Volume 56 - Issue 4

March 2024

The Magazine About Yale and New Haven

The Tarmac Next Door Neighbors sound the alarm as Tweed New Haven Airport sprawls.

Volume 56, Issue 4

Letter from the editors

Masthead

Dear readers,

Editors-in-Chief Jabez Choi

There are a lot of ways to say goodbye. The poets have tried. Louise Bogan calls it “leave-taking.” Emily Brontë reminds us to “follow out the happiest story.” Perhaps Yvor Winters puts it best: “This is the terminal, the break.”

Here we are, at the terminal of our tenure, and there’s not much else to do but wave.

Executive Editor Managing Editor

This issue holds a lot of goodbyes. In our cover story, Meg Buzbee explores the pain of saying goodbye to a quiet neighborhood taken over by airport turbulence. Chloe Nguyen explores Connecticut’s new ethnic studies elective and helps us bid farewell to the history curriculum of the past. We have other, smaller goodbyes—odes to the farmland that borders our city campus, farewells to staying quiet in spoken word poetry. A goodbye to home and all of its food, to the expenses of the year, to churches and summer and loved ones.

In our last issue as a managing board, we felt these farewells in everything we did: our last pitch meeting, our last production weekend, our last design proofing all-nighter. Our farewell isn’t unique. When we started our tenure as a board, we read over letters of advice from boards before ours and combed through their challenges. This February, we wrote our own letters.

They are also a form of farewell, one that means we will be there for you.

We’re trying to think of this not as a goodbye but as a see you later. We can’t wait to see what our next board does, and the next one, and the next. This journal is as good as our lineage. We’ll be waiting when the plane lands.

With TNJ love always, Abbey, Jabez, Paola, & Kylie

Verse Editors

Amal Biskin Senior Editors

Meg Buzbee Nicole Dirks Lazo Gitchos

Cleo Maloney Ella Goldblum Zachary Groz

Associate Editors Naina Agrawal-Hardin Chloe Nguyen Kinnia Cheuk John Nguyen Viola Clune Ingrid Rodríguez Vila Grace Ellis Netanel Schwartz Aanika Eragam Etai Smotrich-Barr Maggie Grether Anouk Yeh Samantha Liu Copy Editors

Yvonne Agyapong Connor Arakaki Lilly Chai Mia Cortés Castro

Iz Klemmer Adam Levine Victoria Siebor

Podcast Editors Meg Buzbee Suraj Singareddy Sawan Garde Adam Winograd

Creative Director Design Editors

Join our mailing list!

Abbey Kim Paola Santos Kylie Volavongsa

Chris de Santis

Tashroom Ahsan Sarah Feng Alicia Gan Angela Huo Lily Lin

Cate Roser Jessica Sánchez Daniela Woldenberg Ashley Zheng

Photography

Web Design

Nithya Guthikonda Makda Assefa Ellie Park Serena Ulammandakh

Members & Directors: Emily Bazelon • Haley Cohen Gilliland • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • Jonathan Dach • Susan Dominus • Kathrin Lassila • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh • Aliyya Swaby

Thank you to our donors

The Elizabethan Club The Hull Barrett Family Fund Neela Banerjee* Anson M. Beard James Carney Andrew Court Romy Drucker Jeffrey Foster David Gerber David Greenberg*

Matthew Hamel Makiko Harunari James Lowe Chaitanya Mehra Ben Mueller Sarah Nutman Peter Phleger Jeffrey Pollock

Adriane Quinlan Elizabeth Sledge Gabriel Snyder Fred Strebeigh Arya Sundaram Stuart Weinzimer Steven Weisman Suzanne Wittebort

*Donated twice. Thank you!

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Advisors: Neela Banerjee • Richard Bradley • Susan Braudy • Lincoln Caplan • Jay Carney • Joshua Civin • Richard Conniff • Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • David Greenberg • Daniel Kurtz-Phelan • Laura Pappano • Jennifer Pitts • Julia Preston • Lauren Rawbin • David Slifka • John Swansburg • Anya Kamenetz • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin

Friends: Nicole Allan • Margaret Bauer • Mark Badger and Laura Heymann • Anson M. Beard • Susan Braudy • Julia Calagiovanni • Elisha Cooper • Peter Cooper • Andy Court The Elizabethan Club • Leslie Dach • David Freeman and Judith Gingold • Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts • Bob Lamm • James Liberman • Alka Mansukhani • Benjamin Mueller • Sophia Nguyen • Valerie Nierenberg • Morris Panner • Jennifer Pitts • R. Anthony Reese • Eric Rutkow • Lainie Rutkow • Laura Saavedra and David Buckley • Anne-Marie Slaughter • Elizabeth Sledge • Caroline Smith • Gabriel Snyder • Elizabeth Steig • John Jeremiah Sullivan • Daphne and David Sydney • Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather • Blake Townsend Wilson • Daniel Yergin • William Yuen

TheNewJournal

Contents

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The Tarmac Next Door cover story

Neighbors sound the alarm as Tweed New Haven Airport sprawls.

By Meg Buzbee

32

Writing in the Margins Connecticut became the first state to mandate an ethnic studies elective in high schools.

How are New Haven teachers and students navigating the curriculum?

By Chloe Nguyen

profile

point of departure

4 Penning Liberation

A writer explores The Word, a New Haven literary arts program for students to gather, write, and perform.

By Kingson Wills snapshots

A writer seeks out authentic Chinese cuisine guided by Chef Jiang, the man behind his eponymous restaurant.

By Isabelle Qian personal essay

6 Decked Out

A tribute to New Haven’s only dedicated skate-shop, Plush, and the public art of street skating.

By Zoya Haq

9 First Light

30 Name it to a God

A writer finds holiness in pews, paintings, and poetry.

By Madeline Art poem

5 Moses

Led by larger-than-life Chef Duff, Sunrise Cafe provides unhoused New Haveners breakfast and community.

By Sophie Lamb

40 Tax Break Under a complicated national tax filing system, New Haven residents and Yale students come together at the downtown Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site.

By Ai-Li Hollander crossword: “Skate Park” by Adam Winograd, page 47.

March 2024

24 Home Truths

By Kanyinsola Anifowoshe aside

29 That Summer

By Lucy TonThat endnote

45 The Old Acre A writer breaks ground on the myth-like delights of the Yale Farm.

By Lucy Hodgman

image credits: Chris de Santis (Front) Ellie Park (TOp, Bottom)

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Points of Departure

In freezing weather, teens crept into class. Icy shoes scuffled along wooden floorboards as the first bell of the school day rang. One final student walked in late and found a seat in the back, a crumpled brown bag of McDonald’s peeking out from his backpack.

Shortly after, Tarishi “M.I.D.N.I.G.H.T.” Schuler entered, dressed in bright crimson red glasses and a hoodie to match. Tarishi is the current artistic director of The Word and the leader of that day’s poetry workshop.

“M.I.D.N.I.G.H.T. is a pseudonym,” he told me. “It’s an acronym for a name I gave myself in my late teens. It stands for ‘Messiah Is Dominant Now Inspired God Helps Tarishi.’ I was born in 1976 when Alex Haley came out with Roots and a lot of parents were naming their children African names…I didn’t know until my early thirties, my name Tarishi is Swahili for ‘mesA writer explores The Word, a New Haven senger.’ So I ended up being a poet not literary arts program for students to gather, knowing that’s what my name meant.”

Tarishi, unfazed by the yawning write, and perform. class of sleepy high schoolers, asked for t’s a full house in the gym of High everyone in the room to stand. Chairs School in the Community. Tennis squeaked, heads rose, and shoulders shoes squeak as students file into silver slouched across the classroom as fifteen rows of bleachers. The air fills with the pairs of groggy eyes turned toward the chatter of three hundred high schoolers smiling poet. left to their own devices.

“Repeat after me,” Tarishi said before In front of the crowd is Keiantae, a clearing his throat. “MEeeeee, MIiiiiii, 16-year-old student rapper about to per- MOOooooooooo!” form at his school’s Black History Month Giggles and laughs fluttered through pep rally. the air as the students exchanged amused “I try not to really look at people glances. This wasn’t what they had expected. because when I do I get nervous,” he told “He brings life to his poems,” one of me after the show. the high school students told me after But this time, Keiantae can’t resist. class. “His personality is contagious!”

As he gazes up from the shiny linoleum another said. flooring, he is met with hundreds of eyes.

The mood shifted. One by one, stuGiving a nod to the sound technician, dents shared their own poems, greeted Keiantae takes a deep breath and grips with applause from the rest of the class. the mic.

Tarishi let the students put on their best Keiantae isn’t just any rapper, he’s a “poetry-writing music” on the class comstudent poet. He’s been honing his craft puter, which the kids used as an opportuin The Word, a literary arts program that nity to suggest their favorite new TikTok has operated for twelve years in New songs. Students raised their hands nerHaven. The Word’s goal is to facilitate vously, then quickly lowered them when a radically inclusive writing and perfor- Tarishi jokingly cold-called them to presmance environment grounded in poetry, ent. If students were too nervous (which rap, and song. Every week, the group they often were), Tarisihi recited his own hosts “Writing Liberation Workshops” poems first. at the Neighborhood Music School— Keiantae sat quietly in the back of the group’s home base—and in-class the classroom. His hoodie hid two clanpoetry workshops in New Haven Public destine white AirPods looping the drill Schools, where students receive guid- beat to his newest poem titled “I Have a ance on crafting poetry.

Dream” for the upcoming pep rally.

It is these workshops that brought “M.I.D.N.I.G.H.T.’s a cool dude, and me to Keiantae one winter morning he’s so into it. I can’t explain it,” Keiantae in the “Introduction to Poetry” class of told me. “It’s like he brings a different type MarcAnthony Solli ’91. of energy, and I mess with it.”

Penning Liberation

I

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Keiantae is part of a new initiative

by The Word. He is one of four New Haven Public School teens selected for a program that trains and hires students to become Teaching Artists like Tarishi. The fourteen-week program, which pays students $25 an hour during training, offers hands-on experiences led by mentors. Participants learn how to create course curriculums, lead workshops, and gel with other students in the program. These skills prepare them to eventually serve as independent teaching artists in New Haven.

When I asked him about his classroom’s partnership with The Word, High School in the Community teacher MarcAnthony could not understate its importance.

“It is nothing short of curriculum changing…allowing the curriculum to become a living, tangible, real thing for students where they see someone performing at the highest level of their art,” he says. “And that it is accessible. Right in front of them. Right down the street on Audubon Street.”

Keiantae sees The Word as a space to engage with his art and process hardship.

“New Haven is basically a place you want to get out of,” Keiantae said. “In order for me to make New Haven better, something’s gotta give, something’s gotta change.”

Keiantae first started rapping at the age of 12 after the loss of his father to gun violence.

“I rap about the minor setbacks to a major comeback,” Keiantae said. This adage seems to also be the theme of The Word.

On the first day we met, Tarishi and I sat across from each other in the Neighborhood Music School, about a mile away from High School in the Community. Students meet here weekly to practice for poetry slams and participate in Writing Liberation Workshops.

The day I visited was different than usual. The snack bowl of Goldfish, pretzels, and other goodies was still full. In the room, no one was there but me, Tarishi, and one student poet, Maximilian, who was also experiencing The Word for the first time.

Low turnout has plagued The Word since the start of the pandemic. “A lot of people have been struggling with afterschool programs,” Tarishi said, sliding me a pack of gummies. COVID-19 has imposed hardships on previous attendees of The Word: students lack the time to make art illustrations by Angela Huo

Points of Departure

as they scramble to find jobs to support families—not to mention the anxiety that comes with moving out of social isolation and trying to resume “normal” life with face-to-face interactions.

“But I feel like we are making a lot of progress and strides in the in-school workshops,” he said, referencing the in-class poetry workshops that The Word currently leads in eight public middle and high schools in New Haven.

Back in the gym of High School in the Community, students rise from their seats. Bodies sway and phones flash to the beat. Keiantae looks out to a sea of sparkling lights. As he raps the lyrics he perfected in The Word’s in-class workshop, he announces: “Alright, now I know that y’all mess with it. Let me really give y’all a show.” ∎ Keiantae, a New Haven high school student training to become a Teaching Artist with The Word.

Kingson Wills is a sophomore in Silliman College.

Moses In 1887, Moses dies, leaving Sarah alone with two-year-old A’lelia.

I have lifted the still slick tongue of the man.

I have placed the coin—cool and heavy—beneath.

I have let the mouth swing shut. Relinquished the blue-bruised body.

If there is such a thing as love, I have trembled in its shadow—thick velvet cape trailing, catching in the splintered floor.

I have wondered what type of woman this shroud will become.

I have felt a small creature watching me with cavernous eyes. In the night, I have shown my mother-teeth.

This poem is inspired by the life and times of Madame C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove).

layout by Jessica Sánchez, Photography BY CHRIS DE SANTIS

—Kanyinsola Anifowoshe

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Snapshot

A tribute to New Haven’s only dedicated skate-shop, Plush, and the public art of street skating.

By Zoya Haq

I

f you turn left from Chapel Street onto Orange Street and walk about a block, chances are you’ll see a group of teenagers performing kickflips and ollies on the pavement. They’ll be outside a storefront with a giant wall of glass. That’s Plush: New Haven’s only dedicated skate shop, decorated with colorful skateboard decks and populated with the trendiest gear on the market.

Sir-Michael Burrow is the employee behind Plush’s white, rounded counter.

As soon as I walk in, he shoots me a big smile and waves me over. “Feel free to ask any questions about anything in shop, and I’ll pull it out for you,” he says. He’s sporting a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans, nothing flashy. His outfit blends in with the plain white wall behind him. White accents—they’re everywhere. They contrast sharply with the colorful racks of clothes that hang a few feet from him, displaying popular brands such as Carhartt, Dickies, and Converse.

Burrow is from Waterbury, Connecticut, and has been skating in New Haven since he was 17. Now, at 25, he has a glint in his eyes when he talks about skating.

He’s flanked by containers overflowing with skate periodicals and poster books.

Burrow’s favorite word is “sidebar.” As we begin to talk about Plush and its connection to New Haven skating, he throws it into our conversation to add more context to the growth of Connecticut’s skating culture. “Just a sidebar,” he says. “Another sidebar.”

Sidebar: a skate video filmed in Connecticut in the nineteen-nineties called Mama’s Boys brought more skaters to the city and 6

March 2024 TheNewJournal

revitalized New Haven’s scene. Sidebar: when Plush opened, Vans came and shot a piece that put New Haven on the map again. Sidebar: for the past few decades, a vibrant skate film culture has been brewing in the city.

Before Plush opened in 2022, the last skateboarding shop in the city closed in 2015. The closure left New Haven skaters with a long commute to find gear and community.

Alexis Sablone, an Olympic skateboarder, and Trevor Thompson,

The interior of Plush skate shop.

also a professional skater, both grew up around New Haven and recognized the inaccessibility of centralized hubs for skating culture in their home state and city. They decided to open Plush, harnessing the power of the local skateboarding community, and the expertise of Connecticut-area skaters like Burrow, to bring the shop to life.

Burrow tells me that their industry connections as professional skaters made the opening process seamless.

“Anyone can open a skate shop, but, like, you need to know what the hell’s actually going on in the trend scene and what companies are cool like the back of your hand,” Burrow said. “As pros, Alexis and Trevor are friends with people who are pros.

It’s about being plugged in.”

Rifling through the clothing racks of the store—organized by color to create a rainbow of choices—you’ll find high-end skate brands ranging from the more commercial Vans to the Colorado-based Polar Skate Co. Behind the hanging clothes is a mural of skate decks and boards; to the left of them, you’ll find a wall displaying the most trendy sneakers on the market.

The highly-curated selection of options in Plush and the aesthetic of their presentation make it feel like not just a skate shop, but an art gallery.

Plush’s role in New Haven isn’t really retail, though. It’s to create a space where New Haven skaters can come together and build camaraderie.

Plush holds monthly events, like skate video screenings and

Layout and Photography by Tashroom Ahsan, Illustration by SaraH Feng

Decked Out

Plush as viewed from Orange Street.

pop-up vintage markets. “It’s a meet up place,” Burrow says. “You have everyone knowing that there’s this one place where they can come together and, you know, skate together whenever.”

Community hubs like Plush naturally function as sites for structural change, too. As a centralized location for skaters, Plush has been instrumental in advocating for more skating spaces in New Haven. The majority of this advocacy can be tied back to Ben Berkowitz, co-owner of Plush.

Since lending a hand to Sablone and Thompson in the opening of Plush, Berkowitz, who is also a local skater, has used the scale of Plush’s wide-reaching community as proof to the city of the need for more skating locations. He’s been successful. Berkowitz worked with New Haven and the Parking Authority Board to transform Temple Street Parking Garage, a formerly unofficial skating hub, into an official indoor skatepark. With his encouragement, city leaders opened Scantlebury Park, a skatepark on Ashmun Street, and a new skating bowl on George Street in 2021.

However, the preservation of street skating, an essential part of skateboarding culture, has been harder to reconcile with the city—and with Yale.

While street skating is not technically illegal in New Haven, it is heavily policed, especially on and around

Yale’s campus. Beinecke Plaza, a popu- as the teenagers around the counter lar skate spot, is often patrolled by Yale laughed with Burrow. I could have met Security personnel, and skaters have them in a skatepark back home—they faced backlash—including removal— were wearing the same outfits that were for trying to skate it and other parts so recognizable to me, and had the same quippy way of speaking that felt like a of campus.

“Street skateboarding… it’s kind of constant challenge. Skating not only libwhat makes skateboarding skateboard- erates; it also connects.

Another tap at the window. It’s been ing,” Burrow says. “The spirit of resilience, of getting kicked out and coming back a few minutes since the last. Same kid— is a big portion of street skateboarding. same face, small and covered by a mop of light-brown hair. Burrow’s eyes light up.

Builds character.”

When I walked into Plush, Burrow It’s clear that these kids aren’t just shop had been laughing with four teenage regulars. They’ve become his friends.

Burrow strolls to the door and yells boys, all decked in mostly-black baggy jeans and T-shirts. As soon as Burrow out into the chilly February evening. and I start talking, the boys flee to the “Mead! Get in here.”

The kid—no older than 17—glides street. I can still see them outside of Plush’s giant window, skating in circles up to the door and steps in. He’s holding around the block. One of the boys comes a mini, skateboard-shaped fidget toy. He up and taps on the window, making a comes up to me at the counter and gives me a nod. The fidget skateboard flips in face at Burrow. He laughs.

“I’ve known these kids for a while his fingers.

Mead taps his foot on the ground. because I’ve been skating out here for a few years,” Burrow says. “That’s another “Are you a student?”

When I nod my head yes, he looks at thing—skating, shops like these, it gives the kids a place to go instead of Burrow and takes a deep breath.

Mead has been skating for six years. a bar or some other time-wasting thing.

Skating is…it’s freedom. We’re giving “Not that long,” he assures me. His terrain is the street, not the parks. Echoing them that here.”

I grew up skateboarding. Walking Burrow’s reflection on the power of street into Plush, I was instantly comforted by skating, he tells me that street skating the familiarity of the shop’s environment, preserves skating culture.

“A lot of people that don’t skate its palpably laid-back energy. Hip-hop music played softly over the loudspeakers assume it’s all about the parks, but TheNewJournal March 2024

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Decked Out

skating started on the street, it’s meant for the street,” he tells me. “Street skating is something you can learn from.

You need dedication for it. It’s escapism.

I use it to cope.”

For the first time in our conversation, he makes direct eye contact with me.

“You go to Yale?”

I nod.

Yale’s Schwarzman Center has funneled thousands of dollars into local skatepark construction, including Scantlebury Park’s and the skate bowl on George Street. While the main publicized reason for this funding has been to support the cultural benefits of skateboarding, Mead thinks that the popularity of Beinecke Plaza as a skate spot acts as a secondary motivation.

“I’ve been wanting to tell someone this, so Yale should hear it. They have power,” he says. He flips his fidget skateboard on the counter. “Just because the city and Yale keep building these skateparks and stuff doesn’t mean that they change anything for us street skaters. Pouring money into that isn’t going to change the fact that we’re going to skate Beinecke.”

Skating in Scantlebury Park.

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March 2024 TheNewJournal

He articulates his final point with the musicality of the sport, the rhythm of a passion that differs from his earlier the wheels. I think that, in a strange way, drawl: “And if they really want us to stay my yearning for that feeling was what off their property, don’t build the skate- made me so interested in the presence parks outside. Like, centralize it in the of skateboarding on every street in New Haven—one of the first things I noticed city. It’s a trek to get to the parks.”

He’s not wrong. The closest park about the city was how much skating to Plush is Scantlebury Park, located was embedded into its culture. At street behind Pauli Murray College off of corners and in parks, on campus and off, Ashmun Street. It’s a twenty-five-min- there are skaters. The sound of wheels on ute walk from Plush’s centralized, down- asphalt is an essential part of the urban melody of my new home. town location.

I stopped skateboarding when I was The next day, I make the journey up to Scantlebury, located off the Canal 15 because of a shoelace-in-wheel trip Trail. My jacket barely keeps me warm that left me in an arm cast for a month. against the frigid wind. It beats at my Sitting criss-cross on the side of the face as I navigate the icy sidewalk. The curving, concrete slopes, I tell Skirkanich playground next to the skatepark is, this. I tell him about the weird fear I unsurprisingly, empty. As I trek up the have of stepping on a board now, about short hill that leads to the base of the how it reminds me of the crack I heard— park, though, I can hear the click of and the instant shoot of pain I felt—four wheels against asphalt. The only person years ago when I last did it. He scoffs.

“You’re telling me you broke your within eyesight is a single skateboarder wrist four years ago and haven’t gotten practicing tricks on the slopes.

His name is Michael Skirkanich. back on a board? I broke my ankle. I’m He’s middle-aged, definitely older than here,” he says. I’m reminded of Burrow’s the kids I saw at Plush. Unlike them, he’s point: that skating is all about resilwearing a helmet. “Don’t want to crack ience. You just have to keep going for my head open,” he says. When I sit down it. Skirkanich echoes him. “You have to on the concrete next to the keep trying, keep going for it.”

“Come stand on my board and you’ll skatepark, we begin to talk see,” he says. “You gotta try.” about Scantlebury.

He waves me over, kicks his board “I like being out here alone,” he tells me. “When towards me. “It’s all about baby steps.”

I balance myself on his board.

I’m here, I don’t care about, think about anything else. He holds his arm out. “Hey, it’s nice.

It’s just skateboarding. Mercedes of skateboards. Be careful,” he Without the squirts—the makes sure to let me know. For the first time in a long while, I feel the liberateens—I can focus.”

As we’re talking, he tion of skating. How it is freedom, like pauses every so often to Burrow told me, how it is self-fulfillfocus on a particular trick ment, like Michael tells me, and I get it. or flip. “I come out here It clicks.

Back at Plush, Burrow left me with seven, eight hours a day,” he explains. “I see every day as some words that pretty much sum it up. a good day or a training day.” “New Haven, skating, music, culture, film, Unlike Mead, the they all go hand in hand,” Burrow told skatepark is an essential me. “Skating is art. It needs to be treated space for Michael. It pro- like art. It needs to be respected like art.”

Art on the street—art in the park. vides a structured space for him to focus on the “artistic” Both go hand in hand. Skateboarding, as art, is an inherently public sport. It side of his skating craft.

After all, to him, skate- deserves space both in structured enviboarding is, in one word, ronments and in the city at large.

Stand on a board like I did, and self-fulfillment. “Not many people can do this, and maybe you’ll get it too. ∎ that fulfills me. Landing a trick, the sound, it’s like Zoya Haq is a first-year in music, it fills me up.”

Saybrook College.

Music. He’s right. I’m reminded again of my own skating roots. I used to love Photograph by Ellie Park

Snapshot

First Light Led by larger-than-life Chef Duff, Sunrise Cafe provides unhoused New Haveners breakfast and community.

By Sophie Lamb

illustrations by Cate roser & Photography by Nithya Guthikonda

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First Light

P

aul McDuffy has been feed- bus stop. When one approached him, I first volunteered at Sunrise in ing people since he was 12. “We his immediate reflex was to hand her late October. On the dark walk along were raised poor,” he tells me the contents of his wallet. “She politely Chapel Street, I anticipated a standard after his Friday shift at Sunrise Cafe. said ‘No, sir, I really don’t want your soup kitchen—bags of pre-packed food, “And because of being poor, my mom money. I really am hungry.’” Instead limited seating, and a line of people taught us how to stretch $1 in the com- of taking the bus home, Duff took the twisting out onto the sidewalk. Instead, munity.” McDuffy has lived in New bus to Stop & Shop, bought $12 worth when I stepped through its glass doors, Haven his entire life. He reminisces of canned bologna and Wonder Bread, I was greeted with rows of white tableabout the butcher at Ferraro’s Market and returned to the Green. cloths stretched taut over wooden tables, who taught him to use his family’s He kept coming back. Five days a slouching with fat vases of flowers and food stamps to buy food in bulk, and week, Duff finished his guard shift and steaming cups of coffee. Guests sat and the Westville neighborhood barbecues started cooking. His meals morphed laughed, or danced to music spilling from where his mom laid out burgers drip- from bologna sandwiches to boiling a piano in the corner. A couple of volunping in mayo and relish. pots of meatball chili; he went from teers ran from an industrial kitchen out McDuffy—or Chef Duff, as he’s feeding ten people to hundreds. Friends into the dining room, balancing trays affectionately called by guests and and strangers alike helped him buy gro- piled high with fish tacos, french toast, coworkers at Sunrise Cafe—likes to ceries and serve. “It was cool,” Duff says, and orange juice. use “we” interchangeably Sunrise’s full menu with “I” when he talks and restaurant-style orderabout food. Towering ing system is the work over staff in a threadbare of Ellen Gabrielle, who apron and wrecked purfounded Sunrise in 2015. ple Jordans—a gift from She envisioned a more his best friend and “corhumane soup kitchen— ner brother”—Duff has complete with a menu a gentle gravity. He grew where guests can order and up in the nineteen-eighthave food brought to them ies, as New Haven faced in a restaurant-style sereconomic collapse. The city vice model. was razing once-vibrant Sally, a retired nurse communities to construct and social worker, has been the Oak Street Connector volunteering for Sunrise interstate, and the fiery since the beginning. She factories that guarded the watched Ellen build the city’s harbor were transCafe. “Yes, these places are forming into vacant redvery important for feedbrick shells. From 1970 to ing… people. [But] the 1980, the city went from goal from the beginning being the thirty-eighth was to make [Sunrise] most impoverished in the a dignified place to eat.” nation to the seventh. By Throughout our conversathe time Duff was in ninth tion, she keeps returning grade, a quarter of New to the word “dignified.” If Chef Duff prepares for service at New Haven's Sunrise Cafe.

Haven youth were living guests need an extra pair below the poverty line.

“It was like the community was backing of gloves, clean socks, or someone to Duff ’s classrooms were marked me.” In November 2020, word of Duff ’s talk to, they ask for Sally. Wrapped in by conflict. His mom used to warn cooking and tenacity reached Sunrise a mask, glasses, gloves, and a plastic him: “Kids act out and bully other kids Cafe’s doorstep. At the time, Sunrise apron, she slips between the kitchen, because they’re hungry.” She would was struggling with a dramatic drop in food pantry, and clothing closet with pack an extra chicken sandwich in his guests and fluctuations in kitchen staff. her keychain in hand. bag each day to feed friends who didn’t Now it’s bustling. Open weekdays at Most mornings, Robert eats have food at home. Watching them 6:30 a.m., Sunrise serves free breakfast behind Sunrise’s piano. “I play it any smile after a good meal invigorated to some three hundred unhoused guests chance I can. So I don’t forget,” he pre-teen Duff: “We can show people out of the basement of St. Paul and St. tells me with a smile, adjusting his love through food [so] I made a prom- James’s church. Chef Duff uses donated black beanie as we talk. “Not having a ise to feed as many people as possible.” ingredients to cook a perpetually rotat- place to be is a lot of pain to bear, so I In 2015, Duff began working over- ing menu of fried fish tacos, sausage and use piano to get away from the suffernight shifts as a security guard. He grits, lasagna, French toast, and fried ing.” He pauses, placing his battered recalls walking past a group of ten chicken. When I ask why lasagna for copy of R&B For Dummies on the unhoused girls huddled against the breakfast, Duff laughs. “I want to treat music rack, and erupts: long fingers morning chill on the New Haven them. I want them to eat what they usu- delicately pulling across the length of Green, on his way to the Chapel Street ally don’t get to eat.” the glittering Yamaha, head swaying, 10

March 2024 TheNewJournal

First Light

eyes closed. Finding serendipitous joy like this is Robert’s driving conviction.

“It’s good you can come to a place early in the morning to eat. And I get to play the piano here. That brings me happiness.”

Fostering a comforting space hasn’t always been easy. When Duff first arrived, “it was hard for us [to] even serve a meal without a fight breaking out.” He’s “quit in his head” a thousand times over. The weight of these challenges is built into the fabric of Sunrise: the heavily bolted pantry, plastic knives, and worn-through floors.

“Some days it’s intense. People have their moments,” says Casey, a mom of five who just moved to New Haven from Alaska. “Moments” are what Casey calls fights. Her oldest son, Eprum, a tall, curly-haired teen, sits next to me. “[Eprum] has moments all the time… because that’s what they are. They’re over soon.”

mandated program that subsidizes the cost of rent for low-income people—but, according to the Connecticut Department of Housing, it can take up to “a few months’’ for their application to be processed.

Robert is also trying to get Section 8 benefits. “To get a voucher you need papers. And it’s impossible to keep track of papers when you carry your life on your back. It’s not like you can lock your Social Security Card in a bush.” He laughs and fiddles with a few keys. “Right?”

The day we talk, Robert is leaving Sunrise early to attend a series of job interviews. He’s nervous about employment—he’s still reeling from a string of exploitative employers and worries the time spent on a job will be time taken away from finding housing. Earlier this year, he was hired to put up a wall for a church—a three-week stint of nailing, plastering, painting, and sweating in a church basement. “I went to the lady for my paycheck,” he says, “and she told me, ‘I’m not paying you.’ They know that if He reminisces about you don’t have a permit, a license, not the butcher at Ferraro’s insured, you don’t have a leg to stand on.”

Between fleeting conversations with Market who taught him guests and volunteers, I met a constructo use his family’s food tion worker reeling from eviction, a musician from New Orleans who found stamps to buy food in a place to live, and a Yale Law School bulk, and the Westville graduate grieving a brutal divorce. neighborhood barbecues Despite varying tracks to homelessness, guests share parallel experiences in their where his mom laid out fight to escape it. They describe their burgers dripping in first nights without a home spent on mayo and relish. friends’ couches and in cars; when their friends’ patience ran out, they turned to temporary shelters. These shelters house people anywhere from three to ninety I sit down with Casey during a lull days. But as homelessness rates conin my morning service. She’s soft-spo- tinue to increase in Connecticut, shelter ken, swathed in two jackets to keep housing is stretched thin, leaving long warm from the January chill. As we waiting lists, and overcrowded accomtalk, she turns away from me to lock modation. In hopes of a more reliable eyes with Eprum, or leans over to brush option, many apply for Section 8. But, the hair from her one-year-old’s fore- as in Casey and Robert’s case, this prohead. Eprum is autistic, and Casey is cess can take months. As shelter slips in solely responsible for his education. and out of place, many end up on the Between teaching and caring for her streets. Most days, Robert walks until he toddler, Casey hasn’t had time to find finds somewhere safe enough to sleep: a job. The family is currently living “There’s really no place where you can sit in the Continuum Shelter on Foxon and be. You’re just wandering.”

Boulevard. At the end of February, their In Sunrise’s cluttered kitchen, I ninety-day stay period will run out. “We meet Nelson, a dimpled, grinning don’t know what we’re going to do,” 30-something who came to New she says, her fingers wrapped tightly Haven from Puerto Rico when he was around Eprum’s hand. They’re hoping to 7. The move made him grow up fast; receive a Section 8 voucher—a federally he supported himself and his sisters Layout By Jessica Sánchez

Diners at Sunrise Cafe.

through high school before meeting his girlfriend of ten years. Nelson first became homeless after his girlfriend suffered a stroke, and he couldn’t spread his income thin enough to cover the costs of rent and healthcare.

He thought he would never escape. “I used to sleep in hallways,” he tells me. “When I couldn’t find food, I just drank water.” For twelve years, he bounced between housing arrangements and living on the streets until landing in prison four years ago. He’s currently living in a halfway house TheNewJournal March 2024

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First Light

“Get angry. We're all in this fight together,” Chef Duff tells all of Sunrise’s guests. He wants them to walk through these doors and leave better.

while he works on getting back on his feet. One of the ways he’s healing is by waking up at 5 a.m. every morning to volunteer at Sunrise. Nelson brims with enthusiasm, carrying trays of food three at a time, high-fiving and hugging me as we pass each other. “I wished someone would help me when 12

March 2024 TheNewJournal

I was starving on the streets. Now I triumphantly chants, “Baby’s here, baby’s can be that help for someone else.” here!” Arms laden with goodies—and a For many of the volunteers, working steaming stack of chocolate pancakes— at Sunrise is a way to reconcile their he hugs Casey, Eprum, and Casey’s oneyear-old. The chaos of Sunrise swells experiences with homelessness.

However, for many of the guests, around them: piano filling the air, steam eating at Sunrise can hold up a mirror rising from cups of hot coffee, laughter to the battles they are facing. Robert booming from the kitchen. Casey left stops me at the door. “I need you to her support system when she left Alaska. know I don’t ever feel good having to “But Chef takes care of us,” she smiles.

“Evil works twenty-four hours a day. come here another day," he says.“You go in Sunrise and you look around and It never takes a break. It never rests. It you see what you’re going through ten never stops.” Duff ’s voice cracks as he tells me this. You can feel this evil pressby ten by a hundred times.”

Duff believes there can be power in ing in on all sides of Sunrise, a midnight that. “Get angry. We’re all in this fight swarm of evictions and addictions, of together,” he tells all of Sunrise’s guests. bad employers and bottomless legal batHe wants them to walk through these tles. “I gotta go ahead and make sure we doors and “leave better”—whether that love each other.” ∎ is wiping down a tablecloth or getting sober. Duff speaks a lot about the successes and failures he watches pass Sophie Lamb is a first-year through Sunrise’s walls: “Everybody in Jonathan Edwards College. who [gets] a job comes to me and says ‘Chef, I have a job.’” They tell him if they found new housing or bought their girlfriend a coat. They also tell him if they relapse or get kicked out of a shelter.

Running to the back pantry to collect a bag of mango yogurt, stuffed unicorns, and applesauce, Duff Photography by Nithya Guthikonda

March 2024

A Podcast About Yale and New Haven

Volume 56 Issue 4

Check out the second episode of the TNJ Podcast! In this episode, Suraj Singareddy interviews organizers with Yalies4Palestine and Jews4Ceasefire, Meg Buzbee digs deeper into her investigation on Tweed New Haven Airport, and Sophie Lamb brings us into Sunrise Cafe. Listen to these stories, and more, on The New Journal website!

March 2024

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design by Chris de Santis, Photography by Ellie Park

TheNewJournal

The Tarmac Next Door Neighbors sound the alarm as Tweed New Haven Airport sprawls.

By Meg Buzbee

March March2024 2024

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iana Gilman-Ford doesn’t like to fly. Airport Authority Board. Still, he has supShe hasn’t been on a plane since the late ported the airport expansion from the beginnineteen-nineties, and even then, she didn’t ning. He worked with Avports and Avelo in make it off the ground. While the plane was still the initial stages to secure their investments. on the tarmac, she suffered a panic attack and had From his perspective, the expansion of Tweed to disembark. Still, for most of her life, Gilman- is for the common good. “The success of the Ford looked up at planes in the sky with awe. airport has spillover for the region, and for the What a marvel, she used to think. Men in the sky. immediate vicinity,” Hoey said. And besides, Then, in August 2022, Tweed New Haven “No one who bought a house didn’t know the Airport, located just 50 yards down the street airport was there.” from Gilman-Ford’s house, entered into a Opponents and proponents of the Tweed forty-three-year contract with the airport Airport expansion seem to operate in entirely management company Avports LLC. The deal different registers. Critics of the airport, paved the way for a one-hundred-million-dol- largely residing within a few miles of Tweed, lar investment in the expansion of the air- denounce the noise and air pollution, as well port. A year earlier, in May 2021, the Airport as increased traffic and safety concerns. Gretl Authority had announced a new partnership Gallicchio, who lives in New Haven near with Avelo Airlines, an ultra-low-cost carrier the airport, said that she had to “completely that began offering flights out of New Haven reevaluate what it means to have a future” in in November 2021. her once quiet neighborhood. “It’s depressing,” Now, over twenty Boeing 737 jets take off she said, “to watch the place where we’ve lived and land each day on the Tweed runway, situ- be destroyed.” ated three miles from downtown New Haven.

Residents of these low-lying, shoreline Sometimes the jets move as late as 10:30 p.m. neighborhoods already contend with warming Gilman-Ford calls her house, which she has and flooding, local consequences of the global lived in for twelve years, a newfound “night- climate crisis. They are skeptical of the value mare.” She keeps her windows closed to block of Tweed’s future LEED-certified, energy-effithe smell of jet fuel. She stopped hanging the cient terminal—especially when the aviation clothesline and pruning the garden last year. industry plays a massive role in carbon emisAnd then there’s the noise. “I don’t even have sions. Such environmental concerns would be words for the noise,” Gilman-Ford said. “There compounded by jumbo jets, the traffic, and the are times it’s so bad you cannot even function.” increased strain on emergency services that “I have great empathy for people who live will come with the expansion. near the airport,” said Matthew Hoey, the First Proponents of the airport are quick to recSelectman of Guilford and Chair of the Tweed ognize these concerns but dismiss them with

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utilitarian logic—more people will benefit from of her house are enough signs of the impact.

Tweed than will be hurt, and thus the expansion “I don’t care what that study says,” she said, will be justified. The benefit takes many forms: speaking about federal environmental impact economic growth from jobs in aviation and con- reports. “Because we know, we’re living here.” struction, accessible and affordable travel from Avelo’s budget flights, and a potential decrease in energy use after construction of the new, From Puddle Jumpers to Regional Hub LEED-certified terminal.

The one thing everyone can agree upon is or all its rapid growth, Tweed is tiny, how enormous and successful the expansion sitting low down in a large bowl just twelve of Tweed services has been already, and how feet above sea level. To get there, drivers exit I-95, impactful future changes will likely continue the main throughway to town, and roll down a to be. Since the first Avelo flight took off from two-lane road with yellow lines down the middle New Haven on November 3, 2021, and landed and parking lanes on either side. Only small green in Orlando about two hours later, Avports signs with a white airplane icon and an arrow has seen an eleven-fold increase in air traf- indicate that Tweed is nearby. Single-family fic at Tweed. In 2020, there were thirty-eight homes spaced about 15 feet apart with grassy thousand enplanements at Tweed. In 2023, lawns line the block. Speed bumps and yard signs there were 465,538. According to Tom Rafter, increase in number closer to the airport: “Keep Executive Director of the Tweed New Haven Tweed Small,” they read. On the tarmac, across Airport Authority, Tweed is the second fast- the street and behind the terminal, there’s usually est-growing airport in the United States. This at least one purple, white, and yellow Avelo 737 may only be the start. Under Avports’ master jet. Morris Creek flows underneath the air traffic plan for its lease from the Airport Authority, control tower, underneath the terminal, and down effective until 2065, the company will invest the tarmac on the other side.

Tweed Airport is not a new addition to this one hundred million dollars into Tweed and oversee the construction of a new terminal and tree-lined New Haven neighborhood. Opened in 1931 as the New Haven Municipal Airport, it took extension of the runway.

To Hoey, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, the name Tweed in 1961 from its first manager, and most other politicians with a stake in the John H. Tweed. Having purchased the land from fight, the equation is simple. Tweed brings jobs East Haven in 1931, the City of New Haven fully and revenue to the region. Private investment owns the acres that Tweed sits on and leases it to from Goldman Sachs-owned Avports pays the Tweed Airport Authority. The complex also for the venture. Government departments crosses into neighboring East Haven, although oversee permits and regulations to ensure that East Haven does not share any financial ownerconstruction is up to federal standards. The ship. Throughout the twentieth century, flight world carries on, the same as it always has, now offerings shifted as different airlines attempted to with six additional flights from New Haven run routes through New Haven. Due to the short to Florida every day. But for residents like length of the runway and small terminal, planes Gilman-Ford, it’s a world changed. The noise were small and flight schedules inconsistent. More that disrupts her sleep, the vegetable garden often than not, passengers chose to fly from New and clotheslines she feels she’s lost access to, York, Hartford, or Westchester instead.

Before 2021, there were not constant 737s at and the black soot she says covers the outside Tweed as there are today, which seat up to 120 passengers; instead, just narrow-bodied airliners seating about seventy-five people maximum.

This was due to a 2015 legal battle, where the Connecticut government prevented the Airport Authority from expanding the length of the runway. The move would have allowed for larger planes and additional carriers to service Tweed.

Then, in July 2019, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision.

Rafter, the Executive Director of the Airport Authority, keeps a small orange booklet with the details of the Supreme Court ruling on his desk at his Tweed office. It reminds him of past resistance to the airport and the avenues through which expansion was still able to move forward.

Rafter, like Hoey, who sits on the board, seems unfazed by local opposition to Tweed

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Tweed 's Executive Director of Airport Authority, Thomas Rafter, at his desk in the air traffic control tower.

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expansion. A veteran of the aviation industry, he’s been in similar situations before. “I’ve lived at the end of runways, I’ve lived near airports,” Rafter said. “I understand their concerns.” He says opponents, though vocal, are not the only ones with an opinion about Tweed. The people who use the airport, who fly the Avelo flights, park in the nearby parking lot, and work jobs in the terminal, he argues, are showing their support for the airport and its expansion through their actions. Tweed also has its vocal cheerleaders: numerous residents of New Haven, East Haven, and surrounding towns who post updates on new Avelo routes, videos taking off over the Long Island Sound, and updates on weather delays.

Yale students and affiliates alike also frequently fly through Tweed. Camila Young ’26 has taken over twelve Avelo flights since beginning college between New Haven and her home in Miami. “I really like Tweed,” she said. For Young, the small airport is convenient and she finds the people there friendly. “It seems kind of like the mom-and-pop version of the airport.”

Most days, Rafter has the tower to himself.

From up here, he can see the entire expanse of Tweed: the houses on Burr Street which sit right across from the airport gates; the cars loading and unloading in front of the terminal; the brook that runs from the parking lot to the tower; and the planes as they land, taxi, disembark passengers, and take off again. Above it all is the expansive sky, visible for 360 degrees from the wrap-around windows in Rafter’s tower.

From up here, Tweed looks beautiful.

The tarmac is lower than the surrounding houses, with orange and red foliage on all sides. To the East Haven side of the airport, where the new terminal will be built, Rafter points out a few commercial buildings and the woods he says separates the airport from residential areas. “The longest highway in the world is a runway,” he says. “There are airports around the entire country and they are part of a larger system.”

have become more frequent since Avelo arrived.

In East Haven, more than 21 percent of children have asthma compared to just 14 percent in New Haven and just 13 percent throughout the rest of Connecticut. East Haven is already home to several oil storage facilities, power plants, and trash collections, not to mention a The Environmental Concerns mile-long stretch of I-95. East Haven is also an ilman-Ford stands in the parking lot of Environmental Justice Community, defined by Robinson Aviation on the east side of the ter- the Connecticut state government as an area minal, watching the planes. Next to her, the sur- with high poverty rates where developers must face of her car, a 2010 Mercury Sable, is covered have a plan to engage local stakeholders before in a thin layer of brown grime which she says is they can seek permits. This is usually done from airplane combustion. A yellow “Stop Tweed through public meetings or comment periods, Expansion” sticker is peeling off at the edges. A where residents can provide feedback on proplane took off three minutes ago, and it takes that posed plans. Because Tweed has been zoned long for the jet fumes to make their way over on as an airport since its inception, and because the wind. airports fall largely under federal jurisdiction, Both Gilman-Ford and her daughter have the expansion hasn’t legally required all these asthma. She said her daughter’s asthma attacks state-level procedures.

Morris Creek flows underneath the air traffic control tower, underneath the terminal, and down the tarmac on the other side.

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As a result, some residents have taken Gallicchio said. Piscitelli did not recall this it upon themselves to assess the environ- conversation and referenced the potential mental and health impacts of Tweed on local environmental benefits from moving the the already-impacted communities. A local terminal—including higher stormwater storenvironmental group called 10,000 Hawks age capacity at the airport. Elicker also conpartnered with Tufts University researcher tested that this is his administration’s position.

Neelakshi Hudda to study air pollution around “[Planes] have jet fuel that is detrimental for Tweed. Residents kept air quality monitors the climate,” Elicker said. “But that doesn’t in their homes over the course of two weeks. mean we should never fly anywhere. We can’t Hudda found that ultrafine air pollution parti- look at the airport in isolation and there is so cles increase by 188 percent during plane take- much we are doing as a city to reduce our clioff and landing, up to half a mile away from mate impacts.” the airport.

The current expansion put forth by In December 2023, the Federal Aviation Avports includes plans for a six-story parking Authority (FAA) issued a Finding of No garage, a 638-foot runway expansion, a 462,500 Significant Impact (FONSI), which concluded square-foot airplane parking building, and that Tweed’s expansion would have no signif- the new terminal that will come in at around icant impact on the environment. This find- 80,000 square feet. Residents and environing was the result of the FAA Environmental mental activists alike fear the potential harm Assessment (EA), a routine procedure that this construction will have on surrounding must be completed for expansion plans to wetlands, and also the prevalence of flooding. move forward.

Low-lying and coastal East Haven is already a “When I heard the news of the FONSI I flood-prone city, with almost a third of homes burst into tears and I doubled over on the at severe risk of flooding within the next thirty floor,” Gallicchio said. “I was literally that years. The new terminal will be built on stilts shocked. The EA was a complete shocking act of to protect against future water damage. This is greenwashing.” still a rare design for airport terminals, but one Save the Sound, a New Haven-based non- that might become more popular as flood risks profit, is currently appealing the Environmental from climate change increase.

Assessment. It cites the numerous state and federal agencies—including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of The Political Quagmire Health and Human Services, and the Connecticut hroughout the three-year expansion Department of Energy and Environmental fight, opponents have complained that Protection—that, like Gallicchio, have pointed out shortcomings in the document. For example, everyone seems to be paying attention to other ultrafine particle pollution was not considered in things, anything but Tweed, including those the FAA’s EA, as these are not federally-regulated who are tasked to legislate on it. At an April pollutants. Neither were the impacts of leaded fuel 2023 meeting of the South Central Regional used by small, private aircrafts. Wetland impacts Council of Governments, East Haven Mayor are also largely left out of the document, which Joseph Carfora accused his colleagues of negstates that there are “no critical habitats within the ligence as they voted to pass a resolution in project site,” a fact that local residents and Save support of the Tweed expansion and the draft Environmental Assessment. the Sound refute.

“First of all, I want to ask everyone on According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the aviation this board,” Carfora said to the assembled industry accounts for 3.5 percent of warming council. “Has anybody read this EA?” It was worldwide. If the industry were a country, it a hybrid meeting—Elicker called via Zoom would be the sixth-largest emitter in the world from his New Haven office. Carfora held up as of 2019. Opponents of Tweed see this as a key a copy of the 216-page draft environmental reason to limit the growth of the airport. “This assessment document, spiral bound with a is an expansion of an impossibly wet, small, plastic cover. “Has anybody took the time foggy airport during an era of climate crisis out to read this?”

Hoey and Elicker responded that they when every responsible policy maker I know talks about ways we need to reduce our carbon had read most of it, but only two other people usage and our carbon footprint,” Gallicchio said. in the adjoined crowd raised their hand, both She said that when she brought up these con- onlookers, not members of the council. “I want cerns to Elicker in a July 2022 meeting with him to ask all of you,” Carfora then said. “How can and Economic Development Administrator you vote if you don’t know what’s in this?” The rest of the members looked on, a few holding Michael Piscitelli, she was quickly dismissed. “[Piscitelli] said that global warming is on to their hands, as Carfora continued to speak, a global problem and this is a local issue,” growing irate. Carfora cursed, and only then did

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The Tarmac Next Door

Plans put forth to expand Tweed New Haven Airport's 437-acre footprint include a six-story parking garage, 638-foot runway expansion, a 462,500 square-foot airplane parking building, and a new 80,000 square-foot terminal.

TheNewJournal

forty-three-year Avports lease was approved, its day-to-day responsibilities have shrunk.

The Authority and the Board do accept noise complaints from residents, who also can send them directly to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection through a complaint line. Board meetings are also open to the public, and the board reserves time for comments and questions from individuals, but they rarely respond directly to public comments. More often than not, individuals are referred to the FAQ page on the website.

Don’t Hate the Player hen Carfora walked out of the SCRCOG W meeting on April 26, 2023, he couldn’t stop the council from passing a resolution in support

Elicker chime in.“Point of order,” he said. “If we could all use appropriate language.”

Carfora’s motion to table the resolution failed with a 5-4 vote. He stood up and, along with two staff members, left the meeting. The council then voted on the original resolution in support of the Tweed expansion and draft environmental assessment. It passed unanimously, though two members abstained: North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda and Woodbridge Deputy First Selectwoman Sheila McCreven.

Although half the airport sits within East Haven’s borders, ownership belongs solely to New Haven. Legal jurisdiction and regulation largely fall on the federal government, as is the case with airports around the country. “This is lopsided,” Carfora said before he left the April 2023 meeting. “Every time I look back at this I’m getting more information. Everything is twisting and turning and it’s all against East Haven.” One aspect that East Haven does have a small amount of control over is the Tweed Airport Authority Board of Directors, a group of fifteen unpaid volunteers appointed to govern the airport.

Of the Board’s fifteen members, eight are appointed by The New Haven Mayor’s Office with confirmation from the Board of Alders, five are appointed by Carfora of East Haven, and two are appointed by the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCRCOG).

The Board governs Tweed and appoints the Executive Director, although since the March 2024

The Tarmac Next Door

of the Tweed expansion and draft environmental assessment. Ironically, Avports, which leases Tweed from the Airport Authority, which leases land from the City of New Haven, did not need the SCRCOG’s vote of support to proceed with its expansion plans.

As a certified airspace, Tweed is under the specific jurisdiction of the federal government, specifically the FAA, which regulates the American aviation industry. The administration’s primary duty is to guarantee the safety of planes and passengers in the air. To ensure this, it manages air traffic control, regulates planes and airlines, and issues licenses to pilots.

The organization’s main goal, as stated on its website, is “providing the safest, most efficient aerospace industry in the world.”

In East Haven, more than 21 percent of children have asthma compared to just 14 percent in New Haven and just 13 percent throughout the rest of Connecticut.

To this end, the FAA has conducted its job admirably in New Haven. Air traffic has expanded, becoming more accessible and efficient, and there have been no major safety incidents since Avelo arrived at Tweed. But although the agency has Environmental Programs that ensure airports are up to the standard, environmental protection and regulation is not the FAA’s top priority, nor is it a part of their stated mission. Yet, the FAA is still the only body—municipal, state, or federal— with the ability to definitively find that there 21

will be no significant impact from the expansion on the land, waters, and people surrounding Tweed.

On September 26, 2023, another federal department got involved in the dispute. Admiral Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a letter to four FAA officials urging them to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Tweed’s expansion. In addition to restarting and expanding study into environmental and health impacts, the EIS would also necessitate considerably more community input and feedback. In the letter, she references the environmental and health hazards many neighborhoods around Tweed already face, notably their high asthma rates. The letter was issued in September. Three months later, the FAA issued the Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact, with no plans to move forward with an EIS. Adam Sarvana, the Communications Director for Levine, declined to comment on this story. “At this point we’re going to let the letter speak for itself,” he said. All Levine could do was “strongly recommend the FAA conduct further analysis,” as she wrote in her letter. The power ultimately landed within the internal operations of the FAA. East Haven and local nonprofit Save the Sound are making one final effort to halt the expansion by appealing the decision to the federal level. If they win, the decision could force an EIS and a much deeper look into the potential impacts than the current EA does.

Still, the changes that have already happened— the onset of Avelo, the ten flights landing at Tweed every day, and the increase in traffic and pollution around the airport—do not require any additional permission or approval. They are here to stay.

From Rafter’s perspective, these impacts are not the only ones to consider. He sees Tweed as having an obligation not only to East Haven, but also to communities much farther away—all along the southern U.S. coast where Avelo flies to. That network of the aviation economy, connected by runways, planes, and corporations that easily cross state lines, relies in part on Tweed. On a heavy traffic day, it may take twenty or twenty-five minutes to reach downtown New Haven from Tweed Airport.

In that same amount of time, 150 people could be halfway to Baltimore, one of the eighteen Avelo destinations. These transportation routes, as they become more habituated, create a connection between two places, economies, and communities that is no longer dependent upon physical proximity. In Rafter’s air traffic controller office, it’s easy to feel close to the wide sky and the planes crisscrossing it high above.

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The ground below is far away.

Gallicchio may be getting ready to leave.

The neighborhood she loved, where she raised her three kids and has lived for twenty-five years, has now changed to the point of unrecognition. “I am one of the people with the wherewithal to leave,” she said. “The people who are going to have to stay here and watch their homes and their neighborhood and their physical health deteriorate, it’s depressing.”

Gilman-Ford doesn’t have plans to leave yet, although she has taken a step back from the airport fight. “It’s just consumed me,” she said. “It’s consumed my kids. I took the flight tracker off my phone,” she said. “I must have filed three hundred complaints, I never got one response, not one.” She used to take her kids walking along the Tweed border on Thompson Avenue; she'd point out groundhogs and ducks to them along the path. The trees were cleared in 2020 as part of a drainage plan, and the animals never came back. Now that they are gone, Gilman-Ford is letting her own garden grow at her house one block away. The garden is overgrown but she doesn’t want to cut down the rhododendron bush—rabbits recently moved in. “I’m going to be the idiot that leaves all the crappy brush on my front yard,” she said. “I don’t want to kill the animals.” Above her, in the sky, the air boomed as another Avelo 737 came in for landing. ∎

Diana Gilman-Ford and her daughter live 50 yards down the street from Tweed New Haven Airport.

Meg Buzbee is a senior in Pierson College and a Podcast Editor of The New Journal.

The Tarmac Next Door

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By Isabelle Qian 24

March 2024 TheNewJournal

Home Truths

A writer seeks out authentic Chinese cuisine guided by Chef Jiang, the man behind his eponymous restaurant.

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verything at Chef Jiang seems designed to reflect light. The glossy wooden tables, the seats upholstered in shiny orange vinyl, the oversized oriental vases. Even the plates of food—hot, spicy, and glistening with oil—have become surfaces of refraction.

In one photo from a profile online, Chef Jiang’s owner, Jiang Zhongshan, wears a black chef ’s uniform and a white cap, and he drapes his arm commandingly over the side of a chair. In person, however, he is quiet, slow-speaking, and straight-faced—in a black zip-up hoodie and white athletic shoes. He tells me that he spends most of his time thinking about the restaurant, its workers, and its customers. I ask him if he has any funny stories, and he shakes his head. I ask him if he has ever dealt with any bad customers, and he shakes his head again. He does not seem accustomed to talking about himself.

Jiang doesn’t speak English. The first thing the restaurant’s hostess asked me when I called to schedule an interview was if I spoke Chinese. I told her that I did. That is technically true. My Chinese is good, although not as good as it should be—which is to say, not perfect. Throughout my interview with Jiang—conducted entirely in Chinese—I sometimes have to ask him to repeat himself. He does so generously. Because we so often

layout design by lily lin

hear about the pressures of the professional kitchen, it is easy to forget that cooking is a skill that takes a lot of forgiveness. Jiang watches as I stop in the middle of a sentence and wave my hands abstractly, searching for a way to rephrase my question. He says nothing, only smiles and waits.

Before Chef Jiang took up residence on 67 Whitney, the building was occupied by Great Wall Restaurant, a Chinese restaurant that closed down in June of 2023, after sixteen years of business. I ate there only once. It was their brunch special: a classic combination of soymilk, congee, and youtiao. I remember the tile floors and the overhead fluorescent lights. Because the restaurant was under renovation, my friends and I ate our congee out of small transparent containers with white plastic spoons.

In comparison, Chef Jiang incarnates a different, shinier version of the Chinese restaurant. “I wanted to have a place that felt modern,” Jiang tells me.

Sure, there are still remnants of traditional Chinese restaurant kitsch—the neon OPEN sign in the window, a faint jazz cover of “Don’t Stop Believing” playing over the speakers—but for the most part, the space looks like something that has just been unwrapped from its plastic.

Jiang is as much a businessman as he is a cook. He tells me that every TheNewJournal March 2024

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Home Truths

aspect of the restaurant’s physical design was carefully planned and that food is only one part of the dining experience. Jiang understands something about his customers: they value the aesthetics of the thing almost as much as the thing itself. He shows me the restaurant’s Instagram page; one reel showcases shining interiors alongside shots of chow mein, dumplings, and fried rice, all filmed aggressively up close. The video cuts to a shot of orange chicken in time to the beat of Beyoncé’s “MY HOUSE.”

Jiang tells me. “The journey was so hard—really, really difficult—and required sacrifice. Not everyone who “Not everyone who opens a restaurant will succeed. If you opens a restaurant are lucky enough to have a restaurant, will succeed. If you are what’s the point in thinking, some fourteen years later, that you wish you lucky enough to have hadn’t done it?” a restaurant, what’s I don’t ask him about sacrifices.

When we’re not talking about the restauthe point in thinking, rant, the conversation ends quickly— some fourteen years perhaps, it seems to me, because he later, that you wish doesn’t have much to say. He briefly mentions his daughter, Lily, who will you hadn’t done it?” be graduating high school in the spring.

— Even though they are no longer separated by the Atlantic Ocean, he doesn’t iang grew up in Hunan, a provA couple years ago, Jiang heard get much time with her between her ince known for its spicy cuisine, and about a lease in Farmington and schoolwork and his restaurants.

“We aren’t very close,” Jiang tells me. comes from a culinary family: his decided to open Chef Jiang’s first locaOn the weekends, Lily sometimes father was a chef, as was his grandfa- tion in 2021. Whitney Avenue is his ther. He attended culinary school and second location, which he selected in takes up shifts as a host and waitress. She went on to work at an elite restaurant part to cater to Yale students. He has is not as shy as her father. “He doesn’t in Beijing. Hearing that economic his eye on Providence—and Brown speak to me much,” she says in English, after I ask her about their relationship. possibilities were more plentiful in the University—for his next restaurant.

Still, when Jiang stops by to check U.S., he immigrated alone from China I ask Jiang about his regrets; he says on us as we chat, Lily turns to smile to the East Coast in his thirties. His he has none. wife and daughter joined him five years “I’ve never really thought about it. at him.

“What are you talking about?” he later, while he was working at a small I’ve never asked myself what I would have been if I hadn’t become a chef,” asks us.

Chinese restaurant in New Jersey.

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Photo of Chef Jiang, the restaurant in New Haven.

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“We’re badmouthing you,” she says, laughing, and he places his hand on her shoulder in the specific way that fathers do: fondly and with weight.

When I ask Lily to describe her father, she immediately tells me that he is very serious. When I ask Jiang to describe himself, he thinks for a moment, and then says that he considers himself a kind person. This makes Lily laugh. Nevertheless, I think that I understand what he means. Jiang rises to bring me a mug of tea the second that I sit down to interview him. He insists that I take home some food after every meeting. He tells me that his favorite person to cook for is anyone who enjoys his cooking.

The dish that is most important to Jiang is not on the menu. A stir-fry of tofu and pork is too simple to be served at most restaurants. It’s a nameless food—the sort that people cook at home. My mom makes it; Jiang’s mother made it too. As a child, his family could only afford to eat the dish once a month. They bought the pork from a man who sold meat door to door, carrying it on his back with a wooden pole.

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grew up eating at a lot of Chinese restaurants. These places were usually family-owned. They were almost always carpeted and decorated with fake plants. Some featured aquariJiang understands that ums of large fish, and as a child, I was food is situational and always worried that these fish were the taste is temporal. His same ones that would end up on the revolving table an hour or so later. mother’s tofu dish exists Among my family and our circle in the past. It is the kind of friends, the highest praise that you of thing to which he can could give a Chinese restaurant was to say that it was authentic. I considered never quite return. authenticity the rallying cry against Americanized Chinese food, exemplified in my mind by chow mein and anything else served at Panda Express.

It wasn’t even that I disliked Panda Now Jiang tells me that he does not Express; in fact, I harbored a secret make the dish at home. He can never longing for its orange chicken and honey walnut shrimp. Still, I underrecreate the flavor.

“It wasn’t that the dish even tasted stood that enjoying “fake” Chinese that good,” Jiang says. “But I was a little food was the sign of being a “fake” Chinese person. The most hurtful kid, and I only ate it once a month.”

Jiang understands that food is situ- insult of my childhood was whenever ational and taste is temporal. His moth- my dad, disappointed at my rejection er’s tofu dish exists in the past. It is the of delicacies such as chicken feet or kind of thing to which he can never pig ears, would sigh and say to me, “I quite return. guess you really are an American.”

Photography by ellie park, Illustrations by Sarah Feng

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Articles reviewing Chef Jiang online make sure to highlight the restaurant’s more exotic dishes: gizzards, frogs, stinky tofu. I wonder if the perceived abnormality of these foods is meant to indicate their authenticity, as though the sign of a properly foreign meal is that it seems instinctively unappealing to the traditional American palate. I wonder, also, when Americans started caring so much about the legitimacy of ethnic food anyways.

Online, I watch a segment of a local news station from one month ago.

In the video, Jiang stands alongside his marketing manager and two news anchors before four platters of food. “A lot of us are getting Chinese food, but we’re not getting the real Chinese food,” one of the news anchors explains.

That’s the selling point: authenticity. The food is real because the tofu is spicy and the fish comes with its head still attached. Jiang’s marketing manager tells the anchors that these are examples of dishes that Chinese people might cook at home, and the anchors marvel at how different this food is from the Chinese food that they had always known. Throughout the video,

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I watch Jiang. He says nothing, just smiles and chuckles. Everyone else is speaking in a language that he does not understand.

...when we say that food is authentic, what we mean is that it tastes like something we have tasted before. That’s all it really is. Just the commonplace longing for something that you already know.

when they come back, they might try something more adventurous, and then they’ll keep coming back to try new things, and they’ll bring their friends along, and this is the slow process of teaching Americans what Chinese food really is, so that someday, maybe Jiang won’t need to put General Tso’s chicken on his menu.

In the meantime, though, he tells me that he isn’t particularly bothered by questions of authenticity.

“I just want people to eat here,” he says.

—

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n Chinese, when you call something authentic, you say that it is dìdào. The word itself is constructed of two characters, one meaning “land,” Jiang tells me that he adjusts the other “road.” This makes me think his cooking to be more accessible about how the concept of authentic for American customers. In addition cuisine never would have existed if to lowering spice levels, he has also people hadn’t traveled so far away from included in his menu a section devoted their own native lands. The original to Americanized Chinese food sta- use of the term, dating back to the ples like General Tso’s chicken and Ming dynasty, was actually as praise Mongolian Beef. Most American cus- for products of a certain locale. Since tomers, he reasons, will first come to then, however, dìdào has taken on Chef Jiang for these familiar dishes. But an additional meaning: that which is

Home Truths

tangible or real. To me, there is something that feels so Chinese about this— the idea that truth must be intimately tied to home.

I eat dinner at Chef Jiang twice in the span of two weeks. The first time, I wait half an hour on a busy Saturday night to get a table with two friends, neither of whom are Chinese. We order scallion pancakes, chow fun, stir-fried lamb, bean sprouts, and Dan Dan noodles. As we eat, I find myself informing them that this is the good stuff, the real deal of Chinese cuisine. By the end of the meal, we are exhausted—both from eating and from talking about how excellent the food is.

My second dinner at Chef Jiang is during the Lunar New Year, upon the invitation of a family friend—a Chinese professor at Yale. She is from Shanghai and is probably the best cook I know. I ask her how she recognizes when a dish is authentic or not. “I only really know if I’ve had it before,” she says, which I understand as her graceful way of telling me that my question is a poor one.

In the middle of dinner, I take a quick trip to the bathroom. In one corner, there is a palm-like plant in a dark

blue ceramic pot. I reach down to press my fingers against the roots. I feel the smoothness of the plant and the softness of the dirt. It’s real.

After our first interview, Jiang insists that I bring some food back to my dorm. From the menu, I select the wontons in chili oil, which he packs up for me in a black plastic container.

If you want to know the truth, I have no idea if the food at Chef Jiang is authentic or not. I haven’t been back to China in close to ten years. When I go out for dinner with my non-Chinese friends and try to explain whether the scallion pancakes are real or unreal, it’s an exercise in bullshit, the indulgence in a feeling of expertise that I can claim and others cannot. This is one of the pleasures of tribalism—the ethnic secret, the esoteric knowledge, the self-aggrandizing idea that my taste buds actually do have some instinct for truth.

We never even made scallion pancakes at my house. Instead, we bought them frozen from the Chinese grocery store and heated them with slices of cheddar cheese melted blasphemously on top.

But when I sit on my couch and eat Jiang’s wontons, I remember making wontons at my kitchen table, and also the restaurant back at home where my mom used to order this same dish for me after school. I think about how these wontons taste like something familiar. And how, when we say that food is authentic, what we mean is that it tastes like something we have tasted before. That’s all it really is. Just the commonplace longing for something that you already know.

“Exactly,” Jiang says, when I try to explain all this to him at the end of our last interview. He nods at me, as though in approval. “Authenticity is just what we say about something that makes us think of home.” ∎ Isabelle Qian is a senior in Pierson College.

Aside

That Summer …that summer and the swollen pregnant heat, when Isa and I would walk around the house in our underwear and spend our water bill in the cavities of those hard plastic ice trays, that summer when I had two jobs and there was no poetry left in me by sundown, that summer when we’d keep the windows cracked open and every Saturday the dirt bikers would roar down the road and rattle all of our mismatched kitchenware, that summer I let seashells collect on the bathroom window, that summer I broke the wheels of my parents’ best suitcase bringing thirty-five books back to the library, that summer I waited for you to drive up to me on the weekends, that summer I started a fire by the lake and all of my clothes smelled like smoke and clean tobacco, that summer the man started following me, that summer the shape of my body changed, remember that one?

—Lucy TonThat

Illustration by cate roser

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Personal Essay

Name it to a God A writer finds holiness in pews, paintings, and poetry.

By Madeline Art

She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain, though in one case the fog never lifts.

But each person stores his hope in a different place.

– Louise Glück

went to the service because I and poems written by women we love. n March, Lucy and I went to Paris, Iomore wanted to sing hymns. My soph- We add a piece of writing if it makes Ito feel grown up. I dragged her to fall had been a warm one. I us feel this connection we all have: to the Sainte-Chapelle to see the stained

spent it reading into texts from a girl I wanted to be with, drinking purple gin and minty tea, and not thinking about any higher power. I hadn’t been to church since I declared my atheism at 13. But then it was December. I was alone, and the afternoons were dark. I wanted music that sounded like light.

I dragged my friend Lucy to the Christmas service on campus. We sat on the balcony. Below us, poinsettias lined every aisle and window sill. Their symmetry pulled the music into a new sphere; the air seemed to purr. Before “Silent Night,” we watched the light unfurl candle by candle, each congregant passing their flame to the next. I let wax drip onto my fingertips. We pretended not to notice the shake in each other’s voices.

After the service, we ate takeout and Lucy read me a poem by Ada Limón: And I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God.

We pasted this into a document and named it “religion.” Today it is thirty-nine pages long, filled with prose 30

March 2024 TheNewJournal

nature, to each other, to the universe.

up in a small country church, Ijuicegrew sharing hymnals and communion grape with adults who had been sitting in

the same pew since childhood. Maybe, as we sang together, they were connected— to nature, each other, the universe. I certainly was not. Church taught me to remember grown-ups’ names, to speak in front of a crowd, to bake muffins for coffee hour. But I understood religion as something to memorize. I learned the Lord’s Prayer as soon as I could read, because a cross-stitched reproduction was the only thing hanging on the oatmeal-colored walls, and my eyes longed for an interesting place to rest. Each spring, at the end of the Sunday school year, we recited the titles of the books of the Bible before the congregation. I still remember the groupings of syllables, but I can’t keep track of the order of the clusters. Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes. Joshua Judges Ruth. They didn’t mean anything to me then; they don’t mean anything to me now. Just sounds for my wandering mind to chew.

But the scriptures Lucy and I have compiled don’t feel like syllables to memorize—not the hollow words of the Lord’s Prayer or the repeated books of the Bible.

Every entry rips my stomach open.

glass. We marched up the shadowy spiral staircase, heaving closer and closer to the heavenly glow. But the sky was too cloudy. The glass did not glow. We tried to parse out the Bible stories told across the windows—maybe that, there, could be a crucifix?—but we could not orient ourselves. We spotted one woman in all of the thousands of window panes. I told Lucy that the space still felt sacred, but I was mostly trying to convince myself.

In the Musée D’Orsay, we looked for Berthe Morisot’s oil paintings—she’s our favorite. We turned a corner, and our breath caught in our throats. In the frame, a blonde girl placed flowers into the hair of her brunette friend sitting in front of her. It was called L’Hortensia and neither of us had seen it before. We did not speak.

We did not need to say aloud that we were looking at a picture of us—that we were seeing, through Berthe’s paintbrush, the tenderness of our friendship. Sacred. lived near a Cape Cod beach for Inoon, forty days when I was 19. Every afterI stood in front of the water and

waited for the ocean to make me feel small, to lull me into a sense of connection to the earth. Every afternoon, I thought about the people who had stood in front of this same water and felt the same smallness, the same connection. layout by lily lin

Name it to a God

the right thing? That bodily relief—reassurance flooding out pain—that, I think, could feel like God. When I stand in a church, I do not feel God. I do not feel a Father, or a Son, or a Holy Spirit. I feel the people who have stood there before me and looked for something beyond themselves. Who took meaning and comfort from these walls, and from the words and the music—and maybe from the God—that echoed in the vaulted marble ceilings. I am not interested in the Bible—until I think about the people who have turned to it for answers.

These people: their existence moves me. It moves me to stand in this place where they stood, to read these words that they read, to let go of my body as they let go of theirs.

I have always been too sensitive, Ada Limon writes in a different poem. A weeper from a long line of weepers.

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Lucy Ia nSnowe—fiercely Protestant—falls into depression and stops eating. She confesses to a Catholic priest and then has a religious breakdown on the steps outside the church. Every time I read the scene, I wonder if she collapsed from low blood sugar. Feel it in the body, name it to a god.

did think that I felt God one time Idirector, in my childhood church. Our choir Sue, and her son had not spo-

19-year-old girls in fifteenth-century Spain, across the ocean, staring back— every afternoon, I felt connected to them.

Two years later, at 21, I spent a month in France with twelve other students who wanted to write. We were living in a town called Auvillar. Pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago pass through this town on their way to northwestern Spain.

When they reach the coast and look out toward the Atlantic, they face, almost directly, where I stood on Cape Cod. Église Saint-Pierre hosts a church service each night for anyone passing through Auvillar. I joined on a Wednesday, Illustration by cate roser

ken in many years. The son was coming for Christmas to mend things and to watch our yearly pageant. But there was a snowstorm, and his travel was disrupted, and he was stuck in New York.

No public transportation could get him to town before Mary gave birth.

So a deacon named Don drove through the snow, three hours each way, to pick him taking a moment away from trying to nail up. In the middle of the pageant, when a to the page places and people and purring little lamb was singing, the door exploded air. The priest blesses the pilgrims, giving open. The music stopped. Every head in them strength for their next day of walk- the room turned to the door, and then to ing. How many have come before them, Sue. She looked at her son, smiled, and kept dirty feet on this same weathered ground? conducting. And we all kept singing—faces How many have walked, and walked, and a little brighter, eyes a little damper. walked, have given their body over to And maybe it was God. But now, all aching hips and raw skin to serve some- that I can remember is Don’s virtue, and thing greater? How many have doubted Sue’s music, and the relief of a lot of people themselves and their God in the heat of who wanted good things for each other. ∎ midday? And then: how many have sat in these pews, where I sat one Wednesday in July, and had a priest tell them to keep Madeline Art is a junior in walking, to keep going, that they are doing Trumbull College.

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Writing in the Margins Connecticut became the first state to mandate an ethnic studies elective in high schools. How are New Haven teachers and students navigating the curriculum?

By Chloe Nguyen

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layout design BY ALICIA GAN Photography BY ELLIE PARK and chloe nguyen

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Ryan Borowski teaching in his classroom at the Cooperative Arts & Humanities Magnet High School.

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Students in Borowski’s classroom.

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t’s last period, and students in Ryan Borowski moves the conversation into modBorowski’s “African American/Black and ern terms, comparing the violence perpetrated Puerto Rican/Latino Studies” stir with anticipa- against Planned Parenthood centers to the viotion: not of dismissal, but of their in-class assign- lence perpetrated by Nat Turner and John Brown. ment. Students have eyes locked on their notes “[Are] those people in modern times that use vioinstead of the clock. One high schooler motions to lence at Planned Parenthood places…justified open the conversation. Borowski reminds the del- in their actions because they are also acting on egates to shake hands out of respect for debate and behalf of what they think is right?” for differences of opinion.

Five years ago, this debate would likely not “Terrorism is an unlawful use of violence against have occurred in a Connecticut high school classcivilians,” the student begins. For fifty minutes, a room. Borowski has been teaching the state-manclassroom of nineteen high school juniors and seniors dated ethnic studies class at the Cooperative Arts debate the legacies of abolitionists John Brown and & Humanities Magnet High School (Co-Op) in Nat Turner. Each team huddles around their respective New Haven since 2021. The elective is composed table, where they hurriedly jot notes to argue whether mostly of juniors and seniors who are interested the men should be remembered as martyrs or terrorists. in learning about Black and Latino histories. A “Maybe violence was the only answer they had,” 2019 bill made Connecticut the first state in the one student ventures from the four speakers’ chairs, country to mandate the inclusion of ethnic studclustered in the classroom center. “They admit- ies electives in its high school curriculum. Classes ted to murdering people who might not have had like Borowski’s are available to high school stua place in this,” another student rebuts, “Martin dents across the state.

Luther King [protested] peacefully…there were The same year Connecticut piloted the counbetter ways to do this.” try’s first state-mandated offering of a Black and Between designated speaking times, delegates Latino studies elective, ten states—particularly in deliberate these violent rebellions with their peers. the Midwest and the South—passed censorship “Was it inevitable?” “Was it just?” Through the bills to ban “divisive” discussions of institutionthicket of conversation, I hear mentions of the alized racism and Critical Race Theory in both Emancipation Proclamation, Al-Qaeda, and con- K-12 and college classrooms. Americans have long gressional hearings. The upperclassmen’s arguments been conflicted on how to teach race and history pull from a vast bank of historical knowledge. in classrooms. These most recent debates follow When College Street car horns start blaring, a long lineage of “culture war” rallying cries on the students peer out the window to investigate the topics ranging from religious education, sexual commotion. Borowski quickly pulls the room back education, LGBTQ+ rights, and racism that often to focus. “I have no clue what goes on in downtown play out in schools. Educational initiatives that New Haven,” he says, “We can only control what question Eurocentrism, cultural relativity, and the goes on in here.” democratic principles of the founding fathers have 34

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sparked backlash from outspoken critics (in 2019, The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which asserted that America began when the first enslaved Africans arrived, was countered by “The 1776 Project,” a conservative retelling of history since America’s founding). The fixation from all parties reveals that schools are more than just spaces to transmit knowledge; classrooms can be battlegrounds for defining America.

Including Borowski, I spoke with four New Haven Public School teachers, a dozen of their students, and an additional nine advocates about the passage of a bill that has the potential to set a precedent for public education in America.

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n june 21, 2019, governor Ned Lamont approved the incorporation of “Black and Latino Studies” in the Connecticut public school curriculum

with the passage of Public Act No. 19-12. The bill received strong support across parties, with a vote of 122-24 in the Connecticut House of Representatives Borowski attributed the bill’s near-unanimous endorsement to Connecticut’s strong Democraticleaning demographics: “I think [our] side of politics is not afraid to learn true American history, and other states are.”

Though the act passed with little resistance, it took advocacy from students, teachers, and parents to push the issue to the legislature and ensure its efficacy.

Benie N’Sumbu, a 2019 graduate of Co-Op, testified in front of the Education Committee to support an earlier iteration of the bill in the spring of her senior year. On behalf of Students for Educational Justice, a youth-led advocacy group based in New Haven, N’Sumbu expressed concern about how Black history was taught in school: “Just a few years ago, people were talking about how slavery was a choice and how they didn’t fight back, which is so not true.” She hoped the course would

Scenes from Borowski's Co-Op classroom.

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introduce an “untaught history” to schools, with lessons that could challenge biases in conventional curricula through active student engagement, not simply “fact regurgitation.”

N’Sumbu’s sentiments were affirmed by the results of a 2020 survey conducted by the curriculum’s Advisory Group: a third of Connecticut high school students polled were interested in acquiring “a deeper understanding of inequalities and understanding of racism as a social construct.”

According to survey results, students were particularly interested in learning the “real” history.

From 2019 to 2021, the State Education Resource Center (SERC) partnered with the Connecticut State Department of Education to develop a curriculum for the new course. SERC members said they hoped to create a program that would set a new precedent for learning, deviating from a Eurocentric framing of Columbus’s New World landing and European colonization as the start of American, African, and Latin American history.

During the program’s development, rising instances of police brutality and subsequent protests made systemic racism more visible and Critical Race Theory a popular debate in mainstream media. In Connecticut, right-leaning politicians and parents rallying against the program weaponized misconstruals of Critical Race Theory against educators who were attempting to elucidate race, racism, and identity in K-12 classrooms, particularly in wealthier suburbs. In Easton, residents put up anti-CRT signs, and in Guilford, nearly five hundred people petitioned to ban social-justice indoctrination in their public schools. Schools even struggled to run the course because of a lack of student interest, having to offer half-year iterations to improve enrollment.

The State Board of Education approved the final course, “African American/Black and Puerto Photo courtesy of Christy Olezeskiw Rican/Latino Studies,” on December 2, 2020. The curriculum was not approved solely to cover racStarting in the 2021 to 2022 academic year, ism—N’Sumbu and her co-organizers at SEJ were school districts across the state of Connecticut concerned that a class with “Race” in its title would were invited to teach the pilot program. The yearnot pass statewide. But consultants at SERC told me long course was divided into two semesters. The they had every intention of creating a new type of first chronologically taught African American class to address the history of racism in the U.S. and Black history, from ancient African kingdoms The course intends for students to work inti- to the Jim Crow era to the modern Black Lives mately with the material. Most of the assessments Matter movement. The second centered a thematic are journal- or discussion-based, culminating in focus on Puerto Rican identity, a demographic that classroom essays and debates. Only twice does represents 74 percent of the Hispanic population SERC’s curriculum mention the word “quiz,” and of Connecticut, and Latino Studies, touching on never “exam.” Paquita Jarman-Smith, the SERC Indigenous erasure by Spanish colonizers, U.S. Consultant responsible for the African American/ colonialism, and the diversity of Latino identity. In Black studies portion of the curriculum, said that the fall of 2022, all Connecticut high schools were she and her colleagues prioritized activity-based required to include the elective in their offerings. learning to engage students beyond memorizing The developers of the course expressed their facts. The curriculum also outlines a semesterly pride in this achievement, saying, “Each day we are class project, where students collaborate with just enamored with this.” When asked about the other school departments, like Art, Music, and feedback they received on the program, JarmanEnglish Language Arts, to creatively present their Smith, Diaz, and their colleagues at SERC agreed, “All imaginings of justice based on the year’s teachings. students should have this course.”

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Opting In

Teachers Taking Liberties

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tudent organizers, serc, and their Advisory Group felt that pushing for all schools to require the course would have placed excessive pressure on its broader school districts. This is especially true in light of Connecticut’s recent amendments to high school graduation requirements, where students need to obtain twenty-five credits instead of twenty credits to graduate. Legislators and organizers hesitated to impose further changes on schools.

With the course ultimately being an elective, however, the educators I spoke with were concerned that not all students can make room to take it.

“Electives compete with other classes for students,” said Ben Scudder, who teaches the course at High School in the Community. “Students are picking between this and P.E. or art.”

Moreover, they voiced concerns that it would self-select students with prior interest instead of those who already felt disconnected from the material. Throughout the New Haven school district, 89 percent of students identify as non-white, with 48.1 percent of all students identifying as Hispanic or Latino and another 35 percent identifying as Black or African American.

Jessie Piper, who teaches the class at Metro Business Academy, noted varying levels of interest in the course. Piper told me not all students in her class take it on their own accord; some are placed by guidance counselors for scheduling purposes. “I’m worried that the people who don’t care will weigh down the people who do care,” she said. Moreover, the class was designed to be inclusive to students of all learning levels, so some students with less prior knowledge might have to learn the material at a faster pace than others.

Still, each of the four classrooms I visited had students who attested to the value of the course.

Borowski’s junior students at Co-Op affirmed the class’s in-depth nature. Farida I., one student, spoke on the curriculum’s ability to transform challenging topics into accessible ones. “It’s a mix of jokes,” Farida said. “Then we get into the serious stuff, then we cool down and discuss.”

Drew S., a sophomore in Piper’s class at Metro, found the second-semester curriculum especially rewarding. Growing up Black in the South, she had accumulated a knowledge of Black American history but had received less exposure to Latino culture. She cited the Mexico-U.S. border system, Christianity’s diffusion throughout Latin America, and the tenuous relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. as crucial facts the course had taught her.

But Drew also expressed confusion on why this cultural history course was separated from the core U.S. History curriculum. “It’s kinda ridiculous that we even have to have this class when this history is literally American history,” she said. “Why is this not just a part of the regular history curriculum? It’s like they’re othering [people of color]. It’s like ‘This is the history, and there’s no room for you.’”

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Writing in the Margins

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visited A’Lexus Williams’s classroom at Hill Regional Career High School the same day I visited Borowski’s classroom: February 1, coincidentally the first day of Black History Month.

That day, Williams had created a presentation for the last unit of the first semester, “Protest, Politics, and Power (1965-Present).” It included songs like Sam Cooke’s “Change is Gonna Come” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” and a 1964 speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Williams weaved through every corner of her large classroom to address her eleven students. She moderated the discussion closely, but many of her students were excited to jump in.

Williams, who is Black, confidently projected to her class of entirely Black and brown students.

On the whiteboard, she defined the word radical and said: “The audaciousness for Black people, free and enslaved, to call for the abolishment of a system that had been sustained for hundreds of years was considered radical.”

Wesley R., a senior in Williams’s class, felt the class was more freeing than the fast-paced STEM lectures he was used to. “Our ideas just come out, and we talk based on what a peer might say,” he said. “In other classes, we’re quiet unless a teacher picks on us.”

Later that same day, Borowski and his students conducted their final debate of the semester, projected in front of the room: “Were John Brown and Nat Turner American martyrs/heroes or terrorists?” Through laughter and earnest deliberation, Borowski’s students all participated in the assignment with uniform engagement and enthusiasm.

On the same day, following the same state guidelines, Williams and Borowski taught two different classes in two different styles.

“We offer and guide [Connecticut schools] to follow the course and follow [its] fidelity,” SERC’s Jarman-Smith told me. “But school districts have to make it theirs.”

A few years prior to teaching this course put forth by SERC, Borowski and his colleagues had been asked by Co-Op principal Paul Camarco to develop and teach a class on African American and Black history. Borowski developed the course, which he recalled teaching from 2017 until 2021, by asking his students what they envisioned. The result emphasized modern figures and events, a practice that he has carried into implementing SERC’s program. “[Students’] personal experiences tend to relate more to current events and injustices,” Borowski said, “police brutality, mass incarceration, war on drugs…”

Straying from the statewide curriculum, Borowski asks his students to research examples of modern-day slavery or the stories of unheralded Americans like queer activist Marsha P. Johnson.

He wants his students to discover what makes them curious, and what makes them uncomfortable: “If you give students meaningful choice [over] what they learn, they’re more likely to take ownership of their learning.”

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This style seemed to resonate with some of his students. “[The content] is not just facts and dates, which don’t connect with me easily,” Juliet S., a senior in Borowski’s class, said. “We talk about the mistakes of the past.”

This standardized curriculum can look so different between two schools in part because following SERC’s program in its entirety can be overly ambitious for educators.

“The curriculum is so dense [and] pacing in the curriculum underestimates certain lessons,” Williams said. Scudder and Piper agreed that it is infeasible to cover all the content in one year.

As a consequence, teachers have assumed the liberty to modify lesson plans according to their educational interests and understanding of their students’ learning paces. “I’m looking at it as a course that opens a lot of opportunities,” Scudder said. “It’s not beholden to anything; there’s no AP exam at the end.”

The class looks different everywhere. Teachers facilitating the course throughout New Haven public schools don’t communicate directly—when asked if they knew anyone else who taught the course, the teachers I spoke to struggled to come up with a name from any of New Haven’s nine public high schools.

According to Williams, the history departments across the schools meet once a month for only an hour. There is no set time for the African American/ Black and Puerto Rican/Latino studies teachers to meet. As a result, the program can vary in content, pacing, and methodology from county to county, school to school, classroom to classroom.

Despite this lack of inter-district communication and consistency, Williams noted a shared experience among teachers in the district. “We’re definitely on the same page on how dense [the program] is, but we have to do what is in the best interest of who is in front of us.”

structure. ARTLC offers solutions in their anti-bias and anti-racist oriented teaching guides, lesson plans, webinars, and in-person seminars for those teaching the course.

Williams acknowledged how ARTLC’s resources help empower teachers to feel comfortable having the difficult conversations that emerge from course questions. “Having that [professional development] allowed my white colleagues to think it is okay to maybe say the wrong thing,” Williams said. “Now they know how to move forward. We’re not gonna get into that white defensiveness.”

Scudder and Piper also mentioned finding these resources through colleagues and friends who were already involved in ARTLC. Similarly, Borowski expressed taking additional steps to learn beyond the scope of SERC’s recommended training, such as researching books to include in his lessons, like Dear Martin by Nic Stone and The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros.

“Training is like ‘Let’s go through the curriculum in a week,’” said Scudder. He said the difficulty of the topics is not matched by the quality of training, which largely reiterates SERC’s publicly available material. To him, this cannot sufficiently compensate for every background discrepancy. “I didn’t major in Black or Latino history,” he said. “I majored in political science…There needs to be a greater discussion of what this class will look like.”

White Teachers, POC Students

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he deeply personal themes of the course, paired with varied implementation and levels of training, mean that student experience depends more than usual on who is teaching and how.

While 89 percent of the students in New Haven Public Schools are non-white, only 28 percent of teachers are non-white. Williams was the only nonwhite teacher I spoke with.

Training Teachers This discrepancy is no anomaly in the history of ublic Act No. 19-12 does not mandate an New Haven Public Schools. N’Sumbu said she never additional certification for teachers to instruct had a Black teacher in her time at Co-Op. Drew the course—any high school social studies teacher added that the students are aware of this disparity: can teach it. But in its public digital copy of the “Especially with the history that we know between curriculum, SERC publishes hyperlinks to databases, white people and Black and brown people, it feels articles, and activity lesson plans. It also hosts a sum- questionable at times to have a majority Black and mer institute, quarterly trainings, and an end-of-year brown school and basically, all the staff be white.” showcase to prepare teachers and track progress.

This divide is not lost on the history and social Williams opted to attend a professional develop- studies teachers of New Haven. Borowski said that for ment seminar hosted by the Anti-Racist Teaching his class’s first discussion, he wrote a question on the & Learning Collective (ARTLC). The initiative is board: “How do you feel about having a white teacher a collaboration between Yale professor Daniel teach this class?” While he received a mixture of posiHoSang; Students for Educational Justice; Hearing tive, neutral, and negative responses, Borowski took the Youth Voices, a youth activism group based in New opportunity to hear his students and, together, negotiLondon; and local educators. Members of ARTLC ate best practices for learning heavy content. had expressed a wide array of concerns about the Juliet, who is Persian and one of the few stubill: that it would mandate an inflexible curriculum dents in Borowski’s classroom to not identify as that would “displace existing teacher-developed Black or Latino, told me, “Borowski makes it very courses,” fail to prepare teachers, employ ineffec- clear that we all have a voice here.” tive and impersonal methodology, and silo African Piper had also welcomed the subject into her American and Latino Studies with each semester’s classroom. “You’re white and why are you teaching

P

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this class?” she tells me her students have asked. She says she responds: “It’s history, and you don’t have to personally live history to talk about it.”

One of Piper’s senior students, Alysian M., said she’s glad that Piper is the one to teach the course. Alysian identifies as a biracial trans lesbian, or, as she puts it: “a lot of different identities hodgepodge together.” Alysian sees her own history in the course, in discussions of struggle ranging from African American history to the Haitian Revolution.

“Learning about [slavery] makes me feel closer to history and people around the world and struggling with an oppressor,” she says. “Despite race, nationality, gender, and sexuality, everyone has had somebody who’s bullied them…Overcoming that oppression, that’s what attracts me to the course.”

As students learn, the teachers in front of them consider their own roles.

“I’m trying to think of myself as less [of ] a teacher and more as a facilitator of discussion,” said Scudder, whose sentiments were shared by the other white teachers I spoke with who are teaching the course.

Williams, who is one of two women of color in her seven-person department, believed that that attitude might distill classroom discussion. “The white teachers who are teaching this course Posters hanging in Scudder’s probably are worried about saying High School in the Community the wrong thing or don’t know classroom. how to have these conversations about race,” she said. “They don’t want to upset their students or perpetuate something.”

Wesley noted how that representation was important to him and his classmates: “[Williams] is someone who has felt disparities…since she looks like us, we feel like what we’re being taught is more personal in that way.”

But regardless of background or identity, Williams acknowledged that everyone has something to learn from the course. “I’m the first to tell my students that just because I am Black does not mean I know everything about Black history because we are not monolithic,” she said. “There are things that I’m learning and unlearning and considering other perspectives as we go through this together.”

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Writing in the Margins

Williams recalled an unexpected learning experience for her in her classroom. One day, she presented a recent court case to her class regarding a Black student who was suspended by his Texas high school for refusing to cut his hair. She intended for the case study to demonstrate the future of Black excellence and beauty, incorporating the idea from previous units of race as a construct. In response, one of Williams’ students asked whether or not he would cut his hair when he entered the workforce. Williams was surprised how susceptible her students were to messaging around “what is proper, what is presentable, who gets to decide.”

For Williams and her students, her deviation from the original lesson plan became an opportunity to illustrate how the course’s significance transcended arbitrary facts and grades. In Williams’s classroom, the course served to bridge the sometimes wide divide between the student and the individual.

Though teachers had various interpretations of the course, they shared recognition of its value.

Borowski described this class as an opportunity to promote interest in educational careers, saying, “We want to push more of our students to become teachers.” Borowski highlighted the importance of representative curricula and teaching, considering he is positioned as a white educator in a predominantly non-white community.

“This course can be a unifier if done correctly.”

While Williams had apprehensions about having a “real” history course being situated outside of the popular U.S. History curriculum, she approved of what was available. “If they’re not going to completely rewrite and review the U.S. History curriculum,” she said, “then yes, this course does do well to stand alone.”

To Williams, though the course itself leaves room for improvement, it represents something invaluable. “I think this course in particular hopefully allows students to connect to not just content in a more authentic way but really see we’ve all contributed something to make this nation what it is. There’s good and bad and ugly everywhere, but there’s so much value in being able to explore these things together.”

“The mere existence of this sends a message,” Williams said, “that it is important, that it matters, that it is U.S. History.” Connecticut’s students and teachers are the proof. ∎

Chloe Nguyen is a sophomore in Saybrook College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

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Snapshot

Tax Break Under a complicated national tax filing system, New Haven residents and Yale students come together at the downtown Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site.

By Ai-Li Hollander

O

n a cold February afternoon, ten people scatter among identical rows of chairs in the basement of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL). Between the patterned surfaces, diffusely lit by the overhead fluorescents, the room hums with noise. It is an hour and a half before the opening day of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site, which operates as a branch of the Internal Revenue Service’s national VITA program. Here, at Connecticut’s largest VITA site, Yale students run the operation.

Thirty minutes before the site officially opens, Yale student volunteers wander in. With widened eyes, they scan the waiting area for their fellow students, 40

March 2024 TheNewJournal

now full of clients. Last year, the site brought more than $2 million back to New Haven and helped more than a thousand people file for free.

While helping taxpayers avoid costly tax preparation fees, VITA sites also aim to increase access to tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC). These credits are part of the complicated web of programs that define the United States’ social welfare system. However, claiming them is difficult for those without a professional accountant or online tax preparation services. Out of the one hundred and forty eight million individual tax returns filed in 2020, only a little more than four

million were filed for free. Without the time or energy to parse through the code by hand, the most economically disadvantaged people—including those who do not speak English—bear this bureaucratic and administrative burden the most. As a result, these social benefits often do not reach those who need it. Many New Haveners stand to benefit tremendously from the money these credits put back in their pockets.

According to Census data, 21 percent of New Haven residents live under the federal poverty line.

Every year, around 20 to 25 percent of Connecticut residents eligible for the EITC do not claim it, according to IRS Illustration by Cate Roser

Tax Break

An Inequitable System

Photos courtesy of Maia Ettinger

estimates. Additionally, an estimated two-thirds of those who miss out on significant EITC returns nationwide are those who choose not to file because they are below the income threshold that requires them to submit a tax return. In Connecticut, the average EITC return was $2,294 for the 2022 tax year, a significant boost for taxpayers. Reporting by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic argues that these tax credits mirror a larger trend in social welfare: benefits are shrouded in a sprawling, dysfunctional, and complex web of programs that obscures access for those who need them the most. People who do attempt to claim these benefits face time-consuming bureaucracies, invasions of privacy, and the stigma that surrounds social welfare.

VITA serves as a strange band-aid to these gaps, tasking volunteers with the intimate business of interacting with clients one-on-one and handling their Social Security cards, government IDs, and financial documents. On Yale’s site, the impersonal bureaucratic system becomes personal, at once highlighting the people behind the tax code and the barriers to access of the current system.

The empty desks of the NHFPL where taxpayers work with volunteers.

hen I spoke to John DeStefano W Jr., Mayor of New Haven from 1994 Haven, including those who may be were separated by another dynamic: to 2014, he framed the VITA program as bilingual. Co-President Wendy Zhang race. Census data estimates that 30 pera matter of civic duty, for both the volunteer and the taxpayer. Volunteers give back to their neighbors “in a very traditional social contract sort of way,” while taxpayers contribute through their tax dollars. DeStefano emphasized that this definition of citizenship includes undocumented people, who can pay taxes through the acquisition of a Tax ID number and utilize VITA sites to help them file.

When I asked DeStefano about the barriers people face to filing taxes, he remarked, “I think that some things are complicated,” acknowledging that language differences can exacerbate these challenges. However, he equated filing taxes to getting your driver’s license or passing a driver’s test. “I really don’t think that’s too big of a burden to expect of people,” DeStefano said.

VITA leadership repeatedly told me that a significant challenge they face in providing effective service is language barriers. According to Census data, 20 percent of people speak Spanish in New

’25 acknowledged difficulties in recruiting enough Spanish-speaking preparers, challenging VITA’s ability to provide the accessible services they aspire to.

The Yale student volunteers and clients

On Yale's site, the impersonal bureaucratic system becomes personal, at once highlighting the people behind the tax code and the barriers to access of the current system.

layout by Tashroom Ahsan, Photography by Nithya guthikonda

cent of New Haven residents identify as Black or African American, compared to 7 percent of non-international students at Yale.

Historically, government social safety net programs have excluded Black Americans, through both explicit and implicit means. This form of structural racism has hindered Black people from building generational wealth. Despite this historical context, Black Americans are pigeonholed into harmful stereotypes like the “Welfare Queen,” popularized by President Ronald Reagan in the nineteen-seventies, that depict them as the primary beneficiaries of social welfare, leeching off of hard-working taxpayers. These racist characterizations rest on the American ideal of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” shaming those who access social benefits like tax credits.

Outside of the U.S., an estimated thirty-six countries—including Singapore, the U.K., Germany, and Japan—utilize an alternative return-free TheNewJournal March 2024

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Tax Break

filing system. The government pre-fills year when she joined VITA. information about an individual’s income Many in the city, includinto an online portal, prompting the user ing organizations like New to confirm or amend the information. Haven Rising, argue that On the taxpayer’s end, this takes minutes, Yale does not pay its fair compared to the nine hours the average share in New Haven due to American taxpayer spends filing their its exemption from proptaxes every year—according to IRS esti- erty taxes because of its mates. Since the U.S. government already non-profit status. Although receives information about an individual’s Yale has pledged to volunincome through their employers, it could tarily contribute $135 milfollow those countries’ leads in instituting lion over the next six years an easy filing system, which would reach and contributes through an estimated 41 percent of the population. other initiatives like New This would also eliminate the need for Haven Promise, the city many to visit VITA sites or pay for private still misses out on $100 million a year. “I feel like tax preparation services.

Since Reagan, president after pres- almost being at VITA was ident has repeatedly pushed for similar kind of like a small way in reforms. But the tax preparation indus- which I could be like, ‘I’m try, which stands to profit tremendously really sorry that I am benefrom a complicated and inaccessible tax fitting massively from a syssystem, has intensely lobbied against tem that hurt you,’” Liu said. such reforms. In 2003, a coalition of tax prep companies, including the leading The Inner Workings company Intuit, entered an agreement with the IRS in which the government sat down with Tom agency agreed to stop providing its Costa, a librarian at the own online free file system. In exchange, tax preparation companies themselves NHFPL who has worked with operated IRS Free File services in part- Yale students on VITA for nership with the IRS. These programs roughly twenty years. Earlier, make online tax preparation available I had wandered around the to income-qualified taxpayers, about 60 library, observing the extenpercent of the population at the time. sive resources housed in the A conversation while waiting in line.

But in practice, these private compa- building: shared computers, nies deliberately obscured access to Free a café, a teen center, and a File portals and deceivingly labeled paid “Tinker Lab.” Speaking in a slow, mea- to university restrictions on in-person services as “free.” In 2021, Intuit pulled sured cadence, Costa explained that the operations. However, all of NHFPL’s VITA out of IRS Free File and in 2022, only 2 library’s wide array of offerings are in volunteers are Yale students, both underpercent of people eligible for Free File service of the library’s mission “to be an graduate and graduate. The job demands took advantage of the program. This year, actual community center.” Among these a high level of responsibility and prothe IRS is piloting its own online tax programs is VITA, hosted in the basement fessionalism from its leadership—other preparation software through the Direct next to a popular teen center and a social VITA sites often run out of established non-profits, like United Way. Student File program in twelve states, excluding work office.

“The city sees this as a very import- leaders draw from a deep well of instiConnecticut.

Currently, Yale’s VITA program is ant program,” Costa said, emphasiz- tutional knowledge, working with an not pushing political advocacy for tax ing the continual support of the New extensive list of partnering organizations reforms. When I brought up the idea Haven Mayor’s office through events to make the site function: the NHFPL, to VITA Co-President Joanna Wypasek like an annual kickoff. “[B]ecause these Connecticut Association for Human ’24, she speculated that they might be funds are coming back in sizable refund Service, Yale Hunger & Homelessness able to implement advocacy in the amounts to the individuals, to the fami- Action Project, and the IRS. Costa outlined the evolution of lies, and they spend it in the community, next fall semester. the program from its inception in New “[B]eing from Yale is not a badge thereby boosting small businesses.”

Although around fifteen VITA sites Haven in the early two-thousands to the of honor in that situation,” Rena Liu ’26, a second-year advanced preparer operate in New Haven, Costa said the present. The site grew steadily in pubsaid, acknowledging the trust required downtown NHFPL VITA location is the licity and capacity throughout cycles of between tax filer and student. Joining largest in the state of Connecticut, Yale student leaders. The COVID-19 panout of an interest in contributing to New regularly completing the most returns demic challenged the program, but it has since rebounded, with ninety-eight curHaven, Liu shared that her extracur- per year.

The downtown NHFPL site disaffil- rently active volunteers. The volunteers riculars at Yale felt mostly self-serving before the spring semester of her first iated from Yale over the pandemic due I spoke to were motivated to give back

I

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Tax Break

to their communities, choosing VITA because of its ability to make a tangible difference in other’s lives.

“The money that people are getting back makes a huge impact,” Co-President Zhang shared.

VITA sends emails to its volunteers every day the site operates, Monday through Saturday, for about nine weeks until Tax Day on April 15. Each email includes a red number—the amount of money that taxpayers owed that day— and a green number, which is always significantly larger and denotes the amount of money that was returned to clients.

VITA volunteers strive to express sensitivity, respect, and understanding, especially when a client finds out they owe money or that their return is not as sizable as they had expected.

Zhang recalled instances when she had to explain to people why their returns were smaller than they expected, especially after pandemic-era expansions of the Child Tax Credit expired. This Photography by Nithya guthikonda

thoughtfulness seemed attuned to volunteer on an IRS VITA site. The to navigating the vulnerabil- exam guidelines instruct volunteers ity required of clients and the to take the test individually, noting responsibility given to volun- that “taking the test in groups or with outside assistance is a disservice teers on the VITA site.

Every VITA program abides to the customers you volunteered to by the IRS prescribed structure. help.” However, three out of four of Clients fill out an intake sheet, the VITA sites I have interacted with bringing their Social Security approach the test similarly, in groups card, an official form of iden- with correct answers eventually protification, and all relevant tax vided to all volunteers. documents to the site. The VITA Computers out, we gathered in volunteer reviews these mate- groups according to certification rials, inputting data into the levels, which ranged from “Intake online tax preparation system Coordinator” to “Basic Preparer” to “TaxSlayer,” which automatically “Advanced Preparer.” A veteran VITA calculates the return. Before volunteer, one of the site coordinasubmission, each return is dou- tors, prompted individuals from my ble-checked by a different vol- group to read the exam questions unteer. Filing is often simple, as aloud while soliciting answers from the volunteers are limited in scope group. I strained to hear amongst the and unauthorized to prepare for echo of the tall, domed ceiling, hushed taxpayers with specific, compli- voices, and the hum of other groups’ cated situations. But volunteers discussions. We breezed through the still need to know the right exam. When tougher questions made questions to ask. For example, the group pause, some students opted if a volunteer misidentifies the to switch tabs on their computers to filing status of an individual Publication 4012, the official Volunteer as “single,” instead of “head of Resource Guide. While they searched household,” the taxpayer may for official guidance as a volunteer miss out on certain benefits. would be expected to do on a VITA site, Volunteers must understand the others sat quietly and waited to be told basics of tax law and be prepared the correct answer. to explain returns to clients.

When I asked Theo Schiminovich The Volunteer Standards ’25, a new volunteer with VITA, about his of Conduct Agreement, signed level of confidence going into his first by all VITA volunteers, reminds session, he paused, choosing his words volunteers that “fraudulent returns that carefully. “I feel like I’m gonna need to report incorrect income, credits, or work up to it,” he said. “I’m in the stage deductions can result in many years of right now where I don’t really know what interaction with the IRS as the taxpayer it’s going to look like, so I have this void tries to pay the additional tax plus in my mind.” interest and penalties. ” Before preparing returns independently, new volunteers shadow experienced ones. Co-President Wypasek Training Volunteers described the steps after shadowing as “a gentle push towards doing it on your ver the previous fall semester, own.” She added, “we try to also give I watched the five training video them the tools so that if they’re stuck, modules ranging from twenty min- they know what to do next.” Volunteers utes to an hour that Yale student VITA can search the IRS website or the offileaders created, touching on the fun- cial Volunteer Resource Guide, ask damentals of tax law. fellow volunteers questions, and check In January, I walked into a lec- in with their IRS point of contact. In ture hall for VITA’s “Certification daily emails, leaders share lessons Party,” a gathering to pass the IRS’s learned and keep a running document official certification exams. Although of common questions. As new volunthe exam is taken individually online, teers build their confidence on the job, organizers talked through exam ques- capacity is limited early on in the tax tions in groups, eventually giving each season. Wypasek alluded to this bottlevolunteer the correct answers and neck, warning, “the first week might be officially qualifying all participants very very hectic.”

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Tax Break

Waiting On Site n the first day of VITA’s operation, O I stood next to Andrea Santiago-Tito SOM ’24. We met in the waiting room; she

has used VITA for six years.

“I come here every year because I don’t trust going to other companies and other environments,” Santiago-Tito said.

“I feel the Yale students, we have this trust where, they know what they’re doing.”

On the NHFPL flier, the downtown branch is listed plainly among other NHFPL VITA locations and does not advertise its affiliation with Yale students. Sitting among the clients, I noticed how the students seemed like the youngest people on site, with their stickered laptops and backpacks.

Santiago-Tito and I watched the waiting area fill up the middle of the library basement. Earlier, I had witnessed a public argument between a pair of clients who were worried about what order they would be seen in. The library staff and security guards, milling around in reflective layers, diffused the conflict.

“I’m not in a rush to just be first, as long as I get it done,” Santiago-Tito said. I turned my head to the rustling of coats in the waiting area as people stood. Santiago-Tito bolted, securing a space in the rapidly forming line.

An officer watching over the NHFPL VITA site.

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who were waiting began to notice that the index cards had been given out of order, confusing who was to be seen first. Clevetta responded, “No, I’ve been lucky I suppose, or blessed that when I come it’s...” she paused. “This is the One responded, “they first time I’ve seen this many people.” I take their time, that’s chalked the chaos up to first week growing pains. Another woman sat down why it takes so long next to us, joining the conversation. In and that’s why people hushed voices, they exchanged stories of the ways companies like H&R Block and get frustrated and get Jackson Hewitt had taken their money, aggravated, but they tax season after tax season. gonna make sure they Four hours later, I returned from class to the library and was surprised to do it right.” see familiar faces, including Clevetta, rearranged into different configurations around the room. The Yale students, meanwhile, were transitioning to their third personnel shift of the day. I sat down next to a pair of women talking, playfully Santiago-Tito was number nine- analyzing the volunteers’ actions. I asked teen among twenty-two taxpayers who them about how long they had been were taken that day. VITA volunteers waiting. One responded, “they take their are not allowed to stay after the library time, that’s why it takes so long and that’s closes, so they preemptively limit the why people get frustrated and get aggranumber of clients they will see in a vated, but they gonna make sure they do day. When I asked Costa, the librar- it right.” Between those who were waitian, about the walk-in format of the ing, a friendly camaraderie formed. Small site, he explained that a format blended conversation and laughter emerged often, between appointments and walk-ins disrupting the long stretches of waiting functioned less efficiently, as appoint- that characterized the site.

I stood to leave again, wishing them ments were often missed, leaving volunteers with nothing to good luck. One man tried to get me to do. Costa told me that volun- stay and wait for my taxes to be complete. teers averaged twenty-eight “They’ll get them done for you,” he insisted. to thirty-three people every I smiled, explaining that I was a student, three-and-a-half-hour session. writing a story about the site. “I knew On the last day of the site’s you had that student look about you” he first week, I returned to the quipped. I chuckled, waving goodbye.

When I returned to the VITA site waiting area and sat down next to Clevetta, an older woman for a third time during its second week bundled in her winter coat, hat, of operation, the waiting chairs were and gloves. She told me that already filled. All twenty-one numbered she had attempted to come index cards had been passed out accordthe day before but had been ing to arrival time. The site would not be turned away. This time, one of accepting anyone new that day. As the the library security guards was clients stood, I watched them arrange tasked with handing out num- themselves into a neat line between the bered index cards to denote stanchions. I wondered if it was like this those who would make the cut all tax season: demand high, the atmosphere thick with waiting, and the site at for a session.

“It’s comparable to H&R full capacity. ∎ Block, in my book.” Clevetta remarked. “They’re always thorough, always helpful, always

Ai-Li Hollander is a introducing themselves, and first-year in Morse College. very knowledgeable.”

I asked her whether she had faced long wait times before. As we spoke, others Photography by Nithya Guthikonda

Endnote

The Old Acre A writer breaks ground on the myth-like delights of the Yale Farm.

By Lucy Hodgman

T

he first time i go to the Yale Farm, “This is an interesting hillside we’re I am reminded of Marie Antoinette sitting on,” Jeremy says. Before it was and Le Hameau de la Reine, the a farm, the land belonged to William ornamental village she built outside Whitman Farnam, a member of the Versailles. She would put on her best peas- Yale Corporation who lived at the top ant dress and wander between the dove- of the hill. When Farnam died in 1929, cote and the dairy, where it is said (alas, his widow promised their estate to Yale apocryphally) that she enjoyed milking on the condition that the university goats adorned with ribbons. This is not an wouldn’t build on the land, devoting exact analogy for the farm, but it’s pretty it instead to the study of plants. The close, I think, locking my bike to a lamp- hillside was largely ignored until 2000, post. Yale students, too, sometimes stray when a band of students called “Food from their castles to spend an afternoon from the Earth” began lobbying to turn picking vegetables they did not plant. it into a farm. Their cause was taken up The farm is about a mile from the by Alice Waters—a Yale parent and the center of Yale’s campus, past the man- grand dame of California’s farm-to-tasions on Hillhouse Avenue and the old ble scene—who talked then-university laboratories on Prospect Street. It occu- president Richard Levin into the idea. pies almost an acre of university grounds, Students broke ground on the farm in tightly planted with rows of vegetables the spring of 2003, nicknaming it the and herbs. The farm has no buildings, Old Acre. just a wooden pavilion that protects its “The myth was that the students red-brick pizza oven and picnic tables came under the cover of darkness from the elements. with chainsaws,” Jeremy tells me.

Property Manager Jeremy Oldfield “Everything needs a nice, dramatic crewaves from his riding mower as I cut ation myth.” Jeremy is 41, with sandy uphill toward the middle of the farm. hair and a big laugh. He spent years I wave back and wait for him under farming in Maine and California, but the pavilion. We’re several days into the Yale Farm is unlike any he’s worked a scorching September heatwave, but at before. Most of its crops are selected it’s not yet 10 a.m. and the farm is still not for their ability to feed a family cool and dewy. The last of the late sum- or turn a profit, but because they’re mer light pours out onto the apple trees, “narratively interesting,” he says. Last the rows of squash and corn, the ragged year, Jeremy and his student employbed of wildflowers that separates the ees planted a field illustrating several farm from the street. Up here, if the sky centuries of grain evolution; this year, is right, you can see all the way to the they’re growing indigo for an art class Long Island Sound. studying the history of dye production.

It’s the farm’s capacity for storytelling that interests student manager Calista Washburn ’24. I meet her on a golden evening after one of the farm’s weekly open workdays. We sit in the grass under an apple tree, watching fat white hens peck inside a coop a few yards away. When a group of sophomores comes over to ask if they’re allowed to pick the apples, she gently tells them that no, the farm is saving them for a Russian literature class reading a play with an extended fruit-picking metaphor, but they’re welcome to any that have already fallen.

“There’s hilarious impracticalities here,” Calista says, laughing as she tells me about how much time students on the farm spend hand-weeding the vegetables and about the week they used tiny scythes to harvest wheat. “It totally changed the way I understood history and technology and feeding people.”

Here, she explains, there are no boundaries between the dirt of the real world and the ideas taught down the hill. There are also no physical boundaries between the farm and the rest of Yale, no locked gates or requirements for entry.

This is why Calista has recently become so concerned about the deer, who have been grazing on the farm’s sweet potato plants in droves since the beginning of the summer. A commercial farm might shoot the deer or scare them off with deafening sound alarms, but neither of these are feasible options on a college campus. The Yale Farm has discussed

Layout by Alicia Gan

TheNewJournal March 2024

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The Old Acre

keeping the deer out with an 8-foot fence, the kind of barrier that it has intentionally resisted for its twenty years of existence. Jeremy tells me a fence could go up as early as this spring, but there is still no definite plan in place.

The two other student farm managers I speak to both independently bring up the dilemma with the deer. “It’s this crisis moment,” one of them, Natalie Smink ’24, tells me emphatically. But when I talk to Jeremy about it, he doesn’t seem too concerned. The students will 46

March 2024 TheNewJournal

find a way to protect the sweet potatoes, and if that means building a fence around the farm, then they’ll find new ways of inviting people in. This is one of the farm’s true purposes, he tells me: to provide students who are used to studying ideas in the abstract with tangible problems to solve.

“You’ll go through a bed of carrots that is wild and wooly with three different types of weeds, and by the end of the workday it is legibly a carrot bed,” Jeremy says. “You find students kind of lingering

there, in front of this living physical testament of the work that they just did.”

And even after only a few hours on the farm, I believe him. Because perhaps this is what all of us, even Marie Antoinette, are doing: searching in the dirt for something that feels alive and real and good. ∎ Lucy Hodgman is a senior in Grace Hopper College.

Illustration by Angela huo

Puzzle by Adam Winograd

Skate Park ACROSS Men's underwear, for short 5 Lariat 10 Knocks 14 The right to possession of a property belonging to someone else, until their debt is discharged.

15 Even a little 16 Toward the side facing away from wind 17 Used to 19 UK art institution comprised of four galleries 20 *Element of this puzzle’s title where one might hit the “Rock to Fakie”* 21 Frightened 23 Ostinatos 24 Build 25 Elephant-headed Hindu deity 27 *Element of this puzzle’s theme where one might hit an “Ollie”* 28 Matured 29 Block: Fr. 31 Ushered 32 Bootlicker 34 Weighted avg. of 1

various caesium clocks 37 Hide 38 Seventeenth-century Dutch Huguenot from sourthern Africa 39 *Element of this puzzle’s theme where one might “Nose Grab”* 42 Without fault 45 Sap-feeding bug found on conifers 46 Haggard 47 Humble 48 *Element of this puzzle’s theme where one might “Grind”* 51 Fine, in Scotland 52 Enterprise 54 Incan sun-god 55 New recruit, maybe 56 Enthusiasm 57 Sugary finales?

58 Tableau 59 Specialized coding languages like HTML

DOWN 1

Used thrice, a replacement fo rother words that would communicate little

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS (FEBRUARY) PUZZLE

© The New Journal

March 2024

18 Sunscreen data 39 Change: Sp. Benefice 22 Christmastime hymn 40 Decorates 3 Went downhill 24 Halves 41 Having the 4 Extinguished characteristics of a foot 25 Unit of meas. for milk 5 Fairly delayed 43 Inflame 26 Humiliated 6 Above 44 Zilch 30 Suffix signifying relation 7 “Ditto” or composition 48 Conceal 8 Autoimmune disease 32 Tokens 49 Ancient Egypt’s divine in whcih the immune disc system attacks it own 33 “War without tissue, abbr. bloodshed,” per Mao 50 A way to see something Zedong 9 Pabst's “Chicago’s 53 Drug administered for Beer” 34 They might become paracetamol overdose ingrown, if cut too short and to loosen thick 10 Rapid succession of mucus, included on the knocking sounds.

35 Summertime WHO's list of essential 11 Elizabethan 36 Org. responsible for VITA medicines. call-to-arms 37 The Chronicles of 12 First Emperor of Russia Narnia author PLAY MORE TNJ 13 Preliminarily ranked 38 Revealed CROSSWORDS ON 2

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