HT: Vanderleun.

IMHO, the essence of the Louis’ Lunch burger is easily achieved. You don’t need the 1890s vertical broiler. Just serve your medium rare burger with tomato on buttered toast.

Hurricane Sandy gave New Haven a little Halloween present.

The 16-acre New Haven Green was laid out in 1638 as the central square of a 9-square town layout. Reputedly, the size of the town green was intended to be sufficiently large as to accommodate all human beings saved at the time of the Day of Judgment, whose number was calculated by the Puritan divines on the basis of various theological considerations to amount to 144,000.

The New Haven Green served as a marketplace and militia parade ground and in the course of its history contained a watch house, a prison, a school, several churches, and a succession of statehouses during the period extending up to 1875 when New Haven shared the seat of government of the colony and later state with Hartford.

The Green also served as the colonial burying ground until 1821. Among those buried in the New Haven Green is the regicide John Dixwell. After the use of the Green as a cemetery was abandoned, the headstones were removed to Grove Street Cemetery, but the burials were undisturbed.

Winds from Hurricane Sandy knocked over an oak tree on Monday, October 29th, on the Upper Green. The following afternoon, a homeless woman recognized that a human skeleton was intertwined with the tree’s exposed roots. She called for the police, and detectives and the state medical examiner went to work, concluding that the remains were those of someone buried in the colonial era.

New Haven Independent story & photos.

Fighting obesity has become a cause for the trendy left in recent years, and like all leftist causes the battle of the bulge finds expression in coercive forms of petty tyranny inevitably producing the kind of story reported by WTNH:

An eighth-grade honors student at a New Haven school has been suspended for buying a bag of candy at school.

Michael Sheridan, a student at Sheridan Middle School, was suspended from school for one day, barred from attending an honors student dinner and stripped of his title as class vice president.

Officials say he was punished because he bought a bag of Skittles from another student.

A school spokeswoman says the New Haven school system banned candy sales and fundraisers in 2003 as part of the districtwide school wellness policy.

Spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo says there are no candy sales allowed in schools, period.

The student who sold the candy also was suspended.

A Texas State legislator has introduced a bill challenging the traditional claim of New Haven, Connecticut’s Louis’ Lunch to the invention of the hamburger. Representative Betty Brown’s contention that the hamburger was invented in Athens, Texas by a local resident named Fletcher Davis at a luncheonette he operated in the late 1880s is based upon research by a local Texas historian and newspaper columnist named Frank X. Tolbert.

John E. Harmon

If Fletcher Davis invented the hamburger at a luncheonette in Athens, Texas, one might suppose that an invention so successful would have kept that luncheonette in operation.

Despite the passage of time, progress, and New Haven’s inexorable downtown development, Louis’ Lunch remains in business after more than a century. John Harmon’s dismissal of Louis’ clam is not well-reasoned, in my view. Since Louis’ has declined to switch from using their archaic vertical gas broilers, and has refused to switch from using toast to buns, and has refused even to countenance such innovations as ketchup, how can one possibly assume that Louis’s sandwich has ever changed from something else to ground beefsteak?