Connect with us

New York

Woodbridge, Conn.: A Rural Enclave Close to New Haven

Published

on

Woodbridge, Conn.: A Rural Enclave Close to New Haven

Woodbridge, Conn., a quiet suburb on New Haven’s western edge, is a spot the place privateness comes simply. A lot of the residential tons on the town are at the very least an acre and a half, and multifamily housing is nearly nonexistent. Greater than 1 / 4 of the city’s land space is protected open area. And what little business exercise is permitted is contained inside the city’s southeastern nook, adjoining to the Merritt Parkway.

“We had been type of pleasantly shocked by the texture of the city,” stated Hongbing Huang, 50, a pharmaceutical scientist who moved to Woodbridge from Scarsdale, N.Y., together with his spouse, Hao Wu, a doctor scientist, and their 11-year-old daughter final June. “It has a type of rural really feel, however it’s so near New Haven.”

Certainly, downtown New Haven is a 10- to 20-minute drive from virtually anyplace in Woodbridge, stated Beth Heller, the city’s first selectman. That makes the suburb extremely handy for these working at Yale College, Yale New Haven Hospital or one of many many different instructional establishments and biotech firms within the metropolis.

David Blumenthal, 41, and Noemi Smith Blumenthal, 39, had been drawn to Woodbridge due to the colleges. With one younger baby and one other on the way in which, they determined to maneuver out of Manhattan in the course of the pandemic. Whereas taking refuge at their weekend home within the Poconos, Ms. Blumenthal started looking out on-line for suburbs with well-regarded college methods.

“Woodbridge actually stood out to me,” she stated. “Quite a lot of Yale school stay there, so clearly they’ll need to have good faculties for his or her kids.”

Advertisement

The couple misplaced the primary home they bid on to a different purchaser, then backed out of a deal on one other home after a disappointing inspection. Lastly, they closed on a six-bedroom historic house for $1.05 million — the identical worth they bought for his or her house in Union Sq..

Their new property covers virtually 4 acres, with a pool, a pool home, a barn and two rental cottages, stated Mr. Blumenthal, who sells promoting for medical gear. “Everybody has some area in Woodbridge,” he stated.

Joshua DeBarba, 30, a lawyer, and his spouse, Alyssa, 28, a part-time nurse, moved to Woodbridge final July. The couple, who each grew up in New Haven County, had been renting in Milford and wished to remain within the space, particularly with each units of grandparents residing close by to assist out with their two preschoolers.

“I just like the wooded look of Woodbridge,” Mr. DeBarba stated. “I can stroll round our neighborhood with out having to fret about high-volume site visitors.”

The couple paid $510,000, a number of thousand {dollars} over asking, for a three-bedroom split-level that had been gutted and redone. They recognize the quiet, however they’ve additionally needed to do some adjusting.

Advertisement

“Coming from Milford, if we wanted milk we might get that in 30 seconds,” Mr. DeBarba stated. “In Woodbridge, it’s an enormous journey to get one thing.”

Fewer than 10,000 individuals stay inside Woodbridge’s 19 sq. miles. Sprawling Tudors, modest contemporaries, expanded Capes and vintage colonials all share the identical wooded lanes. The terrain is hilly and traversed by two rivers.

“It’s a suburban group in a rustic setting,” stated Frank D’Ostilio Jr., a dealer and associate at Houlihan Lawrence Wareck D’Ostilio. “It’s about privateness, area, distance, leafiness.”

Strict zoning and the absence of public water and sewers in many of the city discourage denser improvement. A handful of eating places, a bowling alley and a brewpub are clustered within the small business district.

Woodbridge has a median family earnings of $157,610, in accordance with state financial information, making it one of many wealthiest cities in Connecticut. An estimated 42 % of its residents have at the very least a grasp’s diploma, in contrast with 17 % statewide.

Advertisement

In response to criticism that its large-lot zoning successfully excludes lower-income and minority households, the City Plan and Zoning Fee final yr amended the zoning guidelines to permit multifamily housing within the very small portion of Woodbridge with public water and sewers. Two-family houses are allowed elsewhere, however solely topic to the fee’s evaluation and approval.

Erin Boggs, the manager director of Open Communities Alliance, which continues to push for extra intensive zoning reforms, known as the amendments “a primary and really small step towards the extra significant adjustments that have to occur all through the city to make sure that it’s assembly its obligation for inexpensive housing within the area.”

The Alliance has argued that the city’s zoning violates the Zoning Enabling Act, the state structure, and federal and state fair-housing legal guidelines.

Housing stock is extraordinarily restricted nowadays. As of April 10, there have been simply 12 energetic house listings in Woodbridge, ranging in worth from $339,000 for a three-bedroom colonial to $1.295 million for a five-bedroom contemporary-style home.

“All of my shoppers are ready for extra properties to come back on,” stated Pat Cardozo, an agent with Coldwell Banker Realty. “It’s very daunting.”

Advertisement

And patrons are bidding up costs to get what they need. The median sale worth for the 129 single-family houses that offered in the course of the 12-month interval ending April 2 was $520,000, considerably greater than the median of $419,000 for a similar interval a yr earlier, in accordance with information offered by Ms. Cardozo. The median of $520,000 usually buys an older, three- or four-bedroom house, like a ranch or a Cape Cod, she stated.

Costs high out at round $1.5 million. “To my information, there’s solely been one home that’s offered for greater than $2 million,” Mr. D’Ostilio stated.

There are only a few condominiums on the town, and gross sales are rare. The final sale worth, in 2016, was $319,000, for a three-bedroom unit, Ms. Cardozo stated.

Woodbridge’s mill fee (the determine used to calculate property taxes) of $42.64 is excessive in contrast with that of neighboring suburbs. (The speed in Orange is $33.25; in Bethany, it’s $34.50.) Ms. Heller stated the city hopes to ease the property tax burden by increasing the restricted business taxing district.

“We’re within the means of hiring a planner to assist us try this,” she stated.

Advertisement

The Woodbridge City Library, within the historic city middle, is “the guts of the group,” and presents a wide range of programming for adults and youngsters, Ms. Cardozo stated. Within the summertime, the middle’s city inexperienced fills with households for night live shows. Subsequent to the city corridor, a path leads into Alice Newton Road Memorial Park, a nature protect of roughly 100 acres.

Residents help a number of working farms, together with the town-owned Massaro Neighborhood Farm, which is run by a nonprofit group. The 57-acre farm sells natural produce to those that subscribe to its farm-share program, and to eating places. And 10 % of its harvest is allotted to regional hunger-relief packages, stated Caty Poole, the farm’s govt director.

The Jewish Neighborhood Middle of Larger New Haven has a big facility with health gear, a swimming pool and a preschool, whereas the personal Woodbridge Membership has a pool and tennis courts.

Woodbridge has one public elementary college, the Beecher Street Faculty, which enrolls about 850 college students in prekindergarten via sixth grade. College students there averaged 84 % on state assessments for English language arts, and 79 % on assessments for math, in contrast with statewide averages of 68 and 63 %, in accordance with the latest information out there from the State Division of Schooling.

Older college students attend college with college students from neighboring Bethany and Orange, as a part of Amity Regional Faculty District No. 5. Woodbridge college students within the seventh and eighth grades attend center college in Bethany. Highschool college students from all three cities attend Amity Regional Excessive Faculty, in Woodbridge. Common SAT scores for the category of 2021 had been 589 for studying and writing, and 583 for math. The college has a four-year commencement fee of 97 %, in contrast with a statewide fee of 89 %.

Advertisement

Ezra Academy is a personal Jewish day college for college kids in preschool via eighth grade. Tuition ranges from $18,125 to $24,323, and monetary help is accessible.

The Metro-North prepare journey from Union Station in New Haven to Grand Central in Manhattan takes about two hours. A one-way peak-time ticket is $23.50; a month-to-month go is $450.

The 80-mile drive into Midtown Manhattan takes 90 minutes to 2 hours, relying on site visitors.

In 2009, residents voted to spend $7 million to purchase the financially troubled Woodbridge Nation Membership, to stop it from falling into the palms of a developer. The city paid a 3rd occasion to proceed to function a golf course there for some time, however has periodically entertained different proposals for the 155-acre property, which has public water and sewer. Nothing has handed muster. The most recent pitch earlier than the selectmen requires a mixture of housing on a portion of the location, together with some below-market-rate items. However Ms. Heller stated that the board has determined to place out a proper request for proposals, “to see if there’s anything on the market at this level.”

For weekly electronic mail updates on residential actual property information, join right here. Observe us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.

Advertisement

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

New York

Trump Argues That His Immunity Extends to E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

Published

on

Trump Argues That His Immunity Extends to E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

President Trump and the writer E. Jean Carroll are arguing over whether a Supreme Court decision affording him substantial criminal immunity also shields him from having to pay tens of millions in damages for insulting her and saying she lied about his sexually assaulting her.

Mr. Trump made his arguments last year in his appeal of the $83.3 million verdict by a jury that found him liable for defaming Ms. Carroll in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old attack. On Monday, Ms. Carroll pushed sharply back.

Her lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, argued in a brief that Mr. Trump’s view of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which protected him from charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, was too expansive. His statements calling Ms. Carroll’s accusation “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” were strictly personal, she wrote. She said they fell far outside the boundaries of the official acts that presidential immunity protects.

“If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it,” Ms. Kaplan said in her brief.

The dispute over the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, which addressed the scope of a president’s immunity from prosecution, comes as Mr. Trump has seen criminal cases against him in two states come to an end, and a third delayed indefinitely. In a fourth case, in New York, after Mr. Trump was found guilty of 34 counts in a trial stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, the judge imposed no jail time.

Advertisement

But Ms. Carroll’s legal battle with Mr. Trump — fought in two lawsuits spanning more than half a decade and now based in the federal appeals court for the Second Circuit in Manhattan — continues to move forward.

“Presidential immunity forecloses any liability here and requires the complete dismissal of all claims,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, said in an appeals brief in September, citing the Supreme Court decision of last summer. (Mr. Trump has since chosen Mr. Sauer to serve in his administration as the U.S. solicitor general.)

Last month, the Second Circuit appeals court upheld a $5 million judgment against Mr. Trump in the other lawsuit that Ms. Carroll filed against him in Manhattan.

In that case, a federal jury in May 2023 found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. It also found that he had defamed her when, in 2022, he said on Truth Social that her case was a hoax and a lie.

Ms. Carroll testified in the 2023 trial that she ran into Mr. Trump at the Fifth Avenue department store, and he asked for her help buying a present for a female friend. She said they ended up in the lingerie department, where Mr. Trump forced her into a dressing room and shoved her against a wall. He then pulled down her tights and inserted his finger and then his penis into her vagina, she testified.

Advertisement

Ms. Carroll had accused Mr. Trump of rape. The jury of six men and three women found that she had been sexually abused by Mr. Trump, but did not find he had raped her. The jurors have never said why they selected the lesser offense of sexual abuse over rape, which under New York law at the time was defined as sexual intercourse without consent that involves penetration of the penis in the vaginal opening.

The trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of U.S. District Court, ruled that Mr. Trump had waived any immunity argument when he did not raise it early in the litigation.

The $83.3 million jury verdict against Mr. Trump came in Ms. Carroll’s second trial, held in January 2024. That case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made in 2019, when he was still in office during his first term, after Ms. Carroll first accused him, in a New York magazine book excerpt, of raping her in the dressing room.

Mr. Trump called her allegation false and said he had never met Ms. Carroll and did not know who she was. He continued to attack her in social media posts and at news conferences.

Ms. Carroll kept the assault a secret for years, telling only two close friends, before she disclosed it in the magazine excerpt.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

New York

An Anne Frank Exhibition in New York

Published

on

An Anne Frank Exhibition in New York

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at a new Anne Frank exhibition opening in the city today, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A new Anne Frank exhibition will open at the Center for Jewish History in New York today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will remain there for three months before moving on to other cities.

“Anne Frank the Exhibition” is a full-scale re-creation of the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam, and where she wrote her diary. The show has more than 100 original artifacts and examines Anne’s life and death. This is the first time the annex has been completely reconstructed outside Amsterdam, my colleague Laurel Graeber reported.

The exhibition aims to show “how this history, how this memory will go into the 21st century,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said in an interview with Laurel. It comes to New York as antisemitism is rising in the United States and abroad.

The reconstructed annex has five rooms. Each room has the exact details and dimensions as its counterpart at the Anne Frank House, which more than 1.2 million people visit each year. Unlike the original space, which has been intentionally left empty, each room in the exhibition is filled with furniture and possessions, including books and a board game. It also has a facsimile of the diary; the original is in Amsterdam.

Advertisement

The presence of furniture and other possessions in the exhibition could stir controversy. Agnes Mueller, a professor and fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, said her instinct told her that when Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to keep the original annex empty, he was worried about commercialization and universalization of her persona.

“He actually emphasized absence as a way to represent that which is not representable,” Mueller told Laurel. The sight of an annex room filled with possessions, she said, “might induce us to feel way too good about things that we should not feel good about.”

Anne was 13 when she went into hiding, and the installation follows a chronological path, tracing her family’s life in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s through their flight to Amsterdam. One of its introductory rooms uses a montage of film and photos to recreate the atmosphere of Amsterdam in the early 1940s. After that, visitors enter the annex.

“We all know that the diary is about the two years in hiding,” said Tom Brink, the head of collections and presentations at the Amsterdam house and the traveling exhibition’s curator. “But of course, the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that entire story and entire journey deserves to be told.”

The exhibition also chronicles Anne’s father’s return from Auschwitz. He was the sole survivor of the eight Jews who hid in the annex, and pursued the publication of Anne’s diary. In the New York installation, 79 editions of it in different languages are on display, along with memorabilia from theatrical and film adaptations.

Advertisement

Leopold said the immersive elements of the show were meant to take people, especially youths, back in time. The Center for Jewish History has already booked more than 250 school tours of the show, and weekday tickets for visitors under 18 years old are available for $16. The exhibition, a nonprofit venture whose revenues support the missions of its two presenting partners, also provides curriculum materials to classes and free admission to students attending as part of New York City public-school field trips and to those from schools nationwide receiving federal education funding.

There will be programming for adults as well. Tomorrow evening, the author Ruth Franklin (“The Many Lives of Anne Frank”) will be interviewed at the center. On Feb. 9, the novelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Flew Away”) will appear there, and the center will also host a film series. (An extension of the show in New York is under consideration; more venues will be announced in the spring.)

Leopold said that he hoped the show would inspire engagement as well as reflection.

“If this exhibition is doing anything, it’s not just teaching history,” he said. “It is also teaching about ourselves.”


Weather

Advertisement

Expect sunny skies with a high near 39; the wind will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be high winds with a cloudy sky and a low near 32.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).


Dear Diary:

Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.

But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.

Advertisement

He’s got best sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’ —
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)

What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)

It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.

Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.

Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.

Advertisement

Lou Craft

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.


Glad we could get together here. James Barron is back tomorrow. L.F.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

New York

‘ I Heard a Man Behind Me Explaining the Work to His Group’

Published

on

‘ I Heard a Man Behind Me Explaining the Work to His Group’

Dear Diary:

My trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically include a stop to see Seurat’s Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a precursor to his much larger “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

That painting, almost certainly the artist’s best known, has been viewed by countless visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, and by many others who have seen a certain popular 1980s movie in which the piece has a small, but meaningful, role.

On my most recent visit to the Met, I heard a man behind me explaining the work to his group: And there’s another one at the Art Institute of Chicago that’s three times as big as this one, he said.

I turned around.

Advertisement

“You really know your stuff,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’”

— James Devitt


Dear Diary:

Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.

Advertisement

But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore.
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.

He’s got best-sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’—
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)

What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.

Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)

It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.

Advertisement

Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.

Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.

— Lou Craft


Dear Diary:

I was taking an uptown express to the Upper West Side. A trim, older man with a well-worn accordion got on at 34th Street.

Advertisement

He immediately jumped into a set of ’60s rock classics. Man, he rocked. Among the highlights was his version of the 1966 Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black.”

As we both prepared to get off at 96th Street, I gave him a nod of approval and put some money in his cup.

He grinned and rushed toward the uptown local that was waiting across the platform.

He said, “96th Street, ‘96 Tears.’”

— Chris Parnagian

Advertisement

Dear Diary:

It was about 10 years ago. I was in the passenger seat of our Toyota, my husband was at the wheel and we were stuck in northbound traffic on the West Side Highway.

It was warm out, and we had the windows down. I had a copy of “Life of Pi,” with its distinctive blue dust jacket and orange spine, on my lap.

I heard a man’s voice that sounded like it was next to me but much higher up. It turned out it was coming from the open window of a cab on a tractor-trailer that was idling next to us.

“Great book,” the voice said.

Advertisement

I looked up and saw the truck’s driver looking down at me. His elbow was resting on the edge of the open window. Beneath it was a copy of “Life of Pi,” open so I could see the dust jacket.

“Great book!” I said.

Slowly, traffic began to move.

— Connie Beckley


Dear Diary:

Advertisement

It was lunchtime in Midtown, and the deli counter line snaked its way along a refrigerated unit filled with cheeses, salamis and tomatoes.

It was all new to me, a recent arrival from Ireland. Finally, it was my turn to order.

“Yeah?” the counterman said.

“Do you have whole wheat?” I asked.

The counterman furrowed his brow and nodded.

Advertisement

“Do you have Cheddar?”

“Yes.”

“Do you … ”

I felt a tap on my shoulder.

Turning around, I saw a short, older man wearing a pork pie hat and a bow tie and peering at me though his glasses.

Advertisement

“Stop asking questions,” he said. “Tell him what you want.”

— Tommy Weir

Read all recent entries and our submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter.

Illustrations by Agnes Lee

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending