Culture & Community | Mardi Gras | Arts & Culture | New Haven Free Public Library | Literacy
Shamain McAllister, now director of Cultural Affairs for the City of New Haven, with Mitchell Library Branch Manager Marian Huggins. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Long before she was ever New Haven’s Director of Cultural Affairs, Sha McAllister can remember looking down, and marveling at the brand new dark blue library card in her hands.
Back then, she was 10 years old, and the Irvington Public Library seemed huge and endless around her. It was there, over the next several years, that she would travel through universes page by page, from Sandra Cisneros’ Mango Street to Toni Morrison’s Cincinnati to the North Carolina that gave Maya Angelou lyrical wings. Every time, that card wasn’t just another piece of plastic. It was a passport.
Tuesday evening, McAllister brought that memory to the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) during its annual Mardi Gras celebration, a fundraiser for the NHFPL Foundation that brings together New Haven and New Orleans for a single jazz- and mask-studded party on Fat Tuesday. Held across the library’s first floor, the night became a love letter to community, and a recognition that it is at the core of the work that the library does.
The night, which raised over $40,000 for the NHFPL Foundation, honored city both McAllister and chef Claire Criscuolo, whose Chapel Street restaurant, Claire’s Corner Copia, celebrated five decades in business last year.
“The library is one of those fair mediums that we have in our society,” McAllister said before the evening’s official program had begun. “The library to me is like neutral ground. Like, if you’re beefin’ with the library, what’s really the problem? You know? Do you not want people to learn, and explore, and gain knowledge and better themselves? There’s more than books at the library!”
Top: Emcee Ruben Ortiz (in the mask) with performers. Bottom: Trey Moore, DJ Raheem Nelson, and Wes Lewis. Not pictured (but so talented!) are Ron Hurt on piano and Jonathan Small on drums.
From the first strains of jazz to a jamming dance floor and drag queens that glided from table to table, that love for the library came through in big, broad and vibrant strokes, sometimes accompanied with gem-colored lights, long gold streamers, and bright garlands of balloons. Where a second-floor balcony looks over the lobby, a huge mask turned the area into a face, alive as performers stood above it and got the show rolling. Back downstairs, miniature lanterns and street signs evoked the Big Easy, with costumes from Long Wharf Theatre soaking the place in a sense of the past.
As the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective played the evening in, organizer Alisha Crutchfield floated through the room, noting every detail that had transformed the building into a vibrant, dramatic and joyful space, where magic felt entirely possible. This year, she worked closely with Kulturally LIT Founder IfeMichelle Gardin and a small village of artists, small businesses, and library staff to give the event a kind of new-old flair, as though a person might take a wrong turn at the bestsellers, and end up on Bourbon Street.
“I wanted to create a space where people felt so good they wanted to donate,” she said with a musical laugh, radiant in a long dress with yellows and oranges that popped in the low, dramatic lighting. She motioned to the program book, in which several New Haveners had shared their stories of what the library means to them. Throughout the night, patrons added their own narratives to the mix, catching up over muffuletta sliders, veganized Andouille meatballs, hush puppies and enough gumbo and rice and beans from Archie Moore’s.
By just past 6 p.m., as 8-year-old Joseph Ramos called the room to attention, that love for the library was fully on display. Taking the stage with a three, glimmering strands of gold beads over a pint-sized suit, he spoke to the library’s meaning in his own life, and the life of his family. Or in his words, “I’m here to support the library. My favorite place on earth!”
Top: BLOOM's Alisha Crutchfield and City Librarian Maria Bernhey. Bottom: LIT Fest Founder IfeMichelle Gardin, who works closely with McAllister.
Through near-weekly visits, he said, the library is where he has learned about everything from Cesar Chavez to the Tuskegee Airmen to “how to identify rocks like a quartz, quartzite, sandstone, serpentinite granite, and feldspar.” Reading hasn’t just introduced him to authors like Jeff Kinney and Dav Pilkey of Diary Of A Wimpy Kid and Dog Man fame, it has helped him excel in school and at home. “It’s also one of the reasons I can articulate my words so nicely,” he said with a smile.
Elsewhere in the room, attendees were feeling that too. Abigail O'Keefe, a lifelong New Havener who is now a development specialist at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, remembered growing up in the Fair Haven Branch Library, and spending hours delighting in the rows and rows of books in the children’s section (“I still have books probably that I should have returned,” she said with a sheepish smile).
As a kid, trips to the library were a frequent and celebrated occasion, O’Keefe remembered—particularly after she discovered a book with a character named Abagail, and saw herself reflected in the pages (Tuesday, she couldn’t remember the title, despite her best efforts). As she got older, the organization’s five branches never lost that sense of enchantment. So when she heard that McAllister, a former colleague, was going to receive recognition for her work in the community, she decided to finally check the Fat Tuesday fundraiser out.
Top: Shawn Murray and Lauren Anderson. Bottom: Moore and Hurt vibing.
Across the room, writer and comedian Shawn Murray made his way through the atrium with his three-year-old twins, Nadia and Cora, and Possible Futures Founder Lauren Anderson, a member on the NHFPL Foundation’s board who earlier in the day had aptly called the library “the people’s palace.” Born and raised in New Haven, Murray fell in love with the NHFPL young, one of 19 grandkids who would travel to the Ives Main Branch with their grandmother. It lived up to Anderson’s populist sobriquet then, just as it does now.
“I have so many memories of running around trying to get a book,” he said with a smile as Nadia nibbled on the edge of a rose-tinted masquerade mask.
Throughout the night, he and fellow attendees also recognized the sheer number of programs and resources that the library provides on a fairly tight budget. In a given week, the library is a warming and cooling center, job application site, pro-bono tax office, teen gaming space, beloved storytime spot, meeting location, coworking hub, maker’s paradise, concert glvenue, passport office, living archive, and haven for tens of thousands of books and digital resources.
“It’s a challenge for the library because we do so much,” said City Librarian Maria Bernhey, who earlier in the evening had made a Heated Rivalry joke that was right on time.
Top: Abagail O'Keefe. Bottom: Joseph.
It’s also what makes fundraisers like Mardi Gras so important to the survival of the organization. Last year, the NHFPL received $5,512,935, plus $500,000 in capital funds, from the City of New Haven—a number that translated to .78 percent of the city budget, and not enough to cover all of the work it does. In 2025, it served over 420,000 patrons across its five branches (the Ives Main Branch alone sees about 30,000 people come through its doors every month, Bernhey said), with roughly 42,000 attendees at over 2,600 public programs.
All of those programs—things like drag queen story hour, an annual all-ages summer learning challenge, author visits, book clubs, film screenings, and discussions—are funded by grants and donations that come through the NHFPL Foundation.
“It is essential for the survival of any community to have institutions,” said Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT) President and CEO and ConnCORP CEO Erik Clemons, referencing both Claire’s and the NHFPL as he warmly introduced Criscuolo. He remembered growing up very poor, and looking to books as both an escape and a repository of vast, unending knowledge, through which he could learn about the wide world beyond his doorstep.
Criscuolo, who with her late husband Frank started a quiet revolution with vegetarian food and thousands of big, warm hugs on Chapel Street 51 years ago, agreed. Before heading into a jazz-flecked ballroom that stood where Ives Squared had been hours before, she remembered growing up in Wooster Square, where the library became her culinary launchpad.
Top: Criscuolo. Bottom: Queens Valeryan, Kiki Lucia, and Midnight. "Libraries are the great equalizer in society," Lucia said. "This is how we build connection across our differences."
“I often say that I’m who I am today because of the access to the library that I had as a child,” she said, thanking the librarians who keep the organization running. “My brothers and I didn’t have encyclopedias, and there weren’t always a lot of books in the house, because we couldn’t afford them. But the library was always there for us.”
Even as a kid, she gravitated toward the library’s collection of cookbooks, learning recipes from kitchens halfway across the globe. It gave her a deep sense of awe and respect for other cultures that she still brings to her restaurant today.
“My mother always said, ‘Don’t you want to learn to make grandma’s recipes?’” she recalled later in the evening. She remembered rolling tiny meatballs and filling cream puffs in her family’s Italian-American kitchen, parts of which she still channels at the corner of College and Chapel Streets so many years later. “And I would say, ‘I do want to make grandma’s recipes. But I want to make everyone’s grandma’s recipes.”
McAllister, too, praised the library as an enduring cultural connector. Growing up in Irvington, New Jersey, McAllister saw books as both an escape and her gateway to world history. She read voraciously, from kid-friendly reads like Captain Underpants and Judy Blume’s oeuvre to Beloved and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. She especially loved nonfiction—“My life has been serious for a long time,” she said with a laugh—just as she does today.
“Reading something and being able to see it in your head is a gift,” she said. Years later, when she moved to New Haven, getting acquainted with the library was one of her first priorities. When she worked as the associate director of education and community impact at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, she helped organize programming and distribute thousands of books through the NEA Big Read. “It’s been a blessing. I just feel so honored.”
Asked Tuesday if he would support the library at a minimum of one percent of the city’s 2026-27 general fund budget, Mayor Justin Elicker answered that he expects 2026 to be “another challenging budget year.” Before leaving the fête, he did say that his daughters get especially excited when he announces that the family is headed to the library to check out books.
“It will be another challenging budget year, with debt and pension costs continuing to rise because of decisions made years ago, and also because health care costs are rising and American Rescue Plan Funds are drying up,” he said in a text message Tuesday evening. “We would, of course, love to put more funding into the libraries. I’m very grateful to the private donors, such as those at the fundraiser tonight, that allow the libraries more flexibility to do their amazing work.”