Volume 37 - Issue 4

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February 2005

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FkJra Lichtman MANAGING EDITOR

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Sl~ Anna Altman, Jonny Dach, Helen Eckinger, Mina Kimes, Emily Kopley, Beatrice Liu, Casey Miner, Eli:tabeth St. Victor, Julia Wallace, Ivy Wang Mmz!Hn tzntl Dtrrcton Emily Ba.zelon, Jo.bua Civin. Peter B. Cooper, Tom Grigg., Brooks Kelley, Daniel Kum.-Phelan, Jennifer PittS, Henry Schwab, Eli74beth Sledge, David Slifka, rred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong, John Swansburg

Advisors Richard Blow, Jay Carney, Richard Conniff, Ruth Con· niiT. Elisha Cooper, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Steven Weisman. Daniel Yergjn Frimds S<~e

B;ollou, Anson M. lk:ord, Jr., Blai~ lknnctt, Edward B. Bennett, Jr., Edward B. Bennett Ill , PaulS. Bennett, Richard Blow, Martha Br.uu, Jay Cam~, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, oruthan M. Qark, ConstanCIC Clement, Elisha Cooper, Pttcr B. pa. Andy Coun, Mali Oati<on, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. H Fox, Davtd Fr=mn. Geoffrey Fncd, Sherwin Goldman, David Grttnbcrg. Tom Grigp. Stephen Hdlman, Jane Kamcnslcy.

Brook. Kdky, Roger JGrwood, Lavi. E. Lehrman, Jim l...owc.

E. Noblo l...owc. Martha E. Nell. Pttcr H. Neill, Howard H .

N~man. Scan 0' Brien, Julie Peters, L..:wis and Joan Platt, Julia Prnton, Lau~n Rabin, Fairf.ut C. Randal, Scuan Rohrer, Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard ShiddJ, ,W. Hampton Sides. Lisa Silverman, William Sledge. Adina Proposco and David Sukman, Thomu c;trong.

Eliubcth Tat.,, Angela Stcnt Ycrgin

2

Volume 37, Number 4 February 2005

The NewJournal FEATURES 12 Chemical Reaction

Residents discover toxins under a neighborhood school and fight back.

by Libby I rwin

20

The Greenhouse Architects arotmd the 1vor/d are clamoring to b11ild Yale a piece of Paradise.

by Flora Lichtman

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A Divine Intervention T1vo Baptist Reverends seek to reconnect a congregation with its com?mmi!J.

by Zach Jones

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Points of Departure The Critical Angle: Filed Away by Adriane Quinlan Essay: An Ordinary Lover by Mina Kimes Endnote: Thus Spake Zarathustra? by Jamie Martin

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3

Firing Squad "I COULDN'T PULL THE TRIGGER OF THE EMP'I1F.ST gun in the world, not if someone were looking down the barrel. One instinctively doesn't do it--<>ne can't," says the young Ursula in D.H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love. The passage struck me when I read it. I had never touched a gun, but I'd always wondered what it wo uld be like. Was Ursula right? Are some people simply instinctively unable to fire even an empty gun at another person?

One snowy Thursday night, I went to a Yale Pistol Club practice at ' The Armory," a gray warehouse-like building that overlooks the athletic fields. The Armory was built in 1916 as a US cavalry training center, and it seems very much a relic of an earlier time. Among o ld exposed piping and olive green army-issue lockers and tables, the Pistol Club meets most Tuesday and Thursday nights.

Tonight, only three people have come to practice. One of them is Ricky Kamp, who got his Ph.D. from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in the early nineties.

Ricky went to his first practice in 1989, and has been managing the club for more than a decade. When he first started shooting competitively, the club had a much larger membership. People came out as much to socialize as to shoot. These days, attendance is sporadic. Each new semester brings a handful of wide-eyed newcomers, people like me who want to see what it's like to shoot a gun. But they after they've satisfied their curiosity, they usually don't come back.

Ricky talks me through the basics of how to load the pistol, how to aim it and how to stand. I'm surprised to learn that he holds the pistol with one hand, not two. I'm also surprised at how demanding it is to shoot. "You have error in your trigger release, error in your hand wobbling around, error in your elbow wobbling around, your shoulder, your feet, just o n and o n and on." Ricky tells me. He adds that my blood pressure, my blood sugar and how tired I am can have an enormous effect o n how you shoot. Ricky tries to get a good 4

night's rest, eat a high-protein meal and get to the range a few hours before he even picks up a gun. Both he and Barbara, a School of Nursing graduate who's been a member as long as Ricky, say they come to practice to relieve stress. But this seems st rage: t h e

process of shooting seems to require a degree of meticulousness that would make it impossible to release tension. They tell me it doesn't work that way. Shooting forces them to become calm and focused. "You should not be distracted by aggravating calls from the office. You shouldn't have things bothering you," says Ricky. A trip to the shooting range is less like a round on a punching bag and more like a form of meditation.

Ricky blames the media's portrayal of firearms for the waning interest in the club.

H e and Barbara believe that none of the people with whom they shoot targets could ever shoot a person. "The criminal doesn't do it the way we do it," Barbara says. "We do it the right way. We buy [the gun] the right way, with a permit. And we handle it right."

Ricky assures me, 'The people I know who are into shooting are the last people who would ever actually shoot anyone."

For all their reassurances, I can't help thinking of the statistics so often advertised by gun control advocates; numbers showing

that a gun kept in the home is22rimes more likely to be used in an

unintentional shooti n g, criminal assault, homicide or attempted suicide than it is to be used in self defense. I am also reminded of the argument that anybody can be carried away by a state of mind: panic, extreme anger or extreme despair.

These numbers suggest that when a gun is near, we can never be completely sure that we won't be compelled by forces within us but beyond our control, to pick it up and fire.

Though they both have carrying permits, Ricky and Barbara keep their'pistols at the shooting range. They spare no caution when storing and handling their guns. The magazine, which holds the bullets, and the gun are kept separately in a locked case, which is stored in a large black safe, which is locked in a backroom off the main shooting range, nesded away as safely as the innermost cloU of a Russian matryoshka.

Before he hands me the pistol, a .22 caliber semiautomatic handgun, he checks to make sure the mag:uine is removed and The New Journal

the chamber is empty. Then he checks again.

Then he shows me how to check for myself.

There is absolutely no chance the gun contains a bullet. Nevertheless, when I take the gun from Ricky's hand, the other two members shift back slighdy.

Standing in my booth wearing goggles and ear protectors, I feel removed from reality.

I stare through the sights to the bulls-eye hung up fifty feet away, and I'm astonished at how hard it is to keep my aim steady. Ricky tells me I should put my left hand in my pocket to anchor my body, which will give me more accuracy. He also tells me I shouldn't even think of the phrase "pulling the trigger," because simply imagining an action like pulling throws off the gun's equilibrium. Instead, he tells me to think of very gradually applying more and more pressure to the trigger. If I'm doing it right, I shouldn't even know when the pistol will actually fire. The idea goes against my most emblazoned notion of shooting a gun. Instead of being at my most powerful, when I pull the trigger, or rather when the gun is fired, I am at my most passive.

I get into position and tty to clear my mind. I stand still, applying gradual pressure to the trigger with my index finger, and I wait.

And then the bullet is fired. Immediately, a small black hole appears in the paper target, just beyond the outermost ring. Because the gun is small, the kickback isn't the powerful jolt I expected. It felt as if the gun was attached to a taut string, and the string was suddenly cut; or as if the gun was, for the briefest moment, freed from gravity. My next few shots hit closer to the bulls-eye. And then I start shooting wide. To remedy this, Ricky hangs up a plain piece of paper and tells me not to worry about trying to hit a target. It works-the blank white paper clears my mind. It seems, as they say, a litde Zen. After I'm done, Ricky lets me walk over to the back wall of the range, first checking and double-checking that every gun is unloaded and everyone is out of their stalls. The shells at the front of the range crunch like empty husks under our shoes. The tatgets are hung up in February 2005

front of a canvas curtain. Behind the curtain a thick steel backstop hangs at a forty-five degree angle. Traveling at about a thousand feet per second, the bullets nearly liquefy when they hit the backstop. Underneath, instead of spent cartridges, there are deep drifts of what looks like silver sawdust--all that remains of the lead bullets. Seeing this, I remember just how powerful a gun actually is.

According to Ricky, none of the members use the safeties on their guns when they practice. It helps them avoid what he calls a dangerous gray area. "You're either ready to shoot, or you're not shooting. There's no middle ground." I wonder for how many other places this is true. Outside of the painstaking precautions and the quiet isolation of the Pistol Club, can the gray area really be eliminated?

At the end of the night, we all dismande our pistols. We slide out the magazines, remove the bullets, check the chambers and shut the guns inside their cases. Ricky closes the iron safe and the backroom door, and we file out into the snow while Ricky locks the shooting range behind us.

-I'!} Wang

Wisecrack IN JosEPH

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humorous tale, "Jonathan Visits the Celestial Empire," the eponymous Yankee sails around the world selling ginseng, accompanied by his co-captain, a Newfoundland dog. Our hero boasts an adventurous entrepreneurial spirit. One might say the same of Jonathan's contemporary publicist, Professor David E. E. Sloane, who has written about Paulding and revived his tale from wasting away on dusty bookshelves. Dr. Sloane is a professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of New Haven (UNH), where he teaches primarily online classes, disseminating knowledge about 19m century American humor writing, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, adverbial clauses and fashionable hats.

Dr. Sloane is tall and formally-dressed, but his mustached, mischievous grin removes any air of pretense. He chats easily and affably, blending Twain jokes and his own one-liners naturally into conversation. His humor has served him well in his many public roles, which have included editing Co11ntry Dance and Song, directing the American Humor Studies Association and presiding over the Eli Whitney Museum and the Mark Twain Circle.

Since graduating from high school, Dr. Sloane has secured many prestigious degrees. All the while he acquired a love of the banjo, rescued man} 1911 century humorists from obscurity and developed a strong social conscience.

Dr. Sloane's particular interest in Mark Twain burgeoned in high school, when he wrote a book report on Innocents Abraod for which he received a "C" for content and an "F" for grammar/writing. No longer ignorant of effective writing technique, Dr. Sloane has since penned seven scholarly books on Mark Twain and American humor. He explains that Twain's humor is rooted in a critique of social problems that persist today, particularly racism. As Dr. Sloane points out, 'We're living out Huck Finn now in Kew Haven."

The professor's knowledge about the elements of style extends beyond strong writing skills: Dr. Sloane almost always sports a Bog1e-esque fedora. Occasional breaks from the fedora come in online clips of the professor "lecturing" on the UNH classes server. Each clip finds the distingwshed scholar wearing a different hat and cradling his beloved banjo, on which he strums a lecture-sing-along. In one clip, he sings prepositions to the tune of "Yankee Doodle," while another clip concludes with the straight-faced professor pausing, then offering the non-sequitor, "So now the future of Amencan youth belongs to you." In a third clip, the professor dons a severely frayed sombrero as he discourses on the rules of grammar over an Irish jig jangling in the background. And in yet another clip, Dr. Sloane smiles out from under a plastic "New Year's Eve" top hat and belts out the last few bars of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"

5

to demonstrate a particular pronunciation of the word "history."

These short films complement posted written lectures and student discussion boards to provide a convenient alternative to classroom learning.

Like ginsengsalesman Jonathan, Dr. Sloane displays his enterprising nature in his efforts to procure unusual, spicy goods: rare books and humor magazines.

From shrewd online and Aea market exploration, the collector has amassed complete runs of American humo r magazines from the mid-1~ to mid-20"' century, with names such as " Hot Dog," " Ballyhoo" and "Sagebrush Philosophy." As evidence of the Yankee ingenuity and thriftiness that be shares with his favorite writers and their subjects, Dr. Sloane salvaged a " derelict barbershop next to a biker bar" and turned it into his office. I n addition, he hopes to some day live his dream of opening an antique shop, and in so doing earn more than accolades and prestige for his love and knowledge of old Americana.

And there is the possible commercial success of Dr. Sloane's upcoming book on Edison's daughter. His subject, Madeleine Sloane, was in fact Dr. Sloane's paternal grandmother (the second "E" of Sloane's four initials stands for "Edison"). From his ancestors, the scholar inherited not only the inventive impulse, but also h undreds of love letters he has been preserving in water-stained cardboard boxes. This inheritance cannot compensate for Edison's disinheritance of his own daughter when she married a Catholic against her father's wishes, but perhaps Dr. Sloane's forthcoming book, which will draw heavily from her love letters, will rescue Madeleine from anonymity.

Or. Sloane has his own sidekick-not a Newfoundland dog but a seven-monthold poodle named Challah. Dr. Sloane's four

children were contracted as Challah's original caretakers but their father has assumed care of the poodle with tempered equanimity.

Dr. Sloane grumbles in jest, "The poodle doesn't know he's walking in front of a full professor."

Like MarkTwain,Dr. Sloane is deeply devoted to family (past and present), American literature and humor. Dr. Sloane is a modern-day Connecticut Yankee courting financial fortune and exercising pedagogical, scholarly, and fatherly influence. Hot dog!

- Emi!J ](qpley

Outsider's Insider MrNurEs FROM N EW HAVEN, BEVERLY KAYE

has set up her own new haven-for the most marginalized and polemicized art work being produced. Her slightly unkempt front yard bears little resemblance to the picturesque pruned lawns of her Woodbridge neighbors. A burnished metal sculpture of tendrils twisting into a knot momentarily diverts the attention of passing drivers. At the bottom of the driveway, sits another metal sculpture. It is of a folksy Native American, welcoming visitors, pulling them away from suburban Connecticut and into the world of "Outsider Art." As Kaye admits, attempting to define the genre is to venture onto shaky ground.

Outsider Art includes self-taught, folk and visionary art. In general, though, work deemed Outsider Art shares certain characteristics. It is free from overt social and cultural influences, artistic or otherwise; it is often created by self-taught individuals living on the fringe of society; it possesses an intensity of expression; and most importantly, it is driven by a desire to create rather than sell.

This last stipulation presents a conundrum for Kaye, who sells Outsider Art witho the blessing of outsider artists. As the genre has emerged, dealers and agents have adopted various tactics to explain this apparent paradox.

When Scottie Wilson, an acclaimed o utsider artist of the mid-20"' century, surprised critics by attending an opening of his work at a N ew York art gallery, his agent felt compelled to issue this disclaimer: "Yes, Scottie Wilson was at the opening. But he wasn't there fo r the art; he was there for the whiskey." Kaye, however, takes a different approach. "It's almost impossible to be truly isolated in this century," she says. "Most of my artists are very aware that their work is being sold, but would be doing it even if that wasn't the case."

Unlike many dealers who operate out of their homes, Kaye's living space is her art space. A showroom, peppered with an array of paintings and sculptures, blends seamJessly into the kitchen, which is adorned with several pieces by the artists Kaye represents. The dining room table doubles as a display area.

Unframed drawings emerge from underneath an upstairs bed. "Most private dealers work out of their homes," Kaye says. "If people see the art they want to buy in a home setting, buying art seems more doable."

In addition to aesthetic concerns, Kaye cites financial motivations for using her home as her gallery. ¡~ is very much tied into the stock market," she says. "It's not something anyone needs--it's something people want."

By relieving herself from the burden of rent of a commercial showroom, Kaye has a little immunity from the financial fluctuations that plague many gallery owners.

Outsider artists are linked to each other mainly by the motivations driving their work.

Although their art contains a shared intensity, outsider artists use a variety of techniques and mediums. "Many of these artists strive to create alternative universes," Kaye says. For outsider artist Gilles Manero, vintage records bought at a flea market become canvases upon which he paints vaguely demonic fairy tales. Anthony Guyther appalled art collecton by destroying valuable 18th and 19th century engravings and reassembling them into homoerotic collages.

Unfortunately for Guyther, the collages became so popular that Bergdorf Goodman began using them in its window displays. He glues together seashells and seaweed from the New England coastline; and sells them in gift shops. On the wall in Kaye's dining room, a painting by Maurice Hansen Jr. reveals a hierarchy ranking everyone from God-as a The New Journal

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man and as a woman-to Medusa, Winken, Blinken, Nod and the Whore of Babylon.

"When he was done," says Kaye, "he said •rve painted everything on here but the kitchen sink.' And then," she says, pointing to the canvas, "he painted a little kitchen sink."

Hansen is schizophrenic. "I don't like selling art by diagnosis," Kaye says, "but if Hansen were here, he'd say that he hears voices and that he doesn't want to take medication."

Hansen's illness is not an isolated case--it recalls the origins of Outsider Art, a genre first recognized in Europe by the artist and critic Jean Dubuffet in the 1930s. Initially drawn to the art of patients in mental asylums, Dubuffet labeled it Art Brut (literally "raw art''). Later, Dubuffet and others realized that non-institutionalized patients were producing similar works, and gradually the term Outsider Art came to encompass both Art Brut and comparable works produced outside asylums.

Even today though, the definitions remain vague. "I just try to focus on the an," Kaye says. "If you don't you can get lost in the definitions."

Though many of the artists are also mental patients, Kaye does not look for artists based on their symptoms. Because of increased availability of anti-psychotic medication, insanity is plays less of a role in the world of Outsider Art. But, as Kaye notes, there are exceptions. "Some people have access to the mentally ill-I do not," Kaye says.

Kaye does, howe,·er, represent at least one artist whose work borders on true Art Brut: Oyde Angel, a highway wanderer from Ohio. Angel befriended a retired firefighter who took up artistic welding, and now Angel produces his own metal sculptures composed of scraps he finds in landfills and dumps. Kaye explains, "Clyde was supposedly placed in an institution at a young age and put back into the world in his 30s. No one has ever met himsome believe he's the fireman's alter-ego."

But it doesn't matter, whether the artist is the firefighter's fictional creation or a genuine recluse, according to Kaye. "If someone really is an outsider artist, they don't~ant the world at their doorstep," she says. "If this man is his spokesperson, he's doing him a favor keeping the world away. Regardless, whoever is creating this art is truly gifted."

Kaye's location in suburban Connecticut is a world away from SoHo's glit7} galleries, which seems especially appropnate for the genre she shows. Kaye's home is as much of a hiding place as Angel's Ohio forests.

-Htkn Edeingtr The New Journal

8

1

students, and became an integral member of class discussions. "I felt very comfortable," Baby Geniuses Savana said. "1 was used to talking a lot in class. I was always raising my hand."

I:-. A CRA:\fPI D VAll < LA!>SRtX>:>.I, S W·\~ \doesn't It wasn't until four weeks into her seem out of place among a group of film documentary film class, when Professor Musser studies students energcticall} debating James proclaimed to the class, " ... and Savana, who Dean's adolescent insecuntie~ in RLbtllt/'itholll is an exceptional high school student ... " that a Ca11st. Laughing loudl}, she shows none of Sa,-ana's classmates finally discovered her the insecurity you might expect from a high secret. ''They were kinda surprised," Savana schooler sitting in a college classroom. A said, chuckling. The revelation drew different senior at Wilbur Cross, Sa,·ana leaves her high responses from classmates: some were school life for a few hours each week to join shocked, others, indifferent. Still, for the high the ranks of Yalies three, four, even five vears school students, having their age revealed was her senior. . often gratifying.

Savana is one of fift) high school juniors Savana admits that she and her peers and seniors from various New I Iaven schools in the program are often under pressure who have the opportunity to sample Yale to demonstrate their abilities. Nonetheless, life. The Yale-New !Iaven and Area Schools she excelled in the class composed of program allows exceptional high school upperclassmen and graduate students, students to take classes at Yale for credit: receiving an 'W' on her final paper about eight schools regularly participate. According Brazilian documentary films on indigenous to Linda Cole-Taylor, coordinator of this peoples. "It's very satisfying to know that I did program and associate director of the Teacher well," she said.

Preparation Program at Yale, noted that Yale Eric, another senior at \Vilbur Cross, also opened its doors to high schoolers over thirty loved the class he took last fall-"1 ntroduction years ago. The program began as an outreach to Cognitive Science." He found Professor project for New J Iaven public school students, School witty and insightful, and enjoyed aiming to provtde an accelerated option for being able to forget for a while that he was high schoolers who have exhausted course a high schooler. Eric recalled with slight offerings in a certain subject. embarrassment that he \\:asn't as organized The criteria for entering the program as he would have hoped; he finished his final '·aries from school to ~chool, but most paper ten minutes before it was due. "At the students score 1100 or htgher on the SAT or beginning I told myself that 1 would be the PSAT and maintain a B+ a\·erage. Students in most organized person on earth and put all the program recei\·e free tuition, a Net ID, and Yalies to shame," recalled Eric. full access to Yale libraries. The) take a wide Chris, screenwriter hopeful and Wilbur variecy of classes, rangmg from introductory Cross senior, took Introduction to Pilm courses in Cognitive Science, Film Studtes and Studies. He, like Eric, found completing Linguistics to language courses in Spanish, all of the assignments for class somewhat Chinese and Hebrew, and higher level classes difficult. ''The most challenging thing was in Architecture, Philosophy and Literature. getting all the reading done and making Savana took Charles Musser's sure you remembered the reading," he said.

"Contemporary Documentar} Film and Nonetheless, Chris and Eric said they found Video" class last semester, and thrived in the experience re""-arding.

According to Professor Musser, she it.

The program has allowed the students to participated active)} in the c;mall class of 15 get to know Yalies a little better. "Yale students

•

• •

aren't just people who cross in front of your car," Chris joked. They came to realize that Yalies are ordinary students. "I used to think that Yale students must all be geniuses, but after taking classes with them, they seemed a lot like us," said Chris.

The experience has had an e'\·en greater impact on the way the students feel about Yale as an institution. Although most of the participants in the program grew up in New Haven, Yale has always seemed distant and amorphous. Some high schoolers won't consider Yale because that would mean staying in their hometown. But after such an intimate glimpse of Yale life, some students have changed their minds.

Yale was among the colleges that Chris applied to. "Before, I didn't consider applying because I've lived almost all my life in New Haven," Chris said. "But after the program, I realized Yale has a lot more to offer than I had thought before." Savana expressed similar sentiments. "After the program, I was like, 'Man, I really need to apply to Yale!'" she said.

But like all underclassmen, Savana and Chris must contend with senior privelege.

They didn't get into Professor Lapadula's screenwriting class. The '"-ait list, which included graduate students, was huge, and the rwo highfl)ing Cross seniors had to make way.

"I'm a fan," said Professor ;\fusser, who had recommended the class to Savana, "but she'll have to come to Yale before she can get into that course."

-Btalrict Liu

Tailor-Made TH E

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uncomfortable cross-breed of foreign artifacts and erotica: exotic looking mannequins modeling sheer belly dancing apparel stand adjacent to creepy masks and colorful rugs.

A small foyer leads to the shadowy interior, ideal for lurking robbers or e\il magtclans.

Scents assail those who enter: candles and spices mingle to produce an unfarrultar aroma.

Odd-looking statues from Ghana, ~tgeria, r-:epal and Tirnbuk"tU grin maruacally; some sit in contorted positions, others have settled on their haunches, hands limp at their sides with faces concealing dark secrets. A gigantic door-less wardrobe exposes row after row of African cloth; on top is a row of hundreds of plastic containers brimming with jewelC). One would hardly expect to find this paradise for

9

the Arabian-Nighcs-enthusiast tucked between Hull's art supplies and Thai Pan Asian, but there it is: one of "belly dancing costumes and accessories"-Casablanca.

Sixteen years of collecting merchandise has led to a store full of exotic knick-knacks including hand-woven camel saddle bags, head wraps and a full-body costume from Gandia. In auctions and open-air markets the merchandise has been gathered from the four comers of the world and then jammed into this little store on Chapel stteet.

Surprisingly, in this cultural concoction ordinary jeans hang alongside silky pantaloons.

The jeans are not the only artifacts of American life at Casablanca: NPR's All Thi11gs Con.tidtrtd fuses with the incense. The scattered evidence of American culture in this shop, from blue jeans to Bogart, lends the place an air of parody. The overseer of this unusual collection, the maharaja himself, stands behind a counter plastered with pictures of Morocco, smoking a cigarette, wearing a black beret and thin silver glasses, staring shrewdly at passers by and customers alike.

Twenty-four years ago, Alouah Lachem emigrated to the States from Morocco with his pregnant wife in order to take care of his stepfather. The responsibilities of his store and his daughter made returning to Morocco impossible. Though Lachem left behind Uriga, his birthplace in the Atlas Mountains, he still owns "an ancient house," an heirloom built by his great grandfather. "The walls arc this big," he gestures emphatically with his hands. When he dies, he says, his daughter will inherit the house, though it is unclear what an ,American who has never lived in Morocco will do with such a place.

According to Lachem, his life in the Atlas Mountains was a mix of blissful and intellectual pursuits. Fluent in five languages, Lachem used his linguistic expertise to translate four film writers. He translated native languages to English and vice versa. He intended this only as a part time job, a means of earning extra cash during school, but interpreting was addictive: with each film, Lachem began to build a reputation, successively working with more prominent filmmakers. On the wall behind the counter hangs a p1cture of a younger Lachem standing in a desert surrounded by filmographers and reels of tapes. "That's me with the big Afro," he says.

Exhilarated, he recalls his work with Michael Caine on The Man IV'ho Wo111d Be King. Hidden in a bohemian mecca on Chapel Street, a 'New Haven shop-owner has rubbed elbows with

legendary heroes.

This beret-wearing movie translator has also dabbled in fashion design. "John's on Whitney Ave used to sell my clothes," he says, gesturing south. "Especially during the '70s, they were popular." Lachcm still displays designer duds from his fashion show days, and some of his items appeared at a Coliseum show five years ago.

The mysterious aura of Casablanca might

more like pilgrimages to his past than business trips. When asked about his roots, he replies ina fierce correctional tone, "I am descended from the Berbers, not the Arabs... We are the people who kept Spain free of England." Still, Lachem insistS, "This is my second home," while in the same breath, making sure to identify the jeans as manufactured in France, not the U.S. This instinct to assert his identity, to avoid

C-

give the impression that Lachem is not concerned with ordinary necessities. But his tailoring business proves the contrary: Alouah Lachem is a shrewd businessman. His shop may be a fantastical, but his sewing machine grinds out a profitable, realistic life.

Lachem tailors for local stores such as J. Crew and Ragg's. "Have you ever bought something from J. Crew?" he inquires. "I tailor for J. Crew. If you ever got tailored at J. Crew, l probably did your clothes."

Lachem IS a man of contradictions.

Not only does his enigmatic air collide with his practicality, but his politics are similarly confusing. Ask Lachem his opinion on political affairs and he will claim to be "independent" or uninvolved. There is an uncontrollable excitement m his eyes when he speaks about Moroccan-US relations. (He even pulls out a laminated "Treaty of Peace & Friendship" between the U.S. and Morocco signed in 1787.) His 24 years here have neither erased nor dimmed his Moroccan nationalism. Twice a year he travels to Morocco to acquire more artifacts for h1s store, but the journeys seem

getting lost in mainstream America, epitomizes Casablanca, a queer little boutique whose identity is Less wrapped up in a successful business model than a collection of odds and ends. Lachem's most practical item on sale is a set of purses from Ghana with peace signs woven on them, sold at a price certain to frighten most buyers. He refuctandy admitS that his business intentions are not solely for the almighty dollar, but to indulge his artistic whims.

Hanging from the ceiling, a hairyTanzanian mask with peacock feathers splayed on the top stares unapologetically .at onlookers. This jarring face reveals a world beyond America, far beyond commercialism and into the heart of the wild and magical In response to his The New Journal

10

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customers' fear of the mask, Lachem shrugs and says unapologeticall}', "I Like things that are difficult."

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February 2005

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T

HE HOUSE in the Newhall neighborhood of Hamden seemed perfect to Elizabeth Hayes; it had been on the market for months, waiting patiently for Hayes until she was ready to buy. In March 1996, soon after the sale went through, she began to plan for extensive renovations and went downtown for a building permit. The Hamden building official discouraged her from investing in her new property, suggesting she wait and move to a different neighborhood in a few years.

Elizabeth disregarded the advice-she thought she had gotten a good deal.

Nine years after moving, Hayes has gone from quiet neighbor to community activist, and is currently leading the charge for environmental justice in the Newhall neighborhood. Her home is one of over three hundred built on an old toxic waste dump.

Since she moved, high levels of lead, arsenic, and other hazardous materials have been discovered in several nearby backyards. This environmental disgrace prompted Hayes to take action. She has been one of the most outspoken members of the neighborhood, demanding accountability from the town, state, and corporations responsible for the dumping. Stationed in the back room of the Newhall Coalition office on a freezing December afternoon, surrounded by maps ¡of the neighborhood, newspaper clippings, and pamphlets outlining the state and national standards for various toxins, Hayes recounts the evolution of the environmental catastrophe.

I

1999, pending a possible expansion, surveyors began testing ground around the Hamden Middle School in the Newhall neighborhood. The initial assessment revealed that the school stood on top of a marsh, which had been filled in the 1950s. Consequent testing revealed toxic chemicals in the athletic fields. Still, a study conducted by a team of local professors found no immediate health risk to the teachers or kids. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) reached similar results.

But, in December 2000, D EP surveyors still removed four inches of topsoil from the contaminated areas and the town added a layer of clean fill.

The findings of the initial investigation alarmed teachers, parents and Newhall homeowners and prompted a series of town meetings at the middle school. While the official test results claimed there was no health threat, homeowners pointed to noteworthy cases of teachers who had contracted cancer N

during their long tenures. The DEP and local environmental experts could not guarantee that the landfill was not related to these sicknesses, compelling some teachers to leave their jobs.

That year, Christmas vacation was prolonged for three weeks so that topsoil could be removed. This prompted parents to protest on both sides-some calling for immediate relocation of the school, others complaining that the risk had been blown out of propor tion and that the students be allowed to return to school immediately. Classes reconvened in late January, and architects began drafting plans to expand the school.

Joe Frasier, an employee of Hamden Public Schools, had been following the investigation of the middle school closely but was often to attend the meetings, so he asked his friend Elizabeth H ayes to attend. Childless and relatively new to the neighborhood, H ayes had only a vague interest in the school scandal, but decided to go and listen as Frasier had suggested. Without ties to the school, Hayes was able to hear these discussions from a different perspective. D espite substantial public controversy over the school, there was absolutely no mention of the surrounding community. These meetings prompted Hayes to wonder: if there was a landfill, how far did the contamination extend? The highest levels of waste had been measured in the fields on the outskirts of the school's property, adjacent to residential areas and public parks. And yet, no testing conducted beyond the school's perimeter.

The question of Newhall's vulnerability led Hayes and Frasier to unearth critical history. They started asking some elderly residents of the neighborhood's what the Newhall neighborhood had looked like before the school and houses were built in the '50s.

The unanimous reply was, "a dump." Mayor Carl Amenta explained to them that there had been a mosquito problem in Harnden's natural wetlands, prompting the area to be filled. When they asked what material had been used as fill, the mayor assured them there was nothing to worry about.

With the publicity generated by the middle school's cleanup project and the planned relocation, more reports of cases cancer deaths of former Newhall residents came in from as far as, Mississippi, California and Colorado.

Two Hamden residents, a father and son living in the same house on Newhall Street, had died of cancer within years of each other. Parents reported children with learning disabilities.

Residents stopped eating the vegetables from

their gardens and awaited information about potential toxins in the groundwater. But once again, neither the local authorities, nor the D EP nor the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), could conclude that there was a correlation between the contaminants in the soil and the deaths.

But Joe Frasier felt his community's concerns were being ignored and contacted the DEP to demand further testing. In April2001, at the state's request, the EPA conducted an investigation of surface soil contamination on three residential areas neighboring the middle school. Tests confirmed Frasier's suspicions: eight residential properties were contaminated with up to 4,700 parts per million (ppm) lead in the surface soil and high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH).

Under national standards, lead, which can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in children, is considered hazardous if there are greater than 400 ppm in areas where children play, or 1200 ppm in close proximity. PAH, a compound of several chemicals formed during the incomplete burning of coal, oil, gas, and garbage, sticks to particles in the soil and may be carcinogenic if ingested or exposed to the skin in great quantities. In August 2001, based on the high levels of lead and PAH in the surface soil samples from Newhall, the EPA initiated a "time-critical removal action" and called for further testing by the DEP. Faced with the enormous cost of conducting these soil tests-which require exttacting cores of dirt from as deep as thirty feet below the surface and extensive laboratory testing-the DEP identified four " potential responsible parties" for the contamination: the Board of Education (at one point the owner of the Hamden Middle School property), the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority (RWA), the town of Hamden (which operated a dump in the neighborhood during the 1930s and 40s), and Olin Corporation, a company that owns Winchester Ammunitions, the area's primary manufacturer of hazardous waste.

As the investigation mewed forward, Elizabeth H ayes became a regular fixture at the public meetings, acting as "backup" for Frasier. With a degree in business, Hayes had known nothing about environmental justice, hazardous chemicals or political activism.

She sat quietly and listened from the back of the room, absorbing as muCh of the mosdy technical discussions as she could. " People underestimated me," Hayes says. "They didn't think I have any sense because I like to extract The New Journal

14

all the information, then clissect it. I want to look at things, understand them, read about them before I open my mouth. Yes, I like to be informed." Over time she learned the etiquette of activism and the vocabulary of tox.ics, so when Frasier asked Hayes to spend an entire Saturday in early 2002 at an environmental justice conference at Yale, she agreed.

"That was a major turning point for me," Hayes recalls. Before attencling the conference, she had viewed the problem-from the perspective of her own neighborhood, only considering the issues in terms of how they affected her and her neighbors in the immecliate future. At Yale that day, Hayes was compelled by examples of other contaminated sites strikingly similar to Newhall and began to look at her community's experience in a clifferent light. She met professors and students who were interested in the Newhall problem, and returned home that evening with a renewed sense of ~ency. "I wanted to know how we could get the system to work for us, because that's what it's supposed to do."

At Yale, Hayes met important contacts, including Forestry students Vic Edgerton and Sarah Vogel, who would later conduct a survey of the Newhall neighborhood. She also got in touch with the Toxics Action Center (fAC), an organization that aids New England neighborhood groups fighting pollution in their communities. The Newhall Coalition, formed in the early stages of the investigation during 2001, was now supported and advised by the TAC. Meanwhile, Hayes continued to attend seminars and research contamination and political activism.

H amden residents who didn't live in Newhall were still mainly concerned about the fate of the middle school. Controversy continued to rage between parents, teachers, school administrators and town officials over the appropriate response to the contamination.

Close to the New Haven town line and located in the lowest-income neighborhood of Hamden, the middle school's sole building houses every seventh and eighth-grade student in town. Matriculating from eight different elementary schools, the educational fate of many were at stake. The school's planned expansion, which led to the initial cliscovery of contamination, was a response to the school's overpopulation. Concerned parents lobbied for an extensive renovation of the building. When test results began to come in, however, Hamden residents had justification for a complete relocation of the school and

put pressure on the mayor to find a "more suitable" property.

The cost of rebuilding the school at its current site in Newhall was roughly S3 million less than the cost of buying another property and constructing an entirely new school. But this didn't cliscourage many middle school teachers and parents who advocated relocation.

In a March 2001 Parent-Teacher Association's (PTA) meeting at H amden Middle School, members voted 68-16 in favor of moving students out of the school even if a new building wasn't built within three years. When Mayor Amento announced his decision to run for a second term in June 2001, he listed the relocation among his top priorities.

"It was a political ploy," Hayes says of Amen to's p romise to relocate. While extremely popular with groups like the PTA and Connecticut Teacher's Union, plans for relocation angered other residents who felt they clid not have a voice in the decision. Controversy flared up again when Meadowbrook Golf Course, a 63 acre stretch of grass in the middle of Hamden, was decided upon as the future site of the middle school. In the Summer and Fall of 2002, two declicated activist groups butted heads over whether Hamden's largest expanses of green space should be developed.

The two groups, The New Hamden Middle School at Meadowbrook Action Committee (M & M) and Save Open Space in Hamden, Inc. (SOS), waged a paper battle in front of Wal-Mart and Shaw's, handing out flyers to fellow residents. T hat month, letters to the eclitor published in The New Haven Register reflected disgrunded residents on both sides of the fence: some decried the resistance to overdue renovation of a school for their children. Others addressed the ~herent value of permanent, open, green space in Hamden.

The collective eye of the Hamden public had shifted away from Newhall to the local golf course.

A

HAMDEN MIDDLE ScHOOL, as the day's first class was beginning, students signed in and ~eachers emerged from the faculty lounge with coffee mugs and Xerox copies. Principal Frank Pepe, an impressively tall man with large features and slicked-back hair, enters the main office to handle a shipment that had just arrived. Inside the box was a new computer, which he was to deliver to the home of a student battling cancer. Upstairs, Assistant Principal, Michael Novia juggled simultaneous calls on his office phone and his cell phone, while maintaining a T

conversation with students, and his secretary.

In the course of a few minutes, he assigned Saturday detention to a boy who had thrown a tennis ball in class, interrogated another about touching a girl's purse in homeroom, and let a girl return to class after determining she had not purposefully knocked over her teacher's plant. He micromanages the day-to-day affairs of the high school as they show up constandy at his office door.

Mr. Novia describes his faculty's general attitude toward the contamination as fcxlder for jokes rather than a serious concern. Since plans for a new school were announced two years ago, the initial outrage has faded. "It's a done deal, right? They said it was safe to keep the school here for as long as it takes to build a new one, which they say will open in September 2006," he says, shrugging his shoulders. At the mention of the Newhall Coalition's efforts to have a voice in the D EP's remediation project currently underway in the neighborhood and ask him if there are any teachers that he knows of who are involved in these efforts.

Mr. Novia looks puzzled. "Newhall Coalition?

I don't know anything about that."

In his ninth year at Hamden Middle School, Principal Frank Pepe is eager to move to the new location. " It's a great thing for Hamden," he says. 'We need a new school and I am amazed that there was so much opposition to the construction in the first place. Why wouldn't people want to support a new school?" He goes onto to say that the contamination is an extremely sensitive topic which he preferred not to bring up unless .absolutely necessary. "There were sicknesses--deaths even-among the faculty.

Some teachers chose to retire because of this.

Now that we know there is no threat, I don't like to talk about it."

E

UZABETH HAYES'S attitude is the opposite of Pepe's: "I want everyone to be informed!

Information is freedom! How can you fight someone if they have all the information and you are ignorant?" In the two-and-a-half years since she attended the environmental justice seminar at Yale, Hayes has helped the Coalition sell its message and won the support of the TAC, the Yale Forestry School, and the Boston law firm, McRoberts, Roberts, & Rainer.

In Hartford at a public hearing with the DEP's commissioner, asked how involved the Newhall Coalition would be in future decisions about the remecliation process. Mike Harder, a representative of the DEP, responded that the

February 2005

15

community could have @ed for convening status, but that "the window of opportunity had closed" and the consent order would not include the Newhall Coalition in any capacity. "I was livid!" Hayes exclaimed.

At that point it seemed all the community's efforts were futile, and they would have to rely on the authority of the DEP to promote their interests, which it had failed to do in the past. "So we decided to get legaL No one will listen to you until you get legal," Hayes, but that point a veteran activist, says knowingly." Hayes contacted seven firms, all outside of Connecticut, and decided to hire Mark Roberts, a Boston attorney with experience in representing communities in environmental lawsuits. In May 2003, a suit was @ed against the town and state, claiming the Newhall community was unrepresented in the remediation process and that the residents were given no way to formally address their concerns to the DEP. Over one hundred residents signed on to the suit, representing over one third of the homes in Newhall.

The media ate up the story and word of the lawsuit spread quickly, attracting environmental activists across the country, including the legendary Lois Gibbs, of the famed Love Canal case. Gibbs visited Newhall in November 2003 and spoke in support of the Newhall Coalition and their battle against the DEP and Olin Corporation.

While the immediate health risk to Hamden residents may not have been as dire as those in Love Canal in the 1970s, Gibbs drew striking comparisons between the two communities and urged Elizabeth and others to continue challenging the standards of the DEP. "It was a huge inspiration to have Lois come here," said Hayes. "The DEP didn't like it at all because of the publicity, but we had been struggling through frustrating times and she gave us the motivation and hope to keep 16

moving forward."

And there was plenty to cause frustration. A timeline was established that set 2006 as the target date for the remediation. But in recent meetings, the DEP has projected it may not be until 2008 before Newhall is cleaned up. Questions were raised about the DEP's conflict of interest for delay. ''You want to talk about conflicts of interest; you should look at where the DEP gets its money!" Hayes says.

"Olin Corporation is giving the DEP money for the cleanup, but the DEP is supposed to be protecting us from companies like Olin. Who's watching the watchdog?"

Newhall residents were also concerned about the fate of their neighborhood if the middle school is relocated. With property values dropping, the community runs the risk of heading into a period of decay. When the school moves, residents fear Newhall will be become a ghost town, not attracting any new families or businesses. "Having the middle school here is a great asset to Newhall because it makes people look around and notice us."

T

HE MOST RECENT PUBUC MEETING of the Newhall Coalition in December, which Hayes presided over, included updates from their lawyer, Mark Roberts, and Jay Rasku, a representative from the TAC. Olin had just finished putting four inches of topsoil over ten of the designated "hotspots." But, Henry Blue, an outspoken old-timer of the NAC, delivered a speech about why he had refused to allow Olin to cover up his property with the topsoil, vehemently declaring that he believed in doing a job right the first time. He was unwilling to let Olin get away with such a quick 6x. Mark Roberts spoke next, presenting The New Journal

the latest developments in the investigation phase of the remediation project, doing his best to defend the capping process derided by Blue.

When Roberts mentioned that cleanup may be pushed back to 2008, Hayes glared at him from her front-row seat at, but he seemed not to notice. One resident asked if he knew where Olin would put the waste once it had been removed from their properties.

At one point, there had been discussion of dumping the contaminated soil in one of the fields behind the middle school, but a substantial outcry put an end to that discussion. 'We don't know yet.

Probably a hazardous waste site somewhere," Robert's responded. "I say we dump it in the mayor's house," someone responded in a low voice to quiet cheers and giggles.

Other residents spoke up about tax abatement, health concerns, the most recent timeline for cleanup, and the technical aspects of the lawsuit. Rasku and Blue both urged more neighbors to join the suit, and one woman invited others to join her in attending meetings at City Hall: ''If they won't come to us, then we will go to them. We pay taXes, .. and if they are representing us then they need to hear our voices."

H ayes later characterized the meeting as a tame one, insinuating Aying insults and harsh words exchanged on former occasions, but were impressive enough. The small, individual efforts of these citizens to demand acknowledgement, which have added up to a substantial force for the town and state to reckon with ooking back on that first discussion with the town building official in 1996, Hayes shakes her head. ''I had no idea what was going on. If I had only known ... " Her voice trails off, but she is February 2005

L

smiling. Despite the setbacks, she is hopeful that the N ewhall Coalitio n's work is making a difference. She recently attended an EPA conference in Washington, D C, where she met a pro fessor from John's H opkins University who has joined her cadre. Students at the Environment21 Resource Institute at Storrs University are now also working with the Coalition, and Elizabeth keeps a pile o f info rmational handouts in the office to give to anyone who is interested in the technical aspects o f the remediation. "This is my way of giving back to the community," she says. " I have learned how to become my own advocate, and informatio n is the key. I want to share that with every person in this neighborhood, and maybe someday they will all want to know." She shares a story of an 85-year-old woman who approached her a few mo nths ago and said, "Baby, when will all this be over? I've got to get o n with my life."

Elizabeth has made a promise to her neighbor: " 2006;' she says. She only hopes she can keep it.

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17

The Green

Architects around the world are clarno

use

to build Yale a piece

by Flora Lichtman

Levin into supporting this new building. "If we presume to be a leader, we should act like a

o~etop of a hill, overlooking a grove of towering oaks and skinny pines, a glassy, ultra-modern building will sit. No smoke will puff from its chimneys. No Sew2ge will flow from its pipes. No heat will escape in the winter. No cool air will seep out in the summer. Its roof will be blanketed with ferns and moss. A natural breeze will drift through its sunny halls. Nothing inside will be tainted by pesticides or other chemicals. This is Yale's promise-a tiny slice of paradise on Prospect Street by 2008.

The School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES) raised 27 million dollars to design and construct an environmentally-friendly building to be located in Sachem's Wood-an ironic misnomer for the dilapidated one-acre field hemmed in by the backside of Olin Memorial Laboratory, Kline Biology Tower and a power plant. This project has attracted the attention of architects from all over the world. Robert A.M. Stern, Dean of Yale School of Architecture (YSOA), who has designed corporate offices for many high-profile companies, including Walt Disney and The Gap. describes this project as unprecedented.

"I don't know of any university building that lus such high environmental ambitions as this one," he says. Universities have not been enviro-trendsetters, and until now, Yale lus been no exception. This is precisely the argument that Steven Kellen, FES professor and lead faculty member working on the project, has employed to pressure President

leader," Kellert says.

But can Yale pull it off? The project is ambitious for many reasons, not the least of which is the building's designated site. It will be a challenge to design a building that communes with nature in a city like New Haven, on a street like Prospect. "The building is going in what would have to be described as a rat hole," says James Gustav Speth, the Dean of FES, the founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, former Director of the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and the author of RedS~ at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. "I mean it is right out here," he says, pointing out the window of his office. "It's a rat hole. There's a big power plant sitting there now and it's the ugliest thing at Yale."

The Yale architectural landscape also poses a challenge for designers: it will take imagination to build an ultra-modern building that meets sustainability requirements and also blends into Yale's gothic context. In designing the recent expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, architect Yoshi Taniguchi worked hard to harmonize the new building with its midtown surroundings. Paul Goldberger, the Dean of Parsons School of Design, writes in a review for The Ntw Yorker, "Until now, the Modern has had an unresolved, almost hesitant relationship with midtown

Manhattan .... The old Modem occupied the street in sullen isolation; this one dances with its neighbors." The architect of the new FES building will have to work hard to get this building to tango with its stony Prospect Street companions. 'The gothic context is a fundamental expression of Yale," says Dean Stern. "Plopping a glassy box down in the middle of it doesn't seem to be enough of a response."

The architect will also face logistical stumbling blocks. The building seeks to be "energy-neutral" (it will consume no energy that it hasn't generated itself), a system technically ambitious to design, even in a vacuum. The site picked out for the building, Sachem's Wood, is a sloping hill; constructing any building on this type of terrain is tricky.

The climate is also a concern; a general criterion of sustainable buildings is that they are naturally ventilated-that means no air conditioning. New Haven gets hot and humid in the summers. Designing a building in a New Haven that is naturally ventilated and also bearable to work in twelve months a year seems almost impossible to imagine. So can it be done? "I doubt it," says Dean Stern.

The implications of the success or failure of this building will extend far beyond Yale's gates. This little-50,000 square foot-building has generated a buzz among architects around the globe. "One thing you appreciate when you go around the world is how much people look to places like Yale," says University Planner Pamela Delphenich, an architect herself.

At an international

The New Journal 22

ustainability conference in Oregon last month, the new FES building "was the talk of the conference," says Delphenich, and ground hasn't even been broken yet. Over the next few years, architects, universities and the environmental community at large will be watchlng the progress of Yale's new FES building. The success of thls little building will set an architectural benchmark likely to be noted around the world.

A

begin for at least eight months, the process swell underway: an archltect has been chosen and a landscape archltect solicited to turn Sachem's Wood into a wood. The building will be the home of the Yale Environmental Center and will serve as a base for the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. It will house the undergraduate Environmental Studies department and provide office space for Yale Students Environmental Coalition (YSEC). I twill also have exhibit space, meeting rooms, an auditorium and an environmental library. The building is one piece of the long term makeover of Science Hill, which t stretches from the end of Hillhouse Ave. to the Divinity school. ''This whole area is going r to be landscaped in a very different, and I think, spectacular way," says James Gustav Speth, D ean of FES. Unlike the other departments--chemistry and engineering most notably-with buildings popping up on Science Hill, FES was requited to raise all the money for construction itself.

1 "The chemistry building next door frustrates 1 me a little because it gets paid for by Yale," said Stephen Kellett, a professor at FES and the lead faculty member in charge of the construction of the new building. "Because we are like a self-sufficient professional school, we are expected to raise our own resources."

Kellett is the visionary behind the building, and has been pushing the project for four years. When Dean Speth arrived at FES, one of the 6rst projects he took on was a fundraising

u

:LTHOUGH CONSTRUCTION WON'T

February 2005

campaign for the building. Donors include Richard Kroon, former analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette and managing partner of its Sprout Group venture capital fund; Edward Bass, a member of the Yale Corporation and Chief Executive Officer of Fine Line Inc., a diversified venture and investment capital company; Carl Knobloch, for whom the Yale Environment Center will be named; and Gilman Ordway, who operates a ranch in Wyoming.

Twenty-seven million dollars may seem extravagant, but it's a pittance compared to what Yale is spending on its residential college renovations, projected tocost$80 million nearly a decade ago. Also, sustainable architecturethe genre to which thls building will belongis, in general, more expensive initially because it requires sophisticated design and advanced technology to reduce energy consumption, pollution and other negative environmental impacts. The rationale is that the investment is made up in maintenance costs, which are usually lower for green buildings because energy consumption is lower. Universities are especially good sites for sustainable buildings because the cost savings are guaranteed to last. ''Yale doesn't build buildings for the ten-year haul; Yale builds for the one thousand-year haul," observes Dean Stern. Old universities stick around-and so do their buildings.

Although it's difficult to know whether the "we can do it ourselves" rhetoric was adopted after FES learned that Yale did not plan to fund the project, either way, FES has turned its self-sufficiency into a dogma for the building. The fact that the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies raised the money alone is important. Kellett has expressed one of his design objectives for the new building, with the slogan, ''Build a Ford not a- Ferrari," a catch phrase he later describes as "a cutesy wutesy way of saying if Yale had subsidized the project, the building would not have the widespread applicability it does now: it wouldn't be an instrUctional model for others because they could say, 'Oh yeah you built it because Yale is so rich,' or 'because you got all this extra money.' It's' very important we don't spend too much.'' To insure that Yale is building something that other universities can emulate, the costs can not be excessive. ''We are willing to spend an initial cost premium, but not

a great initial cost premium and not one that can't be easily rationalized by paybacks in a reasonable period of time," Kellett adds.

FES has invested more in thls construction than money. The new building has been pitched as a physical embodiment of the century-old principles of the school.

The mandate is to create a building that is a "symbol of FES' academic program," according to Bob Dinseeko, the landscape architect in charge of Science Hill's overall redevelopment. Delphenich, the University Planner, adds that commissioning a building for which the physical structure has meaning is unusual. ''We do not often do a project that is so symbolic-it is a physical manifestation of their values." In its broadest meaning, sustainability will be the concept embodied.

At the most basic level, the building must be designed in such a way as to minimize adverse effects on the natural environment. :, Devdopment, sprawl, and wasteM buildings are critical environmental concerns: ''The environmental crisis is very much a crisis of the built environment,'' Kellett' says. A climbing world population and the urbanization of undeveloped countries hav~ exacerbated development issues, making, the need for sustainable design even more pressing.

The traditional approach to sustainable development has been to mitigate, minimize and avoid the physical effects of building.

Sustainable architecture emphasizes attention to energy and resource use, atmospheric. degradation, toxi6cation of food chains, pollution and loss of biodiversity. But what is perhaps most exciting about the new FES building is that it promises to go beyond the traditional definition of sustainability, to incorporate a less mainstream and more . cutting edge vision of green design. "From . my perspective,'' Kellett explains, "there is another side to the environmental crisis. And that is the increasing separation and alienation . of people from the natural environment."

Kellett's vision for sustainable architecture, seeks to reconnect humans with nature. "We. evolved in a biological world, not an atcificial wodd. Our fundamental physical, mental and, I would even argue, moral or spiritual well-being depends upon our experiential connection to nature. We are just beginning tCl discover what that means. But it appears to be a biologically encoded need." ' Biophilia, the theory that humans have an innate tendency to affiliate with nature, u.-as 6rst proposed by the well-,

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known ffarvard biolo~st E.O. Wilson. Wilson and Kellert later published Hypotheses on Biophilia, further outlining this principle. Biophillic design, introduced in the book, demands more than renewable energy, good insulation and minimized waste. Also referred to as "positiveimpact design," biophillic design requires a more rigorous interpretation of what it means to be green. Kellen sees in this building the potential to "achieve a new benchmark of sustainable design by expanding the envelope of what we mean by sustainable design. We have kind of high hopes for this."

If you believe, as Kellert does, that the crisis of the built environment is not an intrinsic and inevitable failure of the modern world, the question becomes: how can architecture not only mitigate adverse effects on natural systems, but also, as he puts it, "restore a degree of positive experiential connection" to nature? Part of the biophilia hypothesis is that humans learn better and are more productive in natural environments, which makes a college campus a perfect testing ground for the theory. Examples already exist on campus, Kellett argues, pointing out, "The old campus is replete with those lcinds of connections."

The courtyards, the ivy growing up the sides of buildings, the stone help us feel connected to the natural world.

According to Kellett, who was not trained as an architect, successfully fusing biophilia and architectural design hinges on attention to context, which seems to be the crux of good contemporary design. "You can do it in various ways: directly, indirectly and symbolically. You can do it with the materials you use, the environments you create, the ornamental qualities you create, but you can also do with the relationship of the building to its landscape." Kellett argues that a building must show a commitment to, and a compatibility with the place where it is built. There is an integrity and sense of place on Old Campus, he says. ''You don't feel that way at Kline Biology Tower, I think because it is out of scale ecolo~cally and culturally with its context. Even though it was considered when it was built to be one of the great Phillip Johnson buildings, it was almost built like it stood by itself. without any relation, like it was in a vacuum."

The context for the FES building is Sachem's Wood: in fact, the new building includes a title of "stewardship over Sachem's Wood," as Dean Speth puts it. The Wood will

24

be landscaped by the Olin Corporation, in conjunction with Cesar Pelli-who designed the acclaimed Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

If all goes according to plan, Sachem's Wood will become a destination spot for students and faculty. In its present condition, Sachem's Wood requires more than a makeovernothing less than serious surgery will turn it into a pleasant space on campus. The Wood's revitalization is just one part of a dialogue that was started 15 years ago about how to redesign Prospect Street and Science Hill.

Yale has cropped up in spurts, and Science Hill, a half-mile stretch, may be the last project of this scale that Yale takes on for a while. "It is the last remaining superblock," notes. Dinseeko, one of Yale's landscape architects. There isn't much more space left that needs redesigning.

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UNIVERSITY-SPONSORED

APPROACH

to sustainability is relatively new.

Following the advice of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Management, last year Yale hired Julie Newman, formerly the Sustainability Director at the University of New Hampshire, to direct sustainability at Yale. Given the lack of attention paid to sustainability in recent renovations, the environmental community welcomed the creation of Newman's position. In comparison to other universities, Yale stacks up poorly. "Well, yes it's behind, but I say that reluctantly," Newman says. ''While sure, we're not as far as Harvard, there's so much fire and excitement about this at Yale and that will enable us to move forward."

Perhaps Yale's most pressing problem relating to its built environment is energy use.

"The momentum for the greening of Yale is beginning to grow," Speth says. ''A lot of the greening of the University is focused on the energy system of the University, which is antiquated, wasteful and polluting." Speth says. A FES committee designed to evaluate the energy use at Yale found that Yale's energy consumption was high relative to other schools. " Yale has more greenhouse gas emissions than 32 countries," Speth says, with the qualifier, "they are little countries. My big concern as a Dean here is to try to encourage the University to do something about this."

Environmentalism aside, Yale will have to do something. It's now the law.

Last June, Connecticut adopted a greenhouse gas reduction policy and a renewable energy policy that will control the State's power utilities. T he question for Yale, Speth thinks, is how the University wants to respond: "Does ' Yale want to keep up with the state? Do we want to be leaders on this? Do we want to be the last people to do something?"

The new FES building has been pitched as an opportunity for Yale to show a commitment to being a part of the solution.

Yale recognized this--and in typical Yale fashion, the building has been promised to be the greenest of the green. ''When we started to talk about this four years ago, it was pretty strange stuff," Kellett admits. ''Very few people understood what we were tallcing about. In a few short years, the University has become extraordinarily committed to the notion of sustainability." This building is an opportunity for Yale to prove it.

The concept of sustainability, from a philosophical point of view, is well-matched for a university like Yale. "We want to be a realization of our ideals in built form because we are basically a school about sustainability;' Kellert says. Yale has sustained itself for three hundred years; it seems apt that Yale should adopt an architecture that also values longevity.

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ITH SUCH LOFTY AMBmONS, AND

such a hilly, humid, urban site, the architect selected for the project will have to have a great deal of imagination to pull this off. To add to the challenge, green architecture requires incorporating sophisticated science and technology into the design; according to Kellert, it is tricky because "sustainable design CUJS across every function."

The paradox is that the architect must also be able to divorce himself from traditional uses of mechanical systems in the building: Sustainable design is what Kellett dubs "back to the future design." To make a building sustainable one must 6nd alternatives to energy-wasting machines. "One hundred years ago, people just sweated it out," Dean Stern says, "and went home at 3pm in the summer."

Today our expectations have changed.

The New Journal

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1

process of choosing an architect was highly elective and demanded the attention of two committees. The Architect Selection Committee is made up mostly of adminjstrators-"the committee with the teeth," says James Axley, a landscape architect who co-teaches a sustainable design class with Kellen. Axley himself sits on the other committee, the FES Facility Committee. tephen Kellert is the Chairman of both. The election Committee is "nominally in power o advise the President," Axley says, but timately, President Levin has the final sway.

The initial list of sixty potential architects was chosen based on the architects' xperience with sustainable design. The first ut was done internally, without input from e architects. "Doing a shower stall for your om doesn't qualify you to do a building at ate," said Delphenich, who serves on the dministrative committee. From the original ixty, thirty were asked for " RFQs" (Requests or Qualifications). Twenty-four of the thirty esponded to the request. ("This was a very 'gh number," says Kellert.) Architects on the original list included William McDunough, who did a high-profile green building at Oberlin College. After this, 12 were asked to submit a proposal indicating their approach to the project and invited for an on-site visit.

Six of these architects were interviewed by the selection committee, which included President Levin, Dean Stern of the School of Architecture and Stephen Kellen. Delphenich, also present at all the interviews, said that of the six, "three really stood out. There was really no question." The three finalists were all European-not a surprise considering Europe is ahead of the United States in terms of green design. "Sustainability has been embedded in U'chitecture there for years--they are way ahead of us," Delphenich says.

Europe, according to Dean Speth, "resisted totally ventilated environments." Europeans created laws setting sustainability standards: "ln an office, you must be within thirty feet of a window in Europe." Stern adds. He attributes the laws to stronger office-worker unions that shed for these types of regulations; he also bruary 2005

,,

notes that, for the most part, the climate is less harsh, making green design easier to implement. The U.S. had similar standards in the '20s, which affected the construction of Rockefeller Center in which all desks ace within 27 feet of a window.

But after the invention of air conditioning, the standards were quickly dropped. Sustainability concepts are just beginning to resurface in this country, but if Europe is any indication, green design will be a significant element of the future of architecture.

To decide between the final three architects, Yale sent Kellert, Delphenich and several other members of the committees around the world to see the architects' buildings and kick the tires, so to speak. The Yale representatives spent most of their rime in London and the Netherlands. 'We went to visit many of the buildings of the finalists because there is rheto ric and there is reality," Kellert says. "A lot o f this is new. So you have to go see how these things perform."

The traveling evaluators were concerned '"'-ith the user-friendliness of the buildings.

They asked questions like: "Okay, they did all these things to reduce mechanical energy and they eliminated air conditioning, okay, but do you like working here? Is it comfortable? After all, it's about comfort too." Seeing the buildings in person helped a great deal in coming to a conclusion, Delphenich and Kellen agreed.

The three ardutects that made it to the final round are what Axley calls "the cream of the crop"-Alan Short, Stefan Behnisch and Sir Michael Hopkins. Short, Chair of Architecture at Cambridge University, who is renowned for naturally cooling his buildings v.1th o>ersized chimneys, plans to work with tus Cambridge coUeague Andrew Wood and em-ironmental engmeer, t.Wcolm

Cook.

The Sunday,.

Times described his I work as, "heart-on-sleeve, manifesto architecture. It is saying that_ ecological thinking can and should result in buildings that not only are different, bu( look different as well, with new shapes, new roofscapes." His buildings are bold, beautiful, and always green.

J Stefan Behnisch works out of Stuttgart, Germany and is slated to teach at the Yale, School of Architecture (YSOA) next year. His corresponding environmental team includes .

Tomas Auer, a leading faculty member at the YSOA. The members of the selection committee visited Behnisch's 200,000 square foot Genzyme building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of his most famous works. Behnisch's firm, Behnisch, Behnisch & Parmer, also designed the Forestry Research Building in the Netherlands. This building, like Genzyme, pushed the envelope of sustainable design. I t was described by the firm as a "low-tech building with a high-tech result where scientists can work in almost Edenlike surroundings." Of the final architects selected, Behnisch's work is perhaps the most cutting edge, but can he design a green building that 6ts in the Yale context? His green architecture is often glassy and modern-it is hard to imagine a sister to the Genzyme, building blending in with its would-be gothic neighbors.

Sir Michael Hopkins, who tllugbt at YSOA last year, focuses on using environment:all} friendly products in his designs. His team is.. made up of Patrick Bellum and Ove Arup.

Hopkins' most significant project was buge: â&#x20AC;˘ he won the design contest for University of Nottingham's new million square foot campus in Nottingham, England. He also designed, tbe new and expensive Parliament building in

25

ups t h

\Vestminster.

His designs are black ruxedos to Short's informal and flamboyant party outfits. Hopkins' work is more academic than that of Short or Behnisch-but perhaps less fun.

But Hopkins' tuxedos are more green than black. One can imagine his formal Parliament building quietly moving into a neighborhood that includes Harkness Tower and Sterling Memorial Library, and that formalism ultimately may be a good fit for Yale's mandate.

And in fact Kellett confirmed this. Although nothing has been finalized, Hopkins is Yale's top choice.

According to Axley, "the architects that are competing are very interested in securing this project." But why would these world-class architects care about securing a 27 million dollar, 50,000 square foot building, in which they'll be at the mercy of a dozen egos, all with deep interests and firm ideas about how the building should come out? There seem to be several reasons, beyond the obvious "it's Yale and Yale is famous"-though that part of the story should not be underestimated. "This is a very interesting building and of course, Yale is an important client," Dean Stern says. Axley concurs, "'Ilus project is going to be relatively high profile, well beyond the national level."

But Yale also provides a type of security that other project sites do not. As Axley points out, architects want their work to last. ¡~chitects are in the game of sustaining buildings. Yale

26

e

a n t e because it is old.

Architects assume their buildings will remain for hundreds of years."

In sustainable archltecture, this point is also important.

Because the assumption is that the building will stick around for as long as the University does, the risk of putting up a premium with the promise of future savings is less risky.

This may be smart business in a more fundamental way. This little piece of paradise could be an indicator of Yale's academic future.

"President Levin seems to have more interest in this--that's the rumor," Axley says. "Why was the faculty at FES expanded? Why was Dean Speth selected? Was that an accident?" Axley suggests that it was not. "Levin is interested in FES and because of this, environmental studies is of greater importance." Axley argues that because environmental problems are not going away, putting the University's stock in environmental research is a safe bet. Building this new, state-of-the-art, definition-expanding building demonstrates a commitment to environmentalism that will inevitably contribute to Yale's image as environmentally conscious. It will, in turn, attract environmental researchers, which will bring more grants. "There is an ethical and moral responsibility,'' Axley says. "But also this can position the research machine to keep the intellectual machine growing."

At the very least, the process of looking for a green architect has affected the mindset of powerful people on campus. "I came away with a whole new level of commitment to addressing sustainability in projects. I think we have a moral obligation," Delphenich says after her trip to Europe. Competition with other universities will also drive Yale -forward-the "bigger better'' mentality, as Delphenich dubs it, serves as a prod. "One trap we haven't fallen into," she assures me, "is hiring significant architects to do wildly controversial, wildly expensive buildings to attract students. There is a certain cache to putting .up a building by a world architect; I don't think we've felt the need to do that. We've selected architects because they are right for the job."

According to President Levin, a final The New Journal

decision has been made and negotiations are underway. Delphenich says that there was "complete unanimity" regarding the architect who was selected. He was seen as the most holistically-thinking of the three, Delphenich added. "President Levin has a great talent for architecture and he makes decisions for the right reasons." But ultimately, the idea was that after paring down the list from thirty to three, any of the architects could have done the job. "It is up to us to make sure that President Levin sees only the people who can do the job--then it's his sense of what's right," Delphenich says.

If it seems strange to have President Levin, an administrator with no architectural training, choose the architect, Dean Stern points to the advantages of having a non-architect make the final call: "I sometimes think that it's better that they are not hired by other architectsarchitects tend to be jealous." Plus, Stern adds, "Levin has very good instincts."

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HE ARCHITECT SELECTED FACES A TAU.

order of inventing sustainability on Yale's campus for an audience that stretches around the world, on a hilly site, on a superblock. in a region with hot and humid summers, in New Haven, Connecticut. There is a lot riding on this building.

But in some ways success is certain. All three finalists are acclaimed and green-minded.

The money has been raised. The University and FES seem determined to build What we will not know until 2008, or until the building has been put to the test, is not whether it will be an obvious failure-Yale would never allow that-but whether it will be a subde failure.

Although we don't know what shade the building will ultimately be, for the first time, Yale blue is shooting for deep green. +

Special thanks to: Qi Yan • Casey Miner Katy Rivlin • Sara Schneider Ricky Kamp • Adina Lopatin Lissy Desantis • Ruth Lichtman • •

From: TheNewJgprnl Flcra wh1111a11, a stffior ;, Da1.'tfljXJrl Ccikge, is tht Edi/Qr-i11-Chitj of 1NJ.

February 2005

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Poverty is at our doorstep every Sunday. But poverty because they're not working hard enough. Poverty is .about personal responsibility. We as a black communi II

T

O CALL THE WORSHIP SERVlCE at Immanuel Missionary Baptist Church "vibrant'' is like calling the Statue of Liberty "a big girl"-it doesn't quite make the point. The Immanuel service inspires emotional intensity within its parishioners. Neither forced nor flamboyant, the service seems to produce deep communal spirituality with surprising naturalness. It is a participatory experience: a dozen different people lead the service at different points, using scripted and spontaneous call-and-response rather than prolonged lecturing. The steady stream of soulful music emanating from the choir to the back pews creates a soundtrack for this dramatic religious expression. Even for an atheist guest, it is hard to resist being swept away.

"Are you of a different faith?" the woman beside me asked after I passed on the communion plate, foregoing wine and a wafer. The question came at the tail end of a service during which the pastor had nearly blown out the audio system with shouts of "Come on over!" and "Jump up in Jesus' name!" A number of women had broken into tears and a well-dressed gendeman had leapt out of his seat, stomping and yelling in a spontaneous spiritual spasm. These passionate worshipers did not seem out of place; throughout the service, dozens of parishioners called out and clapped to some of the best gospel music and most thrilling oratory I had ever heard. My previous religious life had consisted of coerced High Holiday attendance at Beth Shalom Synagogue in Seattle, so for me the black church experience was a completely new one. It wasn't that I was merely, as my neighbor had clearly noticed, "of a different faith"-! was of an entirely different world. ~'>ÂŁMANUEL

I

BAPTIST stands on the corner of Chapel and Day streets

in New Haven. It is pyramid-shaped and made of brown, layered

brick-it's distincdy 1970s modern look belies Immanuel's status as Connecticut's oldest black Baptist church. The congregation dates back to 1825, when several black members of New Haven's two Baptist churches began meeting in secret to pray. A 1985 church brochure states that Immanuel's founders "worshipped in halls, yards, private homes or wherever possible" until 1845, when the white First Baptist Church of New H aven recognized them as an independent congregation.

The Third Baptist Church of New Haven became New Haven's first autonomous black church.

But, New Haven's African-American Baptists continued to meet informally until1884, when they built their own church in Immanuel's current location o n Chapel Street. The church that was built housed the Immanuel community for nearly ninety years, but condemned by the city for half its life, it was in use for only forty. The "new" church was erected in 1973; its construction was the pet project of then30

Reverend C.M. Cofield. His wife, Elsie, had urged him to buy an old Episcopal Church that was up for sale nearby, but Cofield wanted a new building, whatever the price. "I thought black people needed to plan something of their own, not something whites used up and sold to black folk." With loans from a few local banks, Cofield raised $7 million for the upgrade, creating another first in the I mmanuel history book. No black church had ever raised more than one million for a new edifice.

The Cofields, married nearly sixty years, are products of a bygone era. They stand when their guest excuses himself to find the restroom and are too polite to complain when our interview runs grossly overtime. Rev. Cofield's quiet manner casts his slight frame in a brooding seriousness. "I had difficulty finding satisfaction in what I'd done," he says of his 53 years as a pastoL "I never really felt at peace with myself until I'd retired." I t was a curious admission from the Reverend,whose 36 years behind the Immanuel pulpit make him the longest-serving pastor in the congregation's nearly two century history.

By contrast, Elsie Cofield, Rev. Cofield's wife, is warm and effusive.

For nearly twenty years she has been a celebrated community leader in her own right. After retiring from teaching in 1987, Mrs. Cofield founded the AIDS I nterfaith Network, a non-profit organization providing comprehensive care to people living with AIDS in greater New Haven.

Beginning with just a few volunteers in the church basement, AIDS Interfaith boasts its own building across the street from the church and has become one of the city's top two agencies providing HIVI AIDS support. Mrs. Cofield's office is replete with plaques and awards from dozens of organizations, from the NAACP to Hispanos Unidos, honoring her work in the fight against AIDS. "We've done a lot," she admits with a grin.

The Cofields are iconic at Immanuel Baptist Church. Besides building the church, they worked to ensure that the "community would not be forgotten." Establishing a weekly soup kitchen, a "clothes closet," and a homeless shelter, the Cofields almost single-handedly made Immanuel one of the more active churches in supporting the black community. Both see public service as a fundamental element of their faith. As Rev. Cofield puts it, "I don't think a church is authentic unless it has a missionary philosophy and action."

On the surface, the Cofields' mission still plays a prominent role at Immanuel. For Ola Sanders, a member of the church since 1952, Immanuel is still a "foundation of New Haven" both "spiritually and socially." She points to the soup kitchen, the homeless shelter, and the low-income housing that the church rents to New Haveners, as examples of the church's importance in New Haven. Diane Petaway, an Immanuel member since 1986, agrees. ''Because of the community The New Journal

today has a Reaganesque meaning: People are poor not about drugs or alcohol or abuse anymore, but have bought into this." -Rev. Ross-Lee services we provide, if someone in New Haven has a problem, [they] know where Immanuel Baptist is." Ms. Pettaway, who visits the elderly and the sick as an Immanuel "Interfaith Giver," believes a "majority of church members are active in community service."

Cofield's successor wants to continue the legacy of volunteerism and charity. At 42, Rev. Samuel Ross-Lee is a dynamic and dramatic force from the pulpit, his enormous baritone as remarkable in song as it is rousing in sermon. His speaking style is animated and pedagogicalan appropriate blend of his Morehouse and Harvard degrees. Asked if he sees himself as a moral teacher, Ross-Lee replies, "I'm scared of that word." Instead, he prefers "prophetic," not in its traditional religious meaning but "in the Cornell West sense of the word--a social critic with notion of the divine."

It is difficult to conceive of just how different Rev. Ross-Lee is from his predecessor. Rev. Cofield arrived five minutes early to our meeting, dressed in a sleek, tan business suit; Ross-Lee arrived ten minutes late in an Adidas workout suit. Cofield rarely replied to questions in excess of twenty words; Ross-Lee's responses were often near dissertation length.

His only moments of reticence came with questions about his family.

(When he was four years old. Rev. Ross-Lee's mother abandoned him "for the typical reasons" to the foster system.) As well-versed in modern philosophy as he is in faith-based initiatives, Ross-Lee references articles from both Ebony and Esquire in a single thought. He straddles, often awkwardly, the fence between populism and elitism.

On at least one issue, however, the old-school/ new-school approaches of Reverends Cofield and Ross-Lee converge. As RossLee put it, "Immanuel should be a force in this community." To him this means preaching, service and sacrifice. At one service I attended, the church recognized six or seven parishioners for community service work and general civic-mindedness. The preacher asked the community to follow their example: "God has blessed us with homes, food and comfort. Let's go out and help someone who can't help themselves. As the kids say, 'You feelin' me?,

ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE GET11NG THE MESSAGE, suggests Rev. Ron Smith, who subbed for an ill Rev. Ross-Lee on one of the Sundays I visited. Recently, church volunteerism has been dwindling, and the situation at the soup kitchen-the longtime staple of Immanuel community service-has become critical. 'We need your help," pleaded Rev. Smith. Without it, he warns, "we may have to shut it down."

In the embattled soup kitchen, only a dozen volunteers are on hand after services to scramble around a linoleum-floored auditorium and February 2005

8

t;T l'o:OT

prepare food for the throngs of people already lined up outside. One volunteer, Mark Fletcher, hands out pastries and a Tang-like orange beverage. "There are a lot of people less fortunate than I am," Aetcher says. "I just see this as part of my duty at the church." A postal wor~er in Branford, Fletcher joined the church just this year, having been baptized in May. He told me he "loves Immanuel," but admitted he was disappointed by the "low number who work in the soup kitchen."

There is evidence of a general decline in the Immanuel soup kitchen: four years ago the soup kitchen served "approximately 400 people each Sunday." One of the afternoons I visited, between 80 and 100 people came to eat, prompting a volunteer to describe it as a "busy day." Cofield noted that the Sunday soup kitchen lasted "two and a half hours" in his day. Today, the sign outside the building reads, "Soup Kitchen, Sunday, 1:30pm - 2:00pm." · Church leaders urge all members to volunteer at least one Sunday a month at the soup kitchen. Nevertheless, the bulk of the burden fall;; to what Deacon Charles Williams called "a small cadre" of regulars.

"We should have people climbing on top of each other to do what's needed to be done [m the soup kitchen)," Williams says. Instead, "we're one step away from having to shut it down." The former principal of Hill High School, Williams is particularly troubled over the dearth of student volunteers at Immanuel and in the greater New Haven community. "Students• agendas tend to follow their parents• agendas," he said. "rm hopeful we can build a model for students here to carry on the Immanuel mission after us!'

ow

THE DIRECTOR OF HiGH ScHooL L'ISTRUcnoN for New Haven Public Schools, Deacon Williams is one of a number of prominent parishioners in the New Haven community. Members and non-members of Immanuel refer to congregants as New Haven's "black bourgeois," pointing to members Brian Perkins. President of the New Haven School Board, Alvin Johnson, a top executive at Yale-N~w .. Haven Hospital, and Reggie Mayo, New Haven School Superintendent.

The "well-to-do" label has stuck with Immanuel over the years. "It's just been the rubric it bears." says Rev. Cofield.

Some at Immanuel embrace this characterization. "That's who we are," Jonathan Berryman admits matter-of-factly. Immanuel•s Minister of Music, Berryman graduated from Princeton in 1994 before attending Yale for his master's degree in sacred music. For Berryman, Immanuel is a place where New Haven's "upwardly-mobile" young African Americans can "identify with our peers."

On the Sunday before we spoke, Rev. Ross-Lee welcomed a young couple, Ronald Sullivan. Jr. and Stephanie Robinson, as new

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parishioners. Sullivan met Ross-Lee at Morehouse before heading to Harvard, where he and Robinson :1ttcnded law school while the Reverend got his theology degree. Sullivan is now a professor at Yale Law School. Robinson, formerly an aide to Senator Edward Kennedy, is~ now in private practice. Rev. Ross-Lee considers Immanuel a "pretty ~epresentative microcosm" of New Ha,·en's black community, though he concedes, "I don't think it's inaccurate to call it middle-class or wellestablished." , Most Immanuel parishioners acknowledge their relative affluence in New H aven's black community, but few believe the socioeconomic divide has interfered with the church's egalitarian goals. "I guess you c.ould say we're middle class," says Diane Petaway, a parishioner since the 1980s. But if there's a gap between Immanuel and the rest of the community, she says, "1 don't see it." For Petawa} and, indeed, probably most parishioners, Immanuel is a "warm, open church [that] makes .people feel at home, no matter who they are."

Back at the soup kitchen, the view isn't so rosy. The latest ,controversy stems from a decision ro allow Immanuel parishioners to get take-out-trays from the Soup Kitchen after worship lets out at one o'clock-half an hour before ~ew ~ Iaven's hungry are admitted.

The result is a two-tiered system allowing Immanuel moms to grab some snacks to tide their kids over for the drive home while the hungry homeless wait outside in the cold. Brown, Grinvalsky and some other volunteers believe it is unfair for "church members to be served b~fore those down on their luck." There is "no interaction between parishioners and those who aren't," says Brown. ''They won't sit down to eat with the non-members, they just get their take-out tray and go."

Grinvalsky and Brown believe the} represent a minority viewpoint at the Immanuel Soup Kitchen: "Those who haven't been doing it for a long time don't see it like we do," says Brown. And the soup kitchen's customers don't seem to be complaining; David Holland, a Vietnam veteran 'vith mental health problems, called the soup kitchen "a blessing" that allows him to eat a good meal without having to "collect empties."

Reverend Cofield echoes Brown and Grinvalsky's sentiments.

Asked if he thinks Immanuel is doing enough to help the community, ~v. Cofield bluntly replies, ''No, I don't. I don't think it's on the agenda, but I don't know why." lie is not alone. Deacon William Knox, who has coordinated the Soup Kitchen for the past ten years, and worshipped at Immanuel for thirty, agrees that there has been a deficiency of civicmindedness at Immanuel in recent years. "You can't just join the church ~o be a spectator," he says. ''You have to participate. You have to give something up."

Born into "Jim Crow South" fifty years ago, Deacon Knox had to "go to the back door to get something to cat." Part of his duty as a Christian, he says, is to "be able to gi,·e something back, to empower somebod}' else," and he JS frustrated that more people don't share his philosophy. Knox speaks of a "culture of plenty" that has stripped society in general, and the congregation in particular, of its moral eurpose: "Kids see a car, a TV, some shoes that they don't have, and they're taught that they need those things." The effect, Knox says, is tpat "we aren't concerned about social things anymore."

He is deeply frustrated by how far the church has drifted from its founding tenets: "People used to walk to Immanuel, but now the}' drive.

They don't see what goes on here anymore-murder, rape, prostitution, drug-dealing. The young men in this neighborhood are either dead or in jail--or on their way. The church is not involved in reaching out to them. We really haven't done enough."

Rev. Ross-Lee agrees that his church can and should do more for the rest of ew Haven. "Our middle-class comfort has blunted our prophetic edge," be suggested. "In our contentment, we have become less noticing of social needs." Like Knox, he decries the consumerism that he believes pervades the African-American culture. He asks, "Why are we such a consumer culture as opposed to a builder culture? We need to be investors, in the Clinronian sense; we need to invest in people." For Ross-Lee, it's not a question of making more monc), but of "using the economic strength we already have, which is considerable, in a way that is ultimately helpful to the community." Pointing out that blacks comprise seventy percent of Seagram's consumer base, RossLee believes Bill Cosby was "on to something" when he criticized blacks for their spending habits: "Instead of making alcohol companies rich, we should be building economic and educational opportunities community-wide in a significant way." The church, he argues, must be a vehicle for constructive change.

Ross-Lee echoes Hen[} Louis Gates' idea of "two black Americas."

To Ross-Lee, the dozen black churches in Greater New Haven do not bode weU for the community. They are indicative of "the fragmentation of the black communit}•" along socioeconomic lines. "Povert}' is at our doorstep every Sunday," Re,·. Ross-Lee says, referring to the Soup Kitchen. "But po,·erty toda} has a Reaganesque meaning: People are poor because they're not working hard enough. Pm·erty is not about drugs or alcohol or abuse anymore, but about personal responsibility.

We as a black community have bought into this."

In 2003, Ross-Lee began asking Immanuel church-goers every Sunday to leave five do!Jars in a special donation box for the United Negro Co!Jege Fund (UNCF). After the first year of this project, Immanuel Baptist had raised $30,000 for UNCF. "If every one did this," Ross-Lee says with a smile, "pretty soon [Yale Uni,·ersity Prestdent) Rick Levin would be at UNCF trying to borrow money."

A pillar of the New J Iaven black communi(}•, Immanuel is beginning to suffer from an institutional inertia. In the words of its pastor, the church is "old, traditional and slow-moving." Its history has left the congregation "self-satisfied." But, Ross-Lee recognizes his responsibility to "shake (the church) from that complacency," a task he takes on in his Sunda} sermons. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things," booms Rev. Ross-Lee from the pulpit, as he urges his church to once again become a bridge between New Havcn's privileged and its poor, a buttress of unity in the black ~_ommunit)', not a barrier to it. . . .

Zarh fonts is a .unior in Dat'tnport Colkgt.

The New Journal 32

Bl980.1.1-.130 "A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of a Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl."

By George Stubbs

Flip past the first four drawings. There. Right there. These are the last works ever drawn by George Stubbs. There is a tiger crawling elegantly and a man, his sinews splayed for view. In 1795, Stubbs was 71-years-old. He was already a prominent painter of horses, but he wanted to try something different. He was an anatomist by trade and his last drawings show it. What you see comprised his final treatise, "A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of a Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl."

Look at how the tiger resembles the man. Look at how the man bends like the tiger. Stubbs drew these to show people that there is an innate, shared structure between all living things.

After his death, Stubbs' wife sold the drawings, which changed hands several times and traveled the world for the better part of the next century, until 1863 when they landed in the Worcester, cr Free Public l.Jbrary.

106 years later, in 1957, a Worcester librarian busied herself with a vast re-cataloguing project. She uncovered the original drawings, penciled by Stubbs.

But what was the library to do with a lot of famous drawings? The Worcester Free Library didn't have a way to restore them or keep the valuable artWorks safe.

Enter Paul Mellon. In 1980, the Yale millionaire bought the drawings from Worcester to dorute to his pet project, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Mellon was pushing a great deal of money toward the February 2005

new building, which would become a cathedraJ to his vast collection of British works. An avid equestrian, Mr. Mellon was obsessed with Stubbs. He left the library $1.25 million for the horse painter's final drawings.

iled

By Adriane Quinlan

Though the town of \Vorcester could never ha,¡e dreamt of . being offered such a sum, the people of Worcester agreed the town shouJdn't take it. "We feel that the art was given to the city and it belongs to the citizens of the city," wrote Joan Gallant in an angry Worcester Sun~ T~ltgram column vehemently titled, "Money in the bank, Drawings in Boxes, and neither can be touched." A letter to the editor a week later ran the headline "Sale of Stubbs Drawings is Unfortunate," and professed that the donor's will had "been

betrayed." By leaving the artworks to a public library, the townspeople felt that Dr. Green had wanted the drawings to be easily accessible tb Worcester citizens. Instead, some out-of-town millionaire rolled in to snatch them up and catt them away. The town lobbied against the sale, even forming a committee called, "Save-OurStubbs," which hoped to raise enough money to take Mellon to court. It never happened.

The citizens who spoke 'tO save these pieces didn't know their value until after they were purchased. And how could tHey have? Andrew Wilton, then curator of Prints and Drawings at YCBA, noted that the library hadn't taken good care of their treasures: ''lJ.l those years in musty storage at the Worcester Public Library didn't help matters. Some have mold, some are foxing. some are brittle, some are fastened to heavy mounting boards, which will have to be removed. All need cleaning--a very touchy process, especially with pencil drawings."

But now, even after a thorough cleaning at Yale's sterile conservation lab on the museum's third floor, tb'e drawings remain out of sight.

"They are hiding in boxes, too fragile to see the light Of day," lamented one WorceSter reporter. Wilton admitted sadly that the works '\.vill spend the better part of their days in boxes" because of their fragil'e condition: "That is the fate ¡of old drawings."

After conservation, the drawmgs were given acquisition numbers--a tracking de'1ce for every work in the collection--and @eo in the large, wooden card catalogue in the from of the department. Today, Scott \X'ilcox, Wuton's replacement as curator, can "pull" the drawings for viewers to examine under the amber lights of the Pnnts and Drawings reading room. When the drawings are no longer needed, they are tucked back on a shelf and locked in a cupboard, where the) someomes wait for months until they are seen again.

33

~996.~.275

"Hooky Walker 1 1"

by Frederick Lancier

The Prints and Drawings room doesn't usually receive generous donations of rare drawings. Mostly, explains Wilcox, the department fields a lot of calls from "people who want to give you things, like a little print they found in their grandmother's attic." Like Paul Mellon, donors want to get a tax break, they want to get rid of a work, and they want to donate to their alma mater. "But 99 percent of the time a donation is of no great significance."

Wilcox doesn't need to tell me about this 99 percent I've been shuffling through them for four months. As student assistant for the Prints and Drawings Department, I have grown used to violent hunting scenes (we call them "sporting prints"), bored aristoCrats ("'portraits"), and prim classical gardens ("landscapes'). It is my distinct privilege to enter into the museum's compu ter database a litany of dull information on works that seem to simply appear here.

On my first day as aYCBA assistant, Tim Goodhue, the art registrar in charge of keeping track of museum acquisitions, had some bad news.

He had discovered over twelve hundred un-accessioned prints-seven uncovered black boxes filled with folders of around 170 prints and drawings that had been lost in storage for eight years.

Some of the folders housed fashion plates, some showcased political cartoons. On a dull Tuesday, four hours into weighing the differences between aquatint and mezzotint portraits, I came across one piece that made me laugh out loud. A tiny monkey looked out at me, his hand stretched open in cruel glee. Below him, the inscription read: "Hooky Walker!!" (exclamation points included). The magnifying glass revealed the crazed animal to be the work of Frederick Lancier, who engraved it some time around 1827. I showed the print to Phil, the department's assistant curator, who has been looking at art for thirteen years. He laughed out loud too. Phil's internet search revealed "hooky walker'' to be a Victorian expression for something extraordinary and unnecessary. Then he printed out his internet search results and filed them away in a docket for artwork 1996.1.215 that may never again be opened.

Manuscript (f ()) 2~.7.76 "Fortifications of the Isle of Wight

by John Gomme

N

On the upper level of the Rare Books Department, buried in a long, flat drawer that you'll need a key to open, boxes and boxes of cÂŁUillbling maps await unfurling fingertips.

The maps look nothing like the world we know today: they show dramatic geometric fortifications and isles curving in the wrong directions. They are fragile and undependable. They are useless and beautiful.

These maps first belonged to a boy my age. At 19, George Legge became Captain of the Pembroke sailing vessel. In 1682, he was named Baron of Dartmouth, and in 1683, he was given command of an entire British expedition to the far-off island of Tangier. During his voyages, he enlisted fleets of cartographers to draw alongside his fleets of boats.

His early efforts resulted in a vast collection for his nation, which he bequeathed to every future Baron of Dartmouth.

After many successful missions, Legge returned to London to take up the lofty position of "Master of the Horse and Governor of the Tower of London." When William of Orange invaded Britain, .Legge

was imprisoned in his own tower, where, in 1691, he died of apoplexy.

The maps stayed in the family until the 1960s, when a dying aristocracy sold them at auction. The British Museum competed with a private dealer for the maps and the dealer walked away with a significant portion of the collection.

When Elisabeth Fairman , a curator at YBAC, put together a show of maps in the early '90s, she invited a correspondent from the British Museum, who was very surprised to 6nd the Legge maps. Neither the dealer nor the auction house had said anything to either museum about the split-up; they had each been looking for the missing maps for years.

"So here's an example of a very large collection for a single person that got divided up in two museums," Fairman says, looking across the solitary maps; as if towards a slim, lonesome arrow pointing across oceans toward its brethren, nestled in twin boxes somewhere in Britain.

"They had no idea we had anything."

B2003.~4

"The Sinews of Old England

by George Hicks

H

Up on the second Boor, on a wall of the Prints and Drawings Reading Room, hiding beneath a screen to protect it so the natural light c~ot fade it, hangs a watercolor by George Hicks. The painting depicts two peasants standing in the doorway, their son playing at their feet. "Look at the little boy-it's just wonderful," sighed Wilcox, who is the reason the painting is hanging in the museum at all.

Wilcox first saw ''The Sinews of Old England" in London , where be often travels to scout for works of art to acquire for the museum's collection. He spotted it at Rupert Moss' gallery, and was "very keen on it." He and his coworker Tim Barringer , an art history professor, fell in love with the painting. "It is very beautiful," Wilcox said, momentarily mesmerized. But for whatever reason, the third party on their trip, Malcolm Warner, the curator of paintings at the time, detested it.

"Oh, Malcolm bates genre paintings," Gillian Forrester, Wilcox's co-worker interrupts. "He always has." When the two proponents went into a curatorial committee, a group that meets monthly to decide bow to handle the museum's funds and discuss proposed acquisitions, Warner's dislike for the painting "killed it in committee." In the world of acquisitions, o ne man's opinion can sway a museum's collections.

Still, Wilcox remained hopeful.

A few months later, Barringer was in New York givng a lecture on Victorian painting at Christie's. He showed a slide of the painting that be and Wtlcox bad loved. After the talk, a Connecticut collector of Victorian paintings who had been in the audience went up the street to an art fair. The collector must have gasped: it was the same work from the talk he bad just attended. Mr. Moss had sold the painting to the private collector, and Wilcox thought sadly, 'Well, that's the end of that."

But about a year ago, while skimming through a sales catalog.

WJ.lcox came across a photograph of the painting be bad pined after.

This time, Warner was no longer working for the museum, and the price of the painting was about half what Moss asked for during the height of the market's craze for Victorian Genre paintings. (Andrew Uoyd Weber's collecting frenzy had driven prices up, Forre$ter explained-he was buying anything available at any cost.) The museum acquired the work, and every so often when he thinks no one is looking. Wilcox will lift the screen tenderly to sneak a peek at the Jninting it took him so long to buy.

The New Journal

34

0 - 0000000000

replied. "They were probably so pissed that it wasn't an actual Turner, that they had asked us at all," Wilcox said briskly.

"A Turner"

by John Anderson

0000000000

You won't find these drawings in museums. They're not hanging grandly in the library court or packed tightly into dark boxes in the Prints and Drawings Department. They are filed as phone conversations, ideas that were never realized, doodles on a yellow legal pad.

About once a month someone calls the center because they've just found a drawing by J.M.W. Turner. It came from their grandmother's attic, from the flea market down the street. Their voices quake in anticipation! They are heady with their attic find! It says "Turner'' right on the back!

Wilcox is on the other end of the line, because another part of his job, besides touring England for paintings or planning shows years in advance, is handling the misinformed. ''Are there any penciled arrows on the drawing?" he'll ask a caller, rolling his eyes and doodling absentmindedly on a legal pad. "Is there a plaque on the back of the frame with the name 'John Anderson'?" Yes, they'll reply. Yes. Yes. Yes. "Well," Wilcox sighs, preparing to repeat the speech he gives monthly. "What you've got there is a fake. It's not really a Turner.

It's a John Anderson 'Turner."' Then he tells them a little story: John Anderson is dead now, but one hundred years ago he traveled the British countryside buying up amateur drawings which he claimed to be the works of J.M.W. Turner. Anderson professed to believe the drawings contained hidden Turner signatures and he penciled in arrows to help people find them. "I'm not sure the extent to which Anderson saw it as a genius scheme or whether he acrually succeeded in deluding himself," Wilcox chuckles. Anderson sold his "Turners" to the only outlet that would accept them: department stores. Today, the fakes circulate through hundreds of attics and flea markets to be dug up by the next generation of starry-eyed sleuths, who, ten years down the road, will telephone Wilcox to ask again.

by Thomas Girtin

"Mountain Scene in Wales "

0000.00 "Steamboat in a Storm" Anonymous.

Ten years ago, a New York couple called up with another Thrner watercolor. A jaded Wilcox employed the same set of questions, but the couple who had called couldn't find any pencil marks and there certainly wasn't the Anderson plate on the back. Could this really be a Turner? When the clients sent the department a set of photographs of their watercolor, Wilcox was "flabbergasted.... It was exactly the same as the Turner in our collection," he spouted. The curators looked at the photograph alongside their original "Steamboat in a Storm," from 1851.

How could it be? "We joked about how he could have snuck in and photographed it, but also along with that discussion, we talked about how ridiculous that would be. Reali}~ it was a matter of coincidence."

With "a little digging around," Wilcox found that the original Turner had been in the collection of John Ruskin and that a student of Ruskin's had copied the Turner watercolor to the last flawless brushstroke as an exercise. Gleeful with his findings, Wilcox called the New Yorkers back with the exciting news and invited them to bring their watercolor over to compare the twin works side by side. The museum even expressed an interest in acquiring the copy for educational purposes. W.Ucox wanted to see the works side by side, but the owners of the other painting never

"There was a perfect Girtin painting," Wilcox begins, "called '~[oun~ Scene in Wales .' And all the British museums had refused the ask1qg price, which was far too high." If he stresses this step in the proces~ it is because if a work is deemed "culturally significant" b} Briti~ authorities, it can be shipped to a seller overseas only when all national buyers cannot afford it. Only then does the sale receive an "export license," a word that makes the curators here cringe. , Though the museum craved the painting, they simply could n<J~ afford it, Wilcox says: "We also refused the asking price, and made an offer of less than half the original price." The seller on the other cod of the line pretended to be appalled, but eventually returned Wilco?','S call. "I remember our old director was practically cracking out rhe champagne. But our export license was stopped. At the new, lower. price, other museums could match the bid." , It's difficult to be a British museum outside of Britain . It's a vC,I"), strange situation really, because when Wllcox thinks how bad he wanted that painting, and thinks of where it ended up, he can't feel angr}. "It's hanging on the wall at the National Museum of Wales," where, Wilcox: shrugs, "I suppose it belongs."

•

2004.1.19

,.

"Windowscape " Anonymous '

When I first ambled through the British Arts Center , I didn't knO\\ a~ of this. It was just a museum, and the paintings were just pictures on, the wall. It was my first year at Yale and it was winter and the sk} '"·~~ cold and empty. I had come with a friend, and together we toured the, entire museum. ''The room we saved for last contained a Turner. I paused aol~l studied it. I didn't really know who Turner was. This work showed a sky sloshing about, mixing and swirling together. I didn't know anythinR about the painting, or how it had gotten here, or who had owned it before. I only knew that it had ended up here because it was ju.s~ beautiful.

"Hey, look at this," my friend prodded, calling me away. Three fet>~ to my right, a plate-glass window stretched from the Roor to the ceiling,: overlooking the intersection outside the museum. It was snowi!)g, everything mixing and swirling together. It was the first snow, and it~ whiteness hid the sooty street entirely. There was no story behind \t.• It was just beautiful Everything in the street was white, like paper'"'? exactly as the world in the painting.

... .

AdrianeQ11inlan, 11 sophomore in Ct~lhoun Colkge, iJ the Production M11n11ger qj TN].

., •

February 2005

3.S

.L IKE

MANY of the illicit love affairs that happen at Yale, my relationship with Connecticut Post Mall began one night at Toad's Place. Or, more precisely, behind Toad's, on a bench where I had sought refuge ,from the blistering winter winds. That night p1arked the first true snowfall of the season, and I, a naive freshman tr.msplant from Arizona, had been caught woefully unprepared in my light tweed jacket. Overwhelmed by cold and exhaustion on the walk to Stiles, I ,collapsed into a heap of tears, frozen soot, and scantily covered limbs. As I trembled and curled my numb toes into my strappy heels, .I murmured to myself two affirmations: one, Connecticut was by far the worst state I had ever lived in (and, as a former military brat, rve lived in quite a few), and twO, I needed tO buy a real coat.

At the time, however, Trailbluer was still daunting to my "West Coast'' sensibility (lt7hat iJ this "North Faa?" I often wondered amid a sea of fleeces), and Urban Outfitters had already failed me with its prioritizing pf flower appliques and "vintage" (read: threadbare) fabrics over actual warmth. I had heard vague references to a nearby mall, but I didn't know anyone who had actually ever ,been to Connecticut Post, or anyone with a car.

Two days, a hunt for a bus schedule, _and a cashed check later, I climbed aboard -a blue Cf-Transit bus on the corner of Temple and Elm, "J-7 Milford" flashing on the front of the bus in tiny lights.

I sat in the front seat---41 spot which, .,according to the sign posted above, I would have to relinquish to the elderly or disabled---4lnd primly clutched my purse, scanning the bus for fellow Yalies. None present.

"This route ends at Connecticut Post Mall, right?" I asked the driver. I felt like I was being escorted to a blind ,date.

"Bingo," he said, yanking the door lever. An hour later, I stepped off the bus and faced my destination.

It was hardly love at first sight. The entrance was like a prison door, industrial gray and beige. A fat toddler with chocolate smeared on his cheeks ¡ "Waddled out of the door, and a lonely plastic shopping bag Aew toward me like tumbleweed. I shivered.

.

36

I stalled for a few minutes and then I breached the doors. Almost instantly, I was overwhelmed by a familiar sense of calm. On that initial journey, I purchased a coat, a pair of gloves, and a Christmas present for my aunt. Two weeks later, I was back on the bus with the gloves and the receipt to exchange them. The following week I returned again, and before I knew it, the occasional outing had evolved into a habit. Eventually, my presence on the J-7 was routine enough to merit nods from the other regulars.

From the outset, I knew that one of the reasons the mall appealed to me so intensely was its ability to provide anonymity. At Yale, one loses the ability to walk down a crowded street without being assailed by a barrage of smiles, greetings, and brief conversations.

While the omnipresence of familiar faces can be pleasant, it _._,_ .... also be

something undeniably liberating about being among a mass of complete strangers.

Inside Connecticut Post's automatic doors, I liked to perch on the benches and peoplewatch, or wander through Sears while busy shoppers swarmed around me. Posses of Abercrombie-clad high school girls eyed me cattily, thugged-out pre-teens toting Foot Locker bags swaggered by my bench, genteel old men asked me for the time, and I loved it. Aeeting, unlikely interactions between strangers abound at the mall, and I sought them out voraciously.

I began to depend on Cf Post as a sort of fix, or a break from the real world. At the time, I couldn't rationalize my habit; the anonymity was nice, but I could have easily found it at other places. Something about the mall was strangely and inexplicably addictive, like the overpowering smell of gasoline. As any couples' therapist can tell you, however, a relationship based on reliance can veer down one of two paths: stable,

An

commitment, Attraction-like and paranoia.

Progressively, my attachment grew to resemble the

and I

~

----------~~----~~~--------~~--~~----------~~--~~----------~--------------------~-playing jealous lover of a non-human I shrugged. ''I dunno ... maybe twice, three As an adolescent, it's dif6cult enough to face ~ entity. times a month. Depends on my workload." . each coming day with the fear of changed :.: The sight of another possible Yale ''You like shopping that much?" body parts; compound that with a constant·~ student stepping onto the J -7 Milford caused ''Well...." Good question. I hadn't actually incursion of new places and people, and my my heart to skip an anxious beat, rousing my purchased anything on three out of my last prepubescent existence began to look a lot apprehension that my trip would be ruined four trips, so what the hell was I doing here? like Heraclitus' river of 6ux. Throughout my by the presence of an acquaintance. These I decided to lie. "Uh, yeah. I guess I'm a childhood, I was willing to accept whatever life preservers were tossed my way, even if they fears were 6nally realized a couple months shopaholic." I cringed. after my initial visit, at which point the mall She nodded knowingly. "Sometimes you were stamped with national brand names. The and I progressed beyond mere flirtation to a gotta get your Abercrombie 6x." effect of which, apparendy, was my ability to full-fledged relationship. I was leaning over a After we parted ways (she, to buy gifts, find solace in the dim glow of a shopping mall, counter in the food court, lustfully watching me, to spy on the awkward salespeople at the bastion of American commercialism. my (thankfully not Thai, Indian, orThai-Indian the cellular phone kiosk), her question rested My newfound awareness of the root of fusion) orange chicken as it was smeared into a uncomfortably in my mind. Why was I so my addiction began to make me uneasy. In my Styrofoam bowl, when the customer to my left infatuated with this place? As I stumbled to desperate efforts to cling to some vestige of the escalator, intoxicated by contemplation, my childhood, had I become the poster child poked me on the shoulder.

"Davenport, right?" she asked. the artifice of the environment suddenly for "mega-bland corporate evil?" Was CT Post suffocated me--the soft drone of peoples' bad? Was my lover evil? ·~ ... yeah." I glanced longingly at my chicken, now waiting for me by the register. voices, the harsh, neon lighting, the stuffy air Shaken by this unsetding notion, I decided "Cool, cool. It's always good to see a conditioning. I felt dizzy. I unwound my scarf to leave the mall, once and for all. I hurried fellow Yalie outside of New Haven." so I could breathe, and leaned against the wall to get out, hoping to catch an early bus back I nodded aod stalled, hoping she wouldn't of Subway. As the sight of the familiar logo, I to Yale. Shoppers, store fronts, and kiosks wait for me, but she stood by the cashier, smiled, remembering how I had once argued whizzed by me unnoticed, but I paused wheh expectandy sipping her soda. After hesitating with one of my friends over where to get I glimpsed a photo booth near the exit. One last toss in the hay, J thought to myself, for old for an awkward moment, I paid for my food, sandwiches.

"What's wrong with Subway?" I had asked times' sake. and we walked together to a nearby table.

While posing behind the musty red "God, Panda Express is disgusting," she her. I had a frequent buyer's punch card. said after we sat down, stabbing her Mongolian "Mega-bland corporate evil aside, curtains of the photo booth, I mused over the egetables with a plastic fork. "Like, what is hometown places are always better. Everyone past few months, mentally cueing a montage of knows that." myself frolicking through CT Post's corridorS, · ? De6nitely not Chinese."

HomekJwn. I had scoffed at the notion my hands loaded with stuffed bags and Auntie "Oh, it's Pandanese." I hoped a stupid oke would scare her away. at the time, but the memory of my friend's Anne's pretzels while geode muzak tinkled in She paused uncertainly for a second, then comment stirred me. I stepped back from the the background. The click of the camera jolted Subway sign, moved by a sudden epiphany. me out of my daydream, and I crossed m y eyes ontinued. "So what brings you here?"

I didn't come to the mall because of the and stuck my tongue out. You're breaking up I opened the plastic top of my bowl, and shopping, or the anonymity, or even the for the right reasons, I reassured mysel£ Has steam poured out. "Oh ... you know...." ''Yeah, de6nitely. Only having Urban refuge it offered me from problem sets and your liberal education taught you nothing, if Out6tters in New Haven can be such a drag course packets. I was addicted to it because not to hate The Man? I stepped outside and waited for the sometimes. Like, it gets a litde old when every of its familiarity. For me---'.1 member of an girl at a party is wearing that 'Everybody Loves Air Force family, the permanent New Girl filmstrip of four poses to develop. The machine a Randomly Ethnic Girl' shirt." She reached and wearied occupant of several stat~s before whirred softly for a second, then spat out m y into ber jean pocket and pulled out a creased entering high school-"bome" was more of pictures through a slot. In the last three shots, ~beet of paper. " I actually brought a list of an abstract concept than a place. I f its inherent I was making silly faces and obscene gestures; }>resents I need to buy, but I can't find them significance is its consistency, then home was the first one, however, was taken before I was anywhere in this dirt hole. Like I want to buy a never an address or a city for me; it was my ready. In it, I looked utterly serene.

I stuffed the pictures into my purse and parents' station wagon coasting down the set of headphones for-" ''Well, there's a Radio Shack on the 6rst interstate, the books I pored over in the car, hurried to the exit, knowing it wouldn't be and my brother snoring with his face smashed long before I returned. I knew my relationship oor, by Sears."

She raised her eyebrows. "Oh yeah? Know against the seat belt. Home was Motel Six, 7- was hardly healthy, and that eventually I would 11, Starbucks, and Payless: and however mega- need to m ove past the images of my transient ere I can find a UConn jersey?" childhood. I also knew, however, that CT Post bland it may be, home was Subway.

"Champs. Second floor."

Growing up, each new "hometown" seemed to possess the capacity to make me "How about wrapping paper? And I'm presented me with a new set of faces, streets, happy. Explicable or not, for a mere $1.25 in t sure I brought enough money."

"There's a Hallmark ... and a Fleet ATM is and rules to learn. In Arizona, a glass of Coca- bus fare I could buy a few hours of blissCola is a "pop"; if you call it anything but a well worth its generic, artificial packaging. t around here, by the food coun."

"Geez." She folded her list and put it "soda" in Virginia, you sound like an idiot. We ck in her pocket. "How often do you come bought our groceries at Kroger in Nebraska, Meijer's in Michigan, and Giant in V uginia. Mina Kime~ a sophomtm in Davtnpport College, is on the •ta.ff of TN].

-

37

Thus Spake Zarathustra?

by Jamie Martin

A

YALE YOU CAN STUDY ZOOLOGY, use a zymoscope, research Zwinglianism and hang out at Zeta Psi. You can even meet a Zoroastrian! Although Zoroastrians don't sponsor dances, put full page ads in the YDN advertising the tenets of their religion or even have an organized group. Zoroastrianism doesn't have a low profile at Yale just because of its small following. The reason for its obscurity is more complex.

When I first met Yale College's sole Zoroastrian, Nazneen Mehta, I assumed she would be bristling with ideas about how to give her religion a larger presence on campus, or how, at the very least, it could be recognized. Given its distinction as the world's first monotheistic religion and its huge influence on other faiths, Zoroastrianism seems to have a claim for integration into Yale's religious scene, even if Mehta is one of two Zoroastrians here.

But Mehta, who describes herself as "deeply religious," is perfectly happy being a minority with no support or recognition from her University. Even if Yale were teeming with Zoroastrians, Mehta can't think of anything they would ask of the University.

Zoroastrianism, as I came to learn, is both a faith and an intellectual discipline.

The religion emphasizes free will and demands rigorous examination of one's actions to determine whether they accord with good or with evil.

Zoroastrianism emphasizes moral action and personal responsibility much more heavily than doctrine or outward signs of piety. While it would be nice to be able to meet other Zoroastrians, Mehta says, their presence at Yale would not affect how she practices her religion.

This is not a public religion: in fact, conversion is impossible--one must be born a Zoroastrian to be a Zoroastrian-and, according to Mehta, Zoroastrians do not require the sort of "group therapy" that is a significant draw of many of Yale's religious groups: "While there's merit in groups and safe places for discussion and development," Mehta says, "I don't need a space or a club but simply other people's understanding and respect of my way of life." But doesn't every Yalie want a club? Mehta was adamant the intensely personal and intellectual T

focus of her religion makes it irrelevant whether or not any Zoroastrian groups exist here.

Avisa Demehri, the other Zoroastrian on campus, confirmed Mehta's synopsis. Demehri, a graduate student in Yale's School of Epidemiology & Public Health and an Iranian Zoroastrian, had virtually the same answers to my questions and had no idea another Zoroastrian even existed on campus. Demehri has not had Zoroastrian friends since moving to the United States. When people learn she's from Iran, she doesn't even bother to dispel their assumptions that she is Muslim.

But, she told me, it's not difficult to be the only Zoroastrian she knows. Nor is there anything that could be done at Yale to make her life easier as a Zoroastrian-no organization, sacred space, magazine, or website would make any difference at all. The only thing that might help, she admitted, would be a course at Yale about Zoroastrianism that would teach others that an Iranian need not be a Muslim, nor an Indian be a Hindu.

Professor Stanley Insler, a philologist and expert on Sanskrit, Ancient Persian, and Avesta, the holy language of Zoroastrianism, has in fact taught courses here at Yale on Zoroastrianism.

'There really should be more classes on Zoroastrianism at Yale," he said.

"It is probably the oldest living faith in the world [and it] has been seminal for the intellectual history of the world." It is crucial, he explained, that religious people--particularly Jews and Christians-understand the history of their religion and the influence Zoroastrianism has had on it. Most Christians, he remarked, are completely unaware of the fact that their conceptions of heaven and hell have been heavily influenced by Zoroastrian metaphysics.

Apart from offering classes about the ancient faith, what else could ÂĽale do for its Zoroastrian population? Professor Insler looked at me incredulously when I asked this question: "Zoroastrians have a sacred space in their fire temples, where they pray. But because Zarathustra wanted his followers to actively fight against evil in the world, he equally considered the world as the larger 'sacred space' in which believers should practice their religion of truth tlu:ough good thoughts, good words and good deeds. Zoroastrianism is a religion of action. The real ritual ground is the whole world." -

Jamie Martin is on staff of TN].

The New Journal

. 38

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