Third Places #2: New Haven Green

On December 11, 2025, 65-year-old Abdulah Kanchero was found dead on a bench in the New Haven Green after warming centers were full; his death was attributed to hypothermia while he endured freezing temperatures. Abdulah was denied basic rights and services because there was simply not enough room for him. But to frame his death as a failure of capacity alone misidentifies the real issue. Scarcity in this context was not accidental, but a result of policy decisions about who and what the city chooses to fund. The infrastructure in place that was meant to support him proved inaccessible when it mattered most.

The Green has never been a truly neutral ground. Established in the seventeenth century as the heart of New Haven’s original nine-square town plan, it has continually reflected the priorities of those in power. Over time, it has functioned as a marketplace, a militia training ground, a burial site for early settlers, and a stage for civic rituals—including speeches, rallies, and public demonstrations. The Green has consistently been shaped to enforce order, assert authority, and control public life according to prevailing social and political norms.

Today, despite the gentle scattering of trees across its vast green lawn and the abundance of benches and sunlit areas, the Green often functions in practice as little more than a shortcut across the block. As of November 2025, the city has plans of revitalization, including planting more trees, implementing a cafe, restrooms and outdoor seating, adding a play garden, improving walkways, and eliminating the through traffic on Temple Street, reconnecting the two halves of the Green.

The plan is to make the Green a more ‘comfortable’ space to occupy. But this comfort only extends to a certain type of person. These plans are a pleasant and tolerable way to disguise the erasure of displaced bodies. As Elihu Rubin has described, “What makes the [Green] a great public space is that it tolerates…all kinds of things and behaviors… Sometimes you’re offended, but that’s what makes it great, that it’s a place that’s not always comfortable.” The Green operates as a microcosm of New Haven itself, reflecting the city’s stark class divisions and the drastic differences that can exist within the same city block. Here, the carefully curated image of the university and the city meets the lived realities of those navigating housing insecurity, unemployment, and systemic neglect.
Ultimately, the future and use of the Green is not only a matter of design or maintenance. It is a question of which bodies are allowed to belong and occupy public space without scrutiny, and which must constantly justify their presence. The Green’s redesign reveals not a commitment to public life, but a confrontation of who the public is imagined to be. Comfort becomes a planning tool, and discomfort—embodied by the unhoused—is treated as a flaw to be designed away.

Third Places is a recurring column documenting, analyzing, and understanding third places in New Haven. It aims to question how these spaces are essential to the health of our souls.