Volume 43 - Issue 5 by The New Journal at Yale

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Publishers

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Madeleine Broder, Jimmy Murphy

Editors-in-Chief Max Ehrenfreund, Jacque Feldman

Managing Editors . .

Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby

Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck

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Senior Editors

Jessica Cole, Julia Fisher, Helen Knight, Sara Mich •

Production Manager Andrew Calder

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Business Director Whitney Schumacher .' •

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. Research Director •

Nicholas Geiser

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Associate Editors Eli Mandel, Emily Rappaport

Online Editor Bay Gross

Copy Editors

Heeseung Kim, Victoria Sanchez, Victor Zapana

StaffWriters Laura Blake, Rachel Lipstein

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Roger Cohn, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Tom Griggs, Brooks Kelley, Kathrin I .assila, Jennifer Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong

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

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Frimds Michad Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Manha Brant, Susan Braudy, Danid Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Coun, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O'Brien, Laura Pappa no, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Josh Plaut, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fai•fax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Ha.mp,ton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Whitdeather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin Cover: Tom Stokes •

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Vol. 45, No. 1 May 2011 The magazine abou,t Yale

and New Haven

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NoT ON THEIR WATCH

Putting on the red jacket of an international civilian crime-fighting brotherhood. by Sanjena Sathian

HIDE YouR TIRES

Traveling inside used tires, the world's most dangerous mosquito threatens to invade Connecticut. by jeffrey Kaiser

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How TO KEEP A PROMISE

The New Haven Promise progratn goes off to college this fall. by jacque Feldman

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE CRITICAL ANGLE TITLE IX: TAKING YALE TO COURT

by D r. Ann Olivarius . .

SNAPSHOT A TRIP TO THE CORNER STORE

by jake Conway

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PROFILE THE HousE THAT ALICE BuiLT

by juliana Hanle

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PERSONAL ESSAY AT HOME IN THE ARAB WORLD

by Helen Knight

ENDNOTE

by Eleanor Kenyon

The New Journal is published five times during the academ ic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, •ew Haven, cr 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copy• ight 2006 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written pamission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Seventy-five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members' of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subsaipti6ns are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The ew Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, ew Haven, cr 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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Haven's elm foliage. They continued to do so sporadically in the years that followed. Then, towards the end of the 1800s, elm bark beetles arrived in New Haven and began to eat their . way through the trees themselves. New Haven residents desperately tried surrounding the elms' lower trunks with In 1685, William Cooper gave an moats of oil to prevent the wingless unusual gift. The po·o r Hamden farmer cankerworms from gaining access to uprooted two saplings, specimens of branches. They later doused the trees Ulmus Americana, the American elm ' with the highly toxic compound lead from his farm and hauled them on his arsenate to ward off the beetles. wagon five miles to the budding city of Despite _these efforts, the elm New Haven, where he planted them in population was shrinking. In 1930, the front of the church that then stood on United States recorded its first case of the town green. They were the first elms Dutch elm disease, a fungus carried by recorded to have been planted in the city.· beetles that is all but certain death to Nearly three and a half centuries Ulmus americana. In the 1940s, the tree . later, the city of New Haven received ·disease struck New Haven, and within a · an eerily similar present. In 2009 and few decades, ninety percent of the Elm 2010, Deborah Edwards and other ' City's eponymous trees were gone. members of the Garden Club of New This is where Edwards's work Haven made two trips, presumably not comes in, she told me. The elms at the by wagon, to · Hamden's Whitneyville Whitneyville Congregational Church United Church of Christ, where two venerable American elms stand. The · . . club members gathered up seeds and saplings from the trees and hastened them back to New Haven. But the Garden Club, whose members do civic horticultural work in New Haven, did not intend to donate them to a Puritan minister and his white clapboard chapel. The project that Edwards oversees, "American Elms in New Haven: On its Green and in its Neighborhoods," has as one of its goals another, perhaps higher, aspiration to restore the Elm City to at least some of its former glory. New Haven has had a long and tragic history with Ulmus americana. Late eighteenth-~entury enthusiasts oversaw the first systematic planting of elms on the Green. Shordy thereafter, James Hillhouse of Hillhouse Avenue fame packed the rest of the city with them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, New Haven resembled an exclusive, elms-preferred arboreal club. But trees are not pillars of stone. In 1838, an infestation of cankerworm caterpi11ars munched through New

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evidently resisted the disease; the seeds gathered there are likely to be disease ~esistant as well. So Edwards's project has distributed those seeds, along with some American elm seeds bought commercially and known to be resistant, to some of its members and to local schoolchildren. The members will raise the trees, 131 in all, in what Edwards called "foster care." Then, in 2013, when the trees are four- to five-foot saplings, they will be transplanted to various New Haven schools, nonprofi~and perhaps residential yards. If New Haven . is _lucky which will become evident only after a few decades the elms will be resistant to Dutch elm disease and will grace the city for centuries to come. Edwards is not the only expert on New Raven's elms. When I requested literature on the topic at the New Haven Historical Society's Whitney Library, •

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· · the librariari peered at me knowingly through her thick spectacles and then buried me under piles of memorabilia about New Raven's long-dead trees; As the number of elms dwindled over the twentieth century, New Haven residents mourned their loss and memorialized their love for the trees. ~ newspaper clipping from February 5, 1972 lamented the loss of Hillhouse Avenue's last elm. A book by an early twentieth century resident, self-published . and inexplicably dedicated to William Howard Taft, criticized New Haven residents for their failure to take better care of their trees. A bound copy of a Yale term paper from 1986 argued that the Elm City's trees had suffered most from unnatural calamities, including "leaky gas mains" and the ill-tempered horses of ninteenth-century locals; who had a predilection for wreaking havoc on the trees' trunks. In a 2006 piece in the Yale Alumni Magazine, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Professor Stephen Kellert speculated that we are drawn to Ulmus americana because it resembles the tree species of our primordial birthplace on the African savannah. Walking along the Green on a recent spring day, I tried to imagine it as it looked in_the photographs that I came upon in the Whitney Library from the early twentieth century. If Edwards's . seedlings prove hardy, the gritty sidewalk will once again look elegant beneath the towering, gently fluted trees that gave the Elm City its name. ___,Eli Mandel •

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Institute The food's on the table: chicken salad, tomatoes, grapes, chips, and a bowl of York Peppermint Patties. Let's go ahead and say a blessing! A graduate student in astronomy bends his head Our father r

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in Heaven, we are grateful to be able to have Institute today, to discuss the problems of life and put the• n in the light and perspective of Scripture. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Institute is just a short name for Institutes of Religion, the program whereby the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides for and educates those I .DS students going to school outside of Brigham Young University. I'm visiting to hear Brother Stephen Weber lead today's lunchtime class at the New Haven Institute of Religion, which students from Yale, Quinnipiac, and other schools in the area attend in this Trumbull Street church. Yes, this is a church, but ifs an educational institute first 'We're turning it into a greater-use building," Brother Weber says. The fourth floor is a welcoming space because of the skylights, particularly on a nice sunny day like today, and there's a foosball table .and a ping-pong table and air hockey and bi1Iiards. If you just want to come here to relax or study, you're of course ~

welcome any time. Anyone who shows up later wi11 just have to trust that the food has been blessed. Brother Weber is serving drinks. Apple juice, grape juice, or Sprite. He admonishes a congregant to serve himself a healthful portion of chicken salad. His class today is on the Doctt ine and Covenants, the revelations given through Joseph Smith during his life. Smith was the Church's founding prophet, called by God to restore the Gospel to earth in its fn11ness. Brother Weber's assistant Valerie Ramos has just gotten off the phone with the mother of a high school senior who has a rule for her daughter that every college she applies to must have an Institute program. Valerie, wearing slacks and a sr nart periwinkle cardigan, has been with the Institute since her husband began the Yale School of Medicine's Physician Associate progra••• more than a year ago. They have no children. ''Not yet," adds a woman parking a stroller beside us. Some rime after my visit, Valerie wiiJ announce she

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is expecting a child in the fall. In the meantime, two women here are pregnant, so Bailey, the baby in the stroller, will soon have playmates anyway. In addition to the hundred-odd undergraduates in the congregation, there are about thirty LDS graduate students or residents at Yale, and many of them are married and have families, according to Brother Weber. In raising their children while pursuing advanced degrees, they've chosen .a difficult path, but a sweet one as well. Soon we are all seated and eating at the four round tables covered with wine-colored plastic tablecloths. We are discussing the story of Martin Harris. As you know, in 1828 the prophet had translated the first 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, and he entrusted the work he had completed so far to Harris after the Lord had acquiesced to this through the prophet. That portion of the Book was called the Book of Lehi, and it was . lost. The pages fell into the hands of

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wicked men who were trying to stop the work of the Lord. Bailey, sitting in her mother's lap, is talking quiedy to herself. She begins to cry, and her mother carries her away as we go .on. talking about Harris. We're going on ''~ Scripture chase," Brother Weber announces. Turn to section 111, verse eight of the Doctrine and Covenants. A husband and wife are ' following along on one of those fancy smartphones with a touch screen. She turns the phone sideways to make the words of Scripture easier to read: "The place wher~ it is my will that you should tarry, for the main, shall be signalized unto you by the peace and power of my Spirit, that shall flow unto you." When the Book of Lehi was lost, · Joseph Smith also lost his gift of being able to .translate the Scripture, and he was in despair. The peace of the Lord was lost to him, explains Brother Weber. · Brother Weber is a tall man with a shaven head, a smiling face, and intense .eyes. He spent most of his life out west, in San Diego and Seattle. There are far more members of the Church in that part of the country. "The culture here is not as familiar with Mormon philosophy and practice, and that's fair," he says later. He is a carpenter and a general contractor . by trade, and for two summers his camng was to work on the rebuilding of the first temple in Nauvoo, Illinois. His hardhat and a few of his grandfather's carpentering tools rest on a shelf in his office. Brother Weber has five sons the sixth died in a car accident-and twelve grandchildren and counting. He is directing our reflections to one passage from Scripture and then to another. Bailey can be heard bo1mcing a ping-pong ball on the floor in a comer of the room as we turn to the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians. Many people think the Church of Jesus Christ does not read the Bible, but its members indeed acknowledge the Old and New Testaments as the word of the Lord. See that painting on the far wall? The whiterobed figure among other figures on the stone steps of a fountain? It depicts an episode from the Gospel of John. •

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Of course, other paintings in this building tell stories from th~ Book of Mormon. One on the first floor shows the white-robed figure among a group of people in garb resembling that of the American Indians. The man in white shows the wounds in his hands to the people surrounding him, who smile and weep. They are members of a tribe of Hebrews in North America to . whom Jesus appeared after His resurrection.they had journeyed there from Canaan centuries earlier. Unfortunately, it's getting time · for us to wrap up. The prophet lost that peace of the Lord for a time along with his gift. But his gift and his peace were restored to him, and in spite of the loss of those 116 pages, the work of the Lord could not be stopped. "The Book of Lehi is gone," says Brother Weber. "We don't need the Book of Lehi. That . book in front of you starts with Nephi, and that's where the Lord knew it would start." To accept that, you really have to have faith. All right, let's get a closing prayer. Will someone say it for us?

-Max Ehrenfreund

Success Every morning, Amos McGee politely asks his sugar bowl for a spoonful of sugar for his oauneal and two for his teacup. Then he ambles out the door. Amos is the city zookeeper, and his closest friends are the zoo's inhabitants: an elephant, a tortoise, a penguin, a rhinoceros, and an owL One day, when Amos wakes up ill and must stay home from work, his friends from the zoo surprise him at his house, passing the time with .h im until nightfall. ~ , Amos and his friends live in a ~ simple world of quiet pastels and soft ~ sketches they live in a picture book. ·· A Sick D~ for Amo.r M&Gee, created by ~ author-illustrator team Philip and Erin g ~

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Stead, won this year's Caldecott Medal, the -country's most prestigious award for picture book illustrators. It is the third Caldecott winner to be published by Roaring Brook Press, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary of producing high quality, hardcover, "literary" children's books. Though it started small in Brookville, Connecticut, Roaring Book is now an imprint of New York publishing goliath Macmillan. · Simon Boughton, Roaring Brook's founder and publisher, still resides in Westport, where he supports the local children's libraries arranging, for example, for Erin Stead to come speak to the lucky children of Fairfield County. Poetic picture books are Roaring Brook's · specialty. Its other Caldecott winners are My Friend Rabbit (2003) and The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2004). First the Egg, also published by Roaring Brook, was a Caldecott runnerup in 2008. The Association . for Library Services to Children, or ALSC, awards the Caldecott prize. The organization prescribes specific criteria for Caldecott winners, but Thorn Barthelmess, a career children's librarian cu.rrendy serving on the faculty of the graduate library school at Dominican University and the president of the ALSC since 2009, said it really boils down to this: A good picture

book is born when "first, the people making the book have something to say, and second, they have a way to say it that is somehow meaningful, that has some kind of relationship to the story itself." Maybe the success of Roaring Brook can be traced to its small size. It publishes fewer books than its competitors but publishes them more carefully. Boughton likes to seek out authors and artists who are overlooked by larger operations and offer them an "old-fashioned, small-shop kind of attention." Boughton also credited Roaring Brook with having top-notch editors. A good children's book editor, he said, can read just a few words on a piece of paper and envision the whole work with illustration. A good editor can judge "what is going to appeal not just to children but also to the people who put picture books in the hands of children." Roaring Brook has maintained its focus on picture books at a time when teen fiction is receiving most of the youth publishing industry's attention. The exact reasons for the teen fiction phenomenon are debated in the industry, but kids are undeniably starting to read black-and-white fiction at a younger age. As a result, Boughton said, "the old fashioned traditional picture book has gotten squeezed." Still, the picture book remains an indispensable literary genre. And in

terms of child development, picture books teach concepts like colors and the alphabet as well as lessons in emotions like friendship, love, and anger. ''Whatever emotion you want to name, there's a picture book that deals with it,'~ Boughton said. In Barthelmess's estimation, "really genius picture books" are ones that play around with the relationship between text and illustration the ones in which the words tell one story, the pictures tell another, and there's a third story in the words and pictures together. As an example, Barthelmess likes to discuss 1996 Caldecott winner Officer B11ckle and Gloria. Officer Buckle is a safety officer whose lectures to schoolchildren go from being dreaded to loved after he is assigned a police dog, Gloria. The text suggests that he's giving safety tips and the kids are really enjoying it, but the picrures show that while he is presenting, Gloria is behind him, goofily acting out his words. The text tells his story. The pictures tell hers. The book is complete only when the two are fused. Picture books, Boughton said, tend to succeed in the "space between the words and the pictures," not on the strength of one or the other. The whole of a picture book is greater than the sum of its parts. And they add up to a lot, Ba.rthelmess explained. ''You're beginning to lay the

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foundation, the scaffold, . for deeper literary understandings and investigation throughout the rest of their life," he said. ''You don't sit a three year old down and say, 'We're going to read A Sick DC!J for Amos McGee so you'll be ready to read Hamlet later.' But in fact that's what's happening." Boughton told me that illustrated picture books become art objects as well as literature and when you hold it in your hand, Sick Dqy does feel like a work of art. Words aside, .the pictures are lovely. The turde carries Amos's teapot and cup to him on his back, the scarf-clad rhinoceros holds out a tissue on his horn, the penguin watches his red balloon float toward the moon as his friends sleep piled up beneath him. The words tell us that Amos says goodnight to his friends, but they cannot capture the way Amos rests his hand on .the elephant's trunk, rubs his toes against the rhino's snout, or holds the penguin under his arm as they crowd together on the bed before sleeping. Artists are embracing Photoshop and other digital tools, incorporating them into their illustrations. Many picture books are now available · for iPad and other electronic devices. But in Sick Dqy, all of the illustrations were hand-sketched, hand-carved, and handpainted. As Barthelmess put it, "They're painterly. They're intended to look personal, like a human made them." Above all, books like this are one proof of Barthelmess's belief that there will always be people who "are committed to the beauty of an honest story." Sick Dt9 is, as Boughton put it, "a book about friendship, a book about having the day off, a book about going somewhere." Timeless themes, in literature and in life.

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---,Emi!J Rappaport

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Nota Bene Yale New Haven Regular Singing, the University's Sacred Harp singing ensemble, does not perform. Instead,

its members sit in a hollow, democratic square, sopranos facing basses, tenors facing altos. Each singer is a listener, as well as a musician. The group ranges from ten to twenty undergrads, graduate students, and New Haven community members. Founded about a year ago by Ian Quinn, a professor of music theory, the group chatters familiarly as they wait in the hall for a course section to vacate their meeting room in William L. Harkness Hall on Wall Street. Some are clearly me, are here for regulars, and others, like • the first time. In eighteenth-century New England, Puritans began Regular Singing to encourage the community to learn to read music and thereby . renew religious devotion. The usual way had been to pra~tice in unison a rote repertoire of only a handful of tunes each Sunday. These revivalists founded pedagogical singing schools, and around the turn of the nineteenth century, invented shapenote music notation. From do to do, each

syllable had a shape. La, fa, and mi were transcribed to the page as tiny, stalked squares, triangles, and diamonds, nested between the black bars of the staf£ To me, musical notes have been just dots on a page ever since I quit the trumpet in fourth grade. I can see how the shaped notes' simple geometry would make sight-singing easier and, perhaps, religious devotion more accessible. A proliferation of shape-note books appeared throughout New England in the early nineteenth century, the most famous of them called The Sacred Harp. Its tide is now the common name for the practice of Regular Singing. After many iterations and editions, the book is still used today. I turn a copy over in my hands outside room 205 of Harkness . Hall as I wait for the meeting to begin, fumbling with the wide, yellow pages. ' Opening to a random page in The Sacred Harp, I find a song entided "Save, Lord, or We Perish." Below the strangelooking notes are the words from Luke: "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace." .

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Despite the message of faith, the group is secular. ''We sing very religious music, without feeling like a religious group," says Carson Evans '13. It is the music, not the meaning, that draws some people. Charles Biada '13, a self-described agnostic-atheist and . a member of the Yale Secular Student Alliance, has come almost every week since Quinn started the group. "If you're going to sing old music and if you're only going to sing songs that conform perfectly to your world view," he says, "you're 'going to find yourself with very few songs to sing. And all this old music the poetry, the melodies, the ideas is way too good not to sing. It's simple and raw and real and beautiful." He adds, however, "If you as a singer did wish to treat the songs as a form of prayer at the individual level, the atmosphere could be conducive to that as well. .s o it's not exactly religious, but it's not un-religious either." Quinn calls everyone to order, joking with them and ushering me into a seat in the square arrangement of chairs.

When the singing starts, we first sing tunes once through "on the notes," with fa's, so's, and Ia's, and then repeat them, adding ·lyrics. The music is alternately fast-paced and slow-moving, and it is uncomfortably loud at climatic moments. Many singers, books propped open on their laps or held in front of their eyes, let their free hands rise and fall in time with the music, creating an .undulating line of metronomes. The fading evening light catches rays of dust motes through the high mullioned windows that look out onto Cross Campus, where I imagine passers-by hear our lilting verses. The practice of Sacred Harp, sprung from the revivalist fervor of the same congregants who n 1ight have rubbed elbows with Elihu Yale in the wooden pews of their spare church naves, eventua1ly faded from the North during the Civil War era. Rural Baptists in Alabama picked up the tradition and preserved it by singing the music not for an audience, but for God and for one another. Since then, Sacred Harp has wound its way back to this university, •

which was founded in 1701 to renew strict theological study after Harvard grew too lax and too liberal for the taste of some New England Puritans. Now, though, this narrow, vaulted room is hardly filled with religious fervor. The voices of music majors mingle with those of atheist ex-Jews and Divinity School students as they sing together from Sacred Harp books. "I feel like a great deal of Yale activities are very achievement-based, which is fine we achieve many great and beautiful things here," Evans remarks. "But singing your heart out is a nice release." Here, the only requisite is singing loudly, though the group still manages to sound quite beautiful. Coming together to sing centuries-old hymns in overlapping, swelling harmonies makes me feel like I am sitting not in a classroom but ·in the crowded pews of a colonial church a noteworthy achievement indeed. •

-Rachel Lipstein

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By Ann Olivarius s a Yale undergraduate, I was . one of the plaintiffs in Alexander Yale, in which a group of students sued the University after it refused to create a centralized grievance procedure for sexual harassment. Now, when such mechanisms are nearly universal in businesses and universities, the objective seems uncontroversial; even then it seemed reasonable. But Yale

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fought the idea tooth and claw. Initially, we did not intend to sue. In the spring of 1977, I led a group in preparing a report to the Yale Corporation on the status of women at Yale after one decade of coeducation. When we surveyed female students, we began to hear a steady drumbeat of complaints about professors who had pressed for sex in return for better grades

or access to high-level courses and in some cases fondled or raped students. It was a "dirty'' problem, one nobody wanted to talk about but the women to whom this had happened were deeply upset, ashamed, traumatized. Many of the professors involved were flagrant repeat offenders, but because no one talked about their offenses, female students kept signing up for their classes.

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Editors' note: Like many others on campus, we have dear friends who, as victims of sexual assault, have been ill-served by their University. We believe that the University's mechanisms for responding to sexual misconduct can be substantively improved, and we are confident that in responding to the complaint to the Department of Education under Title IX, the University will become a safer, better place for students of both sexes. Ann Olivarius was a plaintiff in the 1977 case Alexander v. Yale. Even though the suit was all but thrown out, the plaintiffs succeeded in establishing a precedent that forced schools around the country to adopt policies to address sexual harassment. We asked her for her perspective on the complaint and on the history of sexual misconduct at Yale . - .M ax Ehrenfreund and Jacque Feldman 0

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Instituti~nally,

there was no central system for collecting complaints. If the student actually worked up the courage to tell her residential college dean or master, the usual reaction was to express sympathy, but to advise her that this was "all part of life." We asked Yale to introduce a central grievance mechanism. The University said it would study matters, made sympathetic noises, and strung things along until those who had been pressing for reform were about to graduate; then it refused to act. Hours before my parents were due to arrive for graduation, University Secretary Sam Chauncey, with whom I had been meeting almost every week for three months on friendly terms, called me to say I was about to be arrested for libeling one of the most notorious offenders Keith Brion, a professor of music and band director, who had assaulted multiple students and raped at least one by reporting him to the Yale authorities. You actually can't be arrested for libel, but I hadn't gone to law school yet, and I was alarmed. I asked him if Yale was going to provide me with legal help. "No," he said. ''We're supporting Keith." Yale knew how to play hardball. _ Its deputy director of public affairs, Steve Kazarian, told a reporter from Tinie Magazine that I was flunking out (I graduated summa, a soon-to-be Rhodes Scholar) and was a lesbian (I'm glad for people who are, but I'm not). So we went to court, asking not for compensation but for a comprehensive reporting system. We pioneered a new legal approach, arguing that the pattern of sexual harassment and assault that we experienced as female students hurt our access to education and constituted sexual discrimination, putting the University in violation of Title IX. To give some idea of how far o~ society has come, this case was one of the first to utih~e the concept of "sexual harassment." The book by prominent feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon that would formally define the term was still a manuscript. We argued in our complaint, "Failure to

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combat sexual harassment of female students _a nd its refusal to institute mechanisms ·and procedures to address complaints -a nd make investigations of such harassment interferes with the educational process and denies equal opportunity in education." That last sentence could have been lifted out of .

Private resolution saves the University lots of bad press. Confidentiality have advantages for manywome , but for others, livi on the sa ec pus as their assaila c be distressing and tra atizing. the Title IX complaint lodged this year. Because this was a brand-new field, we had obstacles to overcome that today's complainants will not: We had to argue that students had standing to bring a suit under Title IX (that is now established); we had to demonstrate that sexually assaulted and harassed women could represent a "protected class" rather than a collection of individual incidents (they can now); and we had to show how a consistent atmosphere of sexual harassment could impact the educational attainment of women (these days, that's a gimme). The environment in the 1970s may also have been marginally harsher toward outspoken women. Keith Brion stalked me at night as I was cleaning dorm rooms to prepare for reunions. I reported this to the administration; his behavior did not change, and he kept his job. His wife LaRue was the secretary of my college master, and she threatened

to tamper with my @e and scholarship applications. I received letters containing death threats, a used condom, defaced pictures of naked women, and a knife. Our suit was thrown out on technical grounds. Mostly because all of the plaintiffs had graduated, we were found to be ineligible to bring suit, and one woman was found not to have a "quid pro quo" case because the sexual proposition she endured from a male professor did not actually result in a better grade. However, our legal argument was upheld and found wide acceptance in subsequent cases. In the next five years, hundreds of universities across the country instituted grievance procedures. Yale itself created the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board. We thought that the problem was ignorance about harassment and assault and their effects, and so a reportifl.g system would be enough. Yet as with many other confident expectations of the women's movement, progress has been slower and more ragged than we expected. We were right that ignorance was the problem, but every new generation of women and men, it seems, must relearn fundamental notions about how to treat each other equaHy. To its credit, Yale has evolved dramatically since 1977. When I go back to the University, speakers introducing Alexander v. Yale celebrate the plaintiffs, cheerfully glossing over its place on the wrong side of history. By dairuing those who brought this landmark case for its own, Yale continues its tradition as the proud alma mater of unconventional thinkers who have led social change. Indeed, Yale has produced some of the greatest forces for contemporary women's rights: Judith Butler, Hilary Clinton, and Catharine MacKinnon, who was a second-year law student when she wrote the legal theory behind our 1977 complaint, to name a few out of thousands. It is in the footsteps of these forward thinkers that I believe the sixteen co-signers of this current Title IX complaint now tread. Today's complainants, as I

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2007 forms

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submits report

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forms to evaluate WFF report urges formation of University Wide Committee

forms to implement the changes proposed by the first sexual misconduct committee in the interim before the establishment of the University Wide Committee

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forms, urging the creation of a further committee to review sexual misconduct education

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UNIVERSITY WIDE COMMITTEE

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2011 to start on July 1st

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Opposite page: For the pa·st few years:, Yale has fo problem of sexual misconduct on cam us.

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understand it, are highlighting two aspects of Yale life that violate Title IX: inadequate response to many incidents where groups of men disparage women in public with chants such as "No means yes, and yes means anal" or by stealing the T-shirts created by victims of sexual assault for Take Back the Night; and a disciplinary systetn that does not appear to take sexual assault seriously enough. As for the first problem, I understand the frustrations administrators must feel as they try to regulate the activities of drunk young men taking advantage of the tolerant cocoon university life deliberately provides. Nevertheless, it is clear from the reactions to these incidents that many people think that given the great privilege of a Yale education, a little sexual harassment by frat boys in the evening is not something to make into a

federal case. In 1977, we, too, were told that the occasional proposition or grope or rape was something we should simply learn to handle. Now the general public has come to agree that sexual harassment is not to be tolerated, and Yale no longer belittlesvictims'concerns. . But it does not seem to want to take them seriously either: It often cites a free speech argument in defense of the status quo, daiming that it would not be possible to punish the dirty mouths on campus without risking greater harms. I am not convinced by this. Yale's own policies impinge on free speech rights in this very area. Students being disciplined for sexual harassment before the Executive Committee must stay silent; whatever incident gave rise to the charge effectively disappears from the newspapers and campus

Annual Reports of Student-to-Student Sexual Assault and Harassment to the S.H.A.R.E. Center

dialogue. No one really knows: who are the perpetrators, who are the victims, how frequent and how serious are their crimes? As it did in the 1970s, Yale still keeps disciplinary issues fiercely inhouse. It counts sexual assaults by Yale students against other Yale students, in buildings where no one but Yale students live, apartment buildings as well as frat houses, as exempt from Clery Act reporting because they are "off campus." Yale's disciplinary and counseling systems encourage women victims of sexual assault to pursue their cases internally. Private resolution saves the University lots of .bad press. Confidentiality may have advantages for many women, but for others, living on the same campus as their assailants, who are punished lightly if at all, can be

2009-2010

cases reported to the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board cases, once reported to the grievance board, referred to ExComm to potentially take disciplinary action

2008-2009*

number of cases in the past DECADE a student has received a penalty more serious than a reprimand from ExComm for a sexual offense

1 semester

disciplinary action taken in that one instance

SUSJN'nsion

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Yale has produced so e oft greatest forces for contemporary m 's rights: Judith Butler, , and Hilary Cli Catharine Mac nnon, who as a second-year I student en she rote the legal theory behind r 1977 '

educational one, as it was in 1977, to encourage people. to reexamine their assumptions, so they see the evidence around them in a different light. I have · had two daughters go through Yale, and we have hired dozens of Yalies as legal assistants for our law firm. I regret to say that the complaint does reflect the Yale many of ·them have known. On the Juicy Campus Web site several years ago, a man who said he was in my older daughter's college discussed in detail how he planned-to rape her, and another commenter compared the "fuckability" of my two daughters. Yale did not defend Juicy Campus, but like the excrement I received in the mail, these anonymous comments were symptoms of the large and complex problem the school still faces from misogyny. It is a problem, one that seriously affects the lives of Yale women and men . Yale remains one of the best places .

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in the world to get an education and to grow as a person. I am grateful to it, and so are my daughters. But Yale can get better. The University should embrace the complaint as an opportunity to become a pioneer for preventative programming and resources. Yale has the opportunity to be a model of transformation. As it does in many other areas, Yale should aim to lead.

Dr. Ann Olivarius is a 1977 alumna of Branford College and .t hefoundingpartner ofMcAllister Olivarius, an international law firm in London.

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distressing and traumatizing. Change is often slow, and inertia is · powerful. But more can be done. I am encouraged by the announcement of the University Wide Committee, which furthers the Alexander v. Yale plaintiffs' decades-old goal of a single, campuswide reporting . system for sexual misconduct. Hopefully, this Tide IX · complaint will accelerate the speed and expand the scope of such action. One potential approach could be a major report on the status of women and the state of sexual harassment drawn up not only by Yale students and staff but also outside experts and observers not dependent upon Yale for promotion. These outsiders could also form the backbone of a standing comm1ttee on equality issues, meeting .regularly and reporting in public annually, able to hold up a mirror to Yale to test whether its acnons are meet1ng tts mtennons. Yale College Dean Mary Miller wrote in he.r recent email to the Yale community: "I can also say that what I have heard about the substance of the compla1nt does not reflect the Yale that I know." I am sure she is sincere. I th1nk the project at hand is fundamentally an •

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n our way over to the West River neighborhood, a former Ita1ian enclave that is now predominantly black and Hispanic, Stacy Spell and I drive past a di1apidated storefront its windows boarded up, its sidewalk dusty with the .residue of melted street snow. "See " Spell beams at me "the ' ' potential is he.re." Spell is the head of the West Rive.r Neighborhood Services Corporation, which has recently partnered with the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) at Yale's School of Public Health to consult with local bodega owners about developing new business models that promote healthier options fo.r consumers. A fo.rme.r New Haven Police Department detective fo.r ove.r twenty years, Spell has the .rough-and-ready wit and steadfast committnent to his community of the best law enforcement officers. He has lived in West Rive.r fo.r most of his life and does not plan on leaving, despite some bad memories here. His nephew, an innocent bystander, was killed in 2000 at the package store next to the George Street Deli. Jjke most convenience stores, George Street Deli has a few aisles stocked with basic groceries rice, dried beans, flour, sugar, canned goods as well as household cleaning supplies, a rack of chips and nuts up front, a bank of candy and gum under the countet; and a register encased by protective glass where lottery tickets and cigarettes sit. There are no fresh fruits or vegetables for sale, except for potatoes and onions and maybe a few plantains. The only other perishables are bread, ~ and whole milk. Bodegas fill a key niche in the urban ghetto, especia11y in ''food descrts" like ew Haven, which has a core population of 130,000 but no su et. (A Stop & Shop is slated to open in the former Shaw's location this month, but wany will still lack access to groceries.) A

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CARE study in the fall of 2009 found that, of the 104 stores mapped in the Fair Haven, . West River/Dwight, Dixwell, Newhallville, Hill North, and West Rock neighborhoods, almost two-thirds were bodegas. Of the stores surveyed, 63 percent sold mostly junk food, while only 32 percent sold fresh fruit and 38 percent sold fresh vegetables. When we get into the store, Spell points out a shelf of fourteen varieties of potato chips and cheese doodles, all available for $0.75. In the suburbs they only have $0.99 bags of the same brands, he tells me a calculated disparity in price and marketing. He grabs a handful of the bags, an iced-tea beverage, and three st,1ack packs of crackers, throws them on the counter, and after a quick exchange of bills hustles me out of the store. As we get into his Chevy Suburban, he nods at the bounty at the bottom of my seat. "Look," he says, "for three dollars you get a feast of junk."

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odega means wine cellar in Spanish,· - but the closest thing you'll find . to wine at George Street Deli in New Haven is wine-flavored cigarillos, which kids buy ·for a dollar and change so they can use the wrappers to smoke • manJuana. Spell exp1ains that narcotics dea1ings happen frequently under the well-lit storefronts and neon signs because dealers can stymie the police by pretending they're there to shop. He says that bodega owners are often · · ants Hispanic, South Asian, Middle Eastern and new to the neighborhood, so racial tensions run high. Kids come to the bodegas for after-school snacks. Single mothers and elderly people many of them without cars do their grocery shopping at bodegas because of their ubiquity. The intersection of Norton, George, and Derby streets alone, for example, has three. Spell's feast may have been cheap, but shopping at bodegas isn't necessarily a bargain. Not only is the food unhealthy, but without the big-box economies of scale of a major grocer, bodegas

have virtually no buying power in the distribution market. Besides soda, chips, ' and other products bought straight . from the manufacturer, the food sold in bodegas is bought from wholesale retailers like BJs, Sam's Club, Costco, and C-Town Supermarkets and then resold. This means that some staple grocery items are marked up steeply. A pound '

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of Domino granulated sugar costs $4.49 at George Street Deli. By comparison, that same product costs $1.45 at Stop & Shop in Hamden. For bodega owners struggling to make it, the price disparity is just the nature of the business. The owner of George Street Deli, Ram Regmi, moved to the United States from Kathmandu, Nepal, two years ago. He has owned the store for the last year. When pressed about the mark-up on his products, Regn•i emphasized that his was a convenience store, not a supermarket. Most of his profits come from candy: cigarettes, and especially soda. By contract, most bodegas get free refrigeration units from big-name beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi in return for stocking them with the companies' brand products an

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unsettling irony given that one major reason bodega owners don't sell fresh food is the cost of refrigeration . It's not the most lucrative business. Although Regmi takes in about $1,500 a month in Pepsi products alone and sells th~m at around a fifty percent margin, he still only makes about $0.75 for every 2-liter bottle sold. For chips, margins are even tighter, a few pennies on each bag. "I cannot get a lot of money from here," Regmi lan1ented. "It's not enough." •

anett Quintero moved to New Haven sixteen years ago from Tlaxcala, Together with her husband, Quintero manages Dollar Haven Deli for her husband's uncle, who is from Morocco (she makes nine dollars an hour to her husband's ten). Dollar Haven is situated in a dangerous area. Last year, a man carne in to rob the store while Quintero was leaving and stabbed her coworker. Dollar Haven Deli opened just last year. It is located across the street from George Street Deli, and the only thing differentiating it from its competitor is a large neon street-side sign falsely advertising "Pizza by the Slice." Quintero's _uncle-in-law wants to expand to include a deli with prepared foods but has not yet done so because of the cost. Next to the would-be pizza counter a greyish puddle of mop water has collected in a buckle in the tiling. Dollar Haven, like George Street Deli, offers little selection. There's no fresh meat or produce. For fruit, there's only canned papaya and pineapple. I asked Quintero if it was a problem that so much of the food sold at Dollar Haven is processed and packaged. Before Quintero could answer, a young woman came up to the c~nnter and bought for $0.50 apiece four · cigarettes, or ''loosies" as they are called, which Quintero had unwrapped from a box. "For me, it's not a proble~" she said after completing the sale. She was holding her infant daughter in her arms. ''I don't give my children that kind of food. For the customers, it's a problem. They don't have other options around.

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They can only get pizzas and sandwiches. Or they come here to buy groceries.whatever they can find." Quintero has a car and gets her groceries from Shop Rite in West Haven. Many others do not have that option. Food access is a problem not only of mobility but also of price. "They don't have enough money to buy real food like chicken, rice, and eggs," Quintero said of her neighbors. ocial entrepreneurs and community .._.. activists have recognized bodegas as an opportunity as well as a problem. When James Johnson-Piett, an entrepreneur specializing in urban development, came to campus on January 17 to give a talk sponsored by the Yale Sustainable Food Project, he noted the potential of bodega owners to effect real change in • • mner-ctty commuruttes. '13odega owners have the best potential to be 'change agents' because they have such ail investrnent in their consumers," he argued at the talk. Johnson-Piett's company, Urbane evelopment, LLC, based in Philadelphia, works to educate bodega owners on how to streamline their operations so they can make money without selling inferior products, in particular by helping them integrate technology into their bus~esses. Many currently use haphazard accounting methods.shoeboxes, for example, to store cash and receipts. "We have to educate the bodega owner. You can increase your sales by selling a better product, and it wi11 benefit you and your cormnnnity," Spell said. Part of the Healthy Corner Store Initiative he helps to run with CARE is consulting with five · stores about stocking and marketing healthier food like low-fat milk, whole-grain snacks, and fresh fruits and vegetables. The goal is to develop individnaHzed plans with an emphasis on in-store marketing techniques for stocking and displaying these foods, like shelving bottled water at eye level and creating posters indicating · which products are junk food •

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How bodega owners will receive these suggested changes is another question. Many bodega owners have little to no formal education, awareness of urban public health problems, or training in financial management. Whether consumers will purchase these healthier but often more expensive products is also a concern. ''When you can walk in with a dollar and buy a drink, a bag of chips and piece of candy, what kid is going to spend more on healthier foods?" Spell asked. Isadora Tang SOM '1 0 has been trying to answer that question. MyLu Foods which she founded in May 2010 with a $15,000 Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship and the goal of developing and marketing a healthier version of Lunchables to sell to New Haven youth has struggled to balance its social mission with the demands of running a small business. '"Our whole reason for being," Tang said, "is that we want to set ve underserved communities that don't have the option of healthy food." But bodega owners tend to be wary of her product, which, despite its obvious benefits, retails at $1.99 a marked increase over a $0.50 package of Hostess cakes. When bodega owners like Reg111i are trying to support themselves and their fan 1ilies, low-income shoppers have little recourse to healthier foods. As Johnson-Piett noted, "When we talk about food justice, it distills down to a simple thing poverty."

jake Conway is a senior in Davenport College. -

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e walk in a sharp diamond formation. Rocky reminds me repeatedly to stay on his inside, away from the street, where action is most likely to break out. To patrol tonight, we've driven to the Crown Street nightclub district, an area close to Yale that I know well, but still Rocky has built the formation of hu11cing men in red jackets around me I'm small, I'm a girl, and it is my first patrol. As we approach corners, Rocky holds up a fist to tell us to "post up" we snap to attention and stiffen our bodies

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explains. I look hard into the shrouded corners of each alleyway we pass, willing my eyes to see what Rocky sees, but I'm getting nothing. I stick to watching Rocky's massive shoulders lumber in front of me. Rocky and Taxi split up the group, sending Ninja, Tank, and Cisco one block ahead of us while we follow. Splitting the formation, they explain, will ensure that if the other three patrollers' .. . . presence sttrs up any acttvlty or nervous responses, our half of the patrol can follow up in their rear. But on a quiet night like this one, Ninja, Tank, and Cisco seem to be strolling casually ahead of us, leaving me to chat with Rocky and Taxi. As we walk, Rocky makes eye contact with almost everyone we pass~ espedally the occasional homeless person slouched against a building. Eye contact is part of the mission. Rocky wants the patrollers' red jackets to become a familiar, comforting presence. Rocky says patrols like this with a lot of walking and very little action are part of the job. Too often he's seen young men who join expecting a fight every night grow disappointed when they discover the job is usually quiet. Still, he reminds me to stay on the inside of the group. &~f something happens, you need to be able to get back so we can protect you," he says. Rocky, like all ·the Guardian Angels, goes by a nickname. The true identities of the Angels must remain private, he tells me, because of the work they do. They are the eyes and ears and arms of neighborhoods all over the worldand dn1g dealers and gang members can never be allowed to know their real names. On the ·street and even at the headquarters, they all address one another by nicknames, and that is how I will refer to them here. .

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against a brick wall or a fence while Rocky peers around the corner ahead. Once he has determined that the coast is clear, he motions to us to move along. At the corner outside the Chinese takeout restaurant my roommates frequent, he invites me to look around with him. after he's done the preliminary check, of course. He points to a stoop under a yellow restaurant awning about thirty feet away. . ''We'd look in places like that," he says. To Rocky's trained eye, any activity in side alleys, in slightly hidden stoops, or behind dumpsters is an immediate red Bag. He tells me he simply strolls up to the suspicious person and suggests they move out. If a drug dealer or a prostitute or an addict has been spotted, he or she is likely to want to move on wimngly, he

MAY 2.011

spent four nights patrolling the ew Haven streets with the cit:fs own Guardian Angels, an international nonprofit vol1inteer safety patrol that fights Clime unanued. The Guardian

Angels' red berets and jackets have been seen around the city since 2007, when they first set up a chapter in New Haven. It was the Hassidic Jewish population in the Edgewood community that called in the Angels. Violence had escalated to the point that community leaders had begun arming themselves, ready to take the situation into their own hands. When Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the original Guardian Angels chapter in New York, swept into town at the request of Edgewood rabbis, the New Haven chapter was born. He appointed leaders from other Connecticut chapters to help develop the New Haven group and collaborate with the Jewish community for its protection. The results are clear. Rocky reports that the Edgewood neighborhood has seen a sixty percent

They are the eyes and ears and arms of neighborhoods all around the world ar1d clrzzg dealers ar1d gar1g rne111bers car1 never be owed to ow their real naa1es. reduction in crime since 2007. Today the New Haven chapter of the Angels is one of 143 across fifteen countries. Originally founded in 1979 in New Yo~ the Angels have gained an international reputation for _wallcing the line between s ero and vigilante. Every week, the Angels gather in the

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apartment that acts as their headquarters to plan their route before heading out for patrol. The rooms are sparse and the building is old, but Rocky's "office" · has been arranged to look as official as possible. He speaks to me from behind a desk littered with flyers advertising the Angels. It's important to self-publicize, Rocky tells me, because they're still building up the chapter and he needs as many eyes on the streets with him as possible. It has proven difficult for Rocky to find people willing to give up their nights on a weekly basis to roam around the city preventing crime. Most Angels members' careers last only a few years, Rocky says, but lately the New Haven chapter has retained patrollers for longer periods of time. Still, the guys have their own jobs, Rocky tells me, and they ·· want to spend their time off with their families, so doing more than one patrol a week can be difficult. The evenings spent out on the . . · cold streef corners of New Haven are · unpleasant at times, Rocky tells me, but they're worth it. Rocky keeps in mind · the famous Queens murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, which took place only blocks from where he once lived. Genovese was stabbed repeatedly in the middle of the street, and as she cried out, begging for help, no one came to her rescue. No one called the police until it was much too late. When witnesses were asked later why they .did nothing, their response went down in history: "I didn't want to get involved." Rocky reminded me of this incident on more than one occasion, shaking his head with disbelief each time. That won't happen on his watch. Modern psychologists know the Kitty Genovese story well, because it illustrates the "bystander effect" the idea that the more people there are watching a crime, the less likely it is that someone will stop the events from unfolding, because it's' .someone else's problem. But to the Angels, everyone else's problems are their problems. ''They love us here," Rocky says. As he watches the streets, I can see .

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can fit in my pocket, and I'm wearing as bulky a jacket as I could find. I stuff my hair into a hat and zip up the jacket.. And this time, Ninja suggests I dress to match them. Over my enormous down jacket, I put on one of the Angels' bright red numbers, and I even get a beret. I know I look ridiculous. After a laugh, Ninja offers, c~t least you'll be warm." I waddle obediently to take my place in the middle of the group. This time, Tank is tasked with walking with me and ~eeping me on the inside. Tank's son, Cisco, walks ahead of his father. He's still the new recruit, so Ninja has to supervise him. When we're posted up at a corner, I tty to talk to them both. "So you're the father-son team, huh?" Nods. c"What made you want to join your dad, Cisco?" I flash him my best attempt at a charming smile. At twentysomething he's easily the youngest of the group, and he looks me up and down with obvious discomfort while the other men have only kindly, paternally smiled. ccHe saw a lot of what's going on in the streets and he was sick of it," Tank ' answers. "He's good 'cause he knows the streets and stuff, he knows what's . happenin' out there." ccHow do you know so much about it?" I direct my question to Cisco again. ccHe's seen it, he's been there," Tank responds. I give up. As I walk with Tank, he n my second patrol with the Angels, is happy to chat with me. Unlike his .. I meet them at the headquarters, son, he's no sparse conversationalist. only a fifteen-minute walk away. "It's the He praises Cisco, explaining to me that. X location," Rocky says of this building, . though his son stayed out of trouble, explaining to me that I must be careful enough of his friends fell into gang not to reveal where we are. He laughs. culture that he knows the street calls I can't tell how serious he's being, so I of the major gangs and can spot telltale smile and write it down obediently. markers of gang activity that the others *** Street. X Location. Rocky is wming to let me come to a .. might overlook. Tank's not the first Angel- to brag to me about street smarts. . · "bad neighborhood," but only if ·I make· As soon as I met Taxi, I asked him how an effort to blend in. I know he's referring to the bubblegum-pink notebook I tried ~ he got his nicknatne. eel used to be a bounty hunter," he to bring on our first patrol. He'd looked at it suspiciously and told me to find shrugged, a cocky grip spreading over his face. 'cr did my stakeouts out of a something less conspicuous. This time taxi cab." Ninja, who got his name from I've brought a slim black notebook that his shoulders stiffen with pride. This fraternity of unarmed strangers has been welcomed, first into the Edgewood community, . and slowly block by block into _New Haven, spotting the streets with their red berets.

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his affinity for rnartial arts as a child growing up .in public housing projects, also works as a p_art-time bounty hunter, hired out by local police forces in nearby Meriden. One night as we stood outside Dunkin' Donuts on a brief patrol break, he mm nbled that sometimes it's hard to be unarmed and to know that he can at most make a citizen's arrest when on patrol with the Angels. "What would you do if someone you were trytng to scare away JUSt came at you with a knife or a gun?" I asked. 'Td have to walk away,'' he said, his features screwed up in a grimace. Ninja is a man who prefers to fight back. Tank raises his chin in fraternal greeting to everyone we pass with a gruff ''How you doin', guy?" A few people sto..p him, and they exchange a handshake o.r a hello. Some of the people we pass respond with a nod or a "Glad to see you're out here, man." Not everyone greets us warmly. We pass three teenagers gathered on a doorstep who avoid eye contact with •

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Tank, only responding in grunts to his customary "How you doin'?" greeting. ''I always try to say hello and how you doin'," Tank says. ''Even if they're not gonna respond. Those guys were gang members but at least I got their respect." I peer cautiously back behind me, looking for some telltale brands or marks on the boys. "How'd you know they're gang members?" I ask. ''You could tell," Tank g• ins knowingly at me. ''They was definitely packin'." One tiny, elderly woman sees us moving in double formation (two vertical lines of three people each) and runs onto her porch. As she steps into her doorway, beckoning us over, a few people move shiftily out of the doorframe. "Can you do something about this?', she begs, gesturing to the people cotr•ing and going. ''They smokin' the crack pipe in the house all the rime, I got nenas and

they little and the smoke's comin' under my door." Her English is rough and broken, and Tank, who is Puerto Rican, switches into Spanish. I join them on her doorstep and ask her in Spanish why the police haven't helped her. ''I call the~ all the rime, every day," she tells me. "Nunca /Iegan, nunca 1/egardn." They never come, and they're never gomg to come. Tank promises her that he'll put in a call for her. As we walk away I ask him why he thinks he can get the cops to come if she's been ca11ing .repeatedly. He looks at me importantly. ''Because the Guardian .Angels know now." I turn, craning my neck around Tank's broad shoulders and bulkv frame, watching the woman .retreat into her house. Weeks later, when I inquired with Rocky about the woman's status, he didn't know if the police had responded. On this second night, I can see the real •

patrolling community after community, spending .nights out on cold streets all over the northeast. Rocky ran away from his home ·in Brooklyn at 15 and spent the next few years of his life living with fellow runaways · on the streets of Hell's Kitchen, where he was a member of an informal gang. The group of boys lived together and looked out for each other, occasionally getting into fights with other loosely organized gangs and painting graffiti around the city. Gangs, he says, promise wayward youths like himself love. Gangs lure in stragglers off the street with beds to sleep in and friends to take care of them, and before they know it they are handed guns and asked to do someone a favor, to take care of something for them, to help do their duty for the neighborhood. Help protect the neighborhood, because no one else is watching out. But the Angels make no such · promises, and they attract members

danger the Angels are looking out for. But I can also see how Tank's chest puffs up with manly pride as he brags to me, the way he keeps straightening his uniform and adjusting his beret. Angels are eyes on the street, but they also want eyes on them. At the end of that night's patrol, as I'm. waiting for a cab to come pick me up from the headquarters back in Edgewood, Cisco turns to me. ''Wives and sisters shouldn't have to walk alone and be afraid, you know?" He stares at me from .his wide dark eyes and fixes me with a penetrating look. "That ain't right." It is the first time tonight that he makes eye contact with me. My cab pulls . up. He thrusts a large palm at me to shake my hand before opening the cab door for me.

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who, in Rocky's words, are seeing things they're sick of on the streets, things they want to stop. They're just ordinary citizens, he says, looking to make a difference. Though Rocky has been in the Angels' service for thirty years, he has only been stationed in New Haven for five months. He spent the last several years moving from chapter to chapter around Connecticut and New Jersey, reviving chapters that had fallen by the wayside. The New Haven chapter is· Rocky's latest project, and he aims to train a squadron of committed and talented patrollers in two years. Despite Rocky's years of commitment, he is still a volunteer, and so are all the other patrollers. Though a cabinet-maker by trade, Rocky has had trouble finding work in cabinetry, so now he's working m construction. Rocky's scrapbook holds archives of thirty years of the organization's history. I page through headlines calling the •

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Angels heroes, proclaiming them saviors of neighborhoods and cities. Between pages of worn newsprint and pictures

"I used to be a bounty hunter," Taxi shrugged, a cocky grin spreading over his face. "I did n1y stakeouts out of a taxi cab." of muscled men clad in red, I find a large clipping of a beautiful woman with porce1ain skin and billowing hair Lisa Sliwa, Curtis's ex-wife. She was also an Angel. One snapshot showed her g1aring from between two tough-looking Latino men, all three with arms folded. Her mouth turned up just the slightest bit at the corners in a nearly unnoticeable grin. I tried to imagine her on the streets with the Angels, and how it would feel to be at the front of the patroL night of my last patrol with the Angels, we settle on the couches while Rocky reviews the training essentials that he's gone ov~r every night. Obey orders, community outreach, formations by now, I know the patrols well enough to feel like I can zone out as Rocky says it all again. Crime's down sixty percent since 2007, he reminds us. Tank and Cisco aren't here tonight, to my dismay. Tonight's plan is to do some recruiting in the downtown area after a quick sweep near the Edgewood headquarters. He adds that the recruiting seems to be going well thus far and that next week, a woman will be corning to join the Angels on patrol after seeing

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their fl.yets in a laundromat. In the back corner of the room, a whiteboard looms large with words "GOAL: RECRUIT 30 MEMBERS BY AUGUST 12, 2011." Before letting me out of the Angels' sight, Rocky wants me to have some selfdefense techniques to use if something were to happen. I stand up obediently, leaving my recorder and notepad on the couch. He tells me to come at him. I grab him by the collar of his grey hoodie, waiting for bini to show ·me some new ways to bust free. Startled, he looks up at me and glances around to the other Angels watching us in the middle of the room. ''Whoa she's kinda strong!" They laugh. The demonstration is quick just a few quick tips on how to get out of various choke holds, many of which a five-foot, hundred-pound girl would · not use effectively on a man Rocky's size in real life. After I struggle free, I'm instructed to knee my attacker in the groin and run and scream. ''It's basic stuff that any woman should know," he tells me. "Or guy." The Angels nod somberly. As I make the walk home that night, • facing the streets on foot this time, without a taxi to carry me home safely, I practice a fe~ of the moves again, im · · myself screaming in the face of an attacker and sprinting away. I can't help but laugh at the pictnre. But Rocky's right staying safe is a serious matter, and even if these vigi1antes sometimes talk bigger ta1k than I'd expect from a group of unarmed, beret-topped men, I feel somehow more protected knoMng they're keeping an eye on the streets. I wa1k alone, but two blocks over, I know, the Guardian Angels are watching, making their weekly rounds.

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ohn Shepard spends his summers . white stripes lined the thorax and legs of the black insect. Shepard had seen such hunched over a microscope, identifying mosquitoes trapped in markings before and quickly identif1ed the species as Aedes albopictus, the Asian Connecticut mosquito surveillance tiger mosquito, a carrier of numerous pt'ogram. Shepat'd oversaw the deadly diseases. He checked the sample identification and sorting of 115,725 container to see where the mosquito had mosquitoes last year. The year before it been trapped. He knew the place well.was closet' to three hundred thousand. the Exeter Enet'gy Tire Incinet'ator in He examined probably forty thousand Sterling, Connecticut. under the microscope himsel£ Shepat'd shared his discovery with Connecticut is home to over fifty his colleague D.r. Theodore Andreadis, ] different species of mosquitoes, thirty of which at'e .commonly found in the the chief medical entomologist at the ~ Connecticut Agricultut'al Experiment u.. statewide traps. But one morning in July Station in New Haven, whose office .§ 2006, Shepard saw a distinct, uncommon species under his mic£oscope. Silvery adjoins the lab where Shepat'd works.

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THE NEW ]OURNAL

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Andreadis, who oversees the surveillance program and has extensive training with mosquitoes, had seen the species before and was well aware of the threat caused by its growing global presence. Mosquitoes are picky eaters. Of all the species of the insect found in Connecticut, only a few are known to feed on humans. And.readis and the surveillance tea• n have analyzed the blood meals of mosquitoes and have isolated the species that .readily feed on humans. They vary according to geography but include Ochkrotatus sollicitans, Aetks vexans, Aetksjaponitt~s, Culex pipiens, and, of course, Aedes albopictlls. Shepard ~

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has extensive experience: a number of close-up pictures on the feature his hand being fed on by various • mosqwtoes. The tiger, though, is different from the others. It feeds on anything that moves. In populated areas it is a serious human pest. ''It willliteraUy hunt you down," Shepard explained to me. Andreadis knew that the As1an tiger mosquito had caused an outbreak of disease marked by high fever, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, ras~ and joint pain on the French island of Reunion the year before. Well over a hundred thousand people fell

sick. More gravely, the Asian tiger is a vector of Dengue virus, a disease that has recendy reemerged in the United States. In its most severe form, which is called Dengue hemorrhagic fever, patients experience flu-like symptoms at the onset, followed by severe bleeding from the nose and mouth and bleeding under the skin. In laboratory studies, the Asian tiger has successfully carried five viruses, including Eastern equine and yellow fever. Shepard warned that it could also be a vector for Japanese encephalitis as well as other, yet-to-be-discovered viruses. And this pernicious creature had just arrived in Connecticut. Batrling mosquitoes and defending against the diseases they carry is a grueling counterinsurgency, and the intelligence gathered at the Experix nent Station is vitally important to public health. When the researchers there isolate a virus, they immediately notify officials at the Department of Health. If a virus is regiona1ly concentrated or if a certain mosquito species is showing signs of increased viral activity, the program can advise local officials to spray insecticides or initiate other control mechanisms. According to Shepard, the goal is to prevent outbreaks not just of West ile but of any of the mosquitohome viruses found in the state. The surveillance program's breadth across the state also allows for the ·.totu of new and invasive species, like the • • • stan nger mosqwto. ot even the most sophisticated

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if I wanted to' sit in on a telephone call the next day, Sunday, with the CDC and people from New York and other health directors from .the region." (The CDC is . . the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) · Anderson called a technician in his lab to see if they had ever grown the·St. Louis encephalitis cell line. He needed something against which to test any viruses he might isolate. After . the call he went out to Greenwich and Stamford to set mosquito traps. Anderson couldn't simply walk iiito people's yards and place traps on a Sunday. in Greenwich, so he requested a police escort. None of this was new

prevention techniques, however, can protect against an enemy that remains invisible. he researchers at the Experiment Station are all too familiar with the dangers of mosquito-born diseases. Culex ·pipiens, a less dangerous vector than the Asian tiger, was the species . responsible for the 1999 West Nile epidemic in New York. "It was insane. It was 24/7. It was very explosive," recalls Andreadis. News coverage was around the clock. Trucks were spraying insecticide all over New York City. Calls were coming in daily to the station reporting dead birds crows were fa11ing out of the sky. No one knows for sure how the virus got to the United States. Because the first human cases were in Queens near two airports, the disease likely arrived on an airplane. Andreadis guesses that the culprit was an infected mosquito on a commercial transcontinental flight. But it could just as well have been an infected human returning from abroad, or a bird or mosquito in a ship's hold, he said. The virus that was eventually isolated matched most closely a strain that had caused a minor outbreak among an elderly population in Israel in 1957, so there was some speculation that it originated there. In the first chaotic days and weeks of the outbreak, though, no one realized that the New York City cases were actually West Nile. The virus had never been seen in the Western Hemisphere before, and no labs in the United States had West Nile isolates to test against. The New York virus was assumed to be St. Louis encephalitis, another disease for which Culex is the primary vector. On September 4, 1999, John Anderson, then director of the Experiment Station, read a story in the New York Times under the headline, ''Encephalitis Strikes 3 People, 1 Fatally, In Queens, City Says." It was a Saturday, and Anderson was working on houseflies somewhere in Eastern Connecticut. He heard similar reports of an outbreak on the radio and realized that something was up. ''I got a call that night asking-

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''Bird brains, they're not ve large. A crow brain is about like that size,'' Anderson tells me. ''And I just cut it in pie slices and isolated virus in eve section.'' to Anderson. Two years earlier he had established a small-scale mosquito surveillance program in Connecticut after an outbreak of Eastern equine encephalitis on the Rhode Island border. But this time, acquiring information about the spread of the virus would be critical to prevention efforts, and the Experiment Station had the regions' only facilities able to test mosquito samples and track the outbreak. A few days later a local Greenwich paper published a story about Anderson's activities. That day he got a call from the ln.Qis Arden Golf Club in Old Greenwich. Members there were

worried and had begun to complain of mosquitoes. The course thought it would be best to set a trap. ''And it was there we isolated this virus from two speci~s of mosquitoes," Anderson says. Meanwhile, crows continued to die, and one dead bird made it from . the coastal town of Norwalk to the University of Connecticut in Hartford. Scientists there knew Anderson was working on the outbreak, and they called to offer him the bird's brain. "Bird brains, you know, they're not very large. A crow brain is about like that size," ·Anderson tells me, holding up a hand with thumb and forefinger touching. ''And I just cut it in pie slices and isolated virus in every section." Eventually Anderson tested the three separate virus isolates the bird and two mosquito species against antibodies from St. Louis encephalitis and found that the public health community's prior thinking had been wrong. The disease was not St. Louis. The team then analyzed the structural makeup of the virus's RNA. The sequence most closely matched a sequence of West Nile virus that had been isolated and recorded years earlier in Romania. · After scrambling day and night to pull a paper together, Anderson's team published their findings in the December 1999 issue of Science. Anderson slides his copy across the conference room table where we've met. The abstract warns, "If established in North America, WN virus will likely have severe effects on human health and on the health of populations of birds." At that point, no one knew whether or not West Nile would successfully overwinter. In the earlier outbreaks in Europe it had failed to survive colder winter temperat:uies, and most in the United States thought the disease would not reappear the following spnng. But by 2003, "we had the largest epidemic of a mosquito-borne disease ever in North America," Andreadis said. The years from 2004 to 2008 were the "establishment phase:" The number of human cases settled to around a •

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thousand per year, and the disease became a permanent health threat. In order for an epidemic to occur, not only must a virus arrive in the United States, but it must also find a viable ~osquito vector species that feeds on mammals more specifically, humans,and · that lives in urban and suburban areas. Otherwise, the virus poses no threat to humans. Mosquitoes are finicky about where they breed. Some prefer natural, dry habitats, such as holes and crevices in trees and rocks. Others are simple container breeders and are happy anywhere water pools. Culex pipiens prefers artificial containers or stagnant pools with organic content, and it is highly tolerant of polluted water. In short, Culex mosquitoes love basements, ce11ars, and sewers all the byproducts of densely populated urban areas. In his office at the back of the lab, Dr. Andreadis pulls up a map on his computer screen. It shows the state of Connecticut with black circles marking sites where West Nile has been isolated from mosquitoes (seventy percent of West . Nile isolates come. from Culex pipiens). The do_ts are clustered along the I-95 corridor, a stretch that includes the cities of Greenwich, Stamford, Bridgeport, and New Haven, and around the state capital of Hartford. In Culex pipiens, West Nile found the perfect vector. •

edes albopictues the Asian tigery prove itself a similarly menacing vector for disease. No one knows more about the threat it poses than Dr. Paul Reiter, now the director of the Insects and Infectious Diseases Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, who was the first person to find an Asian tiger mosquito in the Western Hemisphere. Since that fateful afternoon in a Memphis, Tennessee, cemetery in the fall of 1983, Reiter has tracked the global iovasion of Aedes albopictus into 36 states and nearly as many countries. Reiter stumbled into a life devoted to mosquitoes while working on a dissertation on the biochemistry of •

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schizophienia. "I got very bored," he told me over the phone from his home in Paris. He later joked that he was tired of shuttling bottles of urine from schizophrenic patients to the lab for analysis. "There was a kind of Peace Corps type advert to go work in the Cayman Islands in the mosquito control unit. So I thought I'd do that for a year, and I got stuck." After the Cayman Islands, Reiter relocated to the CDC, where he was working in 1983. That year, the CDC sent · Reiter to Tennessee to study St. Louis encephalitis. He spent his days collecting mosquitoes for virus isolation in the fertile breeding grounds of culverts and storm sewers. Reiter, who is six feet tall, found it incredibly challenging to work

hunched over in the five-foot diameter . sewers. So he invented a trap that would allow him to collect Culex mosquitoes in open areas. He baited the trap with a putrid infusion he made by steeping hay in water for about a wee~ which was particularly attractive to Culex females ready to lay eggs. Reiter's trap is used today by mosquito survei11ance programs around the country, including Connecticut's. One evening Reiter got a call from his colleague Dick Darsie, the man tasked with sorriog through all Reiters mosquitoes before testing. ''He said, 'Paul, you'll never guess what I've found in your collections.' And so I tried to guess and o f course I got it wrong," Reiter recalled. Darsie had found an

Asian tiger mosquito. Reiter didn>t doubt him Darsie knew his mosquitoes well and had worked on the species in South Asia years before. Reiter took the discovery to the Tennessee Deparunent of Health but was offered no support for further research. Reiter found no more albopictus for the next few years, and eventuaJly almost forgot about the species. He still wonders how that one mosquito got to Memphis. His only theory is that it came in a mail shipment from Houston. Both Houston and Memphis have large mail sorting facilities; Houston is a major port, and, as it later turned out, it was albopictus' probable point of entry when it eventually took hold in the United States. The mail facility in Memphis was just across the street _from the cemetery where Reiter trapped that first mosquito. "I looked at the place on Google the other day and could see the exact spot where the trap was," Reiter told me almost nostalgically. ''Perhaps we can put a plaque there one day." n 1986 the CDC asked Reiter to go down to Houston. Reports were coming in of a new mosquito, and descriptions suggested it might be the Asian tiger. "Obviously I was the expert," Reiter joked, '1>ecause I had caught one mosquito." In Housto~ Reiter and a colleague spent most of their time exploring tire dumps. Tire piles are just about the perfect breeding sites for mosquitoes. When water gets in a tire it never leaves, and it collects organic material that is very attractive to female mosquitoes. They were finishing up at a site one afternoon when a pickup truck came down the road and stopped about 150 yards from where Reiter had parked. Two men got out and started rummaging through the tire pile. Reiter watched as they started throwing some of the tires he had marked into their· truck. Reiter had planned to come back to check on breeding mosquitoes, so he went up to them and asked what they were doing with the ri res. The tires, it turned out, would be shipped to Mexico and Guatemala. ''I thought, 'Oh,

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for crying out loud, they're going to be shipping out the mosquitoes as well'," Reiter recalled. ''All of the tires had water in them and all of them had lots of mosquitoes." Reiter learned that the men's company also imported tires from Japan: ''And that's how I stumbled on the fact that there's this incredible trade in used tires." The Japanese were exporting used tires to some 140 or 150 countries. The United States exported them to over a hundred countries. Tires were being shipped to the United States for recapping many countries have regulations that allow tires to be ·recapped or retreaded. Airplane tires can be recapped nine times, Reiter learned. And so a trade in what appeared to be useless used rubber was in fact a lucrative global industry. "The Europeans were importing them. I told them that they should not, but of course nobody stopped, and now Europe is full of albopictus. Oh, it's everywhere. It's in about four or five countries in West Africa. It's certainly in Lebanon and Syria. It's going to be universal, I think."

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its entrance into the .port of Houston, the Asian tiger stalked its way east and up the Atlantic seaboard. Today, the front line in the battle against the species lies somewhere along the Connecticut-New York-New Jersey border. At the Experiment Station in New Haven, Shepard and Andreadis are on high alert. When the two found the first in Connecticut in 2006, they were not surprised. Andreadis guessed almost immediately how it · ''There was no question it was by the transportation of used tires," he tells me. All mosquitoes collected in the surveiJlance program's traps identified and sorted by species ~d trap location, and the Asian tiger mosquito that Shepard had identified was from a trap at the Exeter Energy Tue Incinerator. The only question that mattered was whether or not the mosquito would establish a permanent · •

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· presence in the state. To do so, the Asian tiger's eggs needed to last through the cold Connecticut winter. After the first Asian tiger was found at the Sterling tire plant, survei11ance staff returned to the facility weekly for the remainder of the season. They found that the mosquito had successfully entrenched itself in the woodlands surrounding the tire facility, and females were beginning to lay eggs in traps that Andreadis's team had placed. When they returned in early summer of 2007, though, they found no larvae in the traps the eggs had died during the winter and no host-seeking females in the surrounding woodlands. The results of their study, which Andreadis published in a 2009 paper in the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association, identified a temperature barrier. South of the barrier, where the average January temperature is above zero degrees Celsius, the mosquito had successfully established itself. In New York City, where the average January temperature is 0.14 degrees Celsius, albopictus resides in every major

borough. Other surveillance programs had found the species overwintering in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but not north of the zero degree barrier. A line on a map to mark this barrier would rise through central Pennsylvania, stretch across northern New Jersey, and follow the eastern seaboard along the coast of the Long Island Sound out to sea. Average January temperatures all across Connecticut are just slightly below the · zero degree mark. According to Andreadis's paper, the Sterling tire recycling plant often receives tires from out of state. The Asian tiger likely arrived inside a tire on one of these shipments, probably from New Jersey. (Exeter Energy is undergoing an acquisition and declined to comment for this article.) Though the mosquitoes have so far failed to survive the winters • here, average global temperatures are on the rise, and if Connecticut warms even slightly, we may well find the Asian tiger residing permanently in our backyards. John Shepard explained all of this to me in a sma11 closet at the end of a long hall on the -second floor of

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the Slate laboratory building of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. An independent state agency, the Experiment Station is cramped onto a _small campus in the midst of the leafy residential Prospect Hill neighborhood just minutes north of Yale. All states have experiment stations, and Connecticut's is the oldest, founded in 1875. The station ·conducts scientific research focusing on agriculture and the environment. A scientist fu:st bred hybrid corn here in 1914. Since its founding, the station's motto has .been "Puu ing Science to Work for Society." Shepard brought me to this closet"insectary" is the preferred term after his colleague, Dr. Melissa Hardstone, came to tell him that she was "going to get the guinea pig." I asked what this meant, and Shepard led me into the cramped, fiuorescently lit, artificially humidified room. Here, the researchers keep live colonies of eight species of mosquito in wire-mesh cages including certain species not kept in colonies anywhere else in the country. At the . end of a shoulder-height shelf against th~ back wall, one of these cages contained a guinea pig with a shaved back. The white rodent was in its own wire cage, unable to move and subject to hundreds of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Its back was covered in small red bites. Hardstone insisted that the guinea pig doesn't mind the treat:Inent and, in fact, eagerly shuffles into its confining cage each time it is sent to be fed on. The feeding protocols, I . . was assured, are approved-by the United States Departtnent of Agriculture and the Institutional. Animal Care and Use Committee. The guinea pigs are used only for the species of mosquitoes known to feed on rnammals. For others that prefer-birds, a sma11 button quail is • used instead. On a 'l ower shelf ·on .· the adjacent wall, another cage was clearly labeled Aedes albopictus. 'Ibis is one of the country's few colonies of the Asian tiger. These colonies are an important weapon in the arsenal of mosquito containment. Because the Experiment

Station also has an enormous collection of live viruses and pathogens in a highsafety laboratory, researchers can study these diseases and the way they spread through their insect vectors. When mosquitoes bite us, most of us are annoyed at the itch, but few are likely to worry about deadly tropical diseases.

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During the 1999 est Nile outbreak, news coverage was around the clock. Trucks were • spray1ng insecticide all over New York City. Calls were coming in daily to the station repo~ing dead birds crows were falling out of the sky.

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Shepard, because of his exposure to the myriad threats, tends to dwell on these more morbid possibilities. <'I know when my kids get bit it's probably nothing," Shepard told me. <'But I'm not in unune to worrying. And my wife will say to me, ~e we safe here?"'

are newspaper clippings, cartoons, magazine covers, fridge magnets encouraging citizens to report dead birds, and a taxidermied crow. The spread of West Nile through Culex pipiens tells us much about the potential dangers of the Asian tiger mosquito. Put simply, just as Culex pipiens was waiting and ready when West Nile arrived, so too may the Asian tiger be waiting and ready when Dengue arrives. And if the connection seems far-fetched, consider the fact that Culex pipiens made its continental leap on shipping vessels likely wooden saiJing ships that crossed to the Americas in the seventeenth or eighteenth century just as the Asian tiger snuck into Houston and now into Connecticut inside tires. For the scientists who work in this field, it is not a question of if but when. For now, our best weapon is good intelligence, for which we can thank the Experiment Station. The lessons it learned in dealing with the West Nile threat in ultimately failing to contain the virus, despite Anderson's breakthrough in successfully identifying it have · been institutionalized in the form of the massive surveillance progra 111 and better communication with public health officials. <'It sounds terribly trite, but expect the unexpected," warns Reiter. "Who the heck knows what's going to come in next?" Though we will surely deal with another deadly mosquito-borne outbreak, we will be better prepared for the next epidemic, even if the disease finds a vector in the Asian tiger mosquito.

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d.ecot:ations on the wa11s of the two main lab romus of the Experiment Station's Center for Vector Biology and Zoonotic Diseases (the officia1 home of the mosquito survei11ance program) tell almost every detail of the story of ile. There

Jeffrey

is a junior in Saybrook College.

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A New Haven Promise sign hangs outside High School in the Community. •

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long mid-morning class period, which lasts from 10:05 to 11:35, can be tedious if you're a student at Wilbur Cross, a public high school in New Haven. On a rainy day in early April, class was especially tedious for one st:Udent, whom I will call Shawn. He was working in the school library's computer room with his junior English classmates, and he was supposed to be researching a presentation on ''Battle Royal," the first chapter of Ralph Emson's 1952 novel, Invisible Man. It was a long period, the day was dreary, and Shawn hadn't done the

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reading. Worse, his teacher, Michael Robin, was pushing him awfully hard, even though few others seemed to have done the reading either, and even though Shawn was one of five students in a class of eleven to have arrived in the classroom before the late bell rang. As the class period began, Robin explained that he wanted students to fill in gridded worksheets . with information about the story's author, quotations from the text, and their own analysis. By 10:38, the students had settled in the library with their Web browsers open. A few minutes earlier, Robin's goal for the class had dropped to recording and analyzing four quotations apiece, but even that much seemed insufferably boring to Shawn. He copied and pasted the story he was reading from a Web · . site to a Word document, fiddling with the font. By 11:22, Robin was begging Shawn to find just two quotations, but Shawn was still reluctant. By 11 :30, having tried every trick he could muster, having been called a racist by Shawn, who is black, Robin, who is white, settled on a pep talk. 'cyou're way too talented to just blow it off," he told Shawn. Dropping to his knees beside Shawn's chair, he asked Shawn to spend two minutes finding just one quotation. "Can you do that?" In the end, Shawn threw up his hands, saying impassively to his friend beside him that he didn't care. It didn't matter. After class, his mood was markedly low, quiet. Shouldering his backpack, he told me he wasn't on his A-game. While Shawn left the library as quickly as he could, I asked his classmates whether they had ever heard of something called New Haven Promise. Yes, they had. But they didn't think that many people they knew would actually qualify for the scholarship program, which will begin this September to fund tuition at any in-state public university for graduates of ew Raven's high schools who meet its requirements for good behavior, academics, and residmcy in ew Haven. Most people, they told me, weren't focused on their grades-

only on passing enough classes to graduate high school. Students who spoke to me at four of New Raven's high schools said some of their classmates find it hard to understand why they should work at all in high school when they can't afford college anyway. "Some of these kids are slipping," said Diana HernandezDegroat, a guidance counselor at High School in the Community. "The cost of college, some of them think it's too expensive and they can't go." Those behind New Haven Promise plan to change this. They have stated a goal to halve New Raven's high school dropout rate in five years by allowing all students to think of college as a possibility. Any student who lives in New Haven and attends one of the city's public schools is eligible to receive Promise funds, scaled according to how long they've studied in-district and so long as they have an attendance rate of 90 percent, complete forty hours of community service, and maintain a 3.0 GPA. The program wi11 be phased in gradually, with current high school seniors receiving 25 percent of tuition and current freshmen, 100 percent. (It will take into account current seniors' senior-year GPA only and only the hours of community service they've completed since last fall.) The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven has taken on the program's operation from a small office with a handful of staff and a busy whiteboard, and Yale University will guarantee the scholarship's funding for four classes of students, for up to four mi11ion dollars each year, after which the program will be reviewed The program aims not only to provide students with college funding, but also to revitalize the city's economy. The greatest hope for Promise is that it will create a college-going culture in New Raven's schools, explained Emily Byrne, the program's director. She believes that the program's requirements will incentivize students to stay in school and sr 1 ive for a B average. ''We're like the golden carrot for these kids," she said. In the field of education, creating

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incentives can be tricky. Recently, this program, with Promise added to Harvard economist Roland Fryer tested . it, it becomes a beautiful example of • what happens when children are paid what education. . reform can be." She to learn. When Fryer's team paid Dallas referred to School Change, the package . second graders two dollars for each book of reforms rolled out by Mayor John they read, students read many more DeStefano, Jr. in February 2009. The books, and their reading comprehension scores increased measurably when tested. In New York and Chicago, however, where Fryer's team told students they'd pay them for good grades or test scores, students didn't do any better on standardized tests (though their grades did go up becau.se they attended class more regularly). · "If students lack the structural resources or knowledge to convert effort to measurable achievement," the study concluded, "or if the . production function has important complementarities out of their control (effective teachers, engaged parents, or peer dynamics, e.g.) then incentives will have very litcle impact." If you're a student at one of New • Haven's public high schools, you might be able to rise to the challenge set by . New Haven Promise, but you might not. mayor has repeatedly stated a goal to Even if earning Promise funds seems an make New Haven the nation's best urban attractive enough incentive to tug you school district a tall order, given that through 13 years of schooling, you'll still the city's public schools have long rested · need to be helped along the way. at the bottom of the achievement gap It was hard for me to tell what between rich and poor school districts i..~ exactly made Shawn so resistant to work Connecticut, which has the widest such that April morning. Similarly, what it will gap of any state. The state's neighborstake to create a true college-going culture New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode in New Haven is a riddle the one that Island all won funds in 2010 from the those behind New Haven Promise hope federal Race to the Top initiative, but to solve. As its first students to benefit Connecticut was not even a finalist. from Promise prepare to go off to This is where the district stands. college this fall, New Haven is poised to 89 percent of its tenth-graders scored test their answer. below the goal level in Science on the Connecticut Academic Performance Te.st WILL BE THE in 2009, with only 6 percent of school MOST SIGNIFICANT districts statewide scoring the same or ANNOUNCEMENT EVER MADE worse. 83 percent of a representative IN NEW HAVEN," ·wrote Jessica group of New Haven students qnaHfy Mayorga, then New Haven's director for free or reduced-price lunches, of communications, in a press r~lease compared to 30 percent statewide. (The before the program was announced last percentage of students eligible for free November. or reduced-price lunches is often used 'Who's that district that people as an indicator of economic need in a look to, to be a model? We think that · district.) New Haven's schools have a it's New Haven," Byrne told me. ''With dropout rate of 27.5 percent, meaning .

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''To :me, Promise wealt -creation De tefano told :rne, ''and

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that of all the freshmen who matriculate at one of the city's high schools, about a quarter won't graduate. It was as he was beginning his campaign for reelection to an unprecedented ninth term that DeStefano, who sent his own soris to Wilbur Cross, first described what's become his signature education reform initiative. New Haven Promise is only one aspect of School Change, which also includes strategies for ranking schools into tiers, evaluating teachers and administrators, and engaging parents and members of the community in education reform. DeStefano's administration succeeded in reaching a new, reform-n•inded labor contract with the teachers' union in 2009 a victory when in other districts across the country, and famously in Washington, D.C., disagreement between teachers' unions and cities has caused standstill in · reform efforts. "New Haven Promise, to me, could really only be a meaningful and optimal program if it occurred in the context of a set of investtnents, efforts, and energy," DeStefano told me at his office. Wherl. 'the success of Promise is brought · up for review in four years, its funders will also evaluate the success of School 1 ~~~~~..;~~ r1-.~~~.:. •hat one cannot f) """"" succeed without the other. For now, before -anything has been reviewed, proponents of School Change and Promise are hopeful "There's no question that we are a national example right now," said Garth Harries '96, assistant superintendent for portfolio and performance management and a recent hire to New Haven. "In many ways, we think we are leading the state, and leading the country." This is not the first time in its history that the leaders of New Haven have considered their city a model for the nation. In the 1960s, Mayor Richard Lee wanted to rejuvenate a city that was stuck after the war with decreased industr ia1 production and no place to put its newly swollen population, many of them blacks recently arrived from the South, seeking work. Lee's projects to •

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clear so-called slums and make the city . more accessible by cars won New Haven m~re federal funds for urban renewal per capita than any other city and a nickname, the "model city." But as the twentieth century wore on, New Haven declifl.ed further. Mayor Lee's highway, the Oak Street Connector, had sliced through preexisting communities and fragmented them. Manufacturing fell off nationally, doing away with jobs the city had once relied on. New Haven reached a nadir of crime and poverty from which it's since only partially recovered. New Haven Promise and School Change can be seen as the latest in a long line of measures intended to remedy the mistakes of the city's past. .

n Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons, sunlight falls in long rectangles onto an array of music stands, two grand pianos, and a smooth hardwood floor in the recital room at the Neighborhood Music School on Audubon Street. The space comes alive when students spill in. Having completed the half-days they spend at various public high schools in the New Haven area, they assemble for meetings of a class called The Education Project. It's the most recent in a string of classes on social justice theater taught at the Educational Center for the Arts, a halfday arts magnet school. The class, led by Peter Loffredo, a' teacher at ECA for 14 years, teaches students to use hip-hop theater to examine education. Over the course of the setnester, they create and perforn1 a full-length play on the theme. Loffredo has taught other classes on soc~ justice theater, with themes ranging from hepatitis C to homelessness, but he's never seen a topic provoke more passion in students than this one. ~'They're more enthusiastic about this because it speaks to their immediate needs and issues that they're facing on a daily basis," he told me, leaning on one of the pianos. Loffredo is an energetic man with a booming voice, a graying beard, and a guffawing laugh. To his students, he is Peter. When they call him Mr. Loffredo, he likes to

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Tavist ]ones rehearses his rap during Peter Loffredo's class at the Educational Center for the Arts. shout theatrically, ''Did r ••y father come in here?" "They see the flaws in the structure," Loffredo said, serious now as he told me what his students have said to him about uninspired teaching, shoddy classroom environments, and failing figures of authority. ''They may not be able to do it in schools, but they w ant to call the system on depriving them . .And they get frustrated when they can't." Loffredo and ECA have provided a place w here they can. W hen I visited in

early spring, the class had compiled an initial draft of their play, and they were at work revising it. They began class by clustering their chairs in a circle and reading aloud an outline of the sea ipt they'd composed jointly. Bullet points represented scenes, groups of scenes, or monologues in the fon •• of raps. Bolded phrases were to-dos for the session. c'C. Obama/ Bush debate- SatireRace to MJ Left Behind. I eah ~· ~ revtse ~.or cotned" y.

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piano wrapped in a quilted cloth cover, quietly testing the lyrics of a rap he'd written for the · play, a beat issuing steadily from his open computer, one hand p9ised alertly on the keyboard. Jones was one of several seniors I spoke with who . are on track to be among the first to receive funds from New Haven Promise in a few months. Jones has been accepted to the University of Connecticut and other state schools, but he plans to attend DePaul University in Chicago if he is accepted. Like some of One student, Esther Rose-Wilen, his peers, Jones does not think that 25 who goes to Wilbur Cross, explained to percent of in-state tuition will be enough another student her idea behind a scene to influence his college decision. Then she'd written. "If they did treat us like again, his financial situation is special. humans, . we would be more motivated As he is a ward of the state, his tuition and stay in school." The student listening, Tavist Jones, a senior at High . . will be paid for completely at in-state colleges and up to $21,000 at colleges School in the . Community, told her he out of state. understood and wouldn't cut too much "I hate school," he muttered from her scene he would just try to offhandedly, showing me the rap, which make that point "less vague." · Later, Jones stood behind a grand . described his experience taking the SAT (~.

Security profiling (my school is different). . . S ecuriry Guard stops student, ub. We become monsters. Paola shorten, cut to point: we used to fear irnaginary monsters; now we become them (foreshadow "I don't like my school" creatures)." (Fight with Teacher Taking Bets., •

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in a Yale classroom. His face softened, · and he added with irony, "I mean, life's a giant test anyway, so you never really get out of school." "I think everyone here is excited that we get a chance to speak our minds," he said. "This is our chance to rant about it. School is our life right now, and we don't get much of a chance to talk about it. Whatever is good, we're going to blow · it up to ~e extreme, because there isn't much good, we feel. Whatever's bad, we're going to kill it." Characters in the working version of The Education Project script include "bored, uncaring teacher," "racially profiled black girl trying to escape sp,ecial ed," and "Megan, 13, cries a lot, disabled, has panic attacks." Jones told me he hopes the Board . of Education will be in the audience when he and his classmates perform their playnot so that the board members will be embarrassed, but so that "maybe if they •

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feel what we say is good, they can bring it up" and bring about change. me, Promise is very much a wealth-creation · strategy," Mayor DeStefano told me at his office, "and ultimately, a middle-class creation strategy." Not only is the program a long-term investment in the economic potential of New Haven students, it could also stimulate property demand in the city. It is based on an initiative launched five years ago in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which has since inspired similar programs in eighteen other cities crosscountry. Unlike New Haven Promise, the Kalamazoo Promise stipulates no cutoff GPA. Students need only live indistrict to receive the scholarship, which can be put toward vocational school as well as college. "In Kalamazoo, it's about transforming the entire community, so we believe it should go to all students," said Bob Jorth, director of Kalamazoo Promise. The Kalamazoo Promise is intended to transform its host community mostly by encouraging parents of schoolchildren to move in. Census data showed an increase of five percent in the population of Kalamazoo County from 2000 to 2010, and an increase of 22 percent in enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools since the Promise program began in 2006. These initial data are hopeful, but it remains to be seen whether what worked in Kalamazoo will work in bigger, grittier New Haven. DeStefano first read about Kalamazoo Promise in a Wall Street Journal article in 2007, though it had generated chatter in the city's offices prior to that. When Byrne first considered pushing for a Promise program in 2008, she and her colleagues surveyed New Haven students who had dropped out of college and found that financial difficulty was often the reason they were no longer in school. The proliferation of Promise programs also reflects a national paradigm shift in thinking about

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education reform. Rather than simply aiming to graduate students from high school, educators must instead focus on preparing them for college so they can succeed in an economy where a college degree matters more than ever. President Barack Obama has teminded the country that over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require some post-secondary education, and he

89 percent of tenth-graders scored below the goal level in Science in 2009. 0 y 6 percent of school districts statewide scored the same or worse. New Haven's schools have a dropout rate of 27.5 percent. awarded $125,000 of his $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize award to College Summit, a nonprofit that seeks to bring curricula about post-secondary p · into public high schools. At a Chubb Fellowship lecture at Yale shortly after New Haven Promise was announced, DeStefano described "a new way of life in ew Haven where our children are born knowing that they can go to college and that it is expected that they go to college." That dream is spreading. "I haven't seen this community react as enthusiastically to anything else I've seen in New Haven," said Will Ginsberg, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for Greater ew Haven,

which administers New Haven Promise. At the center of public enthusiasm, Gins berg said, is Yale University's agreement to underwrite the program. But it's created a mild controversy among some Yale students, especially those who were participants in the Teacher Prep program that was cut by coincidence in the same week Promise was announced. "If this were an example of Yale caring about education, this is a very odd way to show their priorities," said Brian Bills '12. Bills heads the Ulysses S. Grant program, which places Yale students as teachers in New Haven during the summer, and he believes that the University should be using the money instead to fund research on education or professors who will turn more Yale students into teachers. Yet the people I interviewed were less concerned with whether Yale decided to fund Promise with an eye toward its public image and more excited about the program's potential impact on the students it will help. Yale's investment in New Haven has grown since Yale President Richard Levin took office simultaneously with DeStefanoNew Haven Promise being a sign of the times and most are happy about the opportunity this has presented to New Haven's youth, especially if the University decides to fund Promise past these first four graduating classes. ''There's a lot of obstacles here," Ginsberg added. ''No one's pretending school change wil1 be easy." These obstacles include the slowness of statelevel education reform, according to Ginsberg; the difficulty of publicizing Promise among a community not entirely used to focusing on college, according to Byrne and what to do when even a Promise worth thousands of dollars isn't enough to get some students to earn B's. • ' '

he problem why I didn't make the requirements is I got lazy," said Jerell Emery, a senior at Wllbur Cross High School who hopes to earn a degree in sociology and become a _social worker. He wants to go to

Graffitti outside High School in the Community. .

college in-state, is waiting to hear from Westerm and Southern Connecticut State University, and says that Promise would be a great help to his family, but Emery's 2.2 GPA will bar him from receiving Promise funds unless he is able to it nprove it before the end of the year. We were siu ing in the Career Cente.t; an open room dotted with cotnpute.r clusters, students gossiping about college acceptances, books titled School to Work, and UConn Huskies paraphernalia. It was the same day the Class of 2015 learned of its acceptance to Yale, but Emery was still unsure of his plans. ~~ started being distracted too easy, to roam around the hall a little too much I was going through things a litde bit. It's a phase a lot of people go through. But I think that if somebody were to really, like, stick on me, and really be in my hair a lot, then I would meet the requirements." In the parlance of Fryer's study, Emery lacked the tools necessary •

to convert his effort to achievement. Byrne and her team hope to create support systems and build on plans for systemic .reform in order to make the .requirements of New Haven Promise simple and accessible, but until that happens, they may have on their hands a case like that of Fryer's students in New York and Chicago. . Emery transferred to Cross before his junior year in order to play on its basketball team. He remembered having trouble with the transition to Cross, which is one of two high schools :ranked in the lowest tie~ Tier ill. Students at Cross who spoke to me were coolly aware of this classification, but they also had their own ways to describe the barriers that mvironment posed to their success. ·~ this school there's a lot of 1ot o f peer pressure," sal"d F ~•• •e.ry. " people make you try things, do things .that you really don't want to. A lot of kids in my classes are immature, and they talk over the teachers, and the teachers

sometimes give up, and stop explaining the stuff, which I don't like, because I want to learn and it affects my grade." Promise would serve as a good incentive for Emery, if only he could .figure out how to earn it. "When people talk to me about college, I really listen, because I really want to go to college." For his classmates who are slipping the fastest, however, Promise may not matter at all. 'Teople who really don't care about school don't really care about going to college. When they hear about this New Haven Promise thing, they're just like, ~whatever. It is what it is. I forward to going to ain't really looking • college."' Emery would not place himself in that group. ''I know a lot of people that are ttying to turn their whole lives around, ttying to get their GPA up, and trying to really get this Promise thing, o.r 8 a scholarship to go to college, but they ~ .. can't because their GP was a little bit ~ if too low, and they kind of messed up

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their fu:st two years of high school." He told me that he'll tty to work as hard as he can to earn Promise funding before the school year is out and that it will be the biggest challenge he's ever faced. Students at Cross face many challenges, most of which are rooted in poverty, said Michael Robin, a secondyear teacher of the lowest track of English at Cross. "You can rattle off a laundry list. Drugs, and pregnancy, and gangs, and taking care of your siblings, and taking care of your children ... " ''These may be cha11enges, but we cannot allow them to be excuses for underachievement," Robin clarified in a subsequent e-mail. ''Many of my highest achieving students have been through significant struggles in their lives." He estimated his classes have only 60 to 70 percent attendance on any given day. A 2007 study by Johns Hopkins University labeled Cross a "dropout factory," one of 14 in the state, because it found that only 50 percent of the ~

students in the classes of 2004, 2005, and 2006 who entered Cross as freshmen graduated fouryears later. (New Haven Superintendent Dr. Reginald Mayo disputed the finding, saying that it didn't account for students transferring out of Cross into different high schools. Even generously corrected for that, the dropout rate is quite high about a quarter of students and the city has been criticized for artificially inflating its schools' reported graduation rates.) "The problem with ew Haven Promise," Robin said, "is that the people who need this the most aren't going to get this money. This money will go to good kids, don't get tne wrong ... The kids who need this the most are the kids who are way below the poverty line and the vast majority of tho e kids won't see a dime of this .money, because they . won't be able to meet the standards this program asks for." He emphasized the importance of attracting goo<L new teachers to the district to help srudents

.reach their goals. The people behind New Haven Promise are aware of the hurdles they face, and alongside the scholarship they've unveiled a detailed plan to support students in reaching the program's requirements. They plan to begin talk of college with students and parents in the elementary schools, and flag each year students who have slipped below Promise standards. They plan to create a College Corps of community adults who will go door-to-door explaining what students need for college to parents who may not even hav-e finished high school They have partnered with College Summit to bring a pilot curriculum about applying to college into the classroom at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High chool, and ~'ill extend this program to two more high schools next year. till, sometime sorely needed change have nothing to do with volunteer or curricula. teacher at Cro s who asked not to be named told

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The sign outside Wilbur Cross High School. me that the most effective recent change at the school was reducing its size. Over the past five years, the population of Cross has been reduced by about four hundred students transferring to recently opened magnet schools. Now, the hallways at Cross are less crowded, so there are fewer fights. The teacher showed me a cell phone video taken by a student of a fight between two other students. One male student lunges at another, sending the pair spinning noisily against the orange, red, and yellow lockers. At least one more cell phone recording the fight is visible in the frame, and onlookers are shouting.

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Afterward, the teacher said, the attacked student suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and his attacker was expelled. "Our job in fights is just to ignore them," the teacher told me. Instead, fights fall under the purview of security guards. ''Kids are very used to it." f you're a student at one of New Raven's public schools, by this point in the school year, you may have given a bit of thought to what you'd like to do after you graduate. You might be among the 42 percent of seniors living in-district who hive applied for funding from ew Haven Promise. Or, your

plans might not involve college at all. Brian Flanagan, a guidance counselor at Cross, was careful to say that he's happy to point his students toward vocational schools or employment if thafs what is right for them. (Of New Haven Promise, he said, "Sure, they'll pay for college, but you'll have a lot of families where the student will just need to go to work after graduating school to support · their family.") - You might be one of the lucky ones. You might be like Donald Walker, a senior ·at Metropolitan Business Academy who this September will become a firstgeneration college student, thanks in part to the funds he'll receive from Promise. He wants to earn a degree in history and become a teacher. For now, he has a job at the Peabody Museum, pushing the fossil cart and explaining the museum's exhibits to visitors. Walker described his 27- and 25-year-old brothers as ''rebellious," saying, ''I saw from both my brothers' mistakes." You might be like Victoria Ortiz, also a senior at Metropolitan Business Academ~ whose grandmother immigrated to New Haven from Puerto Rico, long ago. Orr iz feels deep loyalty to the city. "When you grow up in a communicy," she told me, "you should want to give back." She wants to study to become a nurse because after her hospitalization during a bout of sickness her freshman year, Ortiz felt indebted to her nurses' kindness. Her mother, who is single, lost her job after talcing off too much time to care for Ortiz, so '"'ew Haven Promise will be important in helping Ott iz to become a firstgeneration college student this fall. You might be like Maria Arnold, a senior at High School in the Community who is also about to receive Promise funds. and become another firstgeneration college student. Arnold has been accepted to Trinity College, where she hopes to engage in a genomics research program. After college, she ' wants to pursue research in cancer and diabetes and has "since fifth grade," she said. ' ow, even more so. The guidance counselor's daughter has

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leukemia, and my grandfather died from cancer." For her birthday, a friend gave Arnold a dorm-room sized fridge, and over the next few weeks, Arnold plans to tour Trinity and the other schools she's been accepted to. She is quiet, with long brown hair, and is an enthusiastic reader. She recently read Hamlet with her AP English class and made it a personal project to commit to memory the prince's most famous speech. ''Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ... " Meanwhile, the staff of New Haven Promise has been touring the city in order to inform students and parents about what's possible. At a meeting in the community room of Quinnipiac Terrace, a public housing project on the river in Fair Haven, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, Adriana Arreola, who works in the Promise office, said, ''New Haven Promise is a scholarship and support program. We're not about just giving out .

MAY 2011

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money." The handful of people assembled included a few members of the community who started an after-school homework club for the neighborhood because many of the children there live with grandparents who may not speak English or be able to help them. They were quiet, attentive, nodding. They took the glossy pamphlets "School Change Begins With Me," "Making the Promise of College a Reality" and asked only how they could best help get the word out to parents and students. ''We have at least five seniors I can think of. Very bright," said Demetria McMillian, one of the residents. But none of them were there yet. ''We wish they would have come out tonight. We were really trying to connect them with you. " ''It's like expanding their world to show them the choice,'"' said Mary Anne Moran, another resident, of New Haven Promise. Finally, after several minutes, one of the parents whom McMillian was

awaiting arrived, his teenage daughter in tow. "That's my sunshine," he saia proudly, in accented English, as she took a pamphlet. She had to get going to choir rehearsal soon, he said, but in the meantime, he wanted her to hear about New Haven Promise. There was, after all, the chance she'd be among the first few generations of scholarship recipients. And then there was the chance she would not, the possibility that she'd end up someplace besides college, the cards stacked against her by history and c.t.rcnmstance. For the time being, however, Arreola switched to Spanish as she, the father, and the student opened the door to an adjacent room, where they'd talk over the details. · •

jacque Feldman is a junior in Davenport College and an editor-in-chiefo e New Journal.

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houses of Hamden's Swarthmore Street possess delicate bones. Place them atop poles and each home would look like the finest handmade birdhouse. These colonials and their siblings, over one hundred and ten houses· in total, have presided over streets in Hamden, New Haven, and Cheshire since the 1920s, when they were designed and built by Alice Washburn. Washburn began her career as a landscape architect with no forr••al training in 1919 at age 49. She had no formal training. By 1933 she was bankrupt, retired, and living .1......

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in quiet obscurity with her sister in Cheshire. When she died 25 years late~ Washburn's death cerr ificate listed her occupation as "housewife." But her clients remembered and passed on her name to the next owners of their homes. In 1984 Martha Buck, known then as Martha Yellig, began asking about the Swarthmore Street houses where she dropped off her young son for playdates. Buck learned only the builder's name and sex: Washburn, female. Bpck, at forty-something years old and in the midst of a divorce, had returned to school to pursue a college

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degree in art history. She selected the work of the prolific Washburn as the subject of her senior paper at Southern Connecticut State University. But the woman who had speculated and designed better than most men was also discreet Washburn disposed of all her personal records. "I just kept hitting dead end after dead end," Buck recalled in an interview in late March. Not even Washburn's grand-daughter knew much about the woman, she added. Eventually she found building permits that listed not only Washburn but also the names of her workmen. "I cannot tell you how exciting it was for me to find her signature," Buck said. Facts emerged: Washburn was a mother of two and the wife of a wallpaper manufacturer. Family history said that she had been a schoolteacher. Buck used these leads to produce an essay constructed largely around anecdotal evidence gathered from homeowners and the offspring of Washburn's employees. Buck received her degree in 1985.

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By 1990, Washburn's story had fallen into the hands of Mimsie Coleman, then the co-president of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Coleman, a journalist and Washburn homeowner herself, decided that the architect was worthy of commemoration. The council coordinated with the Hamden Historical Society and the Eli Whitney Musent n to mount an exhibit and organize a house tour. The New York Times covered the event. The house· tour alone brought in $10,000, according to Eli Whitney Museum Director Wi11iam Brown. Martha Buck even agreed to produce an informational pamphlet for the event. But Buck's loosely written narrative did not satisfy Brown. To him, Buck lacked the discipline of a trained architectural historian. She was "a · woman who found a really wonderful story and didn't know what to do about it," he said. Negotiations grew heated, money and exhibition priorities became points of contention, and Buck arranged to print her work independendy. She and

two friends fronted and then sold the press run of about 1,000 copies. Admittedly, the Washburn story is not that of a revolutionary designer. However, unique and idiosyncratic . grace saturates the work she left behind. Coleman, ordinarily articulate, allowed her voice to trail off indistinctly when she tried to describe the charm of her own Washburn. Brown, Buck, and Coleman called Washburn's style "intimate," "filled with light," and "warm." "Ifs how wide they typically are, but it's also the height of the window. It's obviously the leaded glass fan light above the front door, the moldings, the crown moldings, and the ornateness of the fireplace," John Cuozzo said of the colonials. Cuozzo is a Hamden realtor who has been selling Washburns for decades since before the name became an adjective. He added that their proportions explain the way they sell for more than other houses in the same neighborhoods with the same amount of floorspace. It was evident to me,

This page and opposite: Original blueprints for two houses from Washburn's archives.

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even in the dim gaze of a March sun, that the precision of the Swarthmore Street houses outshines the clumsier lines of their neighbors. that Coleman's house shows Washburn squeezed a lot into a tiny · space. The living room frames a large, finely carved fireplace on fluted columns and the library wraps around miniature French doors. The fireplace, columns, _ a~d doors are all Washblirn signatures. The fine millwork by all accounts •

the combination of the charisma of her creations and the enigma of her motivations. She provides the perfect foundation on which to construct any personality. . Buck's . 1990 publication depicts Washburn as a lady who used her female sensibility to understand how to appropriately define the domestic realm. . . But when we spoke in late March over coffee, Buck imagitied Washburn as a different kind of creative force. "She was a builder fitst · and a lady second," Buck told me. Just as Washburn designed without access to formal architectural training, Buck constructed her historical narrative from speculation. Buck's Washburn was generous to a fault, building more for her clients than they paid for, and possessed exacting standards, demanding perfection from her craftsmen. From what Buck drew from children . of clients or employees, . . she erected an image of a passionate, intelligent, distant woman. However, •

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uc 1ma 1ne as urn as a • • 1 erent 1n o creative orce. " e vvas a • Ul er irst an a a sec on • "

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juliana anle is a sophomore in Davenport College and a managing editor o . e New Journal .

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Buck couldn't answer the biggest question about Washburn's life. ''What made her think that she could do this?" she asked, shrugging. We can't know the answer. But even if the paint peels on the Washburn homes, if their floorboards sag, or if their interiors are gutted for renovation, we can hope the architect herself will be remembered for having had the audacity to build them.

designed and overseen by Washburn personally endows each Washburn house with its splendor. The construction of this house and of the other Washburns occurred at a transformative period in the countryside . around Hamden. Washburn worked during a time when more and more professionals were moving outside of the city proper and commuting via trolley or car to the office the time when suburbia was born. And, at least during the decade she worked, it looked as if Washburn's precise construction might become the standard for future development around New Haven. But generous and gutsy business practices ultimately ran Washburn into debt. Buck said that Washburn not only took all the financial risk on herself by designing on speculation, but she also would not charge when it became apparent that a family could not provide the wages for extra work. Washburn's appeal comes from

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Du_ring violent protests, visiting expatriate parents at their home in Bahrain. By Helen Knight

y father wrote me an email from u:ru·n on February 11, a month before I visited him and my mother there over spring break. ''We hear the honking of cars from the road in the distance in celebration of Mubarak's resignation," he wrote. "If things go well, this will be a step forward for the Arab world." A few days later, on February 14, I read in the New York Times that the violence had spread to Bahrain. To oversimplify the conflict, the majority of Bahrain's population is Shiite, but the · monarchy is Sunni. Primarily Shiite protestors were demanding greater political and economic freedoms. Pearl Square quickly became the meeting point of the protestors. "Pearl" refers to a monument in the area a white concrete orb held up by six curved pillars that commemorates the country's pearl-diving history. Pearl "Square" is a creation of the international media, an allusion to Egypt's Tahrir Square. I've always known this area as Pearl Roundabout or Lulu Roundabout, after the name of the nearby supermarket. Pearl Square is most definitely a circle. When I'm in Bahrain, I go around it just about every day, and every single time, my mom says, ''Be careful dt iving through roundabouts. Some drivers just don't know how to keep turning to stay inside their lane." In the early hours of Febn1ary 17, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the masses in Pearl Roundabout. Whole families had camped out there:some with young children and man were asleep when the crackdown began.

Paramedics responding to . the scene were targeted. At the end of the next day, hundreds were injured. In the first five days of demonstrations, seven protestors were killed. On February 19, the Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad alKhalifa ordered the withdrawal of forces from Pearl Roundabout, giving it to the protestors as a place of demonstration. A national tragedy had occurred, but it appeared to be over. Pearl Roundabout had become a new symbol one of popular revolt. In the month of peaceful protests following the initial violence, I wasn't so worried as I followed events from New Haven. Sleepy little Bahrain, making headline news. Nicholas Kristof filing editorials from the house of my parents' neighbors. I looked at as many photos of the protests as I could find, trying to identify the buildings in the background that I knew from my visits. am an expatriate because of my father, who works in international finance. My father is an expatriate by choice. As a young lawyer in New York, my father began trading textiles. One of my early memories of Manhattan is of a carpet store. Carpets were hung on the walls, rolled up along the sides of the room, piled several layers deep on the floor. Dust spiraled ·in the shafts of sunlight, disturbed as carpets were unrolled for display. As my parents examined the rugs, my older sister and I jumped between the stacks and hid in corners, engulfed in the mu ty smelL Born and raised in orth Carolina,

my father had never known anything like the textile-trading world. Maybe that's what attracted him to it. At first, he could not afford to buy carpets, but he still went to the stores and talked to their owners. He learned how to distinguish between the carpets of different tribes Soumac, Belouch, Konya. He heard about the cities where textile traders bought their stock Istanbul, Lahore, Tehran. By the time he visited those cities for himself, years later, he had the knowledge of a professional. In the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, my blondhaired and blue-eyed father looked like the perfect target for carpet dealers who wanted to sell him new, chemically dyed, · Persian designs. They harassed him as he walked by. He would turn around and say, "Unless you have an antique Shirvan or Suzani, I'm not interested." They left him alone after that. Now, my father owns around fifty carpets, though he trades them regularly. Some were bought in New York. More were bought in Singapore, where we lived after New York. A few were bought during travels in Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan. He often stands in the living room, staring at a carpet he has recently unrolled. If I walk by, he will ask my opinion of it. He thinks I have an "eye for color." I pause for a minute, loolcing thoughtful. Actua11y, I'm staring without thinking, waiting until I can get away. I say something neutral. I just don't care about the carpets. To me, they all look about the same. I wish I could appreciate therra the way my father does. Each one of the seven houses where I have lived has had carpets on the floor in New York, Singapore, and now Bahrain. But I've never been able to shake off the idea that home should be a fixed point on a map. ivfy father often reminds me that Bahrain is my home. It's not. I've never actna11y lived there I left for college at the same time my parents moved to Bahrain. During school vacations, it's where I "go home.n But it's not my home.

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eing an expatriate means being ready to move to a new country without much warning. In the expatriate world, it is an anomaly that I lived in Singapore for eleven years. My father passed on opportunities to relocate so I could complete school in Singapore. When I finished high school, though, my parents were free to leave. Within a few weeks of graduation, years of life irt Southeast Asia were packed, given away, or discarded. My mother and I flew to Bahrain for the first time that summer. My father already had been living there for six months. He picked us up at the airport and wanted to immediately take us the ruins of a seventeenth-century Persian fort. I convinced him to let me sleep instead. I went to a mall a few days after arriving a beautiful mall, more sophisticated than any I've seen in the States, with Saks Fifth Avenue and every European · designer store. Manhattan, Singapore, Bahrain: all tiny islands, all meeting points. Some women dressed in ·curtain-like black abayat and facecovering niqab. Since even their feet were covered, they seemed to glide over the marble floor. Others pranced around in skin-tight distressed jeans. My mother left me for a few minutes to do errands, and I was alone among strangers. I had already traveled a lot in the Middle East, in Egypt and in Jordan. There was nothing naturally shocking or intimidating about my surroundings at the mall. But alone in this new country a country that had •

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just become a part of my life · I was suddenly and irrationally overcome with fear. I felt self-conscious in my baggiest jeans and most .formless shirt, like every man weat:ing a white robe and headscarf . was stadng at my body. I sat paralyzed inside a Starbucks, apprehensive of the men with Cartier watches and women with Bv~gari jewelry, desperate for my mother to return. That first . trip to Bahrain, my '

I wante tore . o, Its not u . to o ; Its u to ou. a e son1e res onsi i it :' ((

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mother and I took a taxi to the mall once a .day to buy groceries. Otherwise, . we stayed in the temporary apartment where my father had been living. He took the car to work every morning. Bahrain has no public transportation, and taxis are prohibitively expensive, so we tried to avoid taking them more thari was necessary. I worked out in the aparttnent gym. Its only other users were U.S. servicemen from the Navy's Fifth Fleet, stationed a few minutes away by car. I · watched television. Bahraini TV airs a lot of American shows. I read a couple of books one about Jakarta, which brought back memories of living in Singapore. I thought about my friends in Singapore, hanging out at the American Club, a facility with a pool, gym, lihtary, and restaurants where we all had spent a lot of

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time groWing up. Now' tliat we were all finally eighteen years old, my friends would be going to the bar there. n Bahrain, my mom and I looked for a house. My father had brought a few small carpets to put on the floor of the temporary apartment, but it still smelled like plastic. While he was at work, the real estate agent picked up my mother and me in his car. We drove all over the island, visiting house after house. My parents wanted a house with ·"character." Because there would only be the two of . them living there, my mother wanted a house that would be manageable to take care of by herself. Instead, the real estate agent showed us huge, marble palaces with gilded iron gates. McMansions, my m?m called them. They are built primarily fot wealthy expatriates and Arabs; often clustered in gated communities. During my first visit, we did 'not find a single place my parents wanted to live. Those neighborhoods of opulent houses with smaller exterior buildings where the domestic workers and drivers who work at the bouse live are the ones I think of as typical in Bahrain. But this "typical" is coming from the perspective of a Westerner with a sheltered life there. · My "typical" is not accurate. There are outlying Bahraini villages I've never visited. There are neighborhoods of migrant workers who have left their home countries and send money back to their families. Filipinos work in the service industry; South Asians work in construction. The presence of so rnariy migrant workers made me feel comfortable during those first few weeks in Bahrain. I was accustomed to seeing people from diose places in Singapore. I did not embrace Bahrain. My . father did. This t nanifested itself in a suqden and passionate love for eating dates. He had hated dates when he was younger, but according to him, .that was because they lost their flavor traveling long distances. Dates in Bahrain were ' fresh-that is to say, freshly dried. Every time anyone asked, "What's Bahrain • like?" he would mention dates. Every night after dinner, I would hear, "Helen! •

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The writer (second from right) and her family at the Shaikh Isa bin Ali House in Muharraq, Bahrain . .

Have a date." I hated dates. Truthfully, I was indifferent to the taste. But willingly eating them seemed something like • • • gtvmg m. Flights often leave Bahrain in the middle of the night. My father complains about driving to the aitport at that hour, but he does it anyway. Normally, I say goodbye to my parents at the terminal's security checkpoint before Immigration. Then, when I'm leaving with my sister, we start singing, "Freedom... Freeedoooom." We are only half kidding. •

y parents finally found a house _ct,Ll.rlng my first semester in college. They moved in on Thanksgiving Day, which I spent with far nily in Boston. The house across the street had a Sri Lankan maid narned Rani who, by tradition, also worked in the house we had rented. My tnother decided this arrangement would continue. One of the first questions Rani asked my mother was, "Do you like cats?" She was relieved when my mother said no. The previous tenants not only had several cats of their own, but they also fed all of the stray and pet cats in the neighborhood. Every evening, around fifty cats would stream to the house for food. The house had to

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be renovated before we moved in, in part because the cat smell was unbearable. Our house is in what would be called a gated community in the States, although the term "compound" is still used in Bahrain. The houses in the community are all white and one ·or two stories ta11. There is a tennis court and a pool. The compound is literally an oasis, built over a natural water source that still springs up in a pool today. As a result of the fresh water, it is exceptionally verdant, with luxurious bougainvillea bushes and overgrown hedges spming over garden fences. Massive date paln1s line the streets. They are tended by a crew of quiet Nepalese gardeners, who collect thousands of green dates from the trees every spring. Over the course of visits to Bahrain during school vacations, I got to know some of the people in the community. Because the houses are only for lease and not for sale, most are expat• iates. Grace, an elegant Asian-American woman from Colorado, is one of my favorites. She helped me with rtty Chinese homework over winter break. Her husband owned his own business in Colorado, but he lost it in the recent financial crisis. The only work he could find was in Bahrain, so

they sold their house and moved. During my visits there, I usnaJ1y did very little, relishing in the kind of luxury that only arises during a school vacation. I stayed up too late at night, watching DVDs on my laptop, sometimes until the sunrise call to prayer was broadcasted from a dozen mosques nearby. During the day, I padded around the dark and cool house in my pajamas, the bottoms of my bare feet cushioned by the carpets in every room. My favorite carpet, fleecy soft with a blue and red geometrical design, was in a smaller room off the living room with enormous bookshelves. I set ambitious goals for reading books and failed to meet them. When my father was in the house, music would be playing classical, jazz, contemporary Algerian, or something else. Sometim~ m y mother, sister, and I would go to the pool or the movie theater. was about it Bahrain is a quiet placeenothing ever happens there. n Bahrain, as in other Middle Eastern countries, people often say · It is a tic the verbal e · ent of passing prayer beads through one's bands even when one is not actna11y praying. Initially~ inshallah annoyed me. When I told my

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taxi driver, "I would like to go to the of the compound every night. Once, the mall, please," I did not want to hear "If sky was extravagandy colored lavender God wills it" as a response. It seemed with tangerine clouds. Then I decided fatalist. I wanted to reply, "No, it's not the sky was tangerine, and the clouds up to God; it's up to you. Take some were lavender. I kept changing my mind. responsibility." My dad quoted ·Dryden on that walk: On March 13, I woke up late in All things are subject to decqy, And, when Fate summons, monarchs my bedroom in Bahrain, still jedagged must obey. several days after having arrived from ·New Haven. "Protestors are blocking I le.ft the compound with my mother . . to drive to a hotel pool down the road. the highway in the financial district. It's looking violent again," my mom told me. It was a way to think about something other than the political situation for a ''We'll go tomorrow to get the necklace few hours. There, I swam laps, then sat I had restrung for you." But we couldn't in a deck chair in the sun. A waitress go the next day, or the day after that. I departed Bahrain without my necklace. I did not leave my immediate • neighborhood those last three days in Bahrain. Very quickly, the country started sliding toward anarchy. Protestors took . . over whole villages and neighborhoods. On March 14, I saw a photo online of tanks rolling across the causeway from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, sent to regain order by the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Iran claimed this was a Saudi invasion. The next day, the . king of Bahrain declared the country came by to ask if I wanted anything to to be in a state of emergency, and two eat or drink. While demonstrators and civilians were killed in the protests. police sparred fifteen minutes away by I had assumed online news sources car, I worked on my tan. updated almost instantaneously. I quickly At the pool one day, another regular realized this isn't true: News articles swiinmer an American womanappeared online in the evening, after a stopped to talk to my mom. "Did you whole day had passed. Most of the time, see the embassy notice today?" she we did not know what was happening. asked. Rumors flew: The troops had not come '<yes warning Americans not to yet. They were already here, breaking come." "And telling Americans to leave." up protests. There were roving bands of men destroying shop fronts. People ''Well I'm not leaving. I think it's ridiculous. We're sending our daughter who worked in the financial district back tonight, though, earlier than were being threatened by their village planned. We figure we might as well." neighbors, and physically prevented from coming into the city. A few people Then they talked about how they had the same bathing suit, bought at Marshall's. had died. Many people had died. I remember distincdy the sounds I kept thinking about moments such of that time. The wind kept up for as this one even as they happened. It was several days. The palm . leaves rustled. strange. Something historical was going A wind chime jangled. Helicopters on. But life keeps going, and there was droned constandy. Something, maybe litde to do other than what we normally a shutter I never figured out what:-did. banged in the wind with a gun-like report. flight was at 2:00 a.m., but we My father and I walked the perimeter "~ for the airport at 10:00 p.m.,

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hours earlier than we normally would. The night before, the opposition had set up a checkpoint on the highway we were planning to take, and traffic had been delayed for hours. The roads were empty, however. An alley of food stands usually busding with activity was completely dark except for the fluorescent lights of a single shawarma stand, glowing defiandy. We said litde on the way, listening to Mozart's violin concertos my father's choice. Near the airport, we were waved . through two police checkpoints. My mom commented on the recendy raised prices at the airport parking lot. Only one of the ait'port's doors was open, and a policeman stood in front of it. My dad approached him. "Passengers only." ''We're checking in our daughter." "No, sorry, just passengers." "Well, then, take my driver's license until I come back out." "No." That night, outside of the airport and in front of my parents, the police officer, and about a dozen other people, I started sobbing. Once I collected myself, I said goodbye to my parents in front of the airport and went in. I wasn't scared about checking in on my own. I had had a terrible thought. I did not know when I was going to return to Bahrain. n March 18, New Haven had a perfect spring morning. There were robins in the Davenport courtyard. The Yale campus was quiet. In Bahrain, the Pearl Roundabout was also quiet'-completely empty. After the protestors were cleared out of the area, government . bulldozers entered and razed the monument. I'll be back soon. Inshallah. ..

Helen t is a sophomore in Davenport College and a senior editor o e New Journal.

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dream about trains. I ride the .rails, shooting across continents and coasting th.rough da.rk tunnels unde.r city streets. Ticket stubs a.re my bookma.rks and timetables, my wallpaper. One .recent evening, some local news piqued and off-peaked my interest. I was sitting in a lib.ra.ry window seat when I saw that fi.rst train ca.r's interior shine forth from my laptop screen. Suited commuters scanned legal briefs, g.reen coats dangled from sleek overhead luggage .racks, a bea.rded man slept peacefully. The blu.r.red scenery th.rough the windows could have been anywhere. Was this France's TGV? Japan's Shinkansen? The Orient Express? Another photo showed this same silver bullet shooting across a familia.r concrete landscape of parking ga.rages and office buildings: this was New Haven. This was Metro-N o.rth! Metro-N o.rth, that ca.rrie.r of commuters and conce.rtgoe.rs, that pu.rveyo.r of sticky linoleum and sweaty vinyl seat~, has a new look. Eight new Kawasaki M8 ca.rs on the New Haven line debuted this Ma.rch, .replacing a small slice of the existing thi.rty-yea.r-old fleet. By the end of spring, 26 scarlet-striped ca.rriages will be .rolling into stations f.rom he.re to G.rand Central. The.re will be eighty in use by the yea.r's end. Eventually, 380 shiny ca.rs will make up the fleet. Enlarged bath.rooms, speckled floors, electronic destination signs, seat-side powe.r outlets, and th.rones of sumptuous .red leather will propel Metro-North's riders into the future. · Realizing this could be the most exciting news in locomotion since the fi.rst train ran from the Elm City to the Big Apple in 1849, I checked the day>s rail schedule at bettermetronorth.com. There was a train leaving at 10:10 p.m. There would be enough time fo.r me to make a round trip to Bridgeport or even across state lines to Grand Central before the night was th.rough. With excitement, trepidation, and not a single doubt, I hopped in a taxi and paid my fa.re upon a.rrival at Union Station. As I shuffled to the ticket machines, the 10:10 listing flipped to '~I .I. ABOARD" on the old analog depa.rture-boa.rd, which is slated for replacement this spring. I purchased my ticket and eagerly made my way to track 14. But the old yellow headlights in the distance told n1e all I needed to know: There would be no rendezvous with the Kawasaki M8 this evening. As die veteran ca.rs rattled into the station, I wondered what had come over me. I did not want to go to New York. I ran back th.rough the tunnel and up to the street. Not even stopping for a consolation treat from Dunkin' Donuts, I boa.rded the Yale shuttle and headed back to campus. The.re were no plush seats or sleek screens for comfort, but this old Blue-line bus was talcing me where I wanted to go. I tucked my rail ticket into my wallet. Another day, perhaps, I'll ride the train of my dreams. ___,Eleanor Ke1!Jon

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