Soliciting the sounds of the city

"Basically, 95 percent of the people at Yale are horrible blue-blazer-wearing assholes who must be shot," says Jesse, 21, a musician. The Daily Caffe, positioned at the edge of campus, sustains a delicate, but not wholly affectionate, mix of students and townies--and tonight, with Yale the topic of discussion, latent tensions are surfacing. Jesse has lived in New Haven since his high school days at Hopkins, long enough to have cultivated some strong opinions about the University. "If you know anything about feudal politics, it's kind of like the manor house versus the serfs," he continues.

Coffee and rock music may give rise to grandstanding. But the venting at the Daily, one of the few places where Elis and Elm City residents congregate, captures the uneasy blend of hostility and camaraderie that characterizes town-gown relations. Indeed, Jesse's feudal metaphor may be more apt than it seems. Many city residents paint Yale, New Haven's largest employer and a major property owner, as a lofty lord providing for its peasantry while ensuring their dependence.

The task of keeping thousands of students fed, sheltered, entertained, and educated provides a livelihood for both Yale employees and local business owners. "Without Yale, New Haven would collapse into itself like a black hole," Jesse says. But Yale's historically strained relations with its unions have done little to boost the University's popularity among the many New Haven residents employed on campus. Local businesses and their employees are also in a precarious position: they depend on the revenue that students and other Yale affiliates bring to the city, but resent being at the mercy of the University's policies. As Manuel, a 31-year-old itinerant custodian, says, "Yale imposes such a high rent on some of their properties that it's impossible for anyone to own a local business here." No wonder city-dwellers love to spout off about the institution that dominates their city, alternately a source of sustenance and suffocation.

As Yale refines its vision for the Broadway area, businesses are especially vulnerable to an agenda that may or may not include them. Across the street from the Daily, employees at Phil's Hair Styles fear that the barbershop may have to vacate the first-floor location it has inhabited for almost 15 years. As Michele Ridley, an employee, says, "[Yale] doesn't want any service businesses on the ground floor.... Our lease is up at the beginning of 1999 so I assume we'll have to move by then." `Y' Haircutting, on York Street, faces a similar fate.

Jim Kurko, the manager of University Commercial Properties, admits that Yale is trying to clear out support and service industries from first-floor locations. Service retails are destination industries--they don't encourage much window shopping, browsing, or impulse buying, as Kurko explains. Very few people get haircuts on the spur of the moment, but plenty decide to get ice cream or coffee on a whim. "It's not like we've isolated particular tenants or we're trying to put anyone out of business," he says. "What we're doing will make the Broadway district better for students."

Most of the retail stores that Yale has been courting are national chains--familiar names like Urban Outfitters, Eddie Bauer, Mc-Donald's, Speedo, and Starbucks. Ridley says, "I heard they want to make it like Harvard Square." However, she adds, "I think the city is alienated enough [from] Yale, and if you [homogenize the Broadway area] it will just make matters worse." Indeed, the University's chain-heavy approach may further strain relations with residents. Not only are businesses like Eddie Bauer and Barnes & Noble's new Yale Bookstore not locally owned, but they are not unionized. In this state, their employees--mostly city residents--will get lower pay, fewer benefits, and less job security than employees at the unionized Yale Co-op, for example, which was forced out of its Broadway location this summer.

Yale's demands on already existing businesses also make life harder for employees. John, a York Copy employee who refused to give his last name, mentions that the copy center has to stay open 24 hours as a term of its lease. "[Yale] wants everybody to stay open late," he says. "I guess they feel students need it. I think that if students don't do what they need to do during the day, they're not going to do it after midnight."

Of course, businesses are not the only links between the University and New Haven; both a city and a college depend on their people, and in this city, the intersection of these populations provides at least as lively--if not as hostile--a reaction as do property wars.

Yalies may not be able to heal the troubled relationship between one of the richest universities in the world and one of the poorest cities in the state, but they can and do make significant efforts. Roger Jennings, 17, a high-school student, benefits from Project SAT, a one-on-one tutoring and SAT-prep service provided by Yale law students and undergraduates. "I'm grateful that Yale is in New Haven," he says, "because the students are giving me valuable help." Frank, 30, a construction worker, says, "I see the Yale students as achievers...some of them seem rude and inconsiderate sometimes, but many of them are polite. I like being around students and learning. It's a good thing for the city."

Many interviewees, when asked if Yale could improve its relations with the city, stressed a deceptively simple solution: respect. "Yale freshmen should have more of an orientation to the city, entering the community and actually meeting people who are not part of the University," says Jesse. "Just because we don't go to Yale doesn't mean we're idiots."

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