Now of course, I come from Tampa Bay, where the most noticeable landmarks were Todd Adult Video (est. 1969), the weird emo middle-schoolers by Starbucks, and trailer parks. Living in a upper middle-class suburb far removed from anything, not having a car as a result of crashing into a short school bus, and not having friends in high school resulted in Tampa being a perpetually boring place for me. Thus, I may be a lil' bit biased considering I disliked living in Tampa. It may have been a great place if I had lived there on my own in a different area, but my present context can only be applied to New Haven.
I spent my Saturday exploring the Have. No, I don't mean one block west of campus in Rudy's or Au Bon Pain, which I would typically define as "the city." I mean really away from campus. I mean The New Haven Green. OK, maybe that's a bad example. Uh...my house? 227 Dwight? Clearly, there are still a lot of exploring that needs to be done...
I went to the Farmer's Market in Wooster early in the morning to get some eats from my bros' workin' the Yale Farm stand. I worked there last weekend so I got to know some of the people there. This market is something that I never saw in Tampa...fresh, organic produce in the middle of the city, but also a place where one could interact with friends, meet new people, and simply sit down and enjoy the trees and the weather amidst the surrounding roads and traffic.
With my suitemate's bike, I signed on a bike tour as part of the Arts and Ideas festival (I'll explain later) regarding the historical churches around the area. I love biking. I was terrible at the beginning of the summer and crashed into many an old woman, but I've gotten to enjoy it so much as I've gotten better. I can probably spend hours biking in circles in a parking lot so the bike tour was right up my alley. We started by Center Church (est. 1639) on the New Haven Green which was founded in the early 19th century. It was built on a graveyard of the first settlers there. Eli Whitney regularly attended mass there. But 300 years and how things have changed! I imagined the church watching as the demographics changed, as urbanization occurred, as the city expanded...
The most interesting church was in Fair Haven, Connecticut. It was originally an Irish church but it is now has a heavily Hispanic congregation. The industrial neighborhood was a sharp contrast to the upper middle class people of the Wooster Square Farmers Market and the dead white dudes in Trinity Church. The pastor told a fantastic story about Hispanic Christianity and its reverence of the Virgin Guadaloupe.
"According to traditional Catholic accounts of the Guadalupan apparitions, during a walk from his village to the city on the early morning of December 9, 1531,[1] Juan Diego saw a vision of the Virgin - a young girl of fourteen to sixteen, surrounded by light- at the Hill of Tepeyac. Speaking in Nahuatl, the Lady asked for a church to be built at that site in her honor. When Juan Diego spoke to the Spanish bishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the bishop asked him for a miraculous sign to prove his claim. The Virgin asked Juan Diego to gather some flowers at the top of the hill, even though it was winter when no flowers bloomed. He found there Castillian roses, gathered them, and the Virgin herself re-arranged them in his tilma. Diego presented these to bishop Zumárraga. When he presented the roses to Zumárraga, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe miraculously appeared imprinted on the cloth of Diego's tilma."I remember the pastor saying that what was especially striking to him about the story and the picture was that it showed humans and Christ and Mary as mixed races, as mestizo, but this also implied the mixture of the earthly and the divine within humans. I just remembered listening to him and thinking, "Deep, man. Most totally deep." Far out!
The bike tour was extremely enjoyable and I might possibly be doing the Century two weeks from now, which is a 100 mile bike ride through New Haven, though I am considering driving or riding a Segway instead because I am a lazy fatass.
Finally, the Arts and Ideas Festival will be happening on the Green throughout this week. The Arts and Ideas festival puts world-class artists/musicians/honeymakers alongside local artists/musicians/honeymakers. Everyone from Robert Pinski, former poet laureate, to AO Scott, film critic for the New York Times, to Roseanne Cash, will be crashing in The (pretty cool) Dirty this week.
I think I never would have taken the time to explore the city during the school year and I think that's why students see the city in a such a negative light. The summer is different though. There are so many fantastic things happening that give this city a ton of character that I'm sure happens throughout the school year. I'm sad that many Yalies don't spend time to engage the community, that the huge stone walls of Old Campus are both a physical barrier and a psychological barrier between town and gown. I don't do bike tours of the historical landmarks and public art locations during the school year. I avoid the homeless instead of trying to look at why there are so many here. I shy away from the New Haven Green because its for "townies" and "grody sketchballs." I don't go to markets or try to explore restaurants because I have homework.
I'm glad I get to see New Haven this way. I'm beginning to understand, for the first time, the meaning of community.
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