SOLUTIONS FOR CONNECTICUT’S CITIES
The Cities Project is collaborative journalism and reporting on how to revitalize Connecticut cities from The Connecticut Mirror, Connecticut Public Radio, Hearst Connecticut Media, The Hartford Courant, the Republican-American (of Waterbury), the Hartford Business Journal, and Purple States.
Louisville, Ky. — Louisville is known for bourbon, baseball bats and a famous horse race, but the city on the southern bank of the wide Ohio River has another distinction: it is the last large city in the country to have merged with its surrounding county. In 2003, the city merged with Jefferson County, creating…
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Lowell, Mass. — On a warm and pleasant Sunday in August, Len Tarmey and his wife Kathy were in the top row of the right field grandstand of LeLacheur Park, watching their hometown Lowell Spinners, Single A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, zip around the bases. The couple, in their 70s, can remember when…
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New Haven was stumbling and struggling in the 1980s and early 1990s. Downtown was moribund, litter-strewn and dangerous — a Yale student (among others) was killed on the street in 1991. Yale alumni started checking in from around the country, telling school officials that the negative image of the city was discouraging applications. The university…
Read full story →Omar Downer worked his way up from per diem to four overnight shifts as a hospital phlebotomist. He loves what he does. For Stacie Tavaras, phlebotomy was a stepping stone to steady full-time work as a nurse. Their stories reveal the need to create better pathways from training to full-time employment and careers in the…
Read full story →Stacie Tavaras had a CNA and an LPN but couldn’t get a nursing job. The demand for Omar Downer’s electronics skills had dried up. Six years ago, they enrolled at ConnCAT. Part one of their story explores how Intensive, hands-on training creates opportunity for jobs with a future. Part two reveals where they are now…
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NEW HAVEN — Since 2012, ConnCAT has provided free vocational training in medical billing and coding, phlebotomy and culinary arts fields that have job openings, aided by the relationships the organization has built with employers. On the medical end, that is Yale New Haven Hospital, the second largest workplace in the city, which will need…
Read full story →New Haven — Acuity Brands, with its wraparound view of the city from its 15th-floor home at the Century Tower Building, an engineering staff that is pulling in local talent, and its workers’ appreciation of the lifestyle amenities downtown, is a marketing dream for the city. “We love it here,” said Frank Pelliccio, senior design…
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Last year’s Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, stopped into a supermarket in New Haven this week, leading a posse of four clergymen and the Republican candidate for mayor in West Haven, hoping to score political points by criticizing the grocery tax mess made by the Lamont administration. Instead, as the New Haven Register reported,…
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A quarter century ago, downtown Hartford was 8/5 rather than 24/7. People drove in for work or UConn games and then headed back to the suburbs. It was hard to even buy a cup of coffee on weekends. That has changed. With 1,500 new apartments completed or in construction, a new UConn branch, new transportation…
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This welcome to Bridgeport sign sits at the bottom of the northbound I-95 exit on East Main Street near Steelpointe in Bridgeport. Credit: Brian A. Pounds / Hearst Connecticut Media To the world outside its borders, Bridgeport doesn’t have a sterling reputation. On those rare occasions when it’s referenced in popular culture, it’s in a…
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