cities

As a bank building at Elm and Orange streets meets its maker, an edificial ghost has appeared: a long-forgotten church.

Passers-by have been doing double takes over the past week at the site of the demolition taking place at 80 Elm St. at the corner of Orange. That’s where a crew hired by Spinnaker Real Estate Partners is dismantling the 1948 Art Deco former Webster Bank building to make way for a new six-story 132-room Hilton Garden Inn hotel.

It's officially 2020, which means you may see a census taker knocking on your door this Spring. 

The decennial census also will be online. This hour, we talk with NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang about efforts to count everyone who lives in the United States, and why it matters.

The city of New Haven has a new mayor. Justin Elicker was sworn in Wednesday, Jan 1.

In his inaugural address, Elicker said the city is growing at a rate not seen since the 1920s.

William Outlaw is a natural leader. He's been a key figure in helping to lower New Haven's homicide rate over the last decade. He's a strategist and an organizer who can size up a situation quickly. He can defuse a threatening situation with his charisma and charm. He can run a business. 

As a street outreach worker in New Haven, he uses all the same skills today that he used when he co-ran New Haven's largest cocaine gang in the 1980's. 

When you head to New York, do you ever take a break from the city and get lost on a trail in Central Park? This hour, we take a look at the life of the man behind that beloved and iconic city park: Connecticut native Frederick Law Olmsted.

Today’s municipal elections feature unusual bids for redemption by losers of Democratic primaries in two of the state’s largest cities, as Marilyn Moore attempts a write-in campaign to unseat Joseph P. Ganim in Bridgeport and Mayor Toni N. Harp continues as a third-party candidate following her decisive loss to Justin Elicker in September.

Tuesday, November 5 is Election Day in Connecticut. This means another opportunity for residents to cast ballots for town and city officials. But who will turn out to the polls?

This hour, we check in with reporters and analysts from across the state, and we also hear from you. Will you vote this Election Day? Why or why not?

Tuesday was the deadline in Connecticut to register to vote before Election Day, Nov. 5. If you happened to miss the deadline and still want to exercise your democratic rights, don’t despair.

On April 25, 2018, Patrick Clough walked onto a dock at Fayerweather Yacht Club on Black Rock Harbor in western Bridgeport. He looked down. Swirling around the dock was a brown, foamy slick. Women’s sanitary products and other objects floated in it.

The city council in Fall River, MA voted Wednesday night to hire a Boston law firm and enforce the temporary removal of its mayor Jasiel Correia. 

Former New Haven alder Justin Elicker pulled off a huge upset in that city's Democratic mayoral primary, ousting incumbent Mayor Toni Harp. It was a rematch for the two. Six years ago it was Harp who bested Elicker to lead the city. This time, the challenger won a comfortable victory, with an unofficial total of 6,825 machine votes to 4,841.

Voters in two dozen Connecticut communities are at the polls today to choose candidates to run for mayor and other top municipal posts. Polling places are open until 8:00pm this evening.

Mayors in three of Connecticut’s four largest cities face challenges today as voters go to the polls in 25 municipal primaries, intra-family fights that typically turn on hyper-local issues, personal ambitions and, occasionally, old grudges. 

When you head to New York, do you ever take a break from the city and get lost on a trail in Central Park? This hour, we take a look at the life of the man behind that beloved and iconic city park: Connecticut native Frederick Law Olmsted.

Democratic candidates for the 2019 Hartford mayoral election debated Thursday night.

The field includes party-endorsed incumbent Mayor Luke Bronin, J. Stan McCauley, who is a Democrat endorsed by the Republican party, and two candidates that petitioned their way onto the primary ballot -- state Representative Brandon McGee and former Mayor Eddie Perez.

Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim is seeking reelection this fall. The Democrat will face state senator Marilyn Moore in the September 10th primary. 

This hour, we talk with Democratic State Sen. Marilyn Moore who, in addition to representing the 22nd District, is campaigning for mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

What is her strategy to successfully unseat the city's current mayor, Joe Ganim? We find out and we also hear from you.

Abandoned factories tagged with graffiti. Vacant properties marked by broken windows and overgrown lawns. This hour, we consider the impact of urban blight on communities and hear how some local municipalities are working to improve quality of life.

We check in with the cities of Waterbury and Hartford, where significant strides have been made to survey and address blight.

We also talk with Laura Bliss of CityLab and with a housing official in Baltimore. How effective has the Maryland city’s Vacants to Value program been at reducing the number of vacant, blighted properties? We find out. 

A state jury has ruled in favor of the city of Hartford and against a developer in the controversial case of the bungled construction of the city's recently-built minor league baseball park. 

In a decision announced Tuesday, the jury found against developer Centerplan in a suit brought after the city fired the developer from the job.

If large corporations, like United Technologies, are increasingly eyeing urban hubs for future growth, what are we doing to put our cities at the cusp of that trend? Or more likely, what aren't we doing as a state?

This week, we take stock of what cities such as Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport have to offer CEOs looking to relocate their companies, and where they fall short. 

It's been a half-century since the torture and eventual murder of wrongly suspected FBI informant Alex Rackney by members of the Black Panther Party. The racial tensions in New Haven that followed when party leaders were put on trial for Rackney's death led to the National Guard patrolling its streets.

In some ways, the city has changed a lot since then. But many of the social problems that provoked New Haven's angst during that period--injustices by police, substandard housing, gentrificaton, and racial disparity--remain unsolved.

They live underground and gorge themselves in dumpsters. This hour, we’re taking a long, hard look at creatures you’d probably rather not think about: RATS!

We hear about how the city of Hartford is fighting these unwelcome rodent residents, and we ask a researcher why are these scurrying creatures so successful at living alongside humans?

By turns contrite and defiant, Eddie A. Perez launched a populist campaign for mayor of Hartford on Thursday, attacking the downtown corporations that once backed him and testing the notion of whether Connecticut’s capital is ready to join its largest city, Bridgeport, in returning a corrupt former mayor to City Hall.

Connecticut’s cities were the glories of their time. Handsome and self-reliant, well-built and functional, they were economic dynamos, often known by the products they made: The Hat City, Brass City, Silk City, etc. These cities made the state strong. And then the U.S. won World War II. Many cities hit their population peaks just after the war, and then began a long decline. The pre-war trickle to the suburbs became a torrent (of whites), on new highways that wrecked city neighborhoods.

It is estimated that 12 million Americans live inside one of our nations roughly 45,000 mobile home communities. Despite these numbers, few people outside these parks truly know what life is like for their residents.

A state judge has revoked the public pension of former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, a year and a half after Perez pleaded guilty to two corruption-related offenses stemming from his time in office.