A little bit about our new haven

If you're from the west like I am, you may not know too much about New Haven. In fact, you might not have known which city Yale is in. (Or which state. That's okay, too.)

So armed with my camera and Wikipedia, allow me to share a little bit about the city we now call home. (And I mean a little bit. Like 2 blocks worth.)

According to a recent census, New Haven has about 130,000 people in the city limits. That is similar to Ann Arbor (and takes up similar area), but unlike Ann Arbor it is surrounded by other cities rather than fields, so the municipal area has more than 800,000 people. It was settled first by Native Americans, then the Dutch, and then by Puritans in 1638. Yale was founded in 1701.

New Haven has a thriving restaurant scene and holds the Library of Congress certified yet widely disputed claim of being the birthplace of the hamburger. New Haven is also exceedingly proud of its pizza. Additionally, it is replete with food trucks which show up at the medical school, ice rink, and Long Wharf each day.

My son enjoying the flavors from a taco

My other son not falling into the harbor.

Perhaps even more famous than its food scene is its crime scene. New Haven has made headlines with its ranking as one of the most dangerous cities in America. From my observations so far, I think that might be an exaggeration, but I do still hear a lot of sirens. To be fair, we got plenty of alerts about armed robberies near campus in Ann Arbor, and bike theft was common in both Ann Arbor and Provo, so perhaps no city is totally safe. Most of the crime seems to occur west of Winchester and over in Fair Haven (which is on the other side of a wall by I-91), though I guess packages have been stolen right off of porches in our complex. But that happens everywhere, and I've heard that community policing has been so effective in some neighborhoods which might seem sketchier that nothing gets stolen there.

Signs like this everywhere. Also lots of police officers on bikes in the evenings.

Point is, I haven't felt too scared here yet, except that every time I drive people either drive or walk out in front of me when it's my turn to go. I can also count on someone riding their bike into oncoming traffic, namely me. (Pro tip: look both ways even when crossing a 1-way street.)

What is interesting to me is how stark a contrast there can be even a few blocks can be from each other. I'd heard about adjacent streets in Detroit looking vastly different, but it's true here, too. Since I don't really have pictures yet of the most picturesque parts of New Haven (Yale and East Rock Park), I will defer to Google Images for those for now and focus on the few blocks I photographed yesterday.

Driving back from Stake Conference through some of the neighborhoods west of campus, it tends to look like this:

Almost all of the city is draped in slouching power lines like this, and they slouch even more in residential areas.

So, just sort of typical city, I guess. I still need a GPS through this part because there are so many diagonal and one-way streets that it hasn't been intuitive at all for me.

Within a block or two of passing this Detroit-esque building,

we arrive in the East Rock neighborhood!

And oh, it is lovely. It just seems protected from the world around it. Maybe it's all the trees. Maybe it's the tidy straight streets on a grid that brings back order after the chaos of all the one-way roads.

Either way, I like it.

Overseas Ministry Studies Center

A steep hill. There are lots of these each direction.

The entrance to a dog park. 

There are fun colored houses everywhere in this city!

And lots of houses squished up against each other.

flowers in Yale Farm

Some Yale building

Farnam Memorial Gardens. 

Conference Center

Entrance to the Divinity School.

Despite the lack of cars in this shot, it's a pretty busy street. And, you know, surrounded by trees.

The Divinity School is at the northernmost part of Yale Campus, and buildings and residential colleges pop up here and there as you move south through the city. (So it's not nearly as compact as BYU or Princeton, and you're more likely to find churches and restaurants between buildings than at University of Michigan.) The southernmost part of Yale has the hospital and medical school where Kevin works, and the campus is circumscribed on the south and east by business parks, skyscrapers, and restaurants.

Sorta like this.

I have yet to do a proper tour of Yale or a proper walk/drive up East Rock or West Rock, and this post is long enough without a description of nearby parks, but . . . you get the point. New Haven definitely has its pretty parts.

And we still have lots to discover!