There’s a cultural (r)evolution happening in a city often overlooked by creatives and innovators as a long term home. The allure of New York and Boston being so strong, New Haven has long been seen as the place you pass through on your way to either of these behemoths.
A place known only for Yale in most spaces, such that the name is almost synonymous with the university. You kind of have to tell people that it’s where Yale is for them to acknowledge that the city exists, and yet, when you’re here, you see that New Haven is so much more than Yale. A new “breed” of creators is making that real/amplifying that reality.
As a student at the university, you are inculcated with the idea that everything outside of the Yale bubble is dangerous and a threat to your safety. The university consistently reminds you that it can not protect you from the wild sharks in the New Haven oceans if you’re so brazen as to brave an escape from the bubble.
It’s this ever looming threat of the untamed New Havenite that justifies a white student calling the police on a sleeping Black student who can’t possibly belong at the university. This bonnet-donning dark-skinned stranger must be one of the New Haven sharks who somehow broke into our ivory tower and fell asleep in a sacred common space.
When your eyes are opened to New Haven outside of the bubble, the contrast is so shocking that one can not help but obsess over it and wonder how can this secret have been kept so well? A place that nurtures great thinkers, artists, change makers and innovators–outside of / beyond Yale–birthing new paradigms of equity and Liberation for all. In spite of the economic siege that marginalized New Havenites have experienced for decades, this city is an anomaly from which so many places stand to learn.
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After years of voluntary and then involuntary nomadism, I found myself back in a place that had welcomed me so warmly, I couldn’t remember/understand why Spirit / the winds of change had carried me away from here. After years between the tech and creative worlds in New York, I bit the bullet and accepted a spot in the graduate school at Yale, hoping that this would be the end of my back and forth. On an upward trajectory upon leaving Yale for Cambridge University, the pandemic pulled me backwards and yet deeper within myself, such that I spent years grasping for air, until I found a solid lifeline in New Haven county.
There’s a southern hospitality about Black New Havenites, and Black Connecticans in general, that makes a nomad like me feel safe and welcome here. In fact, it was on invitation from an elder statesman that I found myself returning, with my daughter, to a place that always makes us giddy with joy.
It could be the memories of Yale and what we accomplished here, the friends we made here and the freedom we experienced. It could be the Southern-like hospitality that made us feel like no matter what, we would be looked out for here. Protected. Appreciated. Revered. Celebrated.
Friendly Black faces are simply not hard to come by. They fill this town. Your spirit is lifted just walking the streets of New Haven.
Until, of course, you are met suddenly with the contrasting poverty resulting from the university’s extraction from the city. Like the screeching halt of a record stopped in the middle of a plug-and-play, New Haven’s poverty totally kills the vibe.
On any given day, on the New Haven Green, you can find dozens of unhoused people in community or in silence, sleeping on benches or hustling for their next meal. Yale would tell you to fear these people. But not how its practices have displaced them.
The housing crisis in New Haven is characterized by limited units available to the working class and those unaffiliated with Yale. The sprawling bodies covering the city’s most central attraction are the culmination of generations of economic conflict between the University and the inhabitants of the city it occupies.
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From the 1831 blocking of what would have been the country’s first HBCU to the most recent police shooting of a Black youth, there are countless stories of how Yale-affiliated figures have limited the progress of New Haven’s Black population.
The complicity of some Black Yalies in this history too can not be ignored.
And yet, against a backdrop of economic violence, Black New Haven has continued to fight for the Liberated futures they desire, in the spirit of the Black Panthers and so many activist movements that have shaken the city over the last couple hundred years.
It can be said that its because of the New Haven activists who refused to let Yale forget it’s responsibility to the city (from whence cometh the workers who run the university’s structures), that the city has seen a true cultural renaissance over the last few years. A renaissance that is just in its infancy, promising to drive a cultural revolution that can transform the way artists generate wealth, and how the public engages with art.
With a cadre of innovative, creative voices who consistently produce art assets and experiences that uplift the city, redesigning its cultural landscape, New Haven is becoming a cultural hub that is attracting innovators, visionaries and creatives from across the country.
More and more events hosted outside of Yale are consistently attracting populations from other parts of Connecticut, from NYC, DC, Boston and other areas.
The landscape is teeming with creative experiences and people, and it seems so obvious that this city could be the “next big thing.”
But in this day and age, magical, magnetic cities don’t just happen. They are intended. It would take deeply thoughtful, intentional and compassionate city leadership to drive the city to grow in such a way that this innovative energy can be harnessed, and made profitable, for the benefit of all who call this city home.
Considering the history of New Haven, those whose intentions have the most impact are often those with the means to shape reality. I’m hopeful that more and more of those people will be creative people of color who desire to make the city more livable–and thrivable–for even the most marginalized among us.
I will be doing my part to contribute what I can.
Until next time,
Olori
