Mielcarz, Karen, 2007 April 29

Karen Mielcarz first started visiting downtown New Haven in the late 1970s while she was a student at the Paier School of Art in Hamden. Since that time she rented housing in the Newhallville neighborhood, on Chapel Street, and in Hamden and then bought a home in Fair Haven in the early 2000s. She recalls how much she enjoyed being a young person in New Haven in the late 1970s and early 1980s and talks about going to shows at Toad's Place, the Agora Theater, the Grotto, and at the Coliseum and about patronizing small businesses and restaurants like Blessings, Group W Bench, and Dava. She also remembers working at print shops on State Street. In the early 1990s she married but divorced several years later. When she remarried in 2001, she and her husband bought a home in Fair Haven because it was beautiful and affordable and they were tired of being tenants. However, she explains that crime and high costs have made being a landlord more difficult than she realized it would be. Mielcarz misses some of the things that she believed made New Haven unique in the 1970s and 1980s. Though she enjoys the arts culture and restaurants of present-day New Haven, she feels that it is unaffordable. She also laments that crime has made her neighborhood a difficult place to live.

Interviewer: Cannell, Oliver

Length (min): 31