T H E M A G A Z I N E A B O U TYA L E & N E W H AV E N

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board of directorsEmily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby

advisorsNeela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publica-tion at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark

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S I N C E 1 9 6 7

20 CHECKING INTO LIMBO Tenants of New Haven’s most derelict affordable housing face an uncertain future

Elena Saavedra Buckley

standards

4 points of departure YALE’S SECRET CHEF --- Eliza Fawcett MANAGEMENT IN A MASON JAR --- Amelia Nierenberg DIALING FOR THE DETAINED --- Victorio Cabrera

9 poetry MISPRONUNCIATIONS --- Jake Orbison

12 personal essay QUALITY TIME --- Jennifer Gersten

16 critical angle WHEN YALE MOVES IN --- Natalie Yang Has the Yale Homebuyer Program become a publicity stunt?

28 profile REEL TALK --- Ruby Bilger The man behind Yale’s screenings reviews the future of film

32 poetry PICKLE JAR APOLOGY --- Charlotte Ferenbach

33 snapshot AUTISM AT YALE --- Clara Collier Navigating the limits of the University’s support

36 endnote #SPIRITSQUAD --- Azeezat Adeleke

4 THE NEW JOURNAL

YALE’S SECRET CHEFP O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

A student-run restaurant turns dinner into performance art

Eliza Fawcett

The magician slowly slices the grapefruit in half with a large knife. He pries the halves apart, juice running down his hands. Wedged in the center of the grapefruit is a dollar bill, which he was holding just seconds before. The audience around the table applauds, enjoying the opening act of a nightlong din-ner spectacle. Alone in the kitchen, the chef and mas-termind of the evening quietly prepares the first course of the meal.

Every Friday night, junior Abdel Morsy cooks an elaborate dinner for twelve people. Sometimes the invitees know each other; often they do not. For one evening, they sit around a gleaming wood table at what Morsy calls “The Sticker Shop.” (The location, he insists, must be kept secret.)

Morsy doesn’t formally promote The Sticker Shop—it’s a purely word-of-mouth phenomenon. He invites most people personally, but others email him in the hope of getting a seat at his table. He’s also invited his Uber drivers, train conductors, and barber.

The premise of The Sticker Shop is that guests pay not for a meal, but for an intricate sticker that Morsy’s graphic design team creates each week. It’s a way to avoid the legal restrictions of being a restaurant, but

Morsy says that it’s also the celebration of an art form “as lowly as the sticker.” His humble stickers certainly aren’t cheap—each has a “suggested donation” of twenty to sixty dollars, though Morsy is willing to take a loss per head if someone cannot pay in full.

The food is the centerpiece of the project but not its essence. “Every artistic expression is valid at the dinner table,” Morsy says. Each night begins with a short performance—music, magic, or another art form. The magician performing the grapefruit trick was a Yale student and a friend of Morsy’s from the Yale Magic Society.

A square of votive candles flickers in the middle of the table. Behind me, a white floor-to-ceiling bookshelf holds elegantly arranged objects: knuckles of ginger, a row of glowing onions, two packages of ramen noodles, an army of white ceramic bottles, a hefty pumpkin, a lone jar of anchovies. On the other side of the room, Morsy is bent over the kitchen counter. He is a flurry of motion, whirling from stove to sink to fridge, and then utterly still, garnishing a row of twelve identical soups.

He does not look up as the magic show continues, but silently concentrates on the work before him. He has an intense air—eyes framed by round tortoise-shell

—ISS

FEBRUARY 2016 5

glasses, a dark beard and moustache, hair pulled back into a tight bun—and an obsessive zeal about his work at The Sticker Shop. “If I fuck up a dish on Friday, all Saturday I’m redoing that dish,” he says. “I’ve pulled all-nighters cooking during exam period.”

He talks about his work at The Sticker Shop with gravitas. “We’re challenging the conventions of a din-ner,” he announces as he welcomes guests. He describes The Sticker Shop with the language of a self-fashioned foodie out to make a mark: “collective artistry,” “radical localism,” and the creation of “memorable experiences of the highest standard.” The endeavor is all Morsy does outside of classes. “Not just a project,” he declares, but the thing to which he wants to commit his life.

I first heard of Morsy via a friend who raved about a dinner “an upperclassman” had prepared on a weekend retreat for the Urban Improvement Corps—another of Morsy’s extravagant meals. For the next few weeks, I heard bits and pieces about a mysterious Yalie who made restaurant-quality dinners at an off-campus apartment. Eventually I tracked him down, and at his request we met at Blue State late one night. I circled the place a few times before a man who had been sitting near the door pulled off the hood of his Baja hoodie and I realized it was Morsy.

Morsy studies cognitive science at Yale but has been cooking seriously since he was a teenager. Originally from Alexandria, Egypt, he has worked at an array of restaurants, most recently at an izakaya in Japan. During a gap year before college, he struck an unusual deal with families in over fifty homes around the world using the travel site Couchsurfing: if they let him stay for a few nights, he would make them an extraordinary meal. Working with whatever appliances and resources were available, he “adapted very quickly to constraint.”

At The Sticker Shop, he has “two working burners, not even a standard-size sink, [and] a half-size fridge,” but also his magician’s flair for making “something out

of nothing.” The limited set enhances the drama of his dinner-as-performance.

The first course arrives: a covered white ceramic pot beside a hunk of homemade baguette on a wooden platter. I open the lid to find a roasted pepper soup. We all suspend conversation as we dip our bread. The soup appears simple, but Morsy reveals that it’s made from thirteen vegetables, including a ghost pepper. The soup is smooth and sweet until I taste its powerful spicy kick and have to rip off another piece of bread.

Out comes the second course: soy-braised pork belly with a caramel-miso-cinnamon glaze, served with a pickled vegetable and pear slaw and paired with a Goose Island wheat ale.

As we dig into the tender pork, happy groans echo around the table. “Every meal after this is not going to be the same!” someone laments. Morsy glances up from the kitchen and grins, filling fluted glasses with mango lassi provided by The Lassi Bar, a Yale startup.

Morsy ferries out the third course: long black boards with truffle arancini (risotto balls) served on a smear of spinach puree. By the time the next course arrives—dry-aged rib-eye with a red wine and raspberry reduction sauce—it seems impossible to eat more. But we do.

As the hours pass, our conversations grow louder and more animated and the votive candles go out one by one. In a dark corner of the kitchen, Morsy sweeps a blowtorch over a row of glass jars, toasting marshmal-lows for desert. Four hours into the dinner, his concen-tration is as intense as ever. Though working only a few feet from the table, he exists in another world.

For the final course, we are served “Dirt” in glass jars: a rum- and coffee-based chocolate mousse, topped with salty, hot figs and a homemade marshmallow infused with white chocolate liqueur and chestnuts.

Around midnight, the dinner winds to a close. Morsy is weary but radiant. “If you Google ‘runner,’ the third suggestion is ‘runner’s high,’” he says. “If you type in ‘chef,’ there’s no ‘chef’s high.’ But I run, and I know the chef’s high is so real.” The fervor is a little much, but his pride is genuine.

The Sticker Shop flips the dynamic of an ordinary restaurant, in which servers bring out dishes to patrons who will never meet the chef, never witness the sweat and imagination behind the meal. Here, Morsy is the star, and even when he’s quietly removed from his audience, it’s impossible to forget this. “How do you know Abdel?” people ask as their plates are cleared each round.

— Eliza Fawcett is a freshman in Jonathan Edwards College.

MorsY is THE sTAr, ANd EvEN wHEN HE’s

qUiETlY rEMovEd FroM His AUdiENCE,

iT’s iMPossiblE To ForgET THis.

6 THE NEW JOURNAL

DIALING FOR THE DETAINEDvolunteers try to fix a broken communication system between the government and asylum-seekers

Victorio Cabrera

When two groups of Yale Law students arrived in Dilley and Karnes, Texas, in the spring of 2015, the detention centers they saw housed over two thousand asylum seekers. The people inside were overwhelm-ingly women and children fleeing rising violence in Central America’s Northern Triangle, and the volun-teers intended to help them stay in the United States. They were there to conduct interviews, to ask the fam-ilies what they had experienced that would help them win their cases in front of a government judge.

Swapna Reddy LAW ’16 described the first center she visited as a “jail made out of trailers.” The Yale Law students saw asylum seekers locked twelve to a room in crowded cells. They talked to mothers whose children had vomited for several days straight; when they asked for assistance, the center’s medical staff prescribed more water. Many of the pro-bono lawyers working at Dilley, Reddy told me, called it “baby jail.” They set up makeshift offices to record women’s informal tes-timonies about their persecution while their children watched cartoons or made up games about court pro-ceedings, miming the lawyers.

The detention centers at Karnes and Dilley have been criticized for their bleak conditions. The govern-ment’s response is that it had to deal quickly with the unanticipated migrant surges. Most of the migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala fled gang violence to cross the Rio Grande and make it into the U.S. The Karnes center had been open since 2010, and

it could hold five hundred people. The one in Dilley opened in December 2014, after a historic spike in the number of asylum seekers. It is the biggest in the coun-try, with a maximum capacity of 2,400. Both centers are operated by private prison corporations.

Reddy and the four others on the trip assisted one asylum seeker through a successful hearing and many others with their preliminary interviews. When they returned to New Haven, Reddy and Conchita Cruz LAW ’16 formed the Yale Asylum Seekers Advocacy Project (ASAP) to continue their work from afar—poring over intake files, reading transcripts of inter-views with officials, and conducting phone interviews to prepare the information the lawyers on the ground would need.

The initial asylum process has three stages: a prelim-inary interview to establish “credible fear” (a legal term indicating the asylum seeker has reason to fear for her life should she return to her home country), a “mer-its” hearing (where the immigration judge makes a first decision about the credibility of the asylum case), and a final hearing. Around August 2015, the government began releasing asylum seekers on bond after the initial interview, with only a letter following them to notify them of the hearings that would occur many months later. Previously, it had held them at the centers for longer periods before releasing them. There was a fatal flaw in the government’s plan: hundreds of families did

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

—ISS

FEBRUARY 2016 7

not get the letters, and many who did get the letters did not understand that they could be deported if they did not attend their hearings.

By October, legal assistants began to understand the scope of the problem. One of the main organizations working at the detention centers, CARA, a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups, maintains a database of information about asylum seekers. This database cov-ers only the asylum seekers who have interacted with CARA (as of publication, approximately six thousand), just a fraction of the total flow, Reddy says.

With the information from CARA, ASAP can call into a government hotline, obtain information about upcoming hearings, and notify women about their court dates. The voice on the other end of the line has the flatness of an official recording: “Welcome to the automated case information hotline,” a woman’s voice says with little inflection. The recording is a little too loud, and a little too repetitive: “The alien registration number, also known as the A-number, begins with the letter A and is followed by an eight- or nine-digit num-ber.” It is neither hostile nor friendly, but the flatness is unsettling. “Please enter those numbers now.” The Yale volunteers have heard these recordings dozens of times—the same message appears every time they call.

About two hundred Yale Law students and under-graduates filed into room 127 in the Sterling Law Build-ing in late October. Armed with laptops and phones, they turned the lecture hall into a call center. They dialed for hours. The room was mostly quiet as they typed numbers identifying asylum seekers into their phones; occasionally, someone would get information about an upcoming hearing and yell. (Alina Aksiyote, a volunteer, told me that the number entered often has no record to match, either because the asylum seeker has been deported or a hearing has not yet been sched-uled.) Pizza appeared, and the volunteers ate. Then they kept dialing. This went on from six to nine at night and happened again the next day, and the day after.

ASAP got through the backlog of approximately four thousand released asylum seekers during the ini-tial flurry in October. Twenty or so volunteers drawn from the seven other schools affiliated with ASAP, including the law schools at Columbia, Georgetown, and DePaul, now aim to assist a few hundred people per week. They work from a spreadsheet, filling logis-tical details into a script they send out through texts. “Hello,” it begins, in Spanish. “I am a volunteer with the group that helped (name) when she was detained. This is a reminder that (name) has an immigration court hearing on (date) at (time) in (city, state).” The asylum seekers often do not have cell phones; these messages go to their family, friends, or hosts, who are

listed in the database. It continues: “It is very import-ant that she attend this hearing, as not attending might result in her deportation.”

One of the volunteers, Charlotte Finegold ’17, described it as sending texts “out into the ether.” Some-times, those who text back ask if ASAP can help friends with legal problems. Many reply with something far briefer: “Muchas gracias.”

ASAP seeks to guide asylum seekers around the flaws of a system which the government could fix but hasn’t. This lack of official aid, for Reddy, is the most emotionally exhausting part of the work. The detention centers, the broken notification system for hearings, the hair-trigger threshold for deportation—ultimately, the government is treating these people not as asylum seekers, but as criminals, according to Reddy. Her con-solation is the attorneys at the detention centers; the volunteers updating the database in New Haven; the churches in Texas where asylum seekers and their chil-dren receive backpacks full of clothes and food.

What else is there to do when you’re wrestling with World War II-era refugee conventions, state-subsuming criminal gangs a continent away, and an impersonal federal bureaucracy? Prepare twenty-five document collections a week. Send two hundred texts. Scale up, expand. Expect that the system can change, and try to temporarily cover its cracks.

— victorio Cabrera is a sophomore

in Trumbull College.

THErE wAs A FATAl FlAw iN THE govErNMENT’s PlAN: HUNdrEds oF

FAMiliEs did NoT gET THE lETTErs, ANd MANY wHo did gET THE lETTErs did NoT UNdErsTANd THAT

THEY CoUld bE dEPorTEd iF THEY did NoT ATTENd

THEir HEAriNgs.

8 THE NEW JOURNAL

MANAGEMENT IN A MASON JARP O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

Yale soM is investing in applesauce

Amelia Nierenberg

The first time I met Catherine Wu, she sat with two small, misshapen apples at the Happiness Lab, a coffee shop on Chapel Street. Beside her were also three tiny mason jars, each with a different flavor of UglyFruit, the “artisanal applesauce” Wu makes from Connecticut apples and sells to local coffee shop(pe)s. I had just taken a bite of the “vanilla bourbon” flavor (savory, spicy, an applesauce iteration of how houses smell after wood fires), when she leaned across to ask what I thought. “It’s good,” I said, surprised at her intensity. She nodded knowingly. “But how good?” she probed, her quiet voice clipped and professional. “What does it make you think about?”

The name “UglyFruit” doesn’t make sense immediately. The finished product is far from ugly. The mason jars (which you can bring back to the Happiness Lab for a discount on your next purchase) are, frankly, adorable. But the apples Wu uses are ugly, which is why farmers couldn’t profit from selling them in grocery stores. Thousands of pounds of apples rot in orchards across Connecticut every harvest season because they’re too unsightly for consumers. Wu has managed to turn this excess into a resource, fodder for a business idea. She conceived the idea of targeting food waste after watching a John Oliver segment on America’s wasted produce.

In her snug green sweater and delicate gold jewelry, it’s hard to imagine Wu—Cat to her friends—going apple picking. Wu doesn’t even like regular applesauce. She has a “super strong gag reflex” for the stuff (though she does love apple pie). So she made applesauce that she could actually eat: no mealy texture, no added sugars.

She fancies herself the Johnny Appleseed of New Haven, but has little previous experience in agriculture. Before she enrolled in the Yale School of Management, she graduated from Wellesley with a double major in Economics and Political Science, then worked as a consulting analyst and for education non-profits.

She’s successfully made applesauce, a staple of lunch boxes and old age homes, pretty hip. “It’s weird,” she said. “I’m known as the applesauce lady at SOM.” With a grant and mentorship from the Venture Creation Program at SOM, Wu has thrown herself into mission-driven business, seeking to profit and also do social good. She views UglyFruit as a “lifestyle brand”: its customers hypothetically live ethical, healthy, and

socially minded lives, so they gravitate towards a snack that satisfies both their values and their appetites. At least, that’s the marketing strategy. It works for loyal customer and equally idealistic SOM student Hannah Grill ’17: “This goes beyond turning apples into applesauce—this is about connecting people to the food they eat in a new way.” Through limited trials, Wu has sold over one hundred jars and has over eighty customers with direct delivery pre-orders. She plans to have product in mainstream grocery stores sometime this spring.

When Wu talks about potential flavor experiments (“There’s so much you can do with apples”), UglyFruit seems less like a solution to a dire problem and more like an entrée to entrepreneurship. For all its novelty, UglyFruit is the outcome of the standard MBA mindset—find a hole in the market, make a business idea around it, and launch your product. Many of the other start-ups out of the SOM Venture Creation Program also employ this doing-good-by-doing-well business model: Braingrove provides a social learning platform, Sustainable Luxury Pearl creates luxury jewelry by restoring the natural pearl farming environment in China, and Maike Water reduces the brine discharge related to seawater desalination technologies.

UglyFruit is not yet at the core, pun intended, of the SOM social enterprise start-up scene, but Wu is already testing new flavors. Next up in applesauce: vanilla earl grey. It’s not on the market yet, but Wu describes it as an “Asian-Japanese taste of more floral flavors,” and she’s catering to a female demographic. It’s the taste of next week’s success—light, sweet, and just a little zany.

— Amelia Nierenberg is a sophomore in Timothy dwight College.

—ISS

MISPRONUNCIATIONSp o e m

Jake Orbison

We cannot tell anyone where we are going,but they all know we are lost.

We walk from the mountain to a café to another café talking about what foundations are best to build on.

We make guesses. Respect, money. It would have to be something unlike bricks that can evolve with the structure it creates.

Love. No, not love. Anything but love.We know we are more or less talking about affection.

We stay nights on Duluth and enjoypushing the sounds through our slack-jawed mouths:Rue Saint-Denis, Boul Saint-Laurent. Oui.

When you want to make me smile you wink with both eyes,

which I think you might have learned from me,which I think I learned from my grandmother of all people. I notice the night has fallen; you tell me how pretty it is. I notice

my relationship with Ben is deteriorating; you tell me how it is not necessarily

a sad thing. Or if it is a sad thing, a necessary thing, and not uniquely sad.

What’s French for fear? What for desire?I bet they have beautiful ways to say that here.

The children born in this city, who knows where they run to.

—N

YP

L A

rch

ive

Bring this coupon in to receive $10 off per table

Please visit us at facebook.com/fornarellis & Fornarellisristorante.com

FEBRUARY 2016 11

All three events free; no tickets required. ism.yale.edu

The Anchiskhati Church ChoirFrom Tbilisi, Georgia

The Orthodox Paschal CycleChants from Holy Week and Pas-cha, and para-liturgical folk songs with traditional instruments

friday, march 4 · 8 pmChrist Church84 Broadway at Elm

Suman BhattacharyaPadavali-kirtan music and story-telling from India

saturday, april 9 · 5:30 pmHenry R. Luce Hall34 Hillhouse Ave.

Teesri Dhun (The Third Tune)Live documentary transgender drama from PakistanDirected by Claire Pamment and Iram Sana

saturday, april 23 · 7:30 pmMarquand Chapel409 Prospect St.

yale institute of sacred music presents

12 THE NEW JOURNAL

QUALITY TIMEP E R S O N A L E S S AY

getting home, the long way

Jennifer Gersten

Emma picks me up from my dorm at Yale on the first day of spring break so she can drive me to her dorm at Wes-leyan, where I plan to spend the next two nights to figure things out. She looks strange in the driver’s seat, taller and calmer than I’m used to, or maybe I’m just not used to the idea of her sitting there.

I still don’t know how to drive. Last summer I was supposed to learn, and the summer before that, and also the summer before that. I can’t convince myself that driving is any more critical a skill than juggling. It

just seems like another way to be lonely. Lonely is how everyone looks in the photos on their licenses, which is an effect of being told not to smile: caged by the camera, stoic and solitary. On Emma’s license, earned when she was seventeen, her lips are pursed to hide the orthodontic metal reining in her wayward teeth. Now I see a glint on her nose, a tiny silver hoop. She sees me looking: “It’s new.”

For dinner we go to an expensive Spanish restaurant where there won’t be any students and order a fourth

—KC

FEBRUARY 2016 13

“You can come if you want,” Emma adds, as an afterthought.

We enter the building through the trash room and climb the stairs to her third-floor suite, where she lives with her friend Claire. Emma lets me in and goes off, saying she’ll be back soon. In the meantime I turn on the lights and go into the kitchen, where I open all the cabinets and drawers one at a time. Between Claire and Emma there are ten mugs, two handfuls of orna-mented forks and spoons, and one slim knife. Inside one cabinet I find twelve types of tea, several of which are labeled “for women.” I decide on a cup of Women’s Chai. I press the home button on my phone repeated-ly—I like to see it light up—and wait for the tea to boil.

I’m going to study her when she comes back. I’ll inspect her eyes, and watch her person for a smelly pouch or a plastic bag. But her hands are empty when I see her; her jeans don’t even have any pock-ets. She goes into her room and tells me she has to get some reading done. “It’s only the first day of break,” I say. Already, she’s with Persuasion, wrapping herself in blankets.

My mother, Susan, is a Chinese woman whose ability to find and befriend other Chinese women, including Emma’s mother, Shirley, will one day be revealed as an advanced form of echolocation. Susan and Shirley met in line waiting to pick us up from the first day of first grade. At Emma’s house, Susan and Shirley drank tea in the dining room while a floor below Emma and I decided we liked each other over a tub of one thousand Legos. That’s how friendship happens when you’re smaller: you presume it. The older you get, the longer it takes to be sure that someone is on your side. I’d call

of the sprawling tapas menu. When we’re splitting the bill I think suddenly about what my dad is always say-ing, that Emma’s father is a doctor who could afford to buy our entire neighborhood and still have change for pizza, and how that’s probably not true and anyway it’s a bad thought to think, but I can’t help that I’ve thought it.

In the car I realize I wasn’t even all that hungry, just tired. I was up until 4 a.m. scanning other people’s writing into an online database for a writing contest, crouched beside a finicky, old, all-in-one printer with hundreds of pages to go. The overhead light was dim, and my roommate had inexplicably packed up all the lamps, so I worked in the dark. Everyone I knew had left campus. When the machine sputtered, I patted it as if I were consoling a child. From beneath the glass snuck bursts of light that I thought were trying to tell me something.

I wasn’t supposed to be looking at any of the submis-sions because contest staff were to remain impartial, but of course I read everything I happened to see as if it were addressed to me. The last story was eighteen pages about a father and his son, who is a musician. The dedi-cation, at the top of one cream-colored page, read “For Charles.” I wondered if Charles knew about this story, and if he did, whether he enjoyed it, or if he was put off by how self-consciously constructed it came across. But when I reread it imagining I was Charles, I was moved.

Emma is an English major, like me, except she wants to be a doctor, unlike me. She spent the last semester abroad in Dublin taking courses on medieval British literature because the upper-level courses on Joyce were closed to transfer students. In Dublin, she met Mason, who is taking some time off from art college in Tennessee to engage more fully in his jazz death metal band. When I hear this, I nod convulsively to show her how open-minded I have become. She doesn’t have any photos of Mason, only photos of her taken by him on her phone. They’re all black and white. She’s sitting on a brick wall strewn with graffiti, looking at the cam-era, at him, and now at me, sort of.

Emma pulls into the parking lot next to her dorm, a stout building in beige. She’s a good driver, and fits her car into a tiny space like she’s threading a needle. Then she shuts off the music, this thrashing electron-ica that she’s kept muzzled at a low volume. “We can go up, then I’m going to pick up my weed,” she says, yanking the key out of the ignition. The heat in the car lingers, but I feel the incoming cold even beneath my down jacket, two sweaters, and the last t-shirt in the clean pile, which I received at the conclusion of my high school AP United States History class and reads “Four Score and Seven Assignments Ago...”

wHEN THE MACHiNE sPUTTErEd, i PATTEd iT

As iF i wErE CoNsoliNg A CHild. FroM bENEATH

THE glAss sNUCk bUrsTs oF ligHT THAT i THoUgHT wErE TrYiNg To TEll ME

soMETHiNg.

14 THE NEW JOURNAL

most of my earliest acquaintances “elevator friends.” These are people you’d never meet if it weren’t for repeated happenstance in intimate spaces, until one day you’re trying to call your house and you call their house instead.

When we were smaller, Emma wasn’t allowed to bring her toys upstairs. We spent most of our time play-ing in the basement, where I accidentally broke a lot of things. Worst of all was a scale Lego model of Dumb-ledore’s study that took her weeks to build. She didn’t seem angry, but she refused to let me put the pieces back in order. “Everything you touch, you break,” she said, pressing a yellow tile into the place it had been moments ago. That’s not true, I protested. It was a little true. Once I was alone in her basement inspecting a paper model of an ornate Chinese junk when one of the sails broke off in my hand. I was so surprised and upset I almost yelled. But I didn’t want to her to dis-cover what I had done, so I kept quiet and buried the pieces in a crate full of books beneath her desk. Why did people bother making things if they were going to break?

Emma’s silky lavender blanket is bunched around her knees. I haven’t brought anything to do, so I sit in her chair and open the small black notebook I carry around to a clean page. I’m in an introductory fiction class and have a story due the week after break. On Emma’s desk is a photocopy of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Chapter Three: Plot. “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” A story, Forster writes, makes you ask “And then?” and a plot makes you ask “Why?”

I’ve been considering writing about a florist who has ceased to leave his shop and lives surrounded by over-grown houseplants. He makes his final sale, a bouquet

of gardenias, to a woman who has axed her way through the shrubbery. Once he loved her. Then he suffocates on a daffodil. “And then?” “Why?” I get distracted. The snow starting outside seems unnecessary. There is already enough of it, these stout mounds brooding around the edges of Emma’s building like they’re wait-ing to be invited in.

At around 9 p.m., a girl enters without knocking and paws through Emma’s sparse wardrobe. The three of us go downstairs, where five of Emma’s other friends are already sitting knee-to-knee in a circle on Hannah’s small floor planning their road trip to Buku, which I learned earlier is a music festival in New Orleans. There is a tie-dyed dreamcatcher the size of a pocket-watch dangling off a hanger in Hannah’s open closet, the sort of thing you buy at a street fair and forget about.

In one trip scenario they’re going to spend a night in Atlanta and a night in Nashville on the way back. In another they’re staying a day in Houston, two days in New Orleans instead of one, and eating dinner with Martin’s sister in Richmond. At one point Martin has tacked on an extra ten hours to their driving time with the addition of a stop at the Mexican border. “Martin,” Emma says, after which her friends laugh and drop the idea. She’s only lying on Hannah’s bed looking at her phone, but she’s definitely the one in charge. The group sticks little red circles across the map like they’re spreading a pox. Around midnight Emma says she’s had enough and we decide it’s time to leave.

After Emma falls asleep, I go for a walk around her hallway and find a place to pace between the balcony and the vending machine. My phone starts vibrating. I see Home calling and don’t pick up. It’s my mom. She wants to know where I am. No one I know knows where I am, except for Emma. I like it that way. Every year I tell myself I’m not going back, and every year I hate myself for walking in the front door, taking off my sneakers by stepping on their backs the way my high school track coach said you’re not supposed to—it’s bad for your ankles—and taking my seat on the living room couch like it’s been reserved for me. I lean really far over the balcony, which is about a story and a half above the laundry room, and think about being reck-less. If people were looking for me, where would they look first? Bang on my door, then check the library, the classroom I study in and have privately dubbed “A Room of My Own,” the coffee shop where I and a thou-sand other people have spent their time.

I’m pretty bad at hide-and-seek. I was tall long before the other kids in first grade were tall, which made hid-ing behind even the highest chairs or play castle walls difficult. So I sought walk-in closets, cabinets, once even a narrow pantry crammed with Italian herbed

THE oldEr YoU gET, THE loNgEr iT TAkEs To bE sUrE THAT soMEoNE is oN YoUr sidE. i’d CAll MosT oF MY EArliEsT

ACqUAiNTANCEs “ElEvATor FriENds.”

FEBRUARY 2016 15

tomatoes, which made me feel like I was in a cave of little hearts. I wondered what would happen if I fell over this ledge and when Emma would realize, if it would take minutes, or hours, or the terrifying possibil-ity of a year. And I wondered why the people we care about don’t just somehow know when bad things have happened to us without us having to tell them, why that’s not a sense anyone thought we needed to have.

“Jenny,” I hear. My mother; I’ve picked up. “Where are you? Is it snowing where you are? It’s snowing here.” We’re both quiet, like we’re stopped at a light and wait-ing for the other to go. “The snow looks like flour,” she says. “Someone had an accident in the kitchen if that’s true,” I finally respond. “That was a joke,” I add, when there’s silence.

The snow really does look like flour. I’m looking out the window next to the balcony where you can see the snow falling. That big, innocent backyard. “Where are you?” my mother asks again. “Are you coming home soon?” She misses me. She says she misses me every time she looks at the snow. I don’t tell her I’m coming home. I haven’t decided if I will yet, but in three days I’ll be back on my parents’ couch.

The next morning Emma drops me off at the shuttle stop going back to Yale. We hug and I tell her to keep

in touch. While I wait, I listen to other people calling their doctors about appointments. Hi it’s Jane, Hi it’s Matthew, Hi it’s Duncan, just confirming for Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. I wonder if any of the calls are serious, if anyone might have cancer or a grandmother dying, and I feel immediately guilty.

It’s cold outside, and I don’t get back until late. I unlock the door to my room and switch on the over-head light. As usual it does not turn on when requested, but takes its time, sliding into brightness. When it finally does turn on, the light is ungenerous, showing me everything exactly as I left it.

— Jennifer gersten is a senior in saybrook College.

16 THE NEW JOURNAL

WHEN YALE MOVES INHas a university program meant to stabilize the city become a publicity stunt?

Natalie Yang

A dramatic exposé published in a 1994 issue of GQ magazine lamented that Yale was about to cheer its “Last Boola Boola.” The pre-apocalyptic article described an institution whose sluggish endowment struggled amid a “war zone of poverty, crime, and drugs as frightening as any American city.” New Haven was hauling itself out of a recession, and while the city and Yale were certainly not quite as rotten as the arti-cle made it seem, the bad press was an indicator of the University’s declining public image.

It was true that bad blood between Yale and New Haven had existed for decades. “Twenty-five to for-ty-five years ago, there was a time when the president of Yale and the mayor of New Haven wouldn’t even speak to each other,” remembers Sam Chauncey ’57 who served as the University’s vice president and secre-tary under President Richard Levin GRD ’74. The 1991 murder of Christian Prince, a fourth-generation Yale student who was shot through the heart on Hillhouse Avenue, shocked the Yale community. His was the first murder of a Yale student on campus since 1974. Even as it highlighted the gulf between the campus and the rest of the city, Prince’s murder served as a reminder that Yale was inseparable from New Haven.

The Yale Homebuyer Program was a product of this turbulent time, when the Elm City and its wealthiest institution shared a bleak outlook but seemingly lit-tle else. Less than a year after his inauguration, Levin announced the initiative: any Yale employee who bought a house in New Haven would receive two thousand dollars per year for ten years to help offset the city’s hefty property tax. Modeled after similar pro-grams at Columbia and the University of Chicago, the program was designed to simultaneously stabilize the University’s workforce and address the city’s blight. “It asked, how can we promote efforts that create fierce neighborhood loyalty through homeownership?” remembers former mayor John DeStefano, who was sworn in four months after the program began. Today, the Yale Homebuyer Program has declining relevance for New Haven, but it remains a centerpiece of Yale’s sloganeering about its investment in the city.

According to The New York Times, in 1994, when the Homebuyer Program was founded, only about thirty percent of Yale’s employees lived in New Haven. Yale employees met the program with a mix of praise and trepidation. For some, the program was a wel-come incentive to move into New Haven. For others, it wasn’t enough to make the city seem safe. Dee Dee Emery, a food service worker who rented an apartment in New Haven, and whose son had been shot and killed the year before, told the Associated Press in July of that year that she still wanted to move out of the city. “Any-where away from here,” she said. But others jumped at the financial benefits. “If it weren’t for Yale’s assistance, we wouldn’t be looking [for a home] in New Haven,” Richard Gold, a professor at the School of Drama, told the Yale Daily News in October 1994.

Despite the initial ambivalence, the program was quickly lauded. “Homebuyer Program Succeeds,” declared a headline in the Yale Daily News just four months after the program’s launch. Today, more than a thousand Yale employees have bought homes through the program. The Yale Corporation has renewed fund-ing for the Homebuyer Program every two years since its inception, most recently the past December. Each renewal is marked by the publication of an upbeat arti-cle in the University-run site YaleNews, boasting the University’s commitment to the city and highlighting the stories of a few satisfied new homebuyers. For the program’s twentieth anniversary in 2014, the Yale Daily News called it one of President Levin’s “most widely acclaimed town-gown initiatives.”

According to the 2010 census, New Haven had the largest population growth of any city in New England over the previous decade. New Haven’s crime rates hit a twenty-year low the same year, and today New Haven has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the coun-try, according to the Hartford Courant. Luxury apart-ment buildings are popping up in response to the high demand for housing. But at the same time, says Jim Paley, executive director of Neighborhood Hous-ing Services, “We have a great disparity between more affluent people in New Haven and poor people.”

C R I T I C A L A N G L E

FEBRUARY 2016 17

Homes in wealthy neighborhoods, continues Paley, have had fairly stable value on the housing market. Those in lower income neighborhoods, though, have seen a precipitous fall when the economy declines.

The question to consider, then, is what role the Homebuyer Program plays in a city that is very differ-ent from the city of twenty years ago. Since 1994, Yale has committed more than $28 million to the Home-buyer Program. The program has produced over a thousand happy poster children who, as Chauncey points out, can go on to be “ambassadors for Yale” in their neighborhoods. And with these many beneficia-ries and the good press that has followed each biennial renewal, the Homebuyer Program is an opportunity for Yale to profess a commitment to New Haven. It’s clear that the program serves Yale. It’s less clear that it still serves New Haven.

May Brantley stands at the front door of her home surveying the busy rain-slicked road on a November morning. The street is lined on one side with color-ful houses whose azure and lime-green paint peels in small patches. On the other side of the street are several small apartment buildings with uniform win-

dows that seem to repeat endlessly down the street. Brantley, a lifelong New Haven resident who works in Yale’s Theater Studies Department, purchased her home in the Dwight neighborhood two years ago. “All I could say was wow,” she remembers, recreating the open-mouthed look of delight she wore when she first walked into the house.

From her vantage point on the couch, she points out all the things she loves about her home: a small stained-glass window, her collection of potted plants, a fireplace stocked with logs, stairs leading to a spa-cious bedroom. She has a room for her mother to stay in when she is visiting, and a backyard that is large enough for family barbecues. She had been planning to leave New Haven until she heard about the Home-buyer Program. “I was going to move to Hamden,” she says as the television plays softly in the background. “They have much lower taxes there.” The benefit pro-vided by the Homebuyer Program, though, was enough to at least partly offset the high property taxes she has to pay.

According to Michael Morand, Yale’s former direc-tor of New Haven Affairs and a current employee of Office of Public Affairs and Communication, the

Joshua galperin and his wife, sara kuebbing, in their home. Photo by Jennifer lu.

18 THE NEW JOURNAL

Homebuyer Program has two primary target audiences: people who live outside New Haven and might not have considered moving into the city, and people who rent in New Haven and need assistance or incentive to buy a home. Brantley, who fits into the second cat-egory, is a model beneficiary of the program: a native of the Elm City who could afford to purchase a home thanks to Yale, and as a result promotes stability in the Dwight neighborhood.

When Brantley bought her home two years ago, the program had gone through around ten renewals and modifications. When it first began, employees could receive the benefit if they bought a home anywhere in New Haven. After the first two years, it was limited to only homes purchased in parts of East Rock, Beaver Hills, Wooster Square, Dixwell, Newhallville, Dwight, the Hill, and West Rock. Specific areas of the latter five neighborhoods are federally designated “empow-erment zones” in need of economic development. Fair Haven, which does not include an empowerment zone, was also added to the Homebuyer Program in 2003 at the request of union contract negotiators to accommodate employees who wanted to live in a pri-marily Latino neighborhood. Now, eligible employ-ees—professors with appointments of at least one year and permanent staff who work at least twenty hours per week—can receive up to a total of thirty thousand dol-lars, paid in installments over ten years.

Though the Yale Homebuyer Program includes mul-tiple empowerment zones, there is one area of partic-ular focus. The University offers a $5,000 additional credit to individuals who purchase homes in Dixwell, the neighborhood immediately northwest of the new residential colleges, which are scheduled for comple-tion by 2017. Dixwell currently has lower crime and poverty rates than both Newhallville and the Hill.

Yale, however, offers no extra incentive to homebuy-ers in those latter two neighborhoods. By contrast, the Neighborhood Housing Service, a New Haven-based organization that provides a wide range of programs to support new homeowners with down-payment assis-tance and homebuyer education programs, specifically targets Newhallville and parts of the Hill for its housing renovations and support, but not Dixwell. Neighbor-hood Housing Services’ Jim Paley says his organization focuses on areas where money can have the greatest impact. “A lot of areas in Dixwell have come back very strong,” he explains, contrasting it with Newhallville and the Hill. “I think Yale is selecting Dixwell because it is just adjacent to where the new residential colleges are being built.”

One way of reading Yale’s selection of neighbor-hoods, says Chloe Taft, a postdoctoral associate in the American Studies department who teaches a course on the history of housing in America, is to conclude that Yale has chosen the empowerment zones as areas that could particularly benefit from increased homeowner-ship and the investment it would bring. “On the other hand,” she continues, “Yale has an interest in creating buffer zones” by investing specifically in the areas that border the campus, creating more stability through homeownership in an area, like Dixwell, that is close to student housing.

Yale’s focus on empowerment zone neighborhoods also contributes to subtle shifts in the demograph-ics of communities surrounding the University. “The Homebuyer Program is gentrification in that it implies investment in the community,” says Elihu Rubin, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Architecture. “The dark side of that, though, is displacement.” As homebuyers purchase homes and go on to live in them instead of renting them out, a house that might have once been rented out at an affordable rate is no longer on the market, reducing supply and, considered on a large scale, gradually raising prices.

DeStefano points out that New Haven’s housing problem today—now that the rate of home vacancies has been brought down significantly—is the avail-ability of affordable housing. “The community that is feeling squeezed by the development of market-rate housing feels like we need to have policy that pre-serves affordable housing,” he says. Bridgette Russell, director of the Homeownership Center of the Neigh-borhood Housing Services, points out that New Haven has become a target for real estate investors because of its low vacancy rates—2.1 percent, according to the New York-based real estate research firm Reis—and high rents. According to a 2014 report by the City of New Haven, the average monthly rate for a two-bed-

For THE ProgrAM’s TwENTY-YEAr

ANNivErsArY iN 2014, THE YAlE dAilY NEws CAllEd

iT oNE oF PrEsidENT lEviN’s “MosT widElY

ACClAiMEd TowN-gowN iNiTiATivEs.”

FEBRUARY 2016 19

room apartment in the city is high: $2,173. Though the Homebuyer Program has not caused the rents to sky-rocket, it now sits in the uneasy position of handing out money without making a concentrated effort to direct it to places that truly need it the most.

Despite the changes in the city and the University, Yale touts the program as proudly as ever. “For more than two decades, the University has sought to engage in even more powerful ways with its neighbors,” says Morand, delivering a well-practiced speech in his deep baritone. “The Homebuyer Program is a key facet of this comprehensive engagement with our neighbors.” The program has attracted roughly thirty-five partici-pants per year in the last few years, and the majority of those homeowners end up staying in their homes for a long term. In that sense, Morand says, it is a clear success. And participants in the program are, unsur-prisingly, thrilled by the financial rewards and by more intangible benefits.

“I definitely feel more vested in New Haven as a city,” says Sarah Kuebbing, a postdoctoral associate in the School of Forestry. She and her husband, Josh Galperin, who teaches at Yale Law School and the School of Forestry, bought their home in Beaver Hills after renting an apartment in East Rock. Even though they were already living in New Haven, looking to buy a home encouraged them to move outside of the “Yale Bubble,” as they referred to it several times during our interview. “I’m more interested in the community and the politics than I would be if I lived in East Rock,” she says. Owning a home in Beaver Hills allows the couple to take advantage of one of the greatest benefits of liv-ing and working in New Haven—the short commute—while also being able to become part of a close-knit community. On weekends, they spend much of their time working in their yard, which slopes high above

the street and gives them a good vantage point from which they can talk to their neighbors next door and across the street. “They’re great neighbors,” says Dana Holahan, who lives next door to Galperin and Kueb-bing. “They’re committed to making the neighborhood better.” Homeowners like Galperin and Kuebbing are exactly the type of “ambassadors” that Chauncey says the University hopes to dispatch through the Home-buyer Program.

But while the ambassadors help Yale put forward a friendly face, DeStefano says housing is no longer the biggest problem that New Haven faces, and certainly not as big a problem as it was in 1994, at least as far as vacancies and rampant blight go. “The problem now is how we invest in young people, not how we invest in housing stock. I frankly happen to think that invest-ment in core competencies of human capital around things like higher education, entrepreneurship … are more important,” DeStefano says.

After the end of her Thursday shift in the Berkeley dining hall, Annette Tracey leans forward in a chair in the common room and proudly flips through pictures of her home in Dixwell. “This is my back yard… This is my street…” she says, swiping quickly through sunny photos of her red-with-white-trim house on her phone. She leans back, her lipsticked mouth pulling back into a wide smile as she shakes her head, still in disbelief at her good fortune ten years after she bought her home.

A happy-ending story like Tracey’s is certainly one of the biggest accomplishments of the Homebuyer Pro-gram. Indeed, in the twenty-two years and counting of its existence, the Homebuyer Program has helped more than a thousand Yale employees buy homes and fulfill their “American Dreams,” as Tracey puts it. But the Homebuyer Program is essentially an investment, and as with any investment it is made because the investor plans to get something out of it.

Morand concludes that one of the many functions of the Homebuyer Program today is “maintaining the momentum that New Haven has built over the last twenty years.” But when it comes to maintaining the momentum of the city’s tremendous comeback since the nineties, it is hard to see how the Homebuyer Pro-gram, ill-suited to the city’s current needs in education and employment, could play a big role.

— Natalie Yang is a sophomore in Ezra stiles College.

THE HoMEbUYEr ProgrAM is EssENTiAllY AN iNvEsTMENT, ANd As wiTH ANY iNvEsTMENT,

iT is MAdE bECAUsE THE iNvEsTor PlANs To gET soMETHiNg oUT oF iT.

20 THE NEW JOURNAL

FEBRUARY 2016 21

Ramon DeJesus, a former tenant of Church Street South.

FEBRUARY 2016 23

Marx, a lawyer with New Haven Legal Assistance, represents the people who lived there. Del Hoyo, DeJesus, Rivera, their children, and more than fifty other families at Church Street South who were displaced due to black mold, decaying ceilings, crumbling staircases, and illnesses, among countless other issues. New Haven’s Livable City Initiative declared their units unlivable last September, and occupants moved into hotels around the city. Over the past few years, Northland Investment Corporation, the Boston-based company that owns the complex, has been the target of myriad accusations of neglect because of the Church Street South conditions. Northland is now at the center of legal action involving more than a thousand tenants. Over two hundred families remain in the apartments, waiting to hear where they will go. Their homes haven’t yet been condemned, but they know that the buildings will soon be torn down.

When the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) assessed the property in response to the September inspections and other complaints, it came back with a score of 20 out of 100, the lowest given to any complex in New Haven’s history. The former residents are asking who is to blame. The previous year, HUD’s partial assessment was a positive eighty-one percent, calling into question how much attention the department really pays to low-income properties. With the help of the Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH), Northland has begun to relocate families in the most severe conditions, but the process of finding new, affordable housing is sluggish at best and torturous for many. It’s a project that requires government inspections, landlords who will accept subsidized rent for short periods of time, and vacant, affordable homes. At the time of this publication, only forty-two families had managed to sign leases and relocate—only about fifteen percent of the residents at Church Street South. Representatives from Northland declined to comment for this article.

Marx and another local attorney, David Rosen, separately represent the tenants against Northland, but while the private sector wrestles with accountability, families live in uncertainty. Seventeen families—left without homes in Church Street South or elsewhere—are still staying in hotels. Some have gone to the Clarion, six miles north from where Marx stood; others have ended up in the Premiere, one mile past the train tracks. They have been there for months. Their belongings are often in storage if not destroyed by mold, and even large families are crammed into rooms with two beds. This is the aftermath of neglect.

Clarion Hotel, Hamden, Connecticut

I had to enter the Clarion through the side entrance to meet Del Hoyo in her room. Plywood panels covered the main doors and windows of the lobby, and the front desk had been moved into the continental breakfast area, across from the cereal dispensers. The Sunday before, at 3 a.m., Del Hoyo woke up thinking a bomb had gone off. After the explosion, she scrambled out of bed with Jeilyn, her 1-year-old daughter, to get dressed, in case she had to run through the shards of glass that covered the hallways.

When she stepped outside, she realized that the bomb was, in fact, a silver sedan that had careened through the lobby’s wall. In a video she took of the scene, a doorframe torn off its hinges lies on the floor, chunks of glass litter the carpets, and police lights blink through gauzy curtains from the parking lot outside. In the center of the frame, the car’s pixilated back bumper sticks out of a pile of rubble that, minutes before, had been the reception desk.

This incident didn’t faze Del Hoyo. Taking a record of her surroundings is routine by now, after snapping endless pictures of black mold and waterlogged windowsills from Church Street South. Compared to the gradual decay of her home, the car incident was minor—and ended quickly.

When I knock on her first-floor door, she welcomes me in as if I were coming over for dinner. But there is no place for Del Hoyo to serve dinner, let alone cook, in her room. Northland gives her a weekly allowance for food. Her amenities add up to one queen-sized bed, a flat screen TV, and a bathroom. Laundry lies in piles near the door, and her daughter’s shoes (a pink boot, a sparkly sneaker) are scattered across the carpet.

“There’s nothing to do here,” she says as she takes a seat on the bed, allowing me the only chair in the room. She’s been going to her mother’s and grandmother’s houses to avoid the hotel. “I literally have been going to work even on days that I don’t work, even on days when the office is closed.” She is still dressed in the scrubs she wears to her receptionist job at a health care clinic. Jeilyn crawls across the bed’s surface, back and forth, over and over, her small hands leaving slight impressions in the sheets.

Because of the mold that climbed up the walls of Church Street South, Jeilyn now has three inhalers. Like many other children who grew up in the complex, she visits the doctor frequently. Del Hoyo seems exhausted when describing her apartment falling to pieces. There’s no mold at the Clarion or the other hotels where tenants are staying, but their sterile anonymity is hard to adjust to.

24 THE NEW JOURNAL

Across the hotel, on the second floor, Luz DeJesus is cooking rice in a Crock-Pot that teeters on the edge of a countertop barely big enough for the small sink. Her short frame is cramped while standing in front of it to stir. The food—held in rubber bins and cardboard boxes stacked on top of one another—leans against the wall behind her. She offers me a glass of water and free reign of the room’s mauve striped couch, but she’s offering me access not to her home, but to a temporary space.

In September, both Del Hoyo and DeJesus moved out of Church Street South and into the Premiere Hotel, where they had stoves and a bit more space than they do now. The Premiere was close to their old apartments and the kids’ schools. But when Yale parents arrived for the University’s Family Weekend, DeJesus, Del Hoyo, and others had to move out. They were sent to the Clarion, on the other side of town, to make room for the visitors, a transfer coordinated by the Premiere. Larry Gottesdiener, the CEO of Northland, told the New Haven Independent that the incident was “unavoidable” and that “most or all” of the tenants would be moved back to the Premiere within days. The promise hasn’t held for DeJesus or Del Hoyo.

DeJesus had lived at Church Street South’s José Martí Court building since 1996. She’s no stranger to the neglect from Church Street South administrators, which, she says, forced her family to be its own maintenance staff—it took building custodians two days

to respond to her clogged sink, so her 17-year-old son Ramon bought supplies and did it himself.

“We knew we had mold in the bathroom,” she says. “But nobody really knew the condition we were living in.” DeJesus stresses how impossible it was to get help from the complex’s maintenance. If she called about the mold, they often told her they didn’t have the supplies or time. If they did come, they strolled in days after the complaint and did a flimsy patchwork job.

The environment became harder to bear as time went on. Her eyes and nose watered. The lupus she was diagnosed with in 2006 began acting up, and her whole family contracted asthma, a common symptom of living in the condemned apartments. “We’re all human just like they were,” she says of the Church Street South staff and executives. “But we were all living there basically, as I see it, as animals.”

As the mold pushed her out of her apartment, the violence and drug use in the Church Street South courtyards pushed her back in. The complex takes up three blocks with no through streets; areas hidden behind concrete walls make it easier to commit crimes. DeJesus says gunshots kept her awake at night. “I never used to come out of the house,” she remembers. “If I sat out front, it was for a little bit so my kids could get air, and then we’d come back inside.”

DeJesus’s case first gained momentum after Del Hoyo introduced her to Marx. In February 2015, Del Hoyo got the ball rolling by calling the Livable City

Luz and Ramon DeJesus with their parrot Pistachio.

FEBRUARY 2016 25

Initiative to come inspect her apartment. She tried filing her own case against Northland. (She was training to be a paralegal at the time, she told me, which helped her with the process.) But when Del Hoyo made a minor mistake on a form, Northland’s lawyers were able to get the case dismissed. She went to Marx at New Haven Legal Assistance, and the two of them started gathering other accounts of mistreatment. Del Hoyo texted neighbors she knew in the complex, asking if their apartment had black spots on the ceilings; Marx walked around Church Street South, asking people if she could see if the walls in their homes were leaking. Her office is now working with ninety-nine families, and the list is growing.

While we are talking, DeJesus’s youngest daughter, Ashley, who’s 13 and speaks in a soft, measured voice, and Naydeliz, DeJesus’s 2-year-old, bright-eyed granddaughter, run into the room. They ask: “Can we go to the lobby?” and then, later, “Can we go to the pool?” Those are their only options for play, unless they want to run down the hall with their Yorkshire or hold their green parrot Pistachio, who squawks from beneath the pink rag covering its cage.

DeJesus’s aunt, Haydee Diaz, who lives on the third floor of the Clarion, joins us on the couch. Diaz lives by herself. She also has breathing problems, and she says her doctor insists on monthly visits after seeing photos of the mold under her sink at Church Street South. With Diaz in the room to add to the complaints, DeJesus gets angrier about how long she’s waited for a home. They repeat the phrase, “What’s going to happen after a year?” after most of their sentences, as if it were a prayer.

“We’re not asking to come out of the Jungle and live in a palace!” DeJesus says. “We want something comfortable,” The city’s housing authority is helping locate new homes, but finding a comfortable spot requires time and energy, the kind DeJesus simply doesn’t have. With her severe illnesses, children, and lack of a job, she is more disadvantaged in the housing race than most tenants.

When the kids are off at the pool, DeJesus and Diaz have a harder time keeping their emotions in check. When Diaz starts to cry, steeling her face by looking at the TV, DeJesus burrows her face in her aunt’s shoulder. Then, she looks at me.

“You know, we’re sitting here and talking to you,” she says slowly. “But inside we’re dying to cry.”

She adds one more thing. “All I can say is, God bless Amy. God bless David

Rosen.” Diaz nods in approval.

City Hall, New Haven, Connecticut

In November, Marx and Del Hoyo came to Meeting Room 3 of New Haven’s City Hall to present their case to the Black and Hispanic Caucus of the Board of Alders. (The majority of tenants at Church Street South, like the residents of New Haven generally, are Black or Latino.) Del Hoyo came straight from work, her burgundy-tinted hair pulled back into a tight bun.

“Thank you, chairwoman, for your tireless efforts so far,” Marx said, addressing Ward 6 alder Dolores Colón, the chairwoman of the caucus. After hearing Marx’s concerns and Del Hoyo’s testimony, the alders voted unanimously to put pressure on Northland from inside the city government. Perhaps they could deny the company building permits or cite the Fair Housing Act rules to describe how Northland’s harmful practices disproportionately affect minority residents. There would continue to be meetings about Church Street South and the larger housing landscape of New Haven in the coming months, in the same room and with many of the same faces. But, for Del Hoyo and DeJesus, little has been decided. The rest of the complex’s families have to stay put in the meantime.

Small numbers of residents continue to move out of Church Street South each month, but the number of available spaces for them in New Haven is shrinking. No law requires Northland to replace the complex’s 301 units. Marx is wary that the company could find a way to duck out, perhaps by dumping all the tenants into temporary housing or building apartments that the current residents couldn’t afford.

Gottesdiener, Northland’s CEO, told the Boston Globe that the Church Street South negligence “is an organizational failure and I take responsibility for it. We’re not seasoned subsidized housing developers.” But he also wrote about Marx in an October email to the New Haven Independent:

While we commend her for shining a spotlight on this issue, it is time for her to stop pointing fingers and start working toward the ultimate goal, getting all of the families into quality housing with as little disruption to their lives as possible…

In December, Northland proposed a new plan designed to relocate the Church Street South tenants within the next six months. If HUD approves it, the tenants will have two options for new housing: they can take part in something called an “8bb transfer,” in which residents will move to another large complex that Northland has to find and coordinate. They can also request a “portable voucher,” a type of subsidy that will follow them to an apartment or house of their choice.

Both pose problems: the 8bb is preferable for people

26 THE NEW JOURNAL

who might have trouble getting voucher approval, since certain landlords deny leases on the basis of language barriers, illnesses, disabilities, and criminal records. But the list of possible locations that Northland has proposed to HUD for this transfer, Marx says, is anything but helpful—even a “fiction.” One location, called Val Macri, is a fully subsidized, fully occupied complex for homeless people. Many of the other buildings aren’t even in New Haven. The voucher allows people to select their own homes, for which the tenants will pay only thirty percent of the cost. But in New Haven, there simply aren’t enough units in the city—the pickings for three-, four-, and five-bedroom apartments are slim and often too expensive.

Karen DuBois-Walton, executive director of the Housing Authority, explained that it’s impossible for Northland to move the Church Street South tenants at once: “They’re not going to find 301 units all in one effort, so my guess is they’ll find the first twenty, and then another thirty.”

Northland, HUD, and the city are currently negotiating who is going to pay, and how much, to make this all come to pass. After the company agreed to pay for portable vouchers, the process gained momentum.

Civil rights attorney David Rosen is preparing a lawsuit separate from Marx’s. He wants Northland to pay its former occupants for damages. In his office on Orange Street, with his feet propped on his desk, he tells me he’s looking for serious compensation.

The New Haven Register called Rosen the “dean of the civil rights lawyers in Connecticut.” In 1970, he represented Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Seale was tried and acquitted for shooting Alex Rackley, a fellow Panther thought to be a spy, in the back of the head and dumping him in the Coginchaug River in Middleton, Connecticut. Since what Rosen calls “the trial of the century of the year,” he’s continued to focus on civil rights cases.

“They’re stuck,” Rosen says of the Church Street South tenants. “For the most part, they’re parents of young children, and the ones who are working aren’t making much money at all.” He’s working with Del Hoyo, DeJesus, and many others, but his process thus far is quieter than Marx’s—his case is simmering as he collects information on everything from lost furniture to damaged lungs.

If Rosen’s lawsuit ends up calling national attention to Church Street South, it could also emphasize serious questions about how HUD conducts business with low-income properties. While the 20/100 score HUD recently gave the complex reflects tenant complaints, its 81/100 score in October 2014 is confusing. There were no major capital investments in Northland between

2013 and 2015, meaning that there is no obvious reason their evaluation rose about 20 points from 64/100 in October 2013 before plummeting so drastically.

Amidst all the wrangling over who is to blame, one thing is clear: nobody wants to pay. Rosen’s case is against Northland, but the government was still responsible for funneling money to a negligent landlord. Rhonda Siciliano, the spokeswoman of the HUD regional office in Boston, which oversees New Haven, says the department sampled only a few units at Church Street South during the earlier inspections, contributing to the misleading results. Their inspection process, she said, doesn’t even allow mold to affect scores in meaningful ways. If HUD can miss serious, complex-wide issues, how can the department ensure that they catch life-threatening conditions?

Tyler Street, New Haven, Connecticut

At this visit, there’s no lobby to go through—or around—before knocking on the door. Yomaly Rivera’s new house is on Tyler Street, and I’m waiting on her front steps. The house has two floors, a driveway, its own mailbox, a backyard, and even a Christmas tree inside, under which Rivera has placed a tower of presents for her kids. She’s still in the process of decorating, but she’s proud to show me around. (Her daughter Tatiana’s room, for instance, lacks a bedframe, but it has cheetah-print curtains for now.) “I love it here,” she says, again and again. She’s right across the street from Evergreen Cemetery. When she lets me in the front door, she glances at the rolling hills of tombstones from her porch. “The neighbors are quiet.”

“I was so excited,” she said, remembering the

FEBRUARY 2016 27

moment she found the house. She could finally move out of her room at the Premiere Hotel, where she had lived since August. “I was jumping around.” That day, the landlord called her to say the house passed HUD inspection, and all that was left was to get an official record of that pass, sign some papers at Church Street South, and move her belongings, most of which were still in their boxes (new and mold-free) and piled in the corner of the hotel room. She looked forward to having some privacy on Tyler Street—and some peace.

Rivera is letting herself enjoy the house, but she can’t yet cut ties with Northland. Until the portable vouchers get approved by HUD headquarters, she will continue using something called a “pass-through lease” to pay her rent—a temporary subsidy that is not part of Northland’s proposed voucher program. All tenants who have moved into their own apartments or houses currently use these leases, and in most cases, Northland has been paying about twelve hundred dollars a month for them, Marx said. Pass-throughs are part of a process that HUD usually reserves for those in the wake of a natural disaster. In this case, the disaster is Church Street South itself.

Even though she’s settled in her new home, Rivera still feels the instability of relocation due to her financial dependency on Northland. She started cosmetology school to try to secure a more steady income. (Her hair had become a collage of bright red and brown since we first spoke in her room at the Premiere.) She’s worried that the house could become too expensive, even after she receives her voucher from Northland. If she has no other options, Rivera could potentially move back into an apartment complex like Church Street South. For her, this is the last resort—she recoils from even talking about her old home.

She plans to host her mother-in-law, who’s coming from Pennsylvania, for Christmas this year. It will be a far cry from Thanksgiving, when half of her possessions were still in the hotel, the lease unsigned, and her husband sick with pneumonia. “Now, it’s kind of calm,” she tells me. “We good now.”

Rivera’s situation represents the ideal outcome for the tenants, but she’s one of the early—and lucky—ones. She is now waiting, with fingers crossed, for the results of David Rosen’s lawsuit. “I know we’re gonna win this. It wasn’t our fault. We were dying, little by little, inside that place.”

Armed with photos of mold stretched across her drywall, she says she’s ready to testify in court during the lawsuit. In one of them, something that looks like a mushroom sprouts from a kitchen wall. She goes back to Church Street South only to pick up the mail. “It’s dead over there,” she says.

Church Street South, New Haven, Connecticut

From the ground, it’s clear why they call it the Jungle. Snow is either frozen into solid sheets or melted

into dark, static pools in the mud. It congregates, too, around the more eerie relics of Church Street South’s late-sixties architecture: yellow stone cylinders sticking out of the ground; vacant cinderblock buildings with barred windows, and, in the middle of one courtyard, an inexplicable concrete monolith.

It’s easy to get lost in the Jungle, seemingly by design. The system of squat walls is so jumbled that you’ll find yourself in a corner, completely hidden to others in the complex or anyone on the street. Each dense building has cramped passageways running through it, dark even on a sunny afternoon. Amy Marx points to the rusting stairways, the dripping, icy pipes, and the trash collecting in abandoned yards. As she walks past Del Hoyo’s former yard gate (a wooden one, painted green with a yellow sun), someone sticks a head out of a parked minivan to yell, “Hey, that’s Amy Marx!” She has become a familiar face at the complex.

“I was just really speechless for a while,” she says of her first visit. “It was hard to believe that we had families in New Haven living in conditions that were so close to the places that all of us go, and yet so far from the reality of the rest of our lives.”

She’s here to visit yet another family that has called her office. They live in a building called De Diego by the parking lot, and their apartment is bookended by ones that have been condemned. Black plywood covers the windows and doors here, too. Marx sighs. “It’s brutalism in disrepair.”

Marx approaches a woman who is standing by the staircase, smoking a cigarette.

“Hey there, I’m a legal aid,” Marx tells her. “Carolyn called me. Is she home? Do you have mold?”

The woman quickly finishes her cigarette. She nods. They walk upstairs and go inside.

Most, if not all, of the tenants will be relieved to close their Church Street South doors for the last time. But when they leave their apartments, they’ll also leave behind a place they called theirs. There’s pride in that sense of belonging. For over a thousand people, that pride is in jeopardy. In the meantime, they’ll be living in limbos—ones that are intact, dry, and without mold, but ones that certainly are not home.

— Elena saavedra buckley is a sophomore in silliman College.

28 THE NEW JOURNAL

REEL TALK P R O F I L E

The man behind Yale’s screenings reviews the future of film

Ruby Bilger

Tony Sudol surveys his territory from the projection booth. He makes a brief foray into the theater to check light and sound levels, then returns satisfied. The show tonight, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 French New Wave film Breathless, is one Sudol has projected dozens of times. He knows exactly how it’s supposed to look and sound. While the first reel unspools in one of the reel-to-reel projection towers, Sudol runs his finger over the next, which he’ll load into the second tower in twenty minutes. He starts to thread the polyester film through the projector sprockets, saying he could do this in his sleep.

Inside the booth, the film sounds like a distant jackhammer as it rattles through the gears. We sit in silence and watch the characters’ drowned-out flirtations, waiting for the flashing black dot at the top right of the screen that will cue Sudol to change projectors. Sudol sings along with the movie’s four-note theme, the only sound from the theater that we manage to hear. I ask him if he likes Breathless. He pauses. “I do, but it isn’t successful because Jean-Luc Godard directed it,” he says. “It’s good because Jean-Pierre Melville, the great French director, suggested that he cut out all the unnecessary stuff. So he made this jump-cut storyline that was completely new at the time. I don’t like Godard.”

Sudol is Yale’s projectionist extraordinaire. A middle-aged man with a balding ring of brown hair and nearly translucent blue eyes, he wears about twenty keys on his belt for all the rooms he has to access. He has worked at the Film Studies Center since 1997. He organizes speakers, rents prints, and—most importantly—projects movies nearly every day of the school year. He’s master of a profession that has very recently turned obsolete. In 2000, there were thirty commercial digital screens in the world. By 2010, thirty percent of all theaters had gone digital, and by 2015, nearly every theater in the world had. The Whitney Humanities and Loria Centers are now the only venues in New Haven that still project film, and Sudol the shadowy figure in the back of the theaters who keeps the wheel moving.

He is a film buff with a projectionist’s eye; he can not only rank every film Scorsese ever made and rattle off all the relevant Bollywood flicks of the 2000s, but he also knows what kind of film they were shot on, what their appropriate color contrasts are, which high-

quality film prints do them justice and which digitized versions render them flat and lifeless. He much prefers film to digital, mostly because it gives him control over the screening—the power, as he puts it, “to see that the director’s vision for the film is rightfully displayed.” While modern projectionists download a movie and press play, Sudol controls everything about a reel-to-reel screening, including the light, sound, projection speed, and aspect ratio (the relationship between the image’s width and height). He knows, for example, that badly digitized versions of silents often use the wrong speed, chopping off the sides of the image or speeding up frames so the characters zip around like wind-up dolls. This drives Sudol mad. He notices everything. Once, watching a 1960s film he’d seen before, certain that the focus on the projector was correct, he noticed that the credits on the print itself were out of focus.

Projection itself isn’t an art form; Sudol considers it “protecting someone’s art form.” While he has no control over the quality of a print, he can certainly project it badly. If he screws up, the effect is like a handsome dog in terrible makeup. Charlie Chaplin can run too fast or the mysterious four-note theme in Breathless can shriek over Patricia Franchini’s disaffected musings on love. If you see a film at Yale, Sudol is probably there. If he does his job right, you won’t know it.

Sudol once wanted to be a filmmaker. He tried to make movies out of college in the eighties, went into debt, got a day job at a phone company, and started working as a part-time projectionist in 1988. He was a programming

—EW

FEBRUARY 2016 29

director for nine years at the New Haven International Film Festival, and has worked at Yale since 1997, full-time since 2010. The job is technical, but Sudol obsesses over film from all angles.

As many films as he has seen and projects in a given week, as hyper-aware as he is of their presentation, his reason for watching movies is rather ordinary: to be immersed in a story. He hates films with hackneyed narratives that aim to score style points or box-office success, but he still believes in substance over style. “Story—and the telling of it—is the most important part of a film,” he says.

On this point, Sudol has a long-running disagreement with Ron Gregg, a film professor and programming director of the Whitney Humanities Center. Gregg, who teaches Postwar Queer Avant-Garde Film in the fall and Hollywood in the 21st Century in the spring, doesn’t even pay attention to movie narratives anymore. “Film follows a formula,” Gregg says. “I’m rarely lost in film because I can tell you within the first five minutes what’s going to happen.” Somehow this realization hasn’t made him jaded. “So why do I still go see movies? Why did I see Mad Max: Fury Road? I know that Mad Max is going to win. It doesn’t matter—the experience of the story is the aesthetics of it: the costumes, the acting, the editing. The story was fine but the aesthetics were amazing. Amazing!”

Sudol and Gregg argue all the time. One of Gregg’s favorite movies of this millennium is the Wachowski’s 2008 remake of Speed Racer. “That movie is pure eye candy,” he says. “It’s like watching a moving painting. It’s the most expensive art film I’ve ever seen.”

“I hate that movie,” Sudol told me. “There’s no story there. It’s unbearable.”

Sudol’s favorite films play with Hollywood formula. His first cinematic love was Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western, The Wild Bunch. “What Peckinpah did in that movie was take the rules of a Western and flip them on their heads—he started where all other Westerns end and made the good guys the bad guys.” Sudol seems to set up rules for what he likes so that they can be inverted. “I like movies to have beautiful sets, but Lars von Trier didn’t do that in Dogville,” he says. “That movie didn’t have a set; it broke all the rules for me. But I was sitting on the edge of my seat by the end of it, thinking, ‘Lars, don’t fail me, don’t fail me.’ And he didn’t! I was so immersed that I wasn’t even paying attention to what I usually look for.”

Sudol gets excited when films manipulate their audiences—not emotionally (“I can’t stand it when movies pull at my heartstrings,” he says), but physically, when they trick viewers into thinking they’re actually in the movie. In one scene in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, for example, the characters are talking in a room and the camera is placed right behind the doorframe. In a theater, Sudol says, you’ll see people craning their necks, trying to see beyond the

door. It’s a clever aesthetic trick in a movie with a famous narrative—though whether the shot is engrossing because of the devil baby story or the devil baby story is engrossing because of the shot is up for debate.

Sudol acknowledges that not all viewers notice, or care about, the details he obsesses over. He’s so attuned to editing, acting, lighting, and film quality that when he’s jolted out of a viewing experience, he knows exactly why. He doesn’t like talking about the mechanics of filmmaking because it makes him too self-conscious. “If you’re pulled out of a film and you know that a jump cut irritated you, it ruins the illusion,” he says. But in order for the illusion to be successful, the film has to be screened correctly. He wanted to see Once Upon a Time in the West since he was a teenager, but he refused to rent a corrupt digital copy. Instead, he waited twenty-five years until the movie was playing at a nearby theater so he could see it on film.

If the students watching Breathless for class examine the film as an image, Sudol examines it as an object. Debating aesthetics versus narrative means nothing to a projectionist without considering how the film is actually shown—on an original print, on a crappy re-print, on Blu-Ray, streamed online. In Sudol’s opinion, every technological change in the way a movie is shown affects the quality of the illusion. This makes him understandably anxious these days. Film technology has never been so in flux as it is now.

The argument that pits analog purists against digital progressives is often boiled down to sentimentality versus practicality (“Film looks better!” cry the purists; “Digital is the future!” reply the progressives), but neither medium is objectively superior, aesthetically or practically.

Film doesn’t always look better than digital. Appreciators laud film’s chemical advantage, which provides sharper, more vibrant pictures than cookie cutter pixels. While it’s true that digital pixels haven’t yet achieved the chemical precision of film, the gap is closing quickly. “I was watching a Blu-Ray copy of Citizen Kane the other day and it looked pretty damn good,” Gregg tells me. “Certainly the average viewer couldn’t have told the difference from a film print.” Moreover, the actual quality

ANY ArCHivisTs CAN TEll THAT A FilM HAs diEd

THE sECoNd THEY oPEN iTs CANisTEr ANd sMEll

viNEgAr.

30 THE NEW JOURNAL

swirl out of every shot like a moving painting. Directors like the Wachowskis dive triumphantly into digital cinema, while Quentin Tarantino outfitted theaters worldwide with old projection equipment this past year, so that he could show The Hateful Eight in seventy-millimeter film. Maybe digital archives will fail and prove the purists right. Maybe digital will advance so far that even Sudol can’t tell the difference between a pixel and a molecule. For now every film exists in suspended copies of itself, some in binary and some in celluloid, each distinct difference altering the film’s experience for the sharp-eyed viewer.

So we have people like Sudol, in a relic profession, projecting our film experiences like Oz behind the curtain. You come for a pleasant experience and he generates your illusion, knowing, through obsession, what you don’t—that the illusion may auto-ignite in a warehouse or be deleted when a studio runs out of money, that the jump cut wasn’t Godard’s idea, that the Blu-Ray copy corrupted the colors, that Polanski put the camera by the door so you’d try and see beyond it, that this is a good story because it turns the Western trope inside out, that this is a piece of crap because the story is just a chase scene, that you may never see a movie as dazzling as Citizen Kane on nitrate, that the credits are out of focus on this print.

— ruby bilger is a sophomore in branford College.

of a film image depends on the quality of the print, which varies wildly. Old prints are often scratched and spotted; most prints from the sixties and seventies were shot on cheap film that has since turned pink.

Humans have always disrespected film, even when it was the dominant movie-making technology. Sudol calls it the “abused art form.” Ninety percent of American silent films are lost for good, because American film studios destroyed the prints after sound emerged in the 1930s. The studios didn’t want to pay to store the unpopular silents. TV stations would simply wipe the film used for newsreels and sitcoms and reuse the base. And there’s the millions of small-scale abuses: cheap theaters that kept their light bulbs until they burned out, ushers who threaded platter reels so that the gears scratched the prints diagonally, student projectionists who fell asleep while the reel jammed and the bulb burned a hole in the frame.

Unlike data, film decays. How it decays depends on when it was made: films before 1954 were all shot on a highly flammable nitrate base, which can auto-ignite (as happened in 1978, when the nitrate vaults of both the United States National Archives and Records Administration and the George Eastman House burned to the ground and their rare contents were lost forever) or decay into goo, dust, and a no-less flammable gas. Between 1954 and the early nineties the base switched to acetate, which degrades into acetic acid. Any archivists can tell that a film has died the second they open its canister and smell vinegar. Now film is made of polyester, a strong, pliable, durable plastic ideal for prints. But the material is too strong for cameras, which will break if the film jams.

While film doesn’t last forever, digital isn’t necessarily more stable. “Someone can find a film that’s been in a hut in a jungle for seventy years and it still holds up,” says Brian Meacham, an archivist at the Yale Film Studies Center, “whereas the digital footage you shot yesterday could be inexplicably corrupted.” Film can last for over one hundred years if preserved correctly, at a relatively low cost for the archivist. Digital archives cost twelve times as much per film to maintain, and are under constant threat of data extinction, tech obsolescence, and degradation. If a studio runs out of money, you won’t find the digital data miraculously preserved in a jungle.

Film lovers like Sudol and Meacham like to honor a film by showing it in its original state. But every film is a physical product of its era, altered as technology changes. The nitrate films of the Twenties were projected onto screens made with actual silver, to dazzling three-dimensional effect. Some Blu-Ray recordings remove the hisses and scratches from old prints and enhance their fading colors; others compress the print into a dull plane. Some digital films turn black backgrounds grey and wobbly; others offer special effects so convincing that they

FEBRUARY 2016 31

In ConversationThursday

March 3, 2016

5:15PM

Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel Street

Open to the public without charge

Dianne Wiest

Two-time Academy Award winner

This lecture is endowed through the Elizabethan Club of Yale University and co-sponsored by the

Beinecke Fellows Fund at Yale School of Drama.

Dianne Wiest will appear in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at Yale Repertory Theatre, April 29–May 21.

Photo by Serge Nivelle

The Twenty-Fifth Annual MaYNaRD MaCk LeCTuRe

32 THE NEW JOURNAL

PICKLE JAR APOLOGYp o e m

Charlotte Ferenbach

Because gratitude is finite and because apparently, there was never remorse to start with, what I get instead is handed a jar of pickles.

I sit on the floor in front of everyone. I accept because I am on a floor and it is in front of everyone.I eat and am silent. The muscle brines.

*

I would have preferred themthe afternoon the birdwatcher showed us how to look,

When he tasted the way leaves doif they’re new and sliced through by sun or fingernails. A week after

and I sat at the rocky bottom of a creek for a long time. I listened to birdcalls. It was warmand green, with pebbles for my fists;the smallest were grit under my fingernails.

*

Alone in a motel room, nowhere, I had a jar too.

They forgot to give me towels but no one was around to see me dripso it didn’t really matter.

I swept snow angels in a queen-sized bed It smelled so clean and good I wanted to dieIt was so empty when I reached my arms under the heavy comforter covering the unslept side.

It took four hours to open the jar on the kitchenette counter.The whiskey helped, which I don’t always say.I cried, but also, I did it.

—N

YP

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FEBRUARY 2016 33

AUTISM AT YALES N A P S H O T

Navigating the limits of the University’s support

Clara Collier

Elise* ’16 speaks the way most people write—with-out garden-path syntax, unnecessary repetition, or filler words. Her tone is even and detached, simultaneously emphatic and matter-of-fact. Her lack of facial and audi-tory expressiveness is common in autistic people and bril-liant but abrasive television detectives—but then, I knew what to look for. We didn’t make eye contact.

Like many women with autism, Elise received her diagnosis relatively late in life. She was frank about the process. “It sucked. I always knew something was wrong, or off, and I just thought I was crazy.” This was the first of several points in our interview where I was forced to suppress a powerful urge to babble in sympa-thy. My own emotional memory ranges from patchy to nonexistent, but I’ve never had any trouble recalling the way I felt the first time I read the words “Asperg-er’s Syndrome”: recognition, followed by manic, soaring relief.

One of the more prevalent clichés in the autistic community is that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person—a counter to the com-mon misconception that our personalities, opinions, symptoms, and capabilities proceed uniformly from our diagnosis. If anything, our shared experience is the experience of being different. (It’s worth noting that my experience is necessarily and drastically limited to those of us with the cognitive and motor skills neces-sary for mainstream education. Self-awareness requires some liminal relationship with normality.) We grow up with bizarre talents and unexplained skill gaps, intel-ligent and incapable and out-of-place. Fear, guilt, and self-doubt are as close to universal as anything I’ve ever encountered.

But we are often met with the polite conviction that people like us don’t exist. Yet even among medical pro-fessionals, there is a tendency to assume certain attri-butes are incompatible with an autism diagnosis.

Elise started looking for explanations midway through her sophomore year. “The doctor I saw said, ‘Nope, nothing wrong.’ I wasn’t satisfied with that, and I wanted a second opinion.” She seemed to be in a good place to get one: with Yale’s Child Studies Cen-ter, New Haven is a strong contender for the autism research capital of the United States. But that’s not to

say that Yale-affiliated psychologists are, broadly speak-ing, equipped to handle the fact that autistic children grow up to be autistic adults. Most doctors wouldn’t even agree to see her. She was too old, too female, and too competent. “One of the reasons for why I couldn’t be autistic was ‘Oh, but you got into Yale,’” Elise told me. Cue sympathy-babble. No one at Yale has reacted to my diagnosis with cruelty, hostility, or even ill intent, but I’d heard the same thing before.

There is no one autistic story. There is no one “attending Yale while autistic” story, and I haven’t tried to write it. According to the Resource Office on Dis-abilities, there are at least eleven. That’s how many Yale students have registered for academic or housing accommodations. Judy York, the office’s director, told me that the actual number is almost certainly higher. I’ve spoken to three. Two more declined to be inter-viewed. With such a small sample size, I can’t claim to be dispelling stereotypes about a marginalized, if miniscule, group. This is a call to accuracy, not action.

I owe my friendship with Joshua* ’15 to unvarnished anthropological self-interest. I’d been at Yale for about three months and had settled into a socially anxious orbit around other Directed Studies students. He was a chronically introverted physics major. I hadn’t yet met another autistic person at Yale. At that point in my life I’d met exactly two, total. Everything I knew about the inside view came from blogs, magazine articles, and

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34 THE NEW JOURNAL

the occasional memoir. I consumed them all in bulk, my curiosity driven by lingering pre-diagnostic doubt. (I still have an irrational fear that I’m faking it.) Our social circles overlapped at exactly one point. I asked our mutual friend to arrange a psychiatric blind date.

It went well. We ate quickly and then, in a virtuo-sic display of conformity to stereotype, lectured each other on the minutiae of our favorite science fiction franchises for almost six hours. Around midnight, we started talking case history. Like me, he also had ADHD, though he was diagnosed as a young child. In high school, they hadn’t believed he had a learning dis-ability—his grades were too good.

That was less of a problem at Yale. The Resource Office on Disabilities offers two services to students with developmental disabilities: note taking, for lecture classes, and extended time on tests. Joshua used both. “The system was incredible,” he told me the last time we spoke. He had only one complaint. Many autistic people have a marked discrepancy between their verbal and quantitative abilities. Joshua, while gifted mathe-matically, struggles with writing. He described the sus-tained effort, even for a short paper, as almost physically painful. “I couldn’t take lots of courses I wanted to take and learn things that I thought would be valuable, in philosophy, the humanities, in public policy,” he said. Heavy writing requirements effectively prevented him from accessing much of the Yale curriculum.

According to York, students also have access to tutor-ing, writing assistance, and waivers on core require-ments. This isn’t always conveyed to the students who might need these resources. Not all autistic or devel-opmentally disabled students are registered with the resource office; of those who are (including myself), no one I spoke to had heard of these additional accommo-dations. Personally, I’ve always found York and the rest of the resource office staff helpful, especially in seeking housing accommodations. For instance, I requested and received a single. Academics are harder. Univer-sities are often less equipped than elementary or high

schools to address individual autistic students’ very dif-ferent needs, if only because the cases they encounter are fewer and less severe. “It seems unfair to call them unhelpful when they’re not really set up to deal with someone like me,” Elise said. Her situation is Josh-ua’s in reverse: quantitative skills that lag far behind her verbal ability. “The things they’re able to provide are not relevant to me. So I can’t really blame them for that. On the other hand, it was increasingly becoming clear that I had a problem fulfilling my science and math requirements, and they were patently unhelpful in figuring out what to do about it.”

To find a solution for her particular problem, Elise had to bypass the office. After discovering that dyslexic students are allowed to use literature classes in transla-tion to fulfill their foreign language requirement, she petitioned Yale for a similar substitution: she would take writing-based classes in economics as her QRs. “No one knew it was a thing you could do, and I was the first ever to have ever done it,” she said. “There was no institutional support.” Even so, she doesn’t think her autism is an academic liability. “Being an aspie is probably why I’m good at studying. It’s not in spite of it,” she told me. “I’m good at it because my brain works differently.”

Joshua’s worst problems were more social than aca-demic. Though he got good grades, he struggled with social and organizational skills his classmates took for granted. He didn’t know how to socialize in a group, introduce himself to strangers, or ask girls out on dates. “Yale was set up to help me academically,” he told me, “but not in other ways. But I blame myself and my peers for that, more than the University.”

When I was in eighth grade, my classmates were obsessed with a card game called Mau. The gimmick is that new players can’t be told any of the rules—they can only learn by being penalized for breaking them, and new ones are added every round. The whole thing is entertaining for about five minutes, after which you want to strangle the grinning adolescent sadist who invented it. It’s the best analogue I’ve ever come across for trying to have a social life while autistic. The only difference is that, in Mau, you won’t be ostracized for admitting you don’t know how to play.

Joshua is willing to learn the rules. In an ideal world, he said, “people would actively seek me out and strive to include me, would listen to me when I say things.” This admission made him nervous. Few needs are both more basic than companionship, and more impossible to demand of others. Joshua wanted to be part of a com-munity without forcing himself to be the type of person it naturally embraced. “People will accuse me of ‘enti-tlement’ for most of what I’ve said here. They’re right

“sHoUld wE bE gETTiNg TrEATMENT To CoNForM

oUrsElvEs To soCiETY, or sHoUld soCiETY ExPANd

iTs rANgE oF ACCEPTAblE bEHAvior?”

FEBRUARY 2016 35

in that I do think I’m entitled to it. I think everyone is entitled to it.”

Zack Williams ’16, the president of SAAAY (Stu-dents for Autism Awareness At Yale), is an expert on the question of autistic behavioral adjustment. His own experience with social skills training had been over-whelmingly positive. That’s why he wants to complete an MD/Ph.D. in neuroscience, specializing in autism treatment. “I don’t like ABA or anything like that,” he said, naming Applied Behavioral Analysis, a common behavioral therapy, widely opposed in the autistic com-munity for its abuse potential and excessive focus on normalization. But he says, “exhibiting an autism-like behavior is going to impair their social functioning.”

Behavioral intervention is a divisive issue. Elise, among others, takes the opposing view. “I know there’s a lot of disagreement—Zack and I have this argument all the time. Should we be getting treatment to con-form ourselves to society, or should society expand its range of acceptable behavior?” She shook her head. “Maybe it’s because I was diagnosed so late—I’ve been doing all this work, now you guys can do some work and adapt.”

That was when I realized I was making an effort to avoid her eyes. The same thing had happened when I met Joshua. Both times, I’d found myself anxious not to look too normal. After years spent learning body language’s most common dialect, I’d forgotten how to move and act and speak unnaturally—that is to say, like an autistic person. I tend to agree more with Elise, if only because it’s unsettling to think how much of my behavior is adapted from parents and teachers and occupational therapists in an attempted regression to the behavioral mean.

Social skills are always learned, even if most people don’t take notes. It’s harder for me, and I work harder to compensate. But I can choose to socialize with the people who meet me halfway. That gets easier as the world gets bigger. Joshua is happier since graduation from Yale. “It’s a combination of a change in meds, being with people who shared my values, and being more mature,” he said. “Not sure how much of each.” I’m lucky enough to have found close friends at Yale, as are Elise and Zack. “Everything before Yale was a lot worse,” Elise said. “I have a lot more friends now than I did then. A lot of it is we are incredibly nerdy gener-ally. We are a university of nerdy people. I went to a very small high school. There were fifty people over six years. How many nerds is that? Like four.”

“Nerdy” is an interesting proxy for autistic. In defi-ance of taste and popular opinion, some of us don’t even watch Star Trek. But before “nerdy” connoted awkward, persecuted schoolyard intellectualism, it just

meant weird—and that’s in the most pejorative sense. (A similar alchemy has affected the word “geek,” which originally referred to a circus performer who bit the heads off live chickens). For all the benefits and draw-backs of our neurotype, the costs and consequences, I’m most defensive of our involuntary idiosyncrasies. Elise said it more concretely: “On the one hand, I made spreadsheets of my toys when I was 7. But how many 7-year-olds know how to make spreadsheets?”

TV autism—think Sherlock Holmes or Spock—is all social isolation and dazzling brilliance, as if the two could balance each other out. In real life, though, neu-rochemistry doesn’t have to play fair. My autism isn’t a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just me.

*Joshua and Elise asked that their names and identifying information be changed.

— Clara Collier is a sophomore in berkeley College.

36 THE NEW JOURNAL

#SpIRITSQUAD E N D N O T E

on psychic fairs, the tarot, and millennial angst

Azeezat Adeleke

I am a twenty-year-old college junior and terrible at making decisions—the sort of person who agonizes for an hour about which pack of white socks to buy on Amazon. I have a handle on my immediate future; the rainbow tiles of my Google Calendar are a warm, constant presence in my life. But beyond tomorrow or next week or next month, I am at a loss as to how to make Decisions about The Future. People say follow your dreams, but I am not destined to become Aziz Ansari’s personal assistant. I have tried going to Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, but the well-meaning people there ask way too many questions: What do you want to do? What are your passions? If I knew, I would not have trekked half a mile to their office in the first place.

As twentysomethings growing up in this era, we are privileged to have so many more options than our parents. (Amazon offers 348,353 search results for “white socks.”) But, sometimes, too much choice can be paralyzing. For this reason, I have decided to see the psychics.

In early November, I travel to two weekend psychic fairs. The first is in the Best Western Plus hotel in North Haven, which exudes the sort of muted despair I associate with bland, you-could-be-anywhere-in-America architecture. The second is in the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich, whose lobby is comically ritzy, filled with trees that reach up two stories, climbing vines, shrubs, a lazy river, a pond, a waterfall, and glowing lanterns. I Instagram it immediately. Outside each hotel is a small lawn sign staked a foot from the highway: Psychic Fair Today!

Psychics don’t have the best reputation. If we examine the foundation of our shared cultural memory, Harry Potter, we find a typical portrayal of the psychic: Professor Sybill Trelawney. She bumbles around Hogwarts with her crystal balls, making predictions that range from the laughably vague to the absurdly alarmist, serving mostly as comic relief.

In the real world, high-profile seers don’t get much respect, either. Nancy Reagan consulted the stars before making any important decisions—for that reason, her husband’s 1967 swearing in as governor of California took place at 12:10 a.m. Later, an embarrassed President Reagan insisted to reporters, “No policy or decision in my mind has ever been influenced by astrology.” (Too bad—maybe the constellations could have saved us from trickle-down economics.)

In the best case, I will leave these hotel lobbies with clear next steps. In the worst case, I’ll find myself in a small room with a bunch of Sybill Trelawneys. But remember: Professor Trelawney was wrong ninety-nine percent of the time. The other one percent of the time, she did indeed have the power to prophesize.

When I get to the Best Western, I take a picture with the psychic fair sign for my Snapchat Story. This is partly to announce what a cool Saturday I’m having and partly to leave the police a precise geographic location of my whereabouts in case the Spirits don’t want to let me go. I gather my courage, step through the sliding glass doors, and head inside. I walk into a small conference room decorated in chain-hotel chic. To my right, about nine psychic readers sit behind

—EW

FEBRUARY 2016 37

individual tables, facing their clients. To my left, a few rows of chairs form a waiting area where people pass the time until they’re called up for their appointment with destiny. Someone is playing gauzy New Age music from an old iPod. Most of the people look old enough to be my parents or grandparents.

Inside, I reach for my wallet and realize I have no cash. “Do you take —” I start to ask. “Yes,” says Reverend Robert Stempson. He’s been organizing these psychic fairs since 1984, through his for-profit business, the Programs for Human Development. PHD puts on four psychic fairs a month across Connecticut. Stempson doesn’t sit behind a crystal ball; he has a MacBook and a cash register. His white hair and beard, combined with a checkered button-down shirt and khakis, make him look like a high school principal on his day off. He swipes my debit card. Fifteen dollars for fifteen minutes. I am a little poorer, but I figure it’s a small price to pay to resolve The Future.

My first interaction is a disaster. Starr, a medium wearing librarian chic—lilac shirt underneath a lavender cardigan—sits behind a table covered with Dragon’s Blood herbs, Magic Pagan incense, a Hindu om charm, a crucified Jesus, a seated Buddha. I just want to interview her, but then she tries to squeeze in some psychic predictions. She made one banal observation (I like to write, go figure—I’m carrying a notebook). And then she goes for it: “You got a grandmother that was a slave. Do you know about it?” I try not to roll my eyes. My grandparents all live in Nigeria. No one in my family was ever a slave. And besides, even if my family were American, my grandmother would have to be approximately 150 years old to have been a slave in this country. Millennials do a lot of things well, and one of them is refusing to put up with weird racial commentary from old white people. Some people may say that this means we are “coddled.” I feel bad for these people—they didn’t get to grow up in my America.

When I return to Stempson to choose my reading, the Tarot is on my mind. A few weeks ago I acquired a little book called The Symbolism of the Tarot: Philosophy of the Occultism in Pictures and Numbers, originally published in Russia in 1913 by a mathematician and “esotericist” named P.D. Ouspensky. He explains that the Tarot is a pack of fifty-six cards divided into four suits (scepters, cups, swords, and pentacles), plus twenty-two more numbered cards with special names like The High Priestess and The Hanged Man.

According to Ouspensky, the Tarot is no game. It is a diagram of the universe. In the center, there’s a single card: The Fool, representing man. The twenty-one other named cards are placed around it, in a triangle

with seven cards on each side. This is the Christian Trinity—God. On the outside, the fifty-six remaining cards form a square, representing the physical universe.

That is to say: everything is the Tarot and the Tarot is everything.

I scan through the options on Stempson’s table: Barbara S. reads the stars, James is a clairvoyant and medium (and does a lot of readings with a blindfold on), Ivory reads playing cards, and Barbara D. is a medium and a pet psychic. I wonder what sort of person would want to have a conversation with their dead parakeet or Pekingese. Then I see Heather: warm brown eyes and a kind face that patients must be happy to see at the hospital where she works as a nurse. And she reads the Tarot. Heather’s the one.

I sit down across from her and shuffle the cards, clumsily. I’ve never met with a psychic before. It’s the sort of activity that my immigrant parents would consider haram, or at least highly suspicious.

I make three equal-sized stacks with the cards facing down. I pull one card from each stack and then place it on top, facing up. I will do this four times in our fifteen-minute session: The Future in twelve cards. First, a wizened old man holding a staff and a glowing lantern. “The Hermit is going within, having a lot of a connection to spirit,” Heather says. “When you go to sleep at night you can ask spirit to help you to answer questions or to take you where you want to go.” But to this day, my dreams remain a mix of petty embarrassments (sleeping through finals) and embarrassing absurdities (Justin Bieber is my next door neighbor and we go surfing together).

I pull the Ace of Pentacles, a hand reaching through a white cloud and holding a glowing sphere. “This is a new beginning coming with money,” Heather says. Thank god. Here, I almost insert a quip about how little money is in my Wells Fargo account. I imagine myself spinning around in a shower of $100 and $50 bills, grinning. Spirit, you are too kind.

In a second, Heather holds up the Page of Cups, a young guy grasping a golden goblet. She asks if I’m dating anyone right now. I hesitate. “Kind of,” I say. I am in a thing right now, after becoming a little too comfortable with the rhythmic swiping of Tinder. But this thing is missing an emotional center. Out loud, it’s easy to blame hookup culture—why don’t we care about true romance? But that’s just me parroting the typical line. In all honesty, I wonder if I’m incapable of affection.

“There’s more of a love relationship coming in for you,” Heather says after I pull the Two of Cups. “A heart connection.” It’s not like Heather gives me a name or a date. But: Love, actually…Eventually. The

38 THE NEW JOURNAL

rational me says that this is an obvious conclusion: of course I would find love, most people do. But I have to admit that I feel relief wash over me.

As the remaining fifteen minutes turn into ten and then five, Justice tells me that what I’m studying is “meant to be.” Eight of Swords says I need to stop worrying so much, and The Hanged Man assures me that, with my divine connection, I will get the answers in time.

The psychics are purveyors of suspended disbelief. Optimism is so elusive because pessimism—about the depressing lunacy of our politics, the catastrophe of climate change, the persistence of religious extremism, the ambient fear of gun massacres—feels like it has been the underlying emotion in the United States for the past couple of decades (as long as I’ve been alive). That pessimism has seeped from the national narrative into our own lives.

The psychic fair offers instant validation. All you have to do is hand over a bit of money—and what’s more American than that?

As I sit in the hotel lobby, watching my Uber inch closer to me on the virtual map, I think about why I came here: to see what the psychics could offer a young person from this generation, cultured by snark streaked with sincerity, raised during a tumultuous time. At the fairs, I ran into only a couple of people my age; the prime demographic seemed to be middle-aged women who burn a lot of incense. But in a single afternoon, I had been promised that someone will love me, that I will be rich, that I’m on the right path. While my political science courses tell me that good public policy is the only way to save America from flaming ruin, perhaps what I need is the optimism of the Tarot.

— Azeezat Adeleke is a juniorin berkeley College.

Dear readers, This brief letter serves as both an introduction and a

sign-off: we will not be at the helm of the publication

for the upcoming issue. For the past year, we’ve been

working behind the scenes to bring you The New Journal

by helping our writers share their reporting with you.

Just as the school year is unpredictable, so too is the ebb

and flow of the news cycle. We hope you’ve learned as

much as we have while following our reporters along

on their trips, from basement parties in New Haven to

doomsday-preppers’ homes in suburban Connecticut,

from cornfields in Mexico to protests at the heart of Yale.

Thank you for supporting us in all our endeavors. We

look forward to joining you, our readers, when we open

the next issue of the magazine in April.

—Maya Averbuch & Caroline Sydney

From the Editors’ Desk

Moshe Rosman was born in Chicago, USA and studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University. He has lived in Israel since 1979 where he teaches in the Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. In 2010 he served as the Horace Goldsmith Visiting Professor at Yale. Rosman specializes in the history of the Jews in the early modern period in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His books include: The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov; and How Jewish Is Jewish History?

sponsored by the judaic studies program at yale university

For information, please contact Renee Reed at (203) 432-0843 or renee.reed@yale.edu

5:00 pm • Comparative Literature Library, Bingham Hall, 300 College St., 8th Floor

March 2A Protofeminist’s Challenge to Gender Order: Leah Horowitz’s Tekhino ImohosReception to follow

March 8Gender Under Construction: From Genesis To HasidismReception to follow

March 10Reconstructing Gender: Market, Literature, Halakhah, SynagogueReception to follow

the stanley j. arffa lecture series

Moshe RosmanProfessor of Jewish HistoryBar Ilan University

Constructing Jewish Gender