Volume 49 - Issue 3

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

VOL 49 / ISS 3 / NOV 2016

THE NEW JOURNAL

After a murder, Waterbury begins to rebuild its abandoned Catholic theme park

editors-in-chief elena saavedra buckley isabelle taft managing editor spencer bokat-lindell senior editors sophie haigney sarah holder yi-ling liu aaron mak david rossler associate editors ruby bilger victorio cabrera eliza fawcett aaron orbey natalie yang copy editors griffin brown philippe chlenski harry gray rohan naik

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

with support from senior designer ivy sanders schneider assistant designers elaine wang allison primak illustrator bix archer photo editor elinor hills web designer mariah xu web developer philippe chlenski

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 49 issue 3 nov 2016

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover RESURRECTING HOLY LAND After a murder, Waterbury begins to rebuild its abandoned Catholic theme park Antonia Ayres-Brown

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feature THE WEEK AFTER New Haven communities react to Donald Trump’s election Staff

standards 5

points of departure WATCHING THE KING — Chalay Chalermkraivuth DOES THE FRAME FIT? — Bix Archer

9

critical angle THE NEED TO MEET — Tyler Foggatt The former managing editor of the Yale Daily News navigates the paper’s relationship with the Afro-American Cultural Center

12 profile

WHY BUY A COW — Jared Newman

In the Arethusa universe, Manolo Blahnik executives sell high-quality

yogurt and a pastoral lifestyle 16 snapshot

THE THING WE CARRY — Annie Rosenthal

ID cards have given us access to Yale since the ‘90s.

What do they signify?

20 essay

GRAVE DISPOSITION — Isaac Kirk-Davidoff

What I saw where my ancestors rest 37 endnote

DISPATCHES FROM THE TOAD’S BATHROOM — Charlie Bardey

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

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

WATCHING THE KING The death of Thailand’s monarch reaches New Haven Chalay Chalermkraivuth

illustration ivy sanders schneider

At Dwight Hall on October 18, the dress code is black.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand has died, and over one hundred people from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have congregated at a service organized

by Thai undergraduates at Yale. Among the mourners are the staff of New Haven’s Thai and Thai-owned restaurants: Thai Taste, Pad Thai, Anaya’s Sushi, York Street Noodle Place, and Jeera Thai. As people come forward to place candles and flowers on the altar, they touch their brows to the ground in prayer to a printed image of the late king: a symbol of a symbol. Some cry. Others want a nice photo. When a satisfactory picture is taken, a command follows: “Put it on Face.” “Face” is Thai slang for Facebook, and tonight the phrase is as ubiquitous as “Rest in peace.”

“He’s at peace now,” said Mo, the co-owner of Thai Taste, of the king. Her sadness, she told me, was selfish. Several days after the service, she still wore black to observe the yearlong mourning period. In Thailand, there has been public concern about a shortage of black clothing; state banks have pledged to distribute black clothing to eight million low-income people.

When I went to Thai Taste to interview her, Mo stationed us in the dark, slim corridor leading into the restaurant’s dining room, away from the staff, sprawled and sleeping on couches during the long afternoon. A NOVEMBER 2016

picture of Queen Sirikit, now solitary, hung in the corridor. The picture of the king that used to hang beside hers had been relocated to a small shrine by the door.

We spoke under the watch of the portraits in the lamplight. “The king was completely selfless,” Mo said. “He was really a deity.” She added in English, “An angel.” Then, in Thai, “I’m grateful to have been born during his reign.” Mo grew up during the king’s most active years, the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when the Royal Projects—his policy initiatives, related primarily to agriculture and flood diversion—and media coverage thereof were at their peak. “I grew up seeing the king’s deeds on TV. I’ve always been used to it.”

Over the course of his seventy-year reign, the king, who died October 13 of lung and kidney complications, built up a formidable cult of personality. In the Thai public media network, he is commonly referred to as the “father of the land.” Portraits of him, like the one enshrined at Thai Taste, are omnipresent. In Bangkok alone, hundreds of thousands of people celebrated his birthday annually at Sanam Luang, a public square in front of the Grand Palace—Mo herself attended the celebration two years ago.

Growing up in Bangkok, where I lived before coming to Yale, I participated in this widespread adoration.

The king wasn’t a tyrannical leader; nevertheless, his 5

cult of personality rests on questionable grounds. The idea of his unequivocal goodness has been sustained through the suppression of uglier details, like his complicity in the massacre of university students in 1976.

Articles written in English—by BBC News, The New York Times, and The Economist, for instance—cite lèsemajesté laws, which criminalize insults to the monarchy, as the reason for the absence of visible opposition.

However, this explanation is incomplete. A great number of Thai people feel genuine love for the king, and so revere the monarchy that to speak against it would be unthinkable—even in New Haven, far from punitive forces in Thailand. The five people I spoke to— staff at Thai and Thai-owned restaurants—all said that they loved the king and cried at the news of his death.

Down the street from Thai Taste, pictures of the monarchy are also on display at Pad Thai. Nat, a waitress there, made Thai tea for her friend Ped, Pad Thai’s chef Mai, and me as we talked about life in America.

“I live simply,” said Mai. “Just like our king said: sufficiency.” She was referring to the doctrine proposed by the king that advocates a life of moderation. The dentistry museum of Chulalongkorn University, Thailand’s oldest university, established by King Chulalongkorn, houses a tube of toothpaste, purportedly used by King Bhumibol, that has been squeezed completely flat— evidence of his modesty in spite of his wealth and power. He was considered a moral leader, unlike his son Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, who is thrice married and divorced, and is widely perceived as adulterous and hedonistic.

Mo has spent seven years in America; Mai, thirteen or fourteen. Trips home are expensive and rare. Even so, their statements of veneration sounded like those of Thais who had never left Thai soil.

This bond with Thailand isn’t sustained through a Thai community. “We’re here to work. It’s every man for themselves,” Mo told me. She plans to return to Thailand after retirement—New Haven merely provides a quiet space in which to make a living.

Instead, the bond is conserved technologically.

Everyone I spoke to streams the same three Thai news channels. The Royal Thai Army manages one, and the state-owned public broadcaster manages the other two.

All are conservative. Most of New Haven’s Thai residents don’t watch English-language news channels.

They’re not interested, or don’t find Thailand, as they think of it, correctly represented.

Facebook and Line, a messaging app, are also central to keeping in touch with home. Both serve the double function of communication platform and news source.

Paq, a waiter at Anaya Sushi, couldn’t tell me which online journals specifically served as his news sources: 6

“I just saw it on Face.” This immersion in social media is accompanied by a comparatively sparse social life in New Haven. When I asked Paq what he does in his free time, he said, “I go home and sleep.” In the absence of a community in New Haven, Facebook provides a virtual replica of the social circles Thais inhabited back home.

Because Facebook is a global public network, it also extends the threat of repression all the way to New Haven. This past May, eight people were charged with sedition for mocking the military junta on Facebook, and the threat of repression now hangs, however lightly, over the site. “It’s not right to share such things,” said Mo, of a New York Times article about the king’s death in which the crown prince was spoken of unfavorably.

She shook her head. “It’s too blunt.” It’s difficult to tell whether Mo’s criticism stems from the potential legal consequences or from a cultural norm of deference to the monarchy—the two reinforce each other even on this relatively new platform. Facebook makes Thailand immediate in every sense but the physical.

This immediacy is palpable on the night of the memorial service. After a group picture is taken, a man rouses everyone to sing the King’s Anthem. Some people, such as the initiator, are filled with patriotic furor: they sing vigorously, stridently. Some continue to weep. Paq appreciates the solidarity the service provides. But Mo feels a little lost and disconnected. She pictures Sanam Luang on the king’s birthday two years ago, packed with people who looked upon each other with automatic love. In America, she says, the looks are blank, or guarded. In Thailand, the candles are real— not electric, like the ones at the Dwight Hall service or at Thai Taste’s shrine. The unity created by the king, she says, is real.

Was real. It was fragile enough while he was alive, she says. Thailand has undergone two military coups in the past decade; the 2014 coup was preceded by six months of protests. The crown prince is unpopular.

What will come of it now?

“I can’t die here,” Mo said of America. “It’s too expensive.” She wants to return, and to be buried in Thai soil. Internally, she’s barely left. The Thai residents of New Haven are satellites—projected from Thailand, orbiting solitarily, carrying their particular notions of home, waiting to return.

— Chalay Chalermkraivuth is a freshman in Saybrook College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

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

DOES THE FRAME FIT? With plans to highlight its African art collection, the YUAG grapples with its limitations Bix Archer

NOVEMBER 2016

illustration ivy sanders schneider

When future visitors to the Yale University Art Gallery enter the lobby, they will turn to the left after checking their coats and see the new occupant of the museum’s coveted first-floor space: the African art collection.

The Gallery is moving the collection from its current location upstairs to the first floor, one of the most prominent gallery spaces in the building. In the old exhibit, statues stood on island-like platforms around the room, masks hung from the walls, and artifacts rested in glass cases. Works made centuries apart sat close together: pieces like a twentieth-century Ode-Lay mask from Sierra Leone appeared near small terracotta heads made by the Nok people of Nigeria in 900 BCE. They were united only continentally, with no indication of the massive shifts in time, space, and cultural conditions that occurred between the points of their creation.

The pieces themselves were clustered haphazardly, and other elements of the display exacerbated the experience. According to Curator of Education Ryan Hill, the old African gallery was designed to make visitors feel as if they were “in Africa,” recreating an ambiance intended to convey the atmosphere in which the works originally existed: the walls were painted purple and covered with maps and big photographs of people and landscapes. Yet very little was done to contextualize the collection.

Barbara Plankensteiner, the Frances and Benjamin Benenson Foundation Curator of African Art at the YUAG, took umbrage with the hodgepodge nature of the African collection and its contrived presentation.

The new space—her first project at the Gallery since being hired last year—will be much like those of the modern galleries, with no extra maps or photographic adornment. The transformation requires YUAG curators to wrestle with questions inherent to museum work and unique to the challenge of presenting African art in a Western museum. Take, for example, a squat wooden figure in the collection from the Songye culture in the Congo. The sculpture measures about four feet tall, its face peppered with metal studs, its head adorned with dark brown feathers. It’s called a “community power figure,” and it is an example of a nkishi,

an object inhabited by a spirit, considered by art historians to be a form of “process art.” Process art is only complete in a set of specific circumstances. The community power figure, while considered powerful even when unused, is only able to reach its full potential when used for a ceremony. It can never be complete in a gallery space; it is impossible for the YUAG, or any traditional museum, to fully do the work justice.

By contrast, most artwork displayed in the YUAG, and art museums generally, can be considered “statement art”—intended for viewing as-is, completed once the artist has put their final touches on the work.

How do you honor something in a museum, outside its native time and space, without exoticizing it?

Is it possible? Unlike the African gallery, the Asian and European galleries were not laid out to make anyone feel as if they were “in Asia” or “in Europe.”

This approach, Plankensteiner said, made the African collection “other.” “These are works of art,” Planken 7

steiner said. “Once they enter the museum space, they enter a different world, and we do not need to recreate an ambiance.”

Now, Plankensteiner will display the art of the African collection in a loosely chronological order, grouping pieces to highlight specific themes: original function, spirituality, and materiality, the latter including empowered objects (like nkishi) which hold direct ties to religion. Plankensteiner wants to go digital, too, using videos of dances and ceremonies to simulate how works were utilized and seen in their original environments. She also wants to curate comprehensive exhib-

HOW DO YOU HONOR SOMETHING IN A MUSEUM, OUTSIDE ITS NATIVE TIME AND SPACE, WITHOUT EXOTICIZING IT? IS IT POSSIBLE? its dedicated to African contemporary art, which would be a first for the YUAG. Plankensteiner hopes that the ritual figures and masks from Central and West Africa— what Picasso would have termed “primitive” and what were all the rage for collectors in the early- to mid-twentieth century—will not be the sole image people think of when they picture an entire continent’s art history. But there are still limitations within the collection itself that cannot be fixed with a new arrangement.

The YUAG’s African Art collection comes almost entirely from three sources: the 1954 donation of the Linton collection, a gift of Mr. and Mrs. James M. Osborn, the 2004 gift of nearly six hundred objects from the personal collection of Charles B. Benenson, and the gift of roughly two hundred pieces from SusAnna and Joel B. Grae in 2010. The collection, then, is not encyclopedic but rather an index of its donors’ personal tastes. That is not unusual for the YUAG; most collections in the Gallery come from a handful of donors.

When it comes to the collection of non-Western art, the tastes of the donors conform to what is popular in Western eyes. In the African Art collection, this means a very limited scope of masks and ritual figures from West and Central Africa. Other departments also have funds made up of alumni donations for purchasing new 8

works and expanding their collections; the African Art department does not.

These limitations are present in most Western museum collections of African art, said Daniel Magaziner, an associate professor of twentieth-century African history at Yale. There is a long period of time in African art history that we know very little about, for Western collectors were not interested in the work, and so very little research has been done on the subject. As a result, contemporary African art in the gallery seems to come out of nowhere, although generations of artists and evolving art forms occurred in between. Plankensteiner hopes that more will be added to the collection in this respect, but for now, she said, this is what the YUAG has. And so long as the YUAG’s donors are not interested in African work beyond what’s already here, it will not be represented in the collection.

The possibility of increasing the museum’s holdings of contemporary African art brings up a question about the YUAG’s division of its holdings: When should artwork be included in the Modern and Contemporary section instead of a geographic collection? What, in this case, makes a recent work distinctly “African” enough to be included in the African collection? Is it based on the nationality of the artist, or the subject of their work?

Magaziner pointed out that last fall, when the YUAG presented a large exhibit of the work of William Kentridge, a prominent white South African artist whose work deals explicitly with social and racial politics of South Africa, the exhibit was not billed as “African” or linked to the African collection. Kentridge’s artwork is clearly African, so why was it excluded from the African collection? Since Plankensteiner plans to display contemporary work in the new gallery space and hopes to expand and diversify the collection, these are questions that need to be asked—and answered consistently—as the collection moves forward.

— Bix Archer is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

CRITICAL ANGLE

THE NEED TO MEET The former managing editor of the Yale Daily News navigates the paper’s relationship with the Afro-American Cultural Center Tyler Foggatt

illustration bix archer

NOVEMBER 2016

The Yale Daily News building and the Afro-American Cultural Center share a walkway. The walk between the two takes fifty-six seconds. At second thirteen, you can no longer hear the grumbles of exhausted reporters, or the sounds of street traffic. At twenty-seven seconds in, asphalt becomes sidewalk beneath your feet. You step underneath a stone archway at second thirty, and a slight pivot to the right must be executed at second thirty-four, the point at which the addresses change from York Street to Park.

A few more steps, then look: The cultural center, also known as the House, is on your left.

Last year I lived on Edgewood Avenue, across the street from the Af-Am side of the walkway. Every night, during my stint as Managing Editor of the News, I made the walk between the two fortresses. It was an uncomfortable walk. I’m a half-black woman, but I had never actually been inside of the House. It had started almost as an accident: I was busy, I had plenty of black 9

friends who I met in other ways, and I had never really connected with the peer liaison I was assigned when I matriculated. But my association with the News eventually made me feel unwelcome at the House. Somehow, I had almost become less black.

My first visit to the House was in November of 2015, less than two months after I had become a News editor.

Risë Nelson, the House’s director, had sent the paper’s senior editors an email with the subject line “Need to Meet.” She alleged that the News’ reporting was potentially dangerous to communities of color, explaining that our coverage of the recent protests over racial discrimination on campus had been poorly sourced and disengaged, and “many underrepresented students, faculty and administrators are unwilling to speak with the YDN.” And when we quoted her in the paper, we consistently neglected to include an umlaut over the “e” in her first name.

The News and the Af-Am House have been neighbors since 1970, when the House moved to its current location at 211 Park. The relationship between the News and the black community has historically been turbulent, but the headquarters of both groups are connected by the red brick that lies between them. There are no gaps, no pauses in the hundred-foot wall extending from 202 York to 211 Park. If a bomb detonates in one building, violent tremors rock the other. This is how it has always been.

— Two years ago, the bomb was Rodney Cohen, Assistant Dean of Yale College and the center’s former director. During his time as director, students insisted that Cohen had failed the House: he was consistently absent, and he mismanaged resources. They had lodged complaints against Cohen in 2010, when they requested that he complete more training or risk removal from his post. Four years later, 147 students signed a sixty-ninepage petition of grievances against Cohen.

In February 2015, the Yale Daily News wrote a “News’ View” calling for Cohen’s removal, but it was too late. His poor leadership had gone uncovered by campus publications for years, contributing to the most common criticism the News receives from communities of color: we pester them, ask them questions, and give them attention when something terrible has happened that we simply consider “news.” But most of the time we don’t pay attention. We don’t cover the less obvious things: the events, conferences, and rallies— stories that still deserve to be told.

I spent 2014 reporting on admissions and financial aid for the News, and I was fairly removed from the Dean Cohen situation. It wasn’t on my “beat,” and I had also never stepped foot inside the House. All of 10

my free time was spent doing things for the News or thinking about doing things for the News. I watched my fellow reporters struggle to cover the situation with Dean Cohen, and I overheard students taking issue with their coverage. But at that point, it was still their coverage: articles written and edited by other people. I did not consider myself complicit. I covered the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

Last November, when I was on the editorial board, students of color confronted former Silliman Head of College Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard and stood on cross campus telling stories of discrimination and abuse to Dean Jonathan Holloway. Criticisms of News coverage arose again, and this time I felt responsible for every single thing that was printed in the paper. Students condemned us for not including their side of the story while simultaneously declining our requests for comment. Communities of color said we were too gentle toward SAE (the frat now known as Leo) and Nicholas and Erika Christakis. In a Washington Post op-ed last month, Erika Christakis claimed the News misrepresented what happened last year in a way that indicated our bias and pushed she and her husband out of their administrative positions. When both sides claim you’re biased against them, whom could you possibly be biased toward?

The insensitivity went both ways. One afternoon that November, a News editor saw someone spit on our building as they walked by. Reporters reached out to student activists who said they had been told by group leaders to never speak to the News. Comments posted on Overheard at Yale referred to the News as “trash” and “racist.” At a race teach-in at Woolsey Hall, attended by over a thousand students, speakers leading the teach-in asked News reporters in the audience to stand up and identify themselves. “This meeting is OFF THE RECORD,” the event leader announced, as two News reporters stood up in a sea of one thousand.

The audience cheered.

— Before our meeting with Dean Nelson, my two white, female co-editors and I gathered at the Yale Daily News building. We were going to walk to the House together, and this time I would actually go inside.

In an ideal world, I would have been an active member of both spaces. I would have been best friends with Dean Nelson, or, better yet, like a daughter to her.

I would have seen the House as a source of comfort rather than as a source of unease. I would have written every headline with the utmost sensitivity. I would have known the right things to say and when to say them.

And I would have felt black, truly and completely black, even though my father is white. I would have THE NEW JOUR NAL

been a person of color first, and a journalist second, or figured out how to be a journalist of color, because apparently people can do that. I would have felt like an asset rather than a liability to both. Instead, I was just someone who crossed the walkway with her head down.

During that fifty-six second walk, I wondered whether Dean Nelson would be surprised to find out that I was half black. I wondered if she’d think I was racist anyway. I wondered if that would mean I was.

— I sat down with other Yale Daily News staffers and editors of color, some of whom are more active at the Af-Am House than I am. They shared a similar sentiment. As Coryna Ogunseitan said, when it comes to bridging the gap between the News and the Af-Am House, “there’s no one on campus who’s comfortable in both spaces.” Ogunseitan, a senior who is half Nigerian, used to edit WEEKEND, the News’ arts and culture section. Ogunseitan said that she constantly emphasized the distinction between WEEKEND and the rest of the News during her time at the paper, because she found certain coverage printed in the rest of the YDN, especially that of SAE, to be “indefensible” in how it allowed SAE to justify itself. She also told me that she tended to downplay her connection with the News while at the House.

Both places seem to have “prerequisites” for entry, said Tasnim Elboute, who is North African and a senior photographer for the News. You must have dark enough skin to make it at the House; you need to write hard-hitting articles, often on just a few topics, to be embraced at the News. She said she’s heard people discuss the notion that an association with the News can almost seem to “delegitimize your blackness” at the House.

And while several people said their connection to the News made it difficult for them to spend time at the Af-Am House, sophomore Ellie Pritchett claimed the opposite. At the News, Pritchett always felt like people viewed her as “the activist one” who was slightly out of place. Pritchett has stopped designing pages for the News. Instead she’s serving as Editor-in-Chief of DOWN Magazine, a publication written by and for students of color at Yale.

As it turned out, Dean Nelson didn’t think I was racist. She just thought that we could do better. After the meeting, we made a concerted effort to cover more things happening at the cultural centers, stories that were unrelated to the protests. We pledged to remember her umlaut. But students of color still often decline to speak with the News.

— When thinking about the two spaces now, I start with the windows. Both buildings have the same ornate glass NOVEMBER 2016

portals to the outside. If a window from one building were to shatter, you could replace it with a window from the other. No one would notice.

Both buildings have the same winding staircase. The Af-Am House has its Founders’ Room, with paintings of famous black alumni: Sylvia Arden Boone, John Blassingame, Armstead Robinson. And the Yale Daily News has its Reporters’ Room, covered in past A1s: “Alums lock tomb after Bones taps women,” “Yale overhauls financial aid,” “BODY FOUND.” I’ve spent most of my life trying not to think about color, maybe because it’s just too hard. Elboute described the News’ proximity to the Af-Am House as “a machine of whiteness operating next to a space dedicated to blackness.” But I try to dwell on how red both buildings are, constructed from the same brick.

If it’s a Monday, you can hear drums when walking past the House. And you can see students inside the building, thumbing through textbooks, inserting pods into a Keurig machine, throwing their heads back in laughter. The windows are open, the lights are on, and there are portraits of people you don’t recognize hanging on the walls. Everyone inside is black, and so are you. Second fifty-six. You keep walking.

— Tyler Foggatt is a senior in Berkeley College.

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PROFILE

WHY BUY A COW In the Arethusa universe, Manolo Blahnik executives sell high-quality yogurt and a pastoral lifestyle Jared Newman I’m eyeing a ten-dollar bottle of eggnog, thinking will I, but half-heartedly at best, because I will, and I do, and that’s the story of how I end up spending thirty real American dollars on eggnog. The eggnog, advertised as “old-world” and “small-batch,” comes in oblong, glass bottles. They’re recyclable. The eggnog’s only available in November and December, if it’s not already sold out.

The purveyor, Arethusa Farm Dairy, believes that you don’t just let eggnog sit on shelves, in cartons. To relegate

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Arethusa Dairy products to the back of some supermarket refrigerator is to desecrate not only the food but also the philosophy undergirding it, the gastronomic values that might justify your shelling out thirty bucks at the year-old Chapel Street Arethusa Farm Dairy retail outlet. Dairy can be an art in the way Dutch Golden Age portraiture is, in the way haute couture is, and if there are any two men who aspire to the art of dairy, they are George Malkemus and Anthony Yurgaitis.

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all photographs by the author

George Malkemus and Tony Yurgaitis are not, strictly speaking, dairy farmers. When Tony and George aren’t moonlighting as the owners of Arethusa Farm Dairy of Litchfield, Connecticut, they are executives at Manolo Blahnik International Limited, the manufacturers of the eponymous shoe made famous by Sarah Jessica Parker during her run on Sex and the City. This is all to say that Tony and George don’t come from a lineage bovine; in addition to their careers as fashion executives, the men are lifelong partners. In 1999, having discovered that the plot of land across from their country home in Litchfield was being converted into tract housing, they bought all 350 acres of that abandoned farmland. All that trouble, just to protect their view.

The couple did a bit of research. They surfaced old deeds and went to the town registrar. Lo and behold, theirs was not just any property, but rather the site of a historic farm: Arethusa, named for a rare species of orchid that once bloomed there. On went the light bulb, and a second career emerged. Arethusa rose again. “We saved this farm,” Tony Yurgaitis tells me over the phone, his voice avuncular but pointed, as if debating with a small child. “This farm that has such an important history in our community.”

They erected a barn, wide and white, and as big as an airport hangar. The floors are kept spotless. Over fifteen years, five cows became three hundred: Jerseys, Holsteins, and Brown Swiss. Their tails are washed, conditioned with Pantene Pro-V, and blow-dried daily, as the staff will tell you on a Saturday public tour. A decal reading, “Every cow in this barn is a lady, please treat her as such” hangs above the stalls. Yes, what you’re looking at has that farm sensibility about it, but at the same time, it’s the sort of place that makes you want to come back in the next life as a cow.

About ten years after opening the farm, Tony and George bought the old firehouse on Route 202 in nearby Bantam. It became their first retail and production outlet. Soon, they bought the general store adjacent to the firehouse and opened Arethusa al tavolo, a farm-to-table restaurant now ranked among the top 100 restaurants in the nation by OpenTable. In 2013, the couple made a third purchase in Bantam, just across the street, when Shannon McMorrow, the proprietor of the Bantam Coffee Shop, decided to become a phlebotomist and sold Tony and George her space for $325,000.

This spring, her styrofoam cup joint was reopened as Arethusa a mano, a café serving Italian-style espresso and light lunch fare.

That’s the triptych of Arethusa Farm Dairy in Litchfield County: the farm, the restaurant, the cafe. “The community really supports us,” Yurgaitis said. “It’s always great to see the lines out the door. We’ve become NOVEMBER 2016

a destination not just for locals but people throughout the Northeast who’ve discovered our products.”

And, to a point, members of the community agree.

“They have a good reputation in the area, an excellent reputation actually. They’re always busy,” said Cameron Bove, an organic farmer and librarian, who supplies Arethusa al tavolo with tomatoes, specialty cooking greens, salads, edible flowers, celery root, and beans. “They support a lot in the community. For example, I know they support the [Oliver Wolcott] Library, they certainly support a lot of school fundraisers. The Girl Scouts. You see their name in a lot of places.”

Which brings us to New Haven. According to Yurgaitis, Arethusa had been considering expanding beyond Litchfield, and when Yale University Properties approached them and offered a prime spot on Chapel Street, they couldn’t turn it down.

John and Karen Pollard, who live in Middlebury, Connecticut, have been doing New Haven retail leasing on Yale’s behalf for about twenty years. They knew the Arethusa story. John explains, “Karen saw what they were doing and felt like it would be an excellent addition to New Haven’s offerings of great, Connecticut, quality products.” Connecticut-based quality is a big deal to the Pollards.

It was the Chapel Street aura that appealed to Tony and George: the brick sidewalk, the dignified proximity to Yale, the hauteur. “As soon as I saw it, I thought ‘This is what we’re about,’” Yurgaitis explained. To boot, the space was jeweler Peter Indorf’s former home.

The clincher? The Chapel Street outlet is less than an hour away from Litchfield, which allows Arethusa to uphold its commitment to local, artisanal production, with goods delivered from the Bantam outlet two to three times a week. “It’s just not far. Plus New Haven is a much bigger city than Bantam, which is so seasonal, but in New Haven, where the population is so much bigger, the business is more regular.”

The Chapel Street location is almost identical to the original Bantam storefront, both with respect to design and comestibles. But even though New Haven is close enough to receive regular shipments of fresh dairy, it feels a world away from the bucolic pastures depicted on the Arethusa labels. The aesthetic brings customers into a world where cows graze peacefully, untroubled by human worries. The retail locations are très white.

White walls, white hydrangeas, white light. The walls are lined with black and white photos of Jersey cows. The ice cream flavors are listed in chalk. The floors are checkerboard linoleum. “Sterilized” comes to mind. As if dairy farms didn’t smell of, I don’t know, cows or manure or rot or any of the other pungencies you get when you bust out seven thousand gallons of lactation a week.

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“Going to New Haven we had to really educate our staff there, because people didn’t know about Arethusa or our story,” says Yurgaitis. “We have to be able to include New Haven, give them as much support as we give the Bantam staff.” For example, all new staff members get to tour the farm.

On such a tour, you see prize-winning cows, vats of 4 percent butterfat milk, round-the-clock farm staff.

Maybe, if you’re not an employee but rather one of Arethusa’s patrons, you drive to al tavolo, examine the ceramic dishware from Puglia, Italy. Maybe you order a Stumptown latte at a mano. Maybe you’re driving a Mercedes C-Class.

And the staff? Well, I suppose they just go back to New Haven, sell these pints of creamy country goodness. But this is merely conjecture. I couldn’t get an Arethusa employee to talk on the record.

— For the sake of owning up to my journalistic non-integrity, I’ll put it bluntly: I’m a big fan of the Arethusa products. Like Karen Pollard, my favorite flavor of Arethusa ice cream is Sweet Cream with Dark Chocolate Chunks. Their plain yogurt is not thick, but rather tangy and light in a way you wouldn’t expect.

Who knows. I can’t write about food. The point is: The cheeses are great, the chocolate milk is great, and the ice cream, well.

EVEN THOUGH NEW HAVEN IS CLOSE ENOUGH TO RECEIVE REGULAR SHIPMENTS OF FRESH DAIRY, IT FEELS A WORLD AWAY. But in the words of Barbara Putnam, a longtime Litchfield resident and food activist, however, “It’s not just about ice cream.”

Here’s the trouble: there was a time, not so long ago, in fact a time I remember, when driving West on Route 202 there wasn’t a C-Class in sight. Ice cream in Litchfield County meant Popeye’s or Max’s or Nellie’s, three scoops of blue Cookie Monster in a sugar cone that smelled faintly of formaldehyde. Now Bantam is little more than an Arethusa strip mall. Start your morning with a hand-rolled salt bagel, lunch on lump crab and taro chip salad, maybe some seared 14

veal sweetbreads, and enjoy an ice cream on your way out of town.

Yes, there’s a wistful anger that comes with describing gentrification, but what I’m talking about isn’t gentrification in the obvious sense. Putnam acknowledged that Tony and George “are very engaged in the community and generous to local nonprofits who request their support. Every time I work at the soup kitchen, the fridge is full of milk that they have donated.” Lisa Hageman, a lifelong Litchfield County resident who runs this soup kitchen, says she no longer has to buy milk and can count on Arethusa donations “99% of the time.”

So let’s be clear. George and Tony—good guys. Sweet guys. In a way, Arethusa put Bantam on the culinary map. Putnam notes that the community itself looks upon Arethusa favorably. And, most critically, to suggest that Arethusa hasn’t brought bodies and capital to Litchfield County would deny the simple facts of the matter.

And yet, to understand the nuance of the problem of Arethusa Farm Dairy, a little Litchfield context is necessary. Tony and George are weekenders. Their white-paneled Neoclassical estate facing the farm was, before Arethusa, used for Easter and Labor Day and convenient weekends in between. During the workweek, they are Manhattan residents.

There’s a lot of that in Litchfield. Susan Saint James, Mia Farrow, and Anderson Cooper have all weekended there. Cameron Bove, the organic farmer, acknowledges the weight of this fact: “[Arethusa] caters to the New Yorkers, the second-home community, but they employ a lot of people here.”

In Bantam, not so much. Though a borough under the governance of the town of Litchfield, Bantam has an identity entirely its own. It isn’t blue collar in quite the same way that Reading, Pennsylvania is blue collar. But everything is relative, and though permanent Litchfield residents are not nearly as wealthy as the weekend population, Bantam is still a much poorer town. The median income for a household in Bantam is $32,167; in Litchfield, that amount is $58,418—just a few thousand above the national median. To make it topical: Trump dominated in Bantam and won only by a small margin in Litchfield.

The drive between the Arethusa cows and the old firehouse where their milk products are sold takes only fifteen minutes. But, as Barbara Putnam notes, that distance is more symbolic than one might assume: “There are rich weekenders who can afford to eat in [Arethusa al tavolo] and buy their ice cream, and there are longtime locals who can’t.” Putnam links this tension to the discussion of wealth inequality that has dominated so much political discourse in recent months.

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Trish Lapidus, a senior citizen who’s lived in Bantam for just four and a half years, nevertheless feels that something has changed. “It does seem to have changed,” she tells me. “Five years ago, Bantam was a little more down home. Things weren’t as expensive.

Now I think Bantam—don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful, it’s wonderful—part of it is sort of rich-focused.

There are two restaurants that no ordinary person can afford. Mind you, I admire those people, but it’s just out of my price range.”

To be fair, there’s been no overt clash between Bantam and Arethusa or New Haven and Arethusa. No protests of gentrification, no boycotts by the ranks of the food-conscious. For now, everything remains beneath the surface, simmering, pasteurizing, if you’ll excuse the pun.

“I mean those cows cost $400,000,” Lapidus continues. “I live on $1100 a month. It’s a different world. I look around and I think, that’s a different world.”

— Last weekend, I went to Arethusa on Chapel and paid $4.50 for a huge cone of Sweet Cream. As luck

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would have it, Tony and George were there, and I went over and said hello. George was rearranging pints of ice cream. Tony was telling me how he wants to get the word out about the new grilled cheese sandwiches.

Tony was wrapped in a winter coat, George had a smile as wide as a banana. I ask one of the employees if the couple often visit the store. “Once in a blue moon.”

It’s difficult to watch George rearranging those pints, clad in a Merino wool sweater or whatever and the customers sampling new permutations of blue cheese or debating the merits between the 1% or 2% milk and to be reminded of Litchfield. Or New Haven, for that matter. The store is reminiscent of something, yes—but I’m not quite sure what. It is a Connecticut divorced from the one I grew up in. Yet still the bottles read, “Milk like it used to taste.”

— Jared Newman is a freshman in Jonathan Edwards College.

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SNAPSHOT

THE THING WE C

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ID cards have given us access to Yale since the ‘90s. What do they signify?

Annie Rosenthal

When Miko McGinty was a senior at Yale in 1993, she could get in anywhere. Most students on campus lugged around three keys at all times (one for their college’s courtyard, one for their entryway, and one for their suite), and still had to wait outside the gates of other residential colleges until a sympathetic student let them in. McGinty made no such sacrifices: as the owner of a master key passed down from an upperclassman friend, she was one of only about ten students she knew who could get through every college gate on campus.

Yale’s administration wasn’t particularly excited about the idea of students having unrestricted access to buildings, so some time during McGinty’s junior year, she says, the University changed locks on campus to render the master keys ineffective. Within a few hours, though, a student had figured out how to alter the old key to fit the new lock. The secret to retaining access quickly spread by word-of-mouth. Soon, McGinty says, she heard from a friend: “Oh yeah, you take your gate key and line it up with your master key—the fourth knob on the master key is gonna be wrong, and if you file it down it’ll work.”

Although it still exists somewhere (she passed it down to a Jonathan Edwards freshman when she grad 16

uated), McGinty’s master key is now useless. In 1994, Yale began transitioning to the current swipe card system for building entry. The mid-nineteen-nineties were a tense time for Yale–New Haven relations, particularly following the high-profile murder of Christian Prince, a student who was shot and killed on Hillhouse Avenue one February night in 1991. Across campus, security amped up. ID cards, scanned by electronic readers stationed at building entrances, were implemented as a safer, streamlined, and thoroughly modern alternative to keys. Each one only cost $7 to manufacture, and electronic card readers cost a few thousand dollars apiece, according to a 1998 Yale Herald article in praise of the new “3.3”x2.1”x0.02”” powerhouse.” IDs were less to carry, easy to deactivate if lost, fumble-free for the student coming off the street late at night. And most importantly, perhaps, they were almost impossible to alter.

As more buildings installed readers over the years, the potential access capabilities of the card expanded.

In 2016, a Yale ID has the technological power to get you into most buildings on campus, pay for your food and books, and help buy you a drink (if you’re of age).

More than any navy sweatshirt, an ID is the physical THE NEW JOUR NAL

manifestation of belonging at Yale. And it now serves a tripartite purpose: It marks its holder as a member of this community, gives her the ability to physically participate in it, and, theoretically, keeps her safe from outside threats. But more than twenty years into the practice, we take our cards for granted. We forget that they symbolize more than the ability to open a gate, and we forget what we agree to by carrying a dinky piece of plastic in our back pockets.

— Officially, the communities you’re a part of at Yale determine your access to the buildings on campus.

The ID Card Center, a four-person office that operates under the College’s Security Systems, organizes university personnel into groups who either receive or are denied access to a particular door and links that information to each individual’s card. When you hold your ID near the reader of any given building on campus, the chip inside the card sends out a number that identifies you. The reader runs that number through a program that checks which groups you fall under, then sends a decision via LED light, red or green.

Some buildings, like libraries or academic buildings, are open to anyone with a Yale ID, which includes undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. With the exception of fellows in a particular college, professors can only get into the buildings that house their offices and classrooms, and college staff such as dining hall or facilities workers only have access to buildings in the colleges where they work.

The courtyards of residential colleges are accessible to all undergraduate students, but entryways are only open for students of that college. In an email, George Hines, Director of Security Systems for the University, explained that the ID center’s workers can also set time boundaries on access for a particular entrance or person. Such requests are handled on an individual basis.

Stuart Teal has served as Program Manager of Yale’s Information Technology Services since graduating from Yale in 2014. Under the ID system, he explained, people should only be able to get into places they need to be for University business—but there are loopholes.

Adam Sokol, a senior in Saybrook College, received access to all entryways on campus when he worked for the Office of Sustainability on Spring Salvage in 2015.

That was intentional: His job consisted of going into all residential colleges to pick up books and furniture that students left behind and compiling it to be reclaimed by new owners. But even after the Salvage, as spring turned into summer and most students left campus, Sokol found he still had access to entryways across campus. And the access stuck around more than a year.

It was only this fall that he found he can no longer get NOVEMBER 2016

into some entryways on campus (though he still has access to more than he technically should).

“It wasn’t like I had access to the room where Yale keeps its millions of dollars,” he said. “It was just the entryways. It’s just a little convenient.”

Technology glitches are to be expected. But such seemingly random extensions of access also make sense in a more abstract way: Being a student at Yale both literally and metaphorically opens doors. Inside the college gates, which particular ones you can open can feel both arbitrary and unimportant. Once you’re in, you’re in.

In this way, a Yale ID is no different from a key— either you have one or you don’t. But as a form of identification, the swipe card adds a new dimension. You have access because of who you are. And that’s a political assertion, especially at a university with a $25.5 billion endowment in a city where, as of 2015, more than one in every four residents lives below the poverty line.

More than any navy sweatshirt, an ID is the physical manifestation of belonging at Yale.

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Some campus spaces—open areas like Cross Campus, select libraries during certain hours, the Yale University Art Gallery—are available to the public, but, without an ID, New Haven residents are otherwise excluded from campus. Partly, this is simply a pragmatic consideration: Yale is a private institution embedded in a city. But Architecture professor Elihu Rubin, who specializes in the social life of urban space, argues that swipe cards can also symbolically reinforce of the barriers between New Haven and Yale.

“Both Yale students and Yale faculty are people with a lot of mobility and access in the world at large. And the distribution of key card privileges reinforces that system of access. But there are a lot of people in New Haven who have a lot less mobility and access, both physical and social,” he said.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho, a professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and American Studies, works

Inside the college gates, which particular ones you can open can feel both arbitrary and unimportant.

Once you’re in, you’re in.

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with the New Haven organization Junta for Progressive Action. She said she understands the need for security, and thinks access to physical campus space is less important than other areas in which Yale could improve its relationship to the city, such as its hiring practices and downtown development strategy.

But, she said, part of being a community means you can trust that people are looking out for you. The IDs are symbolic of that dynamic—they mark Yale students as the University’s top concern and all others as potential threats. In asserting its responsibility to protect Yale students, however, the University also gains the power to keep track of them.

— In September 2009, 24-year-old medical student Annie Le went missing days before she was supposed to be married. In the attempts to find her, Yale Police looked to the locational data provided by her ID. The last campus building she’d entered was 10 Amistad St., where she worked in a lab. They then checked security footage from that building, which showed her entering at 10 a.m. and never leaving. After a thorough search, police found Le’s body hidden inside a wall. Swipe card information was also crucial to identifying the murderer. Only certain IDs were able to access the lab, and looking at the database to figure out who had that permission eventually led police to their suspect. Lab technician Raymond Clark III pled guilty to strangling Le and was sentenced to forty-four years in prison.

Locational data doesn’t usually yield such useful or sinister information. In fact, most of the time, it’s not used at all. George Hines assured me over email that students are not being “tracked.” Swipe cards fall under the University’s acceptable use policy for technology, which states that University officials can access information about University personnel without their permission only when identifying or fixing system problems, when investigating a potential violation of the law, or to carry out essential University business functions. But the more specific information about who gets that access, what scenarios fit those criteria, and how those data could be used to benefit the University, is less publicized.

After emailing Hines multiple times without response last month, I went to the Yale Security Department’s office, tucked away in a corner next to the parking garage by Yale Health. The door was locked and I had to tap on the window to get the attention of one of the men sitting by a series of computer monitors projecting footage from around campus. After a moment, somebody let me in and led me down a long hallway to Hines’ office. He was friendly and apologized for not answering my emails, but he was clear—at security, THE NEW JOUR NAL

they don’t like to talk about security. When I asked to visit the access office and talk to the people who work there, he offered to get responses to my questions from the PR team instead. Those responses, when they came over email, were chipper but vague: “an individual’s card is programmed with appropriate access, based on their role at the university.”

Teal said it’s not ironic that the “access” people are so hard to access. Their job is to protect the University and the people associated with it, which requires protecting the information about how they do so. But such layers of obscurity make you wonder: If we can’t access the information being collected about us, then what do we actually have access to? “[We] know that privacy is a thing that a lot of people care about,” said Teal, “and unfortunately, at the moment, the balance between letting you know how things work and not letting you know how things work is leaning towards not letting you know how things work until we know it’s safe to let you know how things work.”

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Still, no matter how well they guard their methods, Yale security is not the final arbiter of campus access— and they know it. “We have strict controls in place for residential colleges but, like any access control system, or physical key, the system only works if people abide by it,” Hines wrote.

You can’t file down the tooth of a master key anymore. But once you’re granted access to a place like Yale, you can get in almost anywhere, whether entry is doled out by four workers in an enigmatic office or by a student holding open the gate on Elm Street. Being “in,” though, also means buying in—accepting membership in this community and all that comes with it.

When we absent-mindedly bump our pockets against the card readers and wait for the IDs to do their magic, it’s worth thinking about what, exactly, the ensuing green light means.

— Annie Rosenthal is a freshman in Berkeley College.

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E S S AY

GRAVE DISPOSITION What I saw where my ancestors rest Isaac Kirk-Davidoff

On the J4 bus to Waterbury, I pulled out my notebook and wrote two lines: “Isabel Gillis,” my distant English relative, and “my mom’s mom’s mom’s grave,” the reason I was on the bus. It was a blustery mid-September day, and I was headed to meet Isabel so that we could tour old family dwellings together. The bus slowly made its way from the New Haven Green, passing through a landscape of strip malls and overgrown medians.

In 1909, my great-great grandfather John Gillis immigrated to the United States from Ludgvan, a small town in Cornwall, England. He arrived in New York City on Christmas Eve and soon moved to Waterbury, seeking work in a brass mill. By 1948, the year he died, Waterbury had become the center of brass production in the United States, earning the nickname “The Brass City.” The city’s official motto is Quid Aere Perennius, Latin for “What is more lasting than brass?” The industry has long since collapsed, but in John Gillis’s day, it was thriving, unlike the Cornish mining industry he left behind.

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Until recently, I knew none of this. All of this information came from Isabel, my grandmother’s cousin, who traveled to Connecticut to see John’s grave as part of a longer genealogical trip through America. The trip was the culmination of several years of research into her family’s history, which included a large family reunion last summer to which I wasn’t invited.

Through my grandmother, Isabel found out I went to Yale and emailed me, asking if I wanted to come along to Waterbury. I told Isabel that, yes, I was interested in seeing the graves, and that I wanted to learn a bit more about my genealogy. But, in the back of my mind, I thought it seemed like a story better told than experienced first-hand. One twenty-email thread on renting cars later, I was off to meet her in Waterbury.

Isabel picked me up at the bus stop in her Zipcar.

She was in her sixties, older than she sounded on the phone, with short grey hair and ruddy cheeks. I had been worrying about what one wears to the graves of long-dead relatives, and I eventually settled on a black shirt with a picture of ruins on it. She was wearing a loud floral print dress, navy blue leggings, and a large floppy hat. She pulled over to the side of the street, took out her tablet, and opened up a PowerPoint titled “Isaac’s Waterbury Adventure.” During a fifteen minute tour through various Ancestry.com files, she showed me our family tree and several census records. Pointing at my great grandmother’s signature on her naturalization form, she exclaimed, “That’s her signature, she wrote that!”

As we started driving to the Pine Grove Cemetery, she told me the story of how she got interested in our family’s history. Her brother had visited Ellis Island a few years ago and called her, saying, “I found our grandfather. He’s from Ludgvan.” She compared her journey to “Who Do You Think You Are,” a British TV show in which celebrities are taken through their genealogy and invariably find that their ancestors led fascinating lives. But it seemed like this assumption only left THE NEW JOUR NAL

room for the stories she wanted to hear. As Isabel spoke, all I could think about was how Ben Affleck refused to air an episode of the PBS version of the show, “Finding Your Roots,” that revealed his ancestors had been slave owners.

I had my doubts about the whole endeavor because I had gone looking for a relative’s grave before. Near the tail-end of a road trip a few years ago, my grandfather, the product of a long line of Pennsylvania Quakers, had taken us to an old farm in Pennsylvania to search for the chestnut tree where my great-grandfather’s ashes were scattered. We ran into a distant relative with a foot-long beard who accused us of trying to flatter him into bequeathing the farm to us. After assuring him we weren’t, we stumbled around in a bramble patch for half an hour, looking for the tree. The jaunt came to a suitable anti-climax when it was revealed that the chestnut, which he remembered had miraculously survived a blight, had died some years ago.

Isabel’s enthusiasm about the trip, though, was infectious. By the time we arrived at the Pine Grove Cemetery, a small plot off a four-lane highway, I had gotten into the spirit of things. Isabel led us straight into the cemetery’s office — a quiet, green-carpeted room with wood vinyl walls and plaques from the Connecticut Crematory Association — and requested that the secretary show us our ancestors’ burial records. The woman slowly walked to a large, messy file closet and pulled out a giant book and a folder.

The Gillis’ graves were in the Old Pine Grove Cemetery, a separate section of the graveyard. My mom, whom Isabel had shown photos of the graves, had warned me that our family’s section was not particularly impressive. (Back at the offices, the secretary had mentioned that the graves were “starter level.”) The graves of John, my great-great grandfather, and Susan, my great-greatgrandmother, were about the size of a brick, weathered and partially obscured by grass. Isabel was thrilled, but I couldn’t see beneath the pieces of stone.

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photographs by the author

Isabel pointed to an adjacent grave. “Laura Gillis Williams-Hough,” she said, referring to my great-great aunt, who died in 1985. “Her maiden name was Gillis, her first husband was Williams, her second husband was called Hough. So she lived 1894-1985, but she’s buried with her first husband.” I made a joke about this being evidence that she preferred the first husband. “Park the cynicism,” Isabel said. Dropping her voice, she explained that the first husband, Joseph John Williams, had died in 1921 in an accident in the brass foundry. “She lost the love of her life. The love of her life after three years of marriage,” Isabel said, looking straight at me. All I could stammer out was: “That’s rough. That’s bad.”

Afterwards, we took pictures of the graves (and of each other by the graves) and went back to the car to drive to the various ancestral addresses Isabel had compiled. This was the real adventure, the living history part where she could derive her ancestors’ stories from the spaces they used to inhabit.

I had no idea what I would say to someone who opened the door to us. It was just as well that the first address, the home that my great-grandmother Lillian had rented, was an empty lot, black, cracked, and scattered with cigarello wrappers and an empty Big Gulp.

Isabel seemed a bit disappointed. I tried to make up for 21

it, telling her that paved-over history was still history, but she seemed unconvinced. She wanted the house, the fixed physical form.

Back in the car, we headed to East Farm Street, where Isabel had recorded two addresses. John Gillis had once rented a room at 116 East Farm, which was now a funeral home. In the 1920s, the whole family had rented 130 East Farm, which was still standing.

The street included several empty lots and boarded up houses. Isabel reassured me that “if you strip back the

I WONDERED WHY SPENDING AN AFTERNOON RETRACING MY DISTANT ANCESTORS’ STEPS HAD NOT BEEN ENOUGH TO MAKE ME FEEL CLOSE TO THEM. years,” these houses would have been very nice, especially compared to those in Cornwall, which remains one of the poorest parts of England. The house itself, split into three units and surrounded by a waist-high chain link fence, was covered in chipped green and white paint.

Two men in a green van parked out front were talking to another man standing in the doorway of the house. Isabel went up and introduced herself to them, explained what we were doing, and asked the men if they had any memories of the area. William, a balding man in his sixties inside the van, said that he had moved there from Virginia in the sixties, and had grown up with the other two men.

“This was a beautiful place in the sixties, it really was. A nice place to grow up,” he said. Isabel was pleased with this.

William suggested we take some dirt from the house as a souvenir. He pointed to a discarded water bottle on the ground that we could put it in. Despite all that has happened since the twenties, he said, “the dirt doesn’t change.”

I picked up the empty water bottle while Isabel took some pictures. I dug into the hard ground with my fingers, and gathered the powdery gray dirt into the bottle.

This, unlike the graves or the documents, finally felt like something real, a physical link to my past.

As we drove to our last stop, Naugatuck, where my grandmother grew up and where Isabel would drop me off at the train, she told me emphatically that the GilNOVEMBER 2016

lis family was “not destitute,” that compared to Cornwall, the houses would have been “spacious.” It seemed strange to me that she insisted on this repeatedly, especially since my grandmother had told me that the Gillises had lived hard lives in small apartments without any heating.

As we approached the final house, my great-grandparents’ first home in Naugatuck, Isabel seemed relieved. It was a fairly plain, three-story house with blue plastic siding. She proclaimed that this was much more like the type of neighborhood my ancestors grew up in. It was, of course, a big step up from Ludgvan. It fit the story she’d built through census forms and old photographs: that the Gillises, who persevered through the Great Depression, worked long but satisfying hours in the brass factory and were happy.

Isabel then dropped me off at the Naugatuck train station. We said our goodbyes and then she drove up to Hartford to meet some family friends for dinner.

Though we each promised to write each other, we still haven’t. As I took the Metro North train back to New Haven with my bottle of dirt, I wondered why spending an afternoon retracing my distant ancestors’ steps had not been enough to make me feel close to them. I wasn’t inspired by Laura’s love or saddened by Joseph’s short life. They were still just my mom’s mom’s mom’s family graves.

For Isabel, the project was more immediate. Until her brother had gone to look at the immigration records, she had had no idea where her grandfather came from.

That discovery prompted an international journey to learn the story of her family — her story of herself.

And I had agreed to meet her because I also wanted to craft a narrative: my “Waterbury Adventure,” in which I went to see my ancestors’ graves with a wacky, distant relative. Isabel’s insistence that our ancestors’ lives had been “nice,” of course, was just right for my story.

But her determination to peer into the past was undeniably powerful. I couldn’t see what she could, but I wanted to. Maybe that’s why, though my ecology-literate housemate assured me that the dirt underneath 130 East Farm Street does indeed change continuously, the bottle still rests on a table in my room.

— Isaac Kirk-Davidoff is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College.

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The Week After 1 3 4

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6

New Haven communities react to the election of Donald Trump

map data © Google 2016

This is how uncertainty in America felt in the wake of November 8, 2016.

On Election Day, New Haven was on the wrong side of a historic upset. Over thirty-four thousand Elm City voters cast ballots for Hillary Clinton; just under five thousand chose president-elect Donald J. Trump. After the race was over— settled in far-away places like southwest Virginia and Kenosha County, Wisconsin—the result dominated conversations all over the city, sparking endless debates about its significance and what to expect from a Trump presidency. The following vignettes are not meant to offer a comprehensive portrait of New Haven residents’ reactions. Rather, they offer glimpses into the ways people respond to national division, whether in a school, on the street, or in a church.

5

People sat in a circle on the hardwood floor, and organizers (a new group called the “Yale Student Group Leaders”) thanked everyone for coming. They opened the floor. A leader with Unidad Latina en Acción invited everyone to the protest Thursday evening. A representative of the Office of International Students & Scholars assured the crowd that Yale would do everything in its power to protect the twenty percent of its students who are not American citizens. A freshman read a poem. He said of America, “What we thought it was isn’t actually what it is.” A boy in the corner carried a sign that said “White Supremacy: I’m Coming for That Ass.”

“Not great.”

“How have you been holding up?”

Conversations began with hugs, and they mostly went the same way.

The Facebook event was called “What Now? What Next?” But by the time some two hundred Yale students trickled into Dwight Hall’s common room on Wednesday night—about twenty-four hours after it became clear that the vast majority of campus had cast their vote for the losing candidate—the mood was less forward-looking than funereal. If you believed the punditry, we were “the establishment” Trump’s voters had punished. What now? What next?

1. “What Now? What Next?”

Dwight Chapel, Yale University Wednesday night

Tyron Huston sits in the center row of the desks and remembers the previous day.

“Justin was really depressed,” he says, smirking. Scully nods. Martinez jumps in to say that she is terrified, and others assent. The students—none of whom are old enough to vote—used to joke about Trump’s campaign, but the humor is different now. It’s more exhausted; a placeholder for resignation.

The students in Justin Scully’s third-period civics class at High School in the Community, a New Haven public school on Union Street, laugh more on November 10 than they did on November 9. The day after Donald Trump’s election, both Carolyn Martinez and Vartaysha Reed cried during class. Today, though, the juniors have a test on the foundations of the US government—the Virginia Plan, the Articles of Confederation, a bonus question of who’s on the ten dollar bill—and the tears are gone. Morning light floods through the windows onto the linoleum floor. Before Scully passes out the test, I ask the class a few questions about how they’re feeling.

2. Civics class High School in the Community Thursday morning

University of Connecticut student and ULA member Jesus Morales-Sanchez spoke first. “Trump has given his implicit permission to hate,” he said. “Now we know for sure the fight must continue.”

Three hundred protesters surged out of the plaza in front of the Connecticut Financial Center and onto Church Street on the Thursday evening after the election. Unidad Latina en Acción, a New Haven-based immigrant rights advocacy group, had planned the demonstration at a meeting the night before. Organizer Dan Ravizza brought a bass drum, emblazoned with a Jolly Roger, from the Local No. 24 Carpenters Union. He fired up the crowd with a pulsating beat.

3. “United Against Hatred” New Haven Green Thursday night

photo by elena saavedra-buckley

New Haven’s alders filed into their chambers in City Hall for their first full meeting since Donald J. Trump became America’s president-elect. On Thursday evening, the mood was subdued; every New Haven alder belongs to the Democratic Party.

Alder President Tyisha Walker of Ward 23 called the meeting to order, and the alders rose for the customary prayer for “Divine Guidance.”

4. Board of Alders meeting City Hall Thursday night

photo by mark rosenberg

photo by isabelle taft

The students move on, discussing a recount, whether Bernie Sanders might have defeated Trump, and the rumor that fourteen thousand Americans voted for the slain gorilla Harambe. When Scully passes out the tests, things quiet down.

Now, they have to remember how many states had to ratify the Bill of Rights.

When backpacks start zipping closed an hour later, Scully reminds them about their upcoming essay on John Locke.

The bell rings.

– Isabelle Taft

– Elena Saavedra Buckley

Scully cuts through the chatter to point out Laurel Cubellotti, the class’s only Trump supporter. She reluctantly reports that she’s happy with the results, tacking on a bashful “sorry” and a shrug. She doesn’t seem victorious. “I’m actually really shocked,” she says. “When he won, I didn’t know what to do.” Scully adds that Trump’s New York hotel, which he has visited, is, in fact, nice. (Reed retorts that her grandmother has been there, too, “and she says it’s trash.”)

The poster’s tone stood out at an event that concluded with a group rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” Organizers insisted that everyone could stay and talk and plan for the future, but when the song was over most people stood up, passed around a few more hugs, put on their backpacks, and walked out, back to the library or to a meeting that hadn’t been canceled, back to normal life in a place we knew now—more than ever before—was a different part of America.

– Mark Rosenberg

Herman Zuniga, president of Community Immigrants of East Haven, shouted into the night, his voice breaking. “I came to this country twenty-nine years ago. I am one hundred percent immigrant. I fought for my papers for seventeen years,” he told the crowd. “Who are you, Donald Trump, to tell us to choose between religion, color, gender, or political party? Who are you, Mr. Trump?”

The protestors marched around the Green. As the crowd circled Rite Aid, it fell into rhyme: “Hey hey! Ho ho! Donald Trump has got to go!” Shop owners peered out of their storefronts as they passed by – young and old, organizers and attendees, students and residents – wielding banners, linking arms, bringing the city center to a halt.

“Our streets!”

“Whose streets?”

At the behest of John Lugo, the cofounder of ULA, the crowd chanted a call-and-response:

Susan Bramhall, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace who has participated in protests in New Haven since 1969, said the protest was the largest she’d seen since the Iraq War.

– Eliza Fawcett

The disorientation generated by the election seemed to linger in the chambers as the alders drifted out. Tidying up afterwards, a staff member handed a copy of Trump’s plan for his first one hundred days in office to a security guard, who shook his head in disbelief.

Standing in the threshold of the chambers, Ward 25 Alder Adam Marchand said that the election results were more than disappointing, especially given the strong voter turnout in his district. He emphasized that despite Trump’s threat to revoke federal funding for all sanctuary cities, New Haven would maintain its identity as a place of acceptance and refuge.

The alders applauded as Festa returned to her seat. With muted efficiency, they moved through the items on the agenda and personal announcements—an upcoming Thanksgiving turkey drive, birthday wishes for an absent alder—and the meeting adjourned after only half an hour.

Festa told the story of her mother, Linda, who immigrated from Amarosi, Italy to New Haven in the early nineteen-sixties.

Linda embraced her new city, Festa said, finding work in a dress shop and support from the local Italian community. She soon married and began raising a family in her home on Orange Street.

Ward 10 Alder Anna Festa walked solemnly to the podium. “In light of everything that’s been going on in our country with immigration, I thought it would be nice to read a biographical narrative my daughter wrote about her grandmother,” she said.

“I don’t really know what the hell they’re mad at,” he tells me. “I don’t believe in violence, anyways. Just makes us look like a bunch of idiots.”

“I seen a lot of them,” Tirotello says of elections. “This is the worst one. Now that he’s our president, even if I don’t like him, I got to back him up. I did the same thing with Kennedy.” What makes Joe most unhappy, though, is the anti-Trump rallying occurring in downtown New Haven and across the country.

The Annex Club sits just off I-95 on the way to East Haven. Founded in 1938 as a center for Italian-American men, the Club is now run by the sons and grandsons of its first generation. Joe Tirotello, who is eighty-eight, is one of those men. At 6:30 p.m. on November 10, he sits inside, having just bought a ticket for Bingo Night, a main source of the Annex Club’s income.

He immediately asks me if I voted.

5. The Annex Club East Shore Thursday night

photo by juliette neil

Across the street from the clinic, a prochoice man named Chris with a cigarette tucked behind one ear uses his sign to obscure that of a pro-life activist named Barrie. Hers has a picture of two ultrasounds with the caption: “Which of these two human beings was conceived in rape?” When Barrie moves, Chris follows her. She raises her sign. He raises his.

Outside the Planned Parenthood at the intersection of Whitney Avenue and Edwards Street, the first Saturday after Trump’s election is like most Saturday mornings: The clinic is performing abortions, and people outside are holding brightly colored signs, engaged in protest and counter-protest.

6. Planned Parenthood East Rock Saturday morning

DJ Gabby plays Top 40 and Latin hits at Partners Cafe on Saturdays like this, but tonight, after the presidential election, the dance floor is deserted. Beyoncé plays in the bar downstairs. I’m sitting next to a couple of hockey players in Yale jerseys who are finishing their beers, wondering if the Rangers are still up. Across the bar, two locals boasting chest tattoos and green lipstick debrief the election in halfhearted murmurs.

7. Downtown Saturday night

8. Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ Dixwell Sunday morning

photo © google street view 2016

– Juliette Neil

Tirotello is one of the only non Trump-supporters that I meet at the Annex Club, and the only one to bring up the election without my asking, but he still joins in when the bingo starts. The first-place prize last week was five hundred dollars; tonight’s players are feeling lucky.

Gail, who volunteered for Trump, eagerly chimes in: “They’ll shoot you through your window if you have a Trump sign.

It’s politics.”

Ed and Shirley, who, like most of the others I meet, have been coming to the Club for “too long,” sit in the back with their friend Gail. Shirley tells me that her mother wouldn’t allow her to accept a college scholarship “because girls don’t go to college.” When I ask her how she felt about Hillary, she tisks. “She’s just a liar. I think he’ll be fabulous.”

– Amelia Nierenberg

At 10:30 a.m., the protest is over, and the sign-holders get in cars — some plastered with Clinton stickers, some with Trump.

They’ll be back next Saturday. And the one after that. And the one after that.

And Barrie? “I’ll be here every Saturday until I die,” she says, “or I move.” What if Trump appoints a Justice to overturn Roe v. Wade? “Not going to happen,” she sighs. “No chance.”

– Spencer Bokat-Lindell

As for the next four years, her plans haven’t much changed. “All I can say is I’m going to keep trying to fuck the system.”

I ask her if she sees a storm gathering.

She shakes her head. It’s been raging for a while, she says, and storms like these never really pass.

For Jerimarie Liesegang, a Trump White House is no great surprise. “Is it shocking?” she laughed. “No. It’s the last gasp of the great white group.” When Liesegang transitioned in the nineties, there were even fewer legal protections for trans people, which inspired her to found the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition almost twenty years ago. She’s not convinced that queer youth, especially queer people of color, are much safer now.

She points out that you can still get fired in most states for being gay or trans.

Orbel—whose name is an amalgamation of Isabel and Orlando—moved from his native Puerto Rico after earning his business degree there in 2012, and he’s been working at a consulting firm in the Northeast ever since. “The laws were passed— they can’t just change them.” He worries about new appointments to the Supreme Court, though, not to mention how people might treat him outside places like this. “I guess I’m fifty percent afraid.”

Later, after moving to another side of the street, Chris tells me the pro-life protestors are emboldened by Trump. “Their guy might have won the White House, but we will win the struggle,” he says. Eyeing Chris across the street, Barrie says direct confrontations like this are rare. “This type of behavior is, of course, because of the election,” she says.

Chris foresees this type of conflict escalating in Trump’s America. He cites Obama’s plans to permanently protect Planned Parenthood’s funding and says: “Because Trump can’t do anything with the funding, they’ll harass patients and people like us.”

He crosses his arms, feet firmly planted on the sidewalk.

“How do I feel?” asks Orbel, one of the other people at the bar who is sipping a pink cocktail and talking to his friend in Spanish. He hesitates for a few moments, as if to gird himself for the answer. “I’m not afraid.”

Barrie finally says, soothingly, “I’m praying for you, Chris.” He angrily wheels around to face her, their body-length signs pressed together. Barrie takes off her sunglasses. “Back up, Chris.” He doesn’t.

They stand in gridlock.

– Ruby Bilger

People in the crowd started to shout in assent. “They are wondering how we’re still a people of faith. How after slavery, you can still smile, how after Jim Crow, you can still dance, how after the war on drugs, you can leap for joy, how after mass incarceration, you can still sing.”

Nearly everyone was crying out now, some standing or holding up their hands.

Williams kept speaking, louder and louder, without stopping to take a breath. “You say to them that God did that,” she said, “God did that all by himself.”

Williams, a guest preacher, wasn’t just there to talk about progress and setbacks.

“By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion,” she began her sermon, quoting Psalm 137 and comparing the Black community to the Israelites in exile. “The Psalm says, ‘For there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy.’

But we are not here for your entertainment. Our songs mean something to us, and we are not in Zion.”

Until Reverend Porsha Williams’ sermon, the service at the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ had been mostly business as usual. Couples smiled and greeted each other as they found their seats, the teen choir sang in rainbow stoles, and the speakers did what they had long planned to do that morning: honor their congregation’s graduates of the historically black Bennett and Morehouse Colleges and pay tribute to their late pastor, Reverend Dr. Edwin R. Edmonds.

Even the earlier mentions of Trump’s election hadn’t relayed any shock or despair.

“We’ve been here before,” said Toni Walker, a Connecticut state representative and the daughter of Reverend Edmonds.

“With President Reagan, and in the early nineteen-hundreds. This is just a setback.”

RESURRECTING

HOLY LAND

by Antonia Ayres-Brown

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s Hill photographs by ElinorTHE NEW

JOUR NAL

After a murder, Waterbury begins to rebuild its abandoned Catholic theme park A cross stands in the center of Waterbury, Connecticut. It’s atop Pine Hill, wedged between I-84 and Route 8, and inside Holy Land USA, a shuttered Catholic theme park. Most Saturdays and Sundays, you can find Bill Fitzpatrick below the cross, clearing brush from the path between “Jerusalem” and “Bethlehem Village,” clusters of biblical replicas made of plywood and stainless steel.

Chuck Pagano, the President of Holy Land’s Board of Directors, will glimpse the cross as he flies out of Bradley Airport to catch a Packers game in Green Bay. Though Mayor Neil O’Leary cannot see the cross from his corner office in Waterbury’s City Hall, a drawing of Holy Land’s original layout is displayed upon a cabinet. Katerina Valenti eyes the cross through a window in her biology classroom at Sacred Heart High School.

Constructed in 1956, Holy Land USA was New England’s first religious theme park. The attraction was founded by a wealthy Waterbury attorney, John Greco, and was composed of more than 125 religious mini-exhibits. Despite the park’s initial success, the property

aged poorly and eventually fell into a state of disrepair.

Replicas became remains and the area turned into a site of vandalism. In 2010, Holy Land’s aura changed from deserted to tragic. A local teenager, Chloe Ottman, was murdered on the grounds, shocking the city and forcing residents to address the future of the abandoned park.

While fundraising efforts following Ottman’s murder led O’Leary and a local car dealer to purchase the land for $350,000, Waterbury’s healing cannot be so easily quantified. The small city situated in Connecticut’s “manufacturing valley” received national media attention for a few weeks after the murder before newspapers lost interest. Nowadays, Ottman’s death is a hushed subject. Her name is spoken in quiet tones, followed with murmurs—“It’s really too bad.” The park reopened in 2014, but Holy Land’s period of abandonment remains a somber footnote in the property’s history. As one resident recalled, “The bad stuff happened up there and then no one went.”

A locked chain link gate guards the crumbling entrance of the property a few hundred yards from the cross. An attached poster board reads “NO TRESPASSING. Violators will be prosecuted,” in bold red lettering. The neighborhood seems to listen, opting to observe the cross from afar. On an October afternoon, there’s no sign of people besides two boys pushing a toddler on a tricycle down the road outside the gate.

Fifty years ago, this scene looked quite different. Older Waterbury residents recall Sunday picnics at Holy Land and races to see who could pick the most blueberries from the bushes on the outskirts of the property.

But for those without these memories, it’s hard to see beyond the cracked asphalt driveway and the conspicuous video surveillance.

Some of Holy Land’s advocates say that Ottman’s murder motivated them to take back the park from abandon. Others refuse to let the crime taint their memories of Holy Land. As Chuck Pagano explains, “I look at life myself, personally, like sailing a boat.

You gotta jibe. You gotta tack. But you gotta keep your eye on the mark. And I think that’s what this group is focused on now: keeping our eye on the mark. But it was a dark episode.”

Can the loss of a sixteen-year-old’s life be reduced to a single dark moment in the history of a revered place?

32

Or does it change the place forever? Should it? Holy Land USA is both the best of Waterbury and the worst: a symbol of its golden age and its decline, a temple and a tomb. This duality still permeates the park’s identity today, begging the question of whether sites of trauma should be redeemed and transformed—or preserved for what they have become.

Life A 1950’s black-and-white photograph of John Greco hangs in the Holy Land chapel. He sits in a wooden chair with his left hand gripping his opposite wrist. His smile is cautious, as though he’s uncertain whether his portrait belongs next to the twentieth century pietà that looms to its right. Holy Land organizers have kept the portrait on display as a eulogy to the religious site’s founder. There’s much more to learn about Greco, however, from what’s outside— the remnant of his labor of love, Holy Land USA. “When you were in his presence, you felt the spirit come through your core,” says Rebecca Calabrese, Greco’s great-niece. Born in Waterbury in 1895, Greco and his family returned to his parents’ hometown in Avellino, Italy when his father could not find work. He only later moved back to the States for his education at the THE NEW JOUR NAL

Catholic University of Washington, D.C. Perpetually ill as an adolescent, Greco had to delay school indefinitely. After finally recovering, he earned a full scholarship to attend Yale Law School and stayed in Connecticut for the rest of his life. His descendants say that he never fully shook his internal desire to become a priest.

He founded an Italian ethnicity group and devoted his free time to tutoring recent Italian immigrants (“all probono” his family still boasts). He later started Catholic Campaigners for Christ, where he developed the idea to construct a Catholic theme park. By 1956, the group had erected a thirty-two-foot neon crucifix on Pine Hill, and Holy Land USA became a reality.

Sites of Christian tourism were not uncommon in the 1950’s, and they continue to thrive in the South today. Another “Holy Land USA” opened in the 1960’s in Del Rio, Texas. An additional park in Orlando, Florida called “The Holy Land Experience” lets visitors be baptized in a chlorinated pool by a John the Baptist impersonator. “Ark Encounter,” a $100 million recreation of Noah’s ark, opened in Kentucky in July 2016.

The ark replica is 510 feet long and houses a zoo. These parks differ widely in offerings, but their popularity and high budgets reveal the passion with which religious fundamentalists have sought to create religious spaces outside the church to inspire the faithful and, perhaps, attract new members to the flock.

In Waterbury, Holy Land USA succeeded at becoming a community place that everyone knew, regardless of religion. The park was composed of religious replicas, exhibits, and spaces for reflection. Park visitors summited the hill and passed through two archways labeled “Holy Land” and “Jerusalem.” From this point, they could observe miniature replicas of notable places from the Bible, including Herod’s Palace and an inn with a “No Vacancy” sign. The inn was large, like a children’s playhouse, with scrappy plastic windowing and a bold red door frame. Figurines of the nativity scene sat in a cave-like structure, blocked off by black metal bars. A nearby plaque on the ground read “Every Day Is Christmas.” Visitors could take pictures at the “Dignity of Marriage” exhibit, which highlighted biblical evidence for the sanctity of matrimony. The narrative pathway of Jesus’ life wrapped around Pine Hill and culminated at the glowing cross.

A donation bucket sat at the exit of the park for fifty-cent parking contributions, but most revenue came from the Holy Land collections that local churches hosted about six times each year. With an average of forty thousand visitors annually, Holy Land didn’t have much trouble staying busy or financially afloat.

Hordes of vehicles, an average of five hundred cars and thirty buses each weekend, navigated the steep climb NOVEMBER 2016

up Pine Hill to unload tourists at the park. For many, Holy Land was the humble destination of countless personal pilgrimages.

Chuck Pagano grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Waterbury next to Saint Patrick’s Church.

Most Decembers, his parents would take him to the Saint Patrick’s nativity scene before bringing him up to Holy Land, which he says always struck him as “a nativity scene on steroids.” Linda Barone, another lifelong Waterbury resident, remembers from childhood the realism of the Holy Land exhibits. She would follow her family around the park, careful not to venture too close to the crypt replicas. After reaching the cross, her family would convene again and return home to watch Jesus Christ Superstar on Sunday nights.

Visiting the park became as ritualistic as church itself to many Waterbury residents. Pagano attributes Holy Land’s success to the universality of its message: peace, reflection, and acceptance. “I think Holy Land was a magnet.” In his opinion, regardless of people’s backgrounds, Waterbury residents considered the park a place of reflection. With its cross glowing in the sky from the highest point in the city, Holy Land was impossible to ignore, Pagano says, “And they had good blueberries up there too.”

John Greco died in 1986, at the age of ninety-one, and designated in his will that Holy Land be left to an order of nuns, the Religious Teachers of Filippini.

Several nuns moved onto the property, but they weren’t able to handle the upkeep. Fearing liability from accidental injury, the religious order officially closed the park soon after inheriting it. Holy Land remained sealed for three decades.

Keeping 17.7 acres of land sealed, of course, is a difficult task, and the nuns attempted it half-heartedly.

In 1997, the nuns granted a troop of Boy Scouts permission to renovate the Hollywood-style Holy Land USA sign that rests on Pine Hill above I-84. A decade later, in 2007, a coalition of local Catholic volunteers scraped together enough money to replace the crumbling crucifix with a fifty-foot, stainless steel cross. The new cross was not internally lit, making it harder to see at a distance. As the lights dimmed on Holy Land, the park sank further into disrepair.

Death RoadsideAmerica.com suggests skipping a visit to Holy Land USA if you don’t have an up-to-date tetanus shot. Grassy clumps peek through fissures in the sidewalk outside the chapel. Discarded plywood replicas of toy church steeples, held together by rusty nails, are strewn around the park’s entrance. The ceramic torso 33

of an animal, maybe a horse or a camel, rests on the site’s sloping terrain. An aged crucifix, which has since been removed from the property, used to lay horizontally, marked with graffiti reading “God is dead.”

Chloe Ottman, like many of her peers, was intrigued

by Holy Land’s seedy mystery. The abandoned park did not scare her. Ottman’s father, Derek, told me that his daughter had a passion for the underdog and a never-ceasing urge to cheer people up. Friends of Chloe’s tenderly recall the lengths to which she would go to make them smile, trying goofy faces and sometimes even using her hands to force the corners of her classmates’ mouths upward. Curiosity spurred her to leave her house by 7:30 a.m. some weekends to explore Waterbury, the city where she grew up. She would later describe these daylong outings with her friends in lengthy Facebook posts, calling them “Epic Adventures.”

On July 15, 2010, Ottman, who was sixteen at the time, agreed to join a friend of her boyfriend, whom she had met at several parties, Francisco Cruz, Jr., at Holy Land as part of an “Epic Adventure” he planned for her. Ottman and Cruz sat at the base of the crucifix, chatting and sipping Joose, a caffeinated malt drink.

Soon after they sat down, Cruz made sexual advances 34

toward Ottman, which she rebuffed. Cruz attempted to grope Ottman. She elbowed him in the face, knocking his glasses to the ground. Cruz became enraged. He strangled Ottman and raped her. Unsure if she was still alive, Cruz stabbed her several times and left her body in a nearby wooded area.

The next day, Ottman’s family reported her missing; Cruz confessed to the crime two days later. He initially pled guilty but later withdrew his plea. Facing the possibility of going to trial, Chloe’s mother wanted to push for the death penalty but her father feared the lengthy trial that it would entail. Cruz finally agreed to plea guilty again if the rape charge was dropped. Ottman’s father reluctantly agreed, admitting that it was “fucked up.” Cruz is now serving fifty-five years in state prison.

Following the murder, the Religious Teachers of Filippini vacated the property and moved to Morristown, New Jersey. As Derek Ottman remembers, the organization was unresponsive to his inquiries about Holy Land’s future. What were their plans for the property? What were they going to do about the bloodstained concrete? Could they build a fence to keep future trespassers out? The nuns said they would have to confer with the heads of the religious order in Rome.

They never got back to him. (The provincial supervisor of Holy Land at that time of his attempts has since died, according to Sister Ascenza of the order, who spoke to me over the phone from Morristown.)

Although Derek Ottman does not blame the religious order for his daughter’s murder, he admits that some resentment lingered for a while. Pagano, on the other hand, adamantly insists that the crime was not a product of Holy Land itself or its managers. He attributes the death to circumstance. He told me, “Holy Land happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Resurrection Waterbury Mayor Neil O’Leary’s office sits on the second floor of City Hall. A framed vintage advertisement that reads “Waterbury Renaissance,” hangs on the wall in the waiting room. A copy of Emery Roth’s Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry sits on the coffee table. (Waterbury’s nickname is “The Brass City.”) Through the Mayor’s window, just across the road on Grand Street, you can see the Waterbury Courthouse, where Francisco Cruz was convicted of murder in 2011.

One afternoon in August of 2013, Mayor O’Leary ventured to Holy Land. The temperature had just reached the high nineties. Scanning the Waterbury skyline, thinking about the town’s past and future, he decided to call Fritz Blasius, a wealthy Catholic friend THE NEW JOUR NAL

who owns a car dealership. As O’Leary recalls, “I called him up and said, ‘What are you doing right now?’ And he said, ‘I just came off the golf course.’ And I said, ‘Come up to Holy Land.’”

O’Leary says that the idea for Holy Land’s resurrection didn’t come as an epiphany, but rather a gradual realization. When he had campaigned for mayor earlier in 2011, he made a point to visit Waterbury’s retirement homes. Across the board, seniors’ biggest request was to illuminate the cross once more. Once elected, he called the realtor of the Holy Land property and learned that the nuns, who still owned it, were asking for $750,000 for the 17.7 acres (city records indicate the property is worth roughly $1.24 million). Knowing that he could never fundraise this sum, the new mayor let the idea go. Three years later, however, O’Leary and Blasius decided to jointly purchase Holy Land using money that they would fundraise on their own.

Holy Land’s restoration (and Mayor O’Leary’s leadership of the movement) has not received any significant opposition. Still, an elected official’s advocacy for a religious site intuitively raises some red flags. Discussing Holy Land’s recent history in his office, Mayor O’Leary cuts himself off mid-sentence. “I’ve got to make sure you understand only one thing so far: this has nothing to do with the city of Waterbury. I’m the mayor, but this was not done with me being a representative of the city, because that would be a big problem with separation of church and state.” I nod. He pauses, leans heavily into his chair, and dives back into the story.

After some negotiating, O’Leary and Blasius convinced the nuns to listen to their pitch. The day of their meeting, the men awoke early and drove to Morristown, New Jersey. The meeting began sharply at 10 a.m. There was no small talk—O’Leary sat with a cup of coffee in one hand and a Danish in the other, he says, waiting for the women to speak.

In the meeting, O’Leary and Blasius explained their motivation for buying the property, promising that they would never change it into a hotel or let the land be mined. By the end of the day, the nuns agreed to sell the listing for $350,000. As part of the deal, the land deed required that the property always remain Holy Land.

Three years later, at Holy Land’s second annual banquet at La Bella Vista Banquet Hall, Jennifer Carroll, a senior at Holy Cross Catholic High School, concludes her speech. “I realize that God does not just let bad things happen in our world. He gave us free will, which makes any outcome possible,” she projects slowly into the microphone. She and Katerina Valenti are the 2016 winners of Holy Land’s high school essay competition, for which students write personal statements about what Holy Land means to them. The young women NOVEMBER 2016

stand by the podium as Rebecca Calabrese awards them one thousand dollars each to help fund their college educations.

Near the center of the ballroom, Joe Pisani sits with ten talkative family members and friends at a table marked “Pisani Steel.” To this crowd, his name alone is enough to stir approving murmurs. In 2013, soon after the purchase of Holy Land, Pisani agreed to construct a new lighted steel cross, entirely free of charge. His company was determined to build a crucifix larger than any of its predecessors. The project required roughly $300,000 worth of material.

On Friday, December 20, 2013, a crane erected the cross on Pine Hill, where it now sits on a hundred square foot base. The cross was illuminated for the first time in years, just in time for Christmas. Ten thousand Waterbury residents, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, came to watch the lighting ceremony. Even Waterbury’s Albanian Muslim community was in attendance. Some Waterbury residents say that traffic came to a halt on I-84 that day; regardless of their religious affiliation, people were leaning out their windows to try to catch a better look. Holy Land—they could finally see—was not lost.

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Derek Ottman was not included in planning for the cross-raising ceremony and I wasn’t able to get in touch with Chloe’s mother for this piece. (The two are now divorced.) Mayor O’Leary initially told me that Ottman’s parents were in attendance, but he later retracted this claim, saying that he only heard of their presence second-hand through a police officer. The Mayor acknowledges the role of Ottman’s death in the restoration process. “I think that it inspired a lot of people to step forward,” he says. She seems to serve as an unspoken martyr for the movement. Neither of the two Holy Land writing competition winners mention her in their essays, and her name goes entirely unspoken at the annual banquet.

After the cross began to shine again in 2013, the restoration movement continued to pick up steam. They’ve received donations from more than 4,500 individuals in the past two years. At this year’s banquet, they’ve set a goal of raising eighty thousand dollars to cover the material cost of constructing a new Holy Land sign.

Mayor O’Leary grabs the microphone and calls on the attendees to make monetary pledges. They auction off the letters from the old sign for five thousand dollars each. (O’Leary revealed before the banquet that he pre-sold three of the letters.) After the letters are auctioned, people raise their hands to pledge smaller amounts. O’Leary publically thanks each individual by name, congratulating several donors on their recent retirements or upcoming marriages.

“Lot of Irish names here tonight!” O’Leary remarks.

One of the men at the Pisani table promptly raises his hand to place a bid. O’Leary squints before recognizing his friend from across the room. “I knew if I challenged these Italian guys they’d step it up.”

Between dinner courses, two priests in clerical collars examine tickets to a Yankees/Red Sox game at the silent auction. A group of Sacred Hearth High School students huddle around a table selling limited-edition Holy Land Timex watches. A Waterbury-based cover band takes the stage. Mickey, the group’s bassist, leans into the microphone. “We love Holy Land. We actually do.”

The absence of Chloe Ottman’s parents goes unmentioned. The two have maintained a low-profile since their tragedy. Derek Ottman made a GoFundMe page last year, hoping to raise $25,000 to return to school to become a writer (he has raised $678 as of this writing). On his fundraising page, he states that he’s on a mission from God, writing that he’s trying to shake his former life plans: “I’ve given up the stifling but ‘sure thing’ path my risk-averse-father-of-a-murdered-teenager brain wants.” Before Chloe’s death, a leaky roof damaged the family’s house, taking down an entire wall in her room. Derek wasn’t able to fix it before she died.

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More than five years later, the house repairs are still incomplete. “The weight of unfinished business is part of the brain feeling sorry for itself,” he explains. Derek writes that after trauma, he initially found messiness to be comforting. Five years later though, he knows it’s time to move forward, for himself and for Chloe, who he believes would want for people to relate to each other even when circumstances are difficult. He’s not focusing on Holy Land as a path forward anymore.

Long after dark, the silent auction winners are announced and the banquet’s attendees slowly trickle out of La Bella Vista. Mickey packs up his bass and the Holy Land vision boards are taken down from the entrance. The parking lot is illuminated as a hundred cars turn on their headlights and migrate toward the venue’s winding exit. Volunteers will be on-site at Holy Land by 11am tomorrow to continue restoration work, but until then, the cross stands alone on Pine Hill, hovering above the old manufacturing town.

Far below the cross, Chloe Monique Ottman’s grave reads, “We love you… forever.” Six years following her death though, her memory remains more prevalent in some people’s minds than others’. Holy Land has risen from tragedy, but the role of Ottman’s murder in the process of restoration continues to be dubious. Maybe forgetting violence in order to overcome it is productive, a way of honoring her. On the other hand, the potential to take advantage of trauma in order to motivate the redemption of a space is ethically challenging. The Bible assures followers that challenges can be overcome; Isaiah promises redemptive glory for the followers of the Lord: “Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise” (Isaiah 60:18). But the role of memory is ambiguous. Maybe we serve ourselves best by moving on, but what do we lose in disremembering trauma? If you turn your head as you leave Waterbury on I-84, you can catch a glimpse of the glowing cross one last time, its LED lighting glowing on the horizon.

— Anna Ayres-Brown is a sophomore in Saybrook College.

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ENDNOTE

DISPATCHES FROM THE TOAD’S BATHROOM What I heard during an hour in the stall Charlie Bardey

NOVEMBER 2016

illustration bix archer

Situated beneath a dance floor coated in liquor and pheromones, the Toad’s men’s bathroom lacks the sterility of other men’s bathrooms on campus. I’ve only spent a few moments in there, and whether by chemical aid or brute force alone, I’ve successfully repressed most of them.

The access I have to the Toad’s men’s bathroom because I’m cis-ish and have a dick (score!) is a privilege that I must wield responsibly. And so, on November 2, I descend into the bathroom corridor in the basement, pass the dapper, human-size, pork-pie-hatsporting toad encased in glass in a nook in the wall, and enter the men’s bathroom, where I will stand, in a stall, listening, for the next hour (with occasional breaks on the dance floor).

The bathroom is not as repulsive as it could be. It has three stalls, two of which lock, and six urinals.

There are no dividers between the urinals. As most men’s room frequenters know, this profoundly alters the psychic terrain. Dividers offer privacy and lessen the intense homophobia that arises at the occasion of male genital proximity. Without them, adjacent urinals become fraught with this tension. Only the foolhardy stand at adjacent urinals without dividers.

I know that simply scrolling through my phone by the sinks will not be an option—people will get suspicious, and in a space like the Toad’s bathroom, I want a door between the straight boys and me. So I stand in a stall—one of the two not glazed in urine— facing the toilet. I am a full head taller than the door, so I know that people can see the back of my head, which feels awkward but is a necessary price to pay for investigative journalism.

Gaze is particularly dangerous in all male spaces, as it carries the potential of erotic desire, so occupying a men’s bathroom usually entails blinkering oneself, though normally not for the length of time I will spend at Toad’s. I resign myself to staring at the tiles in front of me, as so many men have done before, and get to

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listening. I hold my phone to the side so that it doesn’t fall in the toilet. I am fortunate to have a terrible sense of smell.

12:20 am: Two boys walk in and go to separate urinals.

“Can you see my dick?” “No.” “Good.” There are three urinals separating them.

11:48 pm: I hear a spraying sound. I am unsure of the source—it sounds like Axe, maybe, or another brand of spray-on deodorant. I don’t smell anything, though, except the faint aroma of urine—very curious. I recall the existence of lethal odorless sprayable chemicals, though I can’t name any, and hope that I will be okay.

11:52 pm: Two boys walk in. One boy says to the other, walking towards a stall: “I would not wipe the seat to take a fucking shit here. Are you taking a shit dude?” I panic, thinking he’s talking to me, but he’s not. He’s talking to his friend in the stall next to me, who isn’t taking a shit, but is peeing, like I’m pretending to be doing. I think about how friendship heightens the awkwardness of using adjacent urinals, as there is the expectation of continued conversation as you urinate side by side.

12:22 am: Someone is vomiting in the stall next to me and I feel grateful that at least my knees don’t have to touch the floor.

11:55 pm: “She’s winning gold medals, I’m sitting here drinking my ass off.” One boy yells to his friend. They don’t seem that close. “You’re getting too dark for the Toad’s bathroom, dude.” They change topics, and leave.

11:57 pm: I hear the spraying sound again. I realize it’s the sound of the faucet. I feel relief that I won’t perish in this bathroom stall, but also note that I’ve heard the sound of the faucet many fewer times than I’ve heard the sound of flushing.

12:01 am: Two boys exchange ‘sups.’ “This is the fourth time I’ve been down here. Pretty copious.” As someone who pees a lot, I feel a kinship. They begin talking about how much they’re sweating. “I should have worn my Yale cheerleading tank,” one says. “Why has my birthday hat not gotten any females?” the other laments. I no longer feel any kinship.

12:05 am: After four minutes of silence, I begin to feel deeply silly, and I leave the bathroom to take a dancing break upstairs. Self-care is important.

12:27 am: “I’m completely blacked out. But I’m having a good night.” “Cool!” I whisper to myself.

12:29 am: “Lip Gloss” is playing, and the boy in the stall next to me is loudly singing along, but he doesn’t know any of the words. I am angry.

12:34 am: “Do you ever do this? Put paper on your dick when you pee?” shouts one boy from the stall next to me to his friends, drunkenly. “I don’t do that,” his friend responds. The boy defends himself: “Because you don’t want your underwear to be sticky!” “You don’t even have a girlfriend.” “I’m always prepared.”

12:37 am: Sometimes I hear boys come down and use neither the urinal nor the stalls. When I cautiously turn my head just enough to see into the bathroom over the top of the stall door, I see boys looking at themselves in the mirror, or at their phone, simply needing some space from the occasionally overwhelming party upstairs. Seeing these boys in their quiet vulnerability gives me some of my few moments of warmth.

12:46 am: Two boys walk in. “Are they actually dating now? Are they for sure dating?” one of them asks. “I don’t even think she’s that hot,” his friend reassures him. They high-five, I think.

12:48 am: At the hour mark of my entrance, I decide that I’ve spent enough time in the bathroom, and turn to depart. When I do so, I accidentally make eye contact with someone at a urinal. It is a genuinely uncomfortable moment. I wash my hands and leave.

— Charlie Bardey is a senior in Silliman College.

12:17 am: Someone walks in talking about not receiving a Snapchat from a girl. “Bitch,” he says.

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the chubb fellowship · timothy dwight college · yale university

AmbAssAdor João VAle de AlmeidA head of the delegation of the european union to the united nations

lecture

Wednesday November 30, 2016 4:30 pm Burke Auditorium Kroon Hall 195 Prospect Street New Haven, CT Doors open for seating at 4:10 pm The talk will also be live streamed.

Go the 40 www.chubbfellowship.org for further instructions the day of the talk.

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Free and open to the public. No tickets are required. For questions, please email chubb.fellowship@yale.edu or call 203.464.2755.

Supported by Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.