost like writing a poem is how I think about it," he explained. "In graphic design, form is like sound and language.

Poetry encapsulates the sound of language, as opposed co just having a literal meaning."

He pulled out some sheets of paper from a folder. From his front pocket, he removed a small notebook of recycled brown paper-pages of sketches, each a variation of the approved graphic.

The clifferences between the drawings were subtle: a clifferent figure stood in here or there, the crack ran through the pentagon in different places. Every line of his fmal graphic was drawn with purpose: "I wanted three symbols. I always remembered the Shanksville [Pennsylvania] crash. I thought there was such heroism in that particular ace. I clidn't want to emphasize the towers; I wanted the Washington DC attack and the Pennsylvania attack to be just as important," he said. "Then, I wanted to gee across a sense of fragmentation or rupture or devastation. Shanksville was the most difficult for me to think about. I had a symbol of plate glass shatter- , ing. There was a sense of toppling, breaking, crashing-but these are just words, sounds, literal meanings. So I tried co formalize them without being coo clever. That was the other mandate. This was no place to be clever."

I hadn't even thought of this ammunition. But of course it made sense: to be ingenious or witty with September uth would be in poor taste. But what was stancling in for cleverness? The towers tumbling, the plane in mid-crash-these images were not clever.

They were clisturbing. "I wanted it to be alerting," Johnson said.

"But I clidn't want it to be clistressing or macabre. I clidn't want to show ruins or death or have it too horrific." "Why not?" I askeod.

Maybe it should have been more¡clisturbing, more real. "Because we

THE

NE.W JouRNAL

By Flora Lichtman

all kind of know that [it was horrific]. And to identify that would almost underplay the seriousness," he said without skipping a beat. â&#x20AC;˘I wanted to be alerting in a positive sense." I was not convinced.

Death should not have been forgotten in order to make the logo upbeat, I thought to myselÂŁ How could he ignore the people in those buildings? T his day will go down in history because humans were murdered, not because buildings were broken.

In response, Johnson explained to me the difference between formal abstraction and figurative representation. To illustrate his point he described the early controversy surrounding the Vietnam memorials in Washington oc. He juxtaposed Frederick Hart's soldier monument (a literal depiction of soldiers on the battlefield) with the more formalist black gash in the soil. "There are a lot of people riding the fence berween formalism and figurative, or literal and abstract. . . . I was raised as a formalist. It's my language or Vocabulary. As a person who was in Vietnam, I was much more drawn to the abstract. And it might be who I am or by the very fact that [September nTH] was unimaginable."

Johnso n hadn't ignored death. He just knew what he wanted.

He knew what he felt did justice co the death associated ~th a war that he fought in, and for him Maya Lin's memorial was the most llloving-a monument that was abstract. He told me he was trying to accomplish something like that.

To drive his point home, he pulled out an old Nro~ Haven ~. On the outside back cover was his graphic with Yale's ~nts highlighted below it. On the inside back cover was a huge

Ocro&ER

2002

oval air brushed picture of the twin rowers standing unscathed. A gigantic American flag waved in front of the rowers. In front of the flag, two massive hands held a burning candle. Below this picture "Our Faith Will Not Be Shaken" was wrinen in bold. The pair of pants suddenly didn't look so bad. "A lot of this gets too sentimental," he said while looking at the burst of patriotism before him.

"Bur if I use the word sentimental, somebody could say that my graphic is too mechanical." His eyes shifted back to his art.

"Adminedly, I consider it formal; I hope it's not mechanical. I wanted it to be poetical."

But are there answers in his poetry, I wondered. Did he understand September nTH and could I understand it by looking at his graphic. "Unimaginable things happened," he told m e. " I wasn't trying to understand it. I was trying to do the best I could." The graphic didn't have gruesome pictures of mangled human bodies, but it didn't sugarcoat either. The logo didn't act as an exact caption not because the designer forgot what happened or assumed we forgot; he didn't want it to be literal. His graphic was deliberate. It didn't matter that it didn't hold all the answers to September liTH, 2001- that wasn't its purpose. Instead it gave us a way to think about it. And perhaps just seeing 9/u from different vantages and through different mediums gets us closer to some understanding.

Johnson had the courage to take a stab at it. I'm glad he did.

'

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Flora Lichtman, a sophomore in Davenport College, is production manager for TNJ.

35

THE CRITICAL ANGLE

Voice of Atnerica

By Kathryn Malizia

0

N SEPTEMBER 19, 6oo people packed the seats of New Haven's Center Church on the Green. Wherever they sat, stood, or squatted, they listened in silence, breathless, their eyes trained on a small, ancient man hunched behind a podium at the front of the church. They listened as his voice, cracked with age, sang out these lines:

In a murderous time The heart breaks and breaks And lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go Through dark and deeper dark And not to turn I am looking for the trail.

Where is my testing-tree?

Give me back my stones!

The man was Stanley Kunitz and those lines conclude his bestknown poem, "The Testing-Tree." Told through the eyes of a child who uses a monolithic oak for target practice, "The Testing-Tree" evokes the anguish of living in the modern age, an age in which the sorrow of a single boy is simultaneously profound and furile.

Kunitz, a former poet laureate, was just one of nine poets to perform that night at a reading celebrating the prestigious Bollingen Prize for ?oetry, awarded by Yale University every rwo years for what it recognizes as ''che very best in American poetry." T he message is clear enough. Bollingen winners are not your up-and-coming young talents, rwenty-somethings rotating odd jobs and scribbling away nights in their East Village lofts. Nor are they your poets du jour, or those flash-in-the-pan best-sellers. Bollingen po~ts have been published, reviewed, reprinted, coUected, awarded, anthologized, and more often than not, offered lush professorships in the English departments of the country's top universities. Sharing the stage with Kunitz were such luminaries as John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Louise Gluck, John Hollander, ws Merwin, Gary Snyder, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur. Given the removed and selfreBective nature of much modern poetry, the event could easily have slid into irrelevance, of interest only to the smaU coterie of literary scholars, professors and university students who comprised the audience. Instead, most of the poets attempted to engage the current political climate, either by prefacing their work with an oven opinion or by embedding it within the poetry itselÂŁ Though almost all the poets tried to make a significant comment on the rimes, Stanley Kunitz acruaUy succeeded. And his success carne not

from some bold, new meditation, but from a poem written over thirty years ago.

In 1968, short on inspiration, Kunitz was at Yale, staying with Calhoun College Master RWB Lewis before giving a reading. While there, Kunirz found a moment of inspiration and completed the poem whose ending had beed evading him-none other than "The Testing-Tree"-which, at the event, he playfully called "the obscure legend of my youth." But regardless of the poet's intentions, "The Testing-Tree" is far from obscure and is much more than an autobiography. r By turns comic and tragic, trivial and epic, naive and visionary, Kunin's "The Testing-Tree" is to my mind a great American poem by a man who should be deemed the poetic voice of America. The language is simple, the scenes are eerily familiar, and the voice is friendly and intimate. The poem may not come off as high poetry in the tradition of, say, "The Wasteland," but that does not diminish its power. It deals precisely with the toughest questions that we, as both humans and Americans, face in our daily lives.

From its outset, the poem expresses itself in uniquely American terms. Composed in four pans, it first carries the reader through a parable of American youth and closes with ari oracular vision, freighted with the passionate determination "to go / through dark and deeper dark I and not to tum." The narrative section by contrast benign as it follows the path of a boy who seeks his adversary in, of all things, an oak tree: On my way home from school Up tribal Providence Hill Past the Academy ballpark Where I could never hope to play I scuffed in the drainage ditch Among the sodden seethe of leaves Hunting for perfect stones Rolled o ut of glacial rime Into my pitcher's hand T he game being played at the Academy is, of course, easily recognized. It's basebaU, and the narrator's exclusion from it, perhaps an aBusion to Kunin's own ost:racism as a Jew living in America in the early 2oth century, marks him as an outsider. The boy finds balls for his own solitary game in a nearby ditch. His are not of leather but stone, smoothed by the force of ages predating both America and its "tribal" predecessors. But before the reader has time tO reflect on the implications of that "glacial rime," the boy is off in his

THE

NEw Jou.II.NAJ.

The Bollingen Prize winners confront politics with poetry. state-of-the-art "magic Keels," tearing down the road, the "world's fastest human."

Next, he comes to a bend in the road, but resists its turn toward home in favor of a "nettled field," an undisturbed natural expanse, replete with "rabbit-life," bees and "a stringy old lilac ... blazing with mildew" that guards the entrance of the woods wherein stands the testing tree. But the boy does not enter the wood unprepared. He tells of a "key" he once owned to a moss-thickened trail, where, he says, "flickering presences/gave me rite of passage."

He follows resolutely in the footsteps of Massassoit, the Indian who forged the legendary treaty with the first pilgrims. Kunin hearkens back to the historic moment when America's first civilization embraced the one that would eventually supplant it. Centuries later his boy narrator still practices his "Indian walk" as he creeps through the primitive wood.

At the end of this symbolic retreat into nature, past a quarry abandoned by its human creators, the boy comes to a clearing where all at once the stones in his pocket become "oracles" in the shadow of the testing tree. He describes his confrontation with the tree as an "appointment," as though this meeting were fated or at least agreed upon in advance. He has come to play a game against a monolith of nature he describes as "tyrant and target, I Jehovah of acorns I watchtower of the thunders." The tree is both enemy and savior, an earthly thing invested with an imagined supernatural power to save or damn, depending on the skill of the thrower.

Although the game is ostensibly only a test, target practice for the real thing, the boy plays "for keeps," going so far as to invoke the blessing of his absent father (Kunin's father committed suicide before he was born) on his "good right arm." Like the real game, he bas only three throws, and he hurls his oracles "for love, for poetry, I and for eternal life," a redemptive trilogy that, years later, he will find worth fighting for against more than mere trees.

And that necessiry to fight comes crashing in with the fourth part. It opens with a bizarre recurring dream, in which the boy, now grown, is directed to a well containing an albino walrus, a perverse white elephant prophesing a "murderous time." The natural world of the testing tree, and the innocent, idealized America it symbolizes are gone, swept away by a "single Model A" that "unfurled a highway behind I where the tanks maneuver, I revolving meir turrets." The safe, isolated fantasy of youth and the testing tree have given way to a cruel, mechanized reality of war. Whether America >ever was an idyllic natural paradise inhabited by peace-loving Indian tribes is beside the point. In the mind of the speaker and by ettension, in the mind of American itself, something has changed.

OcroaER 2002

a

T he promised land of the past, where boy could practice for the challenges ahead without facing those of the present, no longer exists. Those challenges are here and they must be met. The speaker, whose heart lives only to break in anguish, knows that he must journey "through dark and deeper" without any "key" or "rite of passage" to help him find a path. He is lost in a modern world he had no part in creating. But the boy in him cries out still: I am looking for the trail.

Where is my testing-tree?

Give me back my stones!

It is a futile and anguished cry, wracked with longing for an irrecoverable past, whether it be the author's vanished youth or America's vanished innocence.

It was these words, along with the two previous tercets beginning with "In a murderous time," that Kunin had labored over when he visited Yale in 1968. One night, he told the audience at the reading, he had been working on the poem and went down to the kitchen. Master Lewis was watching the nightly news when he walked in, and on the television he saw that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot. Kunin recalled, "The news was too much for me." He returned to his room and furiously completed the poem.

With these nine lines, Kunin belied his humble intentions of telling the mere "obscure legend" of his youth; instead, he had created a poem that transcended subjectivity. In this way, "The Testing-Tree" represents Kunin's brilliance: He recognizes that one cannot dwell forever in the past or the personal, and that poetry, to be great, must inevitably step outside itself.

"The Testing-Tree" is a deeply American poem. Without directly commenting on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it still confronts the tragedy, and by implication, America's oft troubled past. But more than a historical conscience, Kunin is America's prophet, interpreting the unexplainable in familiar terms.

He sees America in a way that it cannot see itself: in the immediate present.

Kathryn Malizia, a junior in'Bran.ford College, is research director for TNJ.

37

TRUE BLUE from the moment itS history began. "The Victorious Crew of 1859," a painting held in Sterling Memorial Library's Manuscripts and Archives, is prime evidence. The rowers in the picture are enjoying their moment, but not in the way the adult coaches in the painting would like. They are not taking themselves too seriously. They stand casually. Their oars extend comically upwards, dwarfing the heroes below. But the two elders flanking them understand that history is in the making. One man is turning towards the team, in a posture of battlefield gravity. The other man, identified as Commodore Page, holds a flag and faces inwards as well, barely at ease. The flag he holds may very well be the original source of Yale Blue. To most observers it is a relic of the past, but to University Printer John Gambell the flag taunts, . "come and get me."

While the history of Yale Blue is mostly a subject of cocktail conversations among retired alums, for Gambell it is part of his job. In one month the Printer's Office will make a resource available to guide the design of Yale materials. This has forced them to ask the unthinkable: Should Yale Blue be reevaluated? Former University Printer Greer Allen has a range of possible blues in mind. Among them, he said, "My preference would be a color that appears dark, rich blue, which is identifiable from black." Tom Strong, who does graphic design for Yale, prefers a darker blue. For practical purposes there is an official Yale Blue, Pantone 289, but the working definition is another matter. Gambell describes it as "a strong, relatively dark blue, neither purple nor green, though it can be somewhat gray. It should be a color you would call blue."

If the definition of Yale Blue is vague, that is because itS history is vague. The early sons of Eli, observing the blue of today, would go red in the face. "Old Yale forever! Ever green may she be!" said William Maxwell Evarts in 1853. Green was Yale's color for half a century, until 1894, when blue officially replaced it. Most responsible for the shift were the members of the "Victorious Crew."

Former University Secretary Carl Lohmann traced Yale's blue to an original piece: "A Commodore's flag, a blue silk burgee, heavily fringed with white silk . . . was bought by Commodore Waite."

Within the next decade the crew began to wear pantS of dark blue and dark blue handkerchiefs, and their adoring fans wore blue to match.

The origin of Yale Blue was obscured, however, by historians' wish for a grander, longer tradition. In a 1918 article, Franklin Bowditch Dexter looked to the opening days of the Collegiate School for the source of the blue. A purchase of blue calico in 1708 and blue paint on the buildings of the original school were his

Y

ALE BEGAN CREATING ITS OWN HISTORY

By Ellen Thompson

proof But Dexter sought a convenient continuity that never existed. His theories were debunked twenty years later.

In 1938 another painting was dedicated to the self--conscious creation of Yale history. This time the canvas was filled entirely by itS subject, Yale Blue. Lohmann, the same man responsible for recording the 1853 appearance of Yale Blue, wanted to settle the question once and for all. Under the Office of the Secretary, a piece of silk w~ chosen to preserve Yale Blue, and a painting made to match it. There are two competing descriptions of the origins of this piece of silk. According to one story, the color was selected with the cooperation of alumni and the administration under Lohmann's direction. In another version, President Seymour bought the silk himself on a trip to Oxford. Given Lohmann's other efforrs to enthrone Yale Blue, it seems likely that he is the author. But whatever the source, the color first appeared on President Seymour's inaugural robe. The piece of silk now resides in a vault in Woodbridge Hall and has guided every decision about Yale Blue since.

"Wouldn't it be nice to say it was this Yale Blue," Gambell says wistfully. Yet, even with the cloth in hand, he is still looking for the elusive color. In the mid 1950s the Secretary's Office launched a second search for Yale Blue. The silk and painting ftom 1938, while adequate for matching fabrics, were little help in matching ink. The Munsell color system, developed in 1952, was the most convenient way to establish a new standard. Rumor has it that when the University made itS match and ordered 50 pounds of ink mixed, the ink company replied that they already had that ink in stock: It was the shade used by the Modess sanitary pad company. Whatever pink was put into the cheeks of the past administration has since faded, however, and for Gambell this is just one more lead. When all his factS are gathered, Gambell will decide if the current Pan tone 289 is the best representation of Yale Blue, or if a more recently developed Pantone color is a closer match.

Silks fade and color systems change and Gambell is left con· sidering the particulars of tradition. Which choice does better justice to Yale: keeping the current Pantone standard, or adjusting it coward a better bluer past? Greer Allen has had a lot of time to think about this. He has resolved that the question, "if ever settled once and for all, would leave Yale a bland, boring and uninteresting University. So my morning prayers regularly include the fervent hope, 'Dear Lord, please have the answers to the questions sur· rounding Yale Blue and the V~and Map forever elude us!"

I

I

I

I

II1J

Ellm Thompson, a smior in Ezra Stiles Collegt, is on th~ staffofTNJ·

0

TUESDAY OCTOBER 15 DoEs THE WEB DECIDE wHAT's IN THE

NEw

YoRK TIMEs?

THREE STARS OF AMERICAN OPINION MAGAZINES TALK ABOUT THE RisE oF ONLINE JouRNALISM

Panelists:

Michelle Cottle, Senior Editor, The New Republic Rich Lowry, Editor, National Review Jack Shafer, Editor at Large, SlAte Moderator:

Lincoln Caplan, Knight Senior Journalist, Yale Law School and Editor, Legal Affoirs 4:30p.m.

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A Master's Tea, Morse College All Events Free and Open to the Public For information, call436-218S or go to www.yale.edu/opalnewslpoyntn:html

39

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University and New Haven: We're Building Our Future Tog~ther Yale University has a special commitment to New Havens young people. More than 10,000 New Haven young people participate in Yale-sponsored academic and athletic programs on the Yale campus every year, and thousands of Yale students work with public school children through Dwight Hall and other programs.

These Yale student tutors in America Reads and America Counts will provide 45,000 hours of literacy and mathematics instruction to over 600 New Haven Public School students. Yale University has contributed nearly $100 million to educational and cultural outreach programs and to community investments outside its campus in New Haven over t~e past dozen years.

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