Stuart Semmel

Moving to East Rock in 2008, we felt a quick connection to the community. Within weeks, we’d met more neighbors than we had in the six previous years. Our kids came home from Worthington Hooker elementary school singing their music teacher’s celebration of the remarkably international student body (“Coming from places like France and Niger / But most of us come from right here / Hooray for New Haven!”). We didn’t give up our car, but we used it a lot less. The Yale shuttle took us to campus most days—and we could walk home when the weather was nice. The markets on Orange St. provided a safety net for late afternoons when we realized we were missing a crucial ingredient… Our daughter reported, after one grocery errand, that she’d spotted Congresswoman DeLauro chatting with Romeo. East Rock’s a neighborhood where kids can walk and bike without neighbors reporting them to the authorities. They graduate from the playground of East Rock Park to having a picnic on its summit with their friends. They stroll to Edgerton Park for Shakespeare in August, and the fair in September. And if Halloween is the test of a neighborhood’s health, then East Rock proves every year that its population density and sense of community are ideal.”
-Stuart Semmel, Associate Head of Pauli Murray College, Senior Lecturer in History and Humanities