The trail runs 56 miles from New Haven to Massachusetts, and is part of the larger East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile trail from Florida to Maine.

Lisa Fernandez, president of the Farmington Canal Rail to Trail Association, said that the trail is the “crown jewel” and the “spine” of the Connecticut trail system.

Fernandez explained that the money for the trail’s expansion was secured in 2010, and the design for it was approved in 2013.

According to Executive Director of the City Planning Department Laura Brown, city planners are meeting this week with Mayor Justin Elicker to finalize a date for a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the new segment of the trail.

“It connects a lot of Connecticut history,”  Brown explained, “going through the center of the state from New Haven, which is certainly the cultural capital of the state and then going north to the statehouse in Hartford and over to Massachusetts.”

Bruce Donald, the East Coast Greenway’s Southern New England manager and the chairman of the Connecticut Greenways Council, cannot wait to cut the ribbon on this trail, especially because this phase of the development of the trail has been delayed.

Donald said the first meeting about this phase of construction was over 20 years ago. Brown clarified that delays to the expansion’s implementation can be attributed to an effort to ensure the trail is fully ready for use when opened to the public. 

“This is the nature of development in a city,” Brown said, adding that “there is a lot of history and existing buildings and infrastructure,” which can be difficult with construction.

According to Donald, New Haveners and Yalies use the trail primarily to commute to class and to work. City planners estimate that commuters account for 50 percent of trail traffic.

These trails aren’t for the “spandex” crowd, Donald joked, or for the cyclists on “six thousand dollar bikes” — “they’re for everyone.” New Haven commuters rely on this trail to get to work and school, he explained, and they will get to enjoy the extension of the trail and improvements to the infrastructure as soon as it’s open.

For Aaron Goode, the founder of the New Haven Friends of the Farmington Canal Greenway, a trail is not “just a place where people can do recreation. It’s also a place where they can … learn about history and can see interesting art, art, murals, potentially public art.”

The city has already installed placards in the Temple Street tunnel displaying historical information about the history of New Haven’s canals and railroads, which have been transformed into a greenway.

“I think it’s going to be something really special when people are going to really treasure it and appreciate it the way they do the Highline in New York,” Goode said. Fernandez said the Greenway, when completed this spring, will be Connecticut’s “Lowline,” a Highline but with tunnels.

A trail should be accessible for recreation and commuting and the “aesthetic experience” is a bonus, but Donald believes safety on the trail is imperative. He explained that having a safe walking space in downtown will help reduce pedestrian and bicycle deaths in New Haven.

“It’s a big deal for the university,” Donald said. The trail will connect the existing Temple Street tunnel and the Canal Dock Boathouse. Orange and State Streets and Union Station will be more accessible via this route.

Fernandez emphasized that the trail is also invaluable for commuters from Hampton and Cheshire, as well as other suburbs outside New Haven.

Brown says the new segment is nearing completion and will be available before the “spring biking season.”

“I’m confident that this will be a lasting piece of infrastructure and added value for residents when it opens up. It’s been worth the wait,” Brown said. 

The Farmington Canal Heritage Trail is currently accessible from the School of Engineering on Hillhouse Avenue and Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges.

Correction, April 8: The article has been updated to clarify the location of the new segment.

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The DOE said it will no longer investigate book bans, effectively transferring censorship in libraries from the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights to local school districts. Censorship in public schools will now go unchecked at the federal level.

But in Connecticut, library experts and lawmakers are working to protect libraries from excessive book bans. Scott Jazormbek, president of the Connecticut Library Association, said the organization had been preparing for upheaval with the new administration. If censorship is not questioned at a federal level, “that is what it is, but we can make it so that it happens at state level,” Jazormbek said.

Two days before the Trump administration’s announcement, Connecticut state legislators introduced the “Don’t Ban Library Books Bill”, a measure that aims to prevent censorship in Connecticut public libraries and protect librarians from legal backlash. The bill would prohibit public and school libraries from removing books because of “its origin, background or views of the material or of its authors, or solely because a person finds such books offensive.”

This bill, which is still on the floor, would also require school and library boards to develop policies for collection curation and removal.

New Haven’s City Librarian Maria Bernhey supported the bill via written testimony. 

“Removing items from a library because someone believes another person’s child should not read them imposes a singular perspective and undermines the core library principle of providing free and open access to information for all,” she wrote.

But in the Elm City, at least, the bill would perhaps have little impact on its public library system. The city’s libraries already have a removal policy in place, NHFPL Public Services Administrator Rory Martorana said. The Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library has not received any requests to ban books or other materials that librarian Alexandria Robison can recall.

If the library ever did receive a request to ban a book, NHFPL would adhere to its Collection Development Policy. The Collection Development Policy dictates that the library “not exclude materials solely because of the race, nationality, political, gender, sexuality, or social views of the author.”

Robison explained that NHFPL updates its Collection Development Policy every three years, most recently early this year.

For Jarzombek, the policy goes a long way to protect librarians. When complaints and reconsideration requests are directed at librarians without the buffer a policy provides, “librarians get maligned like you wouldn’t believe,” Jazormbek told the News. Librarians sometimes fear threats on their jobs from parents or school boards, or retribution for statements they make about book bans, he added.

“We want to protect our professionals, the people who are experts and have dedicated their lives to literacy and working with youth,” he explained.

Jazormbek noticed an increase in complaints about books in 2024, but since more libraries have instituted Collection Development Policies, there have been far fewer complaints in Connecticut, even as elsewhere in the nation, book bans are on the rise.

Not only do Collection Development policies protect librarians, but they also provide a clear process for parents to “have a voice about what’s in their children’s library,” Jazormbek said.

There have not been efforts to ban particular books in New Haven Public Schools either, according to a NHPS spokesperson. Under Connecticut State Board of Education policy, librarians are to select materials in accordance with the American Library Association’s School Library Bill of Rights.

Martorana wrote in an email that NHFPL also always adheres to American Library Association guidelines and “industry standards, while also considering literary trends,” so that their “collection remains diverse and meets the needs of [the] community.”

“The Library is committed to protecting everyone’s ‘Freedom to Read,’ and ensuring readers have access to information to form their own opinions,” Martorana wrote, referring to the Connecticut Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Statement Against Censorship.

The nonprofit PEN America counted over 10,000 book bans during the 2023-2024 school year, approximately double the number counted between 2021 and 2023.

The post How would New Haven libraries respond to book ban requests? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Among the New Haveners in attendance were members of the New Haven chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the University of New Haven football team and representatives from New Haven Public Schools. 

“The stories here are stories of Black history, which is another way of saying that they are stories of Yale history, of New Haven history, of Connecticut history, of American history,” Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, the New Haven City Historian and a co-curator of the exhibit, said to commence community day.

Artist Denise Manning Keyes Page gave a presentation, “Ubuntu Storytellers: Sweeps and Scholars,” about her enslaved ancestors’ history. The museum also screened a documentary produced by the Beinecke Library entitled “What Could Have Been,” on the 1831 proposal for America’s first HBCU in New Haven, which was the central focus of the exhibit. The proposal was squashed by a town vote of 700-4. 

Morand’s co-curator Charles Warner Jr. explained that this exhibit has been nearly 25 years in the making. Three graduate students had done the research for the exhibit in 2001, but, according to Warner, they presented their report the day before September 11, 2001. Their research was paused.

In 2020, former Yale President Peter Salovey commissioned the Yale and Slavery Working Group, which Warner is involved in, to investigate the history of slavery in New Haven and at Yale. Warner commended Salovey for launching the initiative.

“You cannot be on the outside of what’s happening,” he remarked, especially not at Yale, “an institution that has so much impact in terms of scholarship.”

Stamped in bold black letters on the floor at the entrance to the exhibit is a directive for museumgoers: “You are here as a participant in the future.”

Morand told the crowd that “no work ever has a single author.” He thanked everyone in attendance and deemed them museum VIPs. This education or re-education of Black history in the city is a collective effort, Morand explained, that requires all to participate. 

“It’s not up to the historians or the curators to tell people or institutions or governments what to do, but rather to give them the ingredients so that they can cook up the policies and programs,” he said. 

New Haven Museum Director of Learning and Engagement Joanna Steinberg is thrilled with how the exhibit has been received. According to her, the museum has had over 11,000 visitors since the exhibit’s opening in February 2024.

Museumgoer April Pruitt, who is a Yale doctoral student in neuroscience and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, or AKA, said the museum is “a very reflective space that allows us to think about the progress that could have been and what is our current responsibility to the broader New Haven community, to the Black community, for making sure that progress continues.”

Much like Pruitt, Morand believes the exhibit has succeeded in exposing the truth about Yale, New Haven and slavery. In the exhibit, Connecticut is referred to as the Georgia of the North. It was the last state to abolish slavery in New England. Until recently, there were monuments in New Haven to Confederate and Union soldiers.

Morand noted that “the names that matter are the names you haven’t heard before” in the exhibit.

“We need to acknowledge that Yale and New Haven have been doing history for a long time. In previous histories, we ignored the centrality of slavery as an institution and enslaved people as people. And therefore, the history is incomplete,” Morand said.

David Walker ART ’23, a professor of graphic design at Yale, designed the exhibit. According to Walker, education about the history of the caliber the exhibit provides is more important now than ever. 

“Who knew a short twelve months later that this work would be much more urgent as our history–our imperfect America–would be under attack from within,” Walker remarked. 

Warner echoed Walker’s sentiments in his own presentation. 

“Truth is not truth anymore. This is not political. It is not Democrat or Republican. It is not liberal or conservative. It is simply the truth,” he said. Warner’s remarks were met with applause.  

The “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery” exhibit will close on March 1.

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At the event, Cusk delivered a reading of her unpublished essay, “Into the Light: A Woman Uncovered.” The essay, she said, is a semi-biography of Norwegian modernist artist Anna-Eva Bergman. 

“I think Yale students should know that this lecture will be literary history in the making!” said Megan O’Donnell, associate communications officer at the Whitney Humanities Center. “Yale students have a chance to witness the making of this literary history firsthand.” 

Emily Cox GRD ’25, a doctorate student in art history, explained why she thought Cusk chose Bergman as her muse. 

Cox sees parallels between Cusk’s literary art and Bergman’s visual art. 

“She and the painter share an interest in hollowing out form and seeing what can emerge from spaces of absence or reflection — whether that’s the void of the narrator, as in Cusk’s work, or in the geometric and metallic abstractions that so often figure in Bergman’s work,” wrote Cox in an email. 

Cusk’s essay bends genre; it is neither fiction nor nonfiction, and neither literature nor philosophy. 

Cusk is an innovator. She famously said in a 2018 interview with The New Yorker that she didn’t think character existed anymore. 

“I’m trying to see experience in a more lateral sense rather than as in this form of character,” said Cusk, to her interviewer. “Which, as I said, I don’t actually think is how living is being done anymore.”

The Finzi-Contini Lecture is the pride of the Whitney Humanities Center: they have hosted renowned scholars of all manners — from Italian medievalist and philosopher Umberto Eco to Percival Everett, whose novel “James” won the National Book Award in 2024. 

According to O’Donnell, Cusk was an “ideal” speaker for the Finzi-Contini Lectures due to the “intellectually incisive and formally imaginative nature” of her writing.  

“Her writing often thwarts expectations of traditional narrative structures in ways that invite readers to engage in a more focused form of attention,” said O’Donnell. 

The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by Guido Calabresi ’53 LAW ’58 — U.S. circuit judge and former dean of the Yale Law School — and his brother, Dr. Paul Calabresi ’51 MED ’55, in honor of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini. 

In an email, Diane Berrett Brown, deputy director of the Whitney Humanities Center wrote that the Finzi-Contini lectureship is especially “meaningful” to the Whitney Humanities Center, because of the “abiding and generous support” of the Calabresi family. 

Cajetan Iheka, director of the Whitney Humanities Center, introduced the lecture by honoring “Bianca’s life and example.” 

Finzi-Contini and her husband were involved in the resistance against Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime. They fled fascist Italy for New Haven in 1939. Because Yale College would not admit female undergraduates for another 30 years, Finzi-Contini studied French at the Graduate School instead. 

There, she earned her master’s degree in French and eventually went on to teach at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven. Finzi-Contini’s gravestone at the Grove Street Cemetery is engraved, “Wife, Mother, Teacher, Scholar.” 

Before she delivered her reading, Cusk promised the audience, “I’m going to forget about politics, and think about art.” 

She invited the audience to do the same.

Cusk acknowledged that art is always political. Politics is everywhere right now, she said. But she also cited the power of attention; where we direct our attention is how we assign power to ideas, voices, or characters, she suggested.

According to Iheka, Cusk and Finzi-Contini represent freedom in their art similarly.

“Refusing the demand of fascism, [Finzi-Contini] carved out what our distinguished lecturer today describes as a structure of freedom in her novel ‘Second Place,’” said Iheka. “In the pursuit of this freedom … Bianca chose a new life in the U.S. with her family: the life of the mind, of devotion to family, and of a transcendental freedom.”

During the Q&A portion of her lecture, Cusk briefly broke her promise and spoke about the manifestations of politics in art and literature. 

Perhaps the character does exist again, Cusk remarked to a laughing audience. 

“I know I said I wouldn’t talk about politics, but in the context of dictatorship, for instance, that’s character. That’s the force of character.”

A version of Cusk’s lecture will be published in the summer issue of The Yale Review.

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In the first installment of the Directed Studies spring series of colloquiua last Tuesday, Hinds presented to the program about his work adapting classics like “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” into graphic novels. Hinds has adapted not only Homer’s epics but also several of Shakespeare’s plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “King Lear” and “Beowulf.” He is currently working on an adaptation of Vergil’s “Aeneid.” (That announcement elicited an excited gasp from the Directed Studies crowd. Nerds.)

Hinds has had a talent for art since he was in elementary school. When Hinds writes and illustrates a graphic novel version of a classic, he reads it in as many translations as he can find, over and over, until he can decide how he wants to retell it, and what colors and lines and shapes he wants to use to represent the tale for what he takes it to mean. Hinds explained, “I was basically getting around my own writing weaknesses by choosing the greatest texts in the canon [to adapt].” He’s participating in a tradition of translation too, translating narratives from poetry to art. He’s narrating old stories anew.

After he had some success in publishing, Hinds realized that the market for his graphic novels was kids, school-age and younger, but also their teachers. Teachers don’t teach “The Odyssey” for students to memorize facts about the heroes or gods that it depicts. It’s not taught in as many high schools as it is only for the quality of the poetry either (most read it in translation from ancient Greek — but who knows who wrote it anyway?). Teachers teach the classics, like Homer’s epics, because they preserve some truth about our world that we can still appreciate these 2,000 years later. There’s little else that gives us that access to the past. Professor of Classics Pauline LeVen quoted another professor who says, “We don’t read these texts [“The Odyssey” and “Romeo and Juliet”] because they’re great. They’re great because we read them.” We will always be reading and rewriting them. Hinds thinks so too.

In his lecture, Hinds displayed the technology he uses to write and illustrate his graphic novels. Homer could never have imagined the tools Hinds has access to. There’s a geometry to a panel of a graphic novel; Hinds can pace Homer’s stories how he wants by manipulating that geometry, shrinking some boxes and flattening others. Hinds suggested in his presentation that there is a rhythm to that pacing that is poetic. Once Hinds had his margins laid out and panels squared away for us on the screen, he then got to do his magic. Professor LeVen told me, “my favorite part [of his presentation] was seeing Mr. Hinds drawing in real time and making the head of Menelaus emerge out of three strokes of his pen!” The Menelaus Hinds drew may not have looked like one Homer imagined. But he’s Menelaus nonetheless. Professor LeVen added, “this was a fascinating opportunity to see poiesis.” 

Poiesis is a Greek term for the process of making something new. Hinds’ “Odyssey” is a tale of characters and adventures and questions he imagined anew, through poiesis. 

Hinds had to arrange and rearrange the three lines that made up Menelaus’ head a few times over until he was satisfied (and I’m sure he will change it some more before he finalizes that panel). The lines were there from the start. He just had to play with them. I asked Professor LeVen what students like ourselves might take away from this part of his presentation and she answered that “finishing a draft is the most crucial part of the process: once you’ve conceived of all the pieces, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, (even if not initially in that order) you can rework them as much as you want, and share that draft to get feedback. That is true for an academic paper or a creative endeavor: but you need to have that finished draft out to get to the genius piece that is in your head.” 

There’s a method to the business of essay-writing. There’s research to do and rubrics to follow and drafts to write. We can program our brains to crank out essays and problem sets and presentations. But that gets boring. There’s opportunity for poiesis everywhere in education, if we seek it out.

Hinds’ advice to aspiring artists, or to students with essays to write, is to pay attention to the mechanics of the method while remembering that when you are writing or drawing or doing math, you are doing poiesis. Hinds is a particularly talented artist. But he encourages everyone to draw, or create whatever they can. “I think it’s rewarding to make art for its own sake,” he said. He’s made a career out of it.

Hinds thinks kids and adults alike should always be making art. Kids should “keep drawing even into adulthood even if it’s not something that they’re making a living at,” he insisted. He elaborated on the importance of method: “one of the most rewarding mental experiences we can have is [entering] the flow state, and one of the fairly reliable ways to get into the flow state is drawing or writing something that you know requires some application of skill but is not high stakes.” In the context of interpreting the classics, or even in the context of doing math, the methods that we use are not new. Perhaps Hinds’ methods would be new to Homer, yes. We don’t write and do math so that we can retain information about subject-verb agreement or theorems about calculus, though those are important. Hinds doesn’t write graphic novels because he loves adjusting the margins on pages of panels. 

Our education should be about poiesis. And even though to me it looked like Hinds was performing magic by drawing Menelaus on the screen, that drawing didn’t come from nothing. You have to understand and appreciate the old if you want to try to do anything new. And if you want to appreciate the new, go check out one of Hinds’ books from Sterling. They are beautiful.

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Said architect, former School of Architecture professor Louis Isadore Kahn, was obsessed with light. When he was 3, he stuck his hands into a stove in an attempt to pick up a smoldering coal from the fire. He set his apron alight and burned his face, scarring him for the rest of his life. Kahn, even as a toddler, evidently wanted to know what it would be like if he could carry light. He wanted to hold it, touch it, feel it on his fingertips. His experiment with the coals failed, so he had to find another way to try to do so. Eventually, he became an architect. 

Kahn studied modernism and functionalism in architecture and the International Style; he’s been described as a philosopher and a poet of architecture. In designing the museum, he aimed to glorify — or, perhaps, illuminate — brick and concrete as a poet might glorify a sunset or a placid pond. His art assumed various mediums, as you might be able to tell from this ode he wrote to brick: “If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ … And it’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use … You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it.”

Many of Kahn’s designs primarily feature two materials: concrete and light. He used light, which he described as “the maker of presences,” in his designs like another architect might use wood or iron. Light was a material that he manipulated; his architecture is a study of light and a celebration of it. He once wrote, in a poem as part of a letter to two friends, “I wanted to illustrate Silence and Light.”

One of my classes this semester is in the basement of Humanities Quadrangle. When my professor came into the room for the first seminar we had, she commented right away, “It’s like perpetual night in here.” It is gloomy in that basement. Reference to Directed Studies texts incoming — forgive me. Socrates represented the ultimate “truth” or good as the sun, which he purported all knowledge disseminates from. Lux et Veritas, or better yet, Lux IS Veritas. Light is cheerful and no one wants perpetual night in their classroom, but even more than that, a room should be filled with light, because light is veritas and symbolizes enlightenment and truth, if you’ll lend me some poetic license here. And please do, Kahn would have. 

A museum is like a classroom. Kahn died before the YCBA was ready to open to the public. Since his death, the team at the YCBA will in March have completed two conservation projects with the aim of realizing his vision for the museum, while adapting to the needs of the University for the collection. Kahn was reticent of the various purposes the museum would serve. One famous architect in the International Style Kahn looked up to, Le Corbusier, once said “a house is a machine for living.” Kahn’s museum is a machine for living too, through art, and it’s also a machine for teaching because its function as part of this University is to teach. 

The reopening of the YCBA is something to celebrate, because art is something to celebrate, and light is too, especially in these dark and dreary winter months. Kahn saw something in light and shadow and nature that I don’t know if I’ve ever thought to look for. For example, in these stanzas, he describes “spent light”:

I sense Silence as the aura of the “desire to be to express” 

Light as the aura “to be to be”

Material as “Special Light.”

(The mountains the streams the atmosphere and we are of spent light.)

Silence to Light

Light to Silence

The Threshold of their crossing

Is the Singularity

Is inspiration

(where the desire to express meets the possible)

is the Sanctuary of Art

is the Treasury of the Shadows

(Material casts shadows belongs to light)

I want to sit in a room in YCBA and try to see what Kahn might have seen in the light. He imagined that on a gray day the museum “would be like a moth, but when the sun hits it, it will turn into a butterfly.” So I suppose I also want to know what might happen when the sun hits me. I’ll see you there. 

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