<p>Haven't had a chance to visit but have heard some negative things about Middletown and the relationship of Middletown and Wesleyan. What's been your experience?</p>
<p>What's Middletown like? </p>
<p>Do you feel safe at Wesleyan?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>What do you like to do in Middletown? </p>
<p>Does Wesleyan contribute in a positive way to the town? How?</p>
<p>it’s not a major urban area, so most of the activity is on campus. that said, there’s not the “middle of no where.” There’s not that much missing from the area that most students care all that much about, except maybe a train station.</p>
<p>town-gown relations could be a lot better, and could be a lot worse. Wesleyan contributes in the form of various community service initiatives, like the Green Street Arts Center and tutoring in elementary schools. not to mention being one of the biggest employers in town.</p>
<p>“safety” is sort of subjective. I never feel unsafe. we also aren’t a gated community, which is a good thing, but you also have to be smart about common sense stuff like, say, locking your bike and not letting strangers into your dorm. </p>
<p>I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said here:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/499938-visited-wesleyan-campus-beautiful-students-awesome-middletown-eyesore.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/499938-visited-wesleyan-campus-beautiful-students-awesome-middletown-eyesore.html</a>
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/544974-what-do-middletown.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/544974-what-do-middletown.html</a>
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/884429-town-middletown.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/884429-town-middletown.html</a></p>
<p>Likes:</p>
<p>1) Food - nice variety of ethnic restaurants, fast food chains (Dunkin Donuts, Burger King) and sandwich places all within walking distance of campus. Some food carts (felafal and All-American) find their way to campus after dark.</p>
<p>2) Diverse population - basic southern New England mix of third and fourth generation Italian/Sicilian and Irish with a significant African-American and Latino/Chicano presence (~25%) that is spread pretty much throughout the city. </p>
<p>3) Main Street - there’s a real downtown with places to buy clothing, get your hair cut, get things dry cleaned without traveling to the next county.</p>
<p>4) The Connecticut River - severly underutilized; only the crew team seems to know anything about it. People have spotted everything from wild turkeys to peregrine falcons along its banks.</p>
<p>Dislikes:</p>
<p>1) A percolating racial divide; there’s only one reason for a city the size of Middletown’s to have a k-9 police dog squad, and that’s in case of a riot breaking out. Fortunately, the closest thing to that ever happening is the occasional Wesleyan street party-- and, I’m not joking.</p>
<p>2) lack of a super market - not sure where the people who live in the North End go for everyday essentials (milk, cereal, poultry.) It’s always been a mystery to me.</p>
<p>3) percolating generational divide - Middletown seems strikingly divided between the very old and the very young. The old want their taxes to stay as low as possible while the young struggle to find things to do after school. Wesleyan tries to take up some of the slack (see, below.)</p>
<p>What Wesleyan contributes in a positive way to the town:</p>
<p>1) Wesleyan is the buyer of last resort for much the local real estate market; it is constantly buying and selling property in and around the center of town in an effort to keep property values up and, the fact that there is any residential market at all so close to the center of town is a tribute Wesleyan’s success in doing so.</p>
<p>2) It contributed the lion’s share of funds for the Green Street Arts Center, an after-school program located in the North End, about a fifteen minute walk from campus.</p>
<p>3) It also contributed to the building of a fairly nice hotel on Main Street (parents finally have a place to stay on short weekend visits.)</p>
<p>3) Local young people have guest privileges at Wesleyan gym and pool facilities.</p>
<p>4) Foss Hill, the center of the Wesleyan campus, has gradually become a focal point for much of the town. People of all ages can be seen sledding during the winter and observing sports events during the spring and fall.</p>
<p>As Jarsilver notes, the pros and cons of Middletown have been discussed here a lot in the past. As an update, though, I should note that while I liked the town a lot when my son was a freshman, it’s improved even more over the past four years, with more restaurant choices, more performance spaces, and more community projects such as the Green Street Arts Center.</p>
<p>the only reason i ever go to main street is for the food. they’ve got some great restaurants, but i don’t find any appeal other than that.</p>
<p>The town you’re in doesn’t matter much if there’s stuff to do on campus. As far as I can tell, most people don’t go very far off campus very often. There’s restaurants and a Rite-Aid maybe 10 minutes from campus. There are plenty of food options on campus, including a grocery store. And there’s never not something to be doing on campus. So I don’t think the surrounding area is very important. It seems a lot more important when choosing colleges than it is once you get on campus. Why would you go do things off campus when there are always events, concerts, performances, and a bunch of parties (starting on Thursday) on campus? </p>
<p>Some kids like to say negative things about the “townies” but really we mostly don’t bother them and they don’t bother us. I don’t feel unsafe here or anything. There’s a shuttle at night and be sensible and lock your doors and stuff. </p>
<p>Seriously, don’t let what you think about the town have much of an effect on where you choose to go to college. It’s a lot less important than you think.</p>
<p>
[Security</a> Upped After Theft in Freeman ? The Wesleyan Argus](<a href=“http://wesleyanargus.com/2010/11/16/security-upped-after-theft-in-freeman/]Security”>The Wesleyan Argus | Security Upped After Theft in Freeman)</p>
<p>Apparently, there never was a guest policy, merely a loosely enforced student-only policy. It’s unfortunate that a few bad eggs have had the effect of spoiling a good thing.</p>
<p>I have to say, we found it somewhat noteworthy and a lttle disconcerting when we walked from the campus to the gym, and on the way noted several houses where the porch chairs were secured onto their porches with chains.</p>
<p>Perhaps this is nothing, but it doesn’t send a great message.</p>
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<p>At least there aren’t bars on the ground-level windows, such as at Brown and other institutions… :)</p>
<p>^^ I noticed the same thing on the Wesleyan tour! But that wasn’t disconcerting to me. Some of those porches were just a couple feet from the sidewalk. It wasn’t exactly in the center of campus, overlooking a lush quad. What was disconcerting was how trashed they looked. I had the impression that those were student homes – probably seniors renting from Wesleyan. They reminded me in the crappy place I lived while in grad school, where we nailed blankets over windows and all the doors but the kitchen door to stifle the bitter cold drafts during winter, and we shaked out the bedding each night to evict any wayward roaches. The tour guide later touted the progressive living arrangements when we reached the freshman dorm after the gym part of the tour…and she noted how students gain more and more independence in their living situations. I stood there looking at the trajectory from newly-built freshman dorms to those houses, monydad, and I wasn’t impressed.</p>
<p>Of course, that’s the great thing about being a dad. I won’t have to eat what the dining hall serves up, I won’t have to study in the drafty roach house, and I won’t have to sleep through the classes that I don’t have to register for. Sometimes I point out some of these odd things that inevitably pop up during a tour or I’ll make an ironic sotto voce observation as we depart yet another information session, but I mostly try to keep my opinions to myself since my role in all of this is very limited and requires little more than one or two signatures per year. I think having a porch chair – even if it is chained – would be just swell for my son, whereas I have reached a point in my life where that’s something I like to consider as being beneath me. It’s one of those things that make me wonder why I even go on the tours in the first place…until I think about having to bide my time in the admissions office lobby looking at yet another, non-distinct viewbook for 75 minutes.</p>
<p>There are over 150 so-called “wood-frames” or university owned houses in the vicinity of campus that, in essence, function as small dormitories, complete with beds, kitchens and internet connections. The variety is huge, given Middletown’s antiquity and growth over the past 300 years (there are several that actually date to the Revolutionary War), but, the eventual aim is to replace as many as need be with contemporary “prototypes” that mimic their size and scale but constructed to withstand the heavy use college students put them through.</p>
<p>Here’s a viewbook that might peak your interest:[Residential</a> Life - Wesleyan University](<a href=“http://www.wesleyan.edu/reslife/ugrad_housing/woodframes.html]Residential”>http://www.wesleyan.edu/reslife/ugrad_housing/woodframes.html)</p>
<p>how do you get it to print in bold here?</p>
<p>“I won’t have to eat what the dining hall serves up,…”
Perfectly good actually, though in small portions, waiting on long slow lines (but it was weekend brunch or something).</p>
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<p>It’s easy! And more than you’ll ever want to know is in a PM sent to you.</p>
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<p>Thanks. That is interesting. I didn’t intend to single out Wesleyan. My son’s Wesleyan visit was actually exceptional in that his class visit went exactly as planned and I killed time by going to the bookstore to get some logo-clothing.</p>
<p>The worst experience for me was at another college when the class he was told to visit had been moved/canceled/rescheduled. (This actually happened 3x during our two week string of campus visits during his fall break.) But at this one particular college, I was trapped there waiting for an incredibly long time because he had found a second, later class to sit in on. The entire admission building was empty except for the receptionist and a couple student interns. And me. I was sitting in the waiting room, trying to mind my own business, when the student interns, in the separate reception area, started talking about, um, battery-operated, um, aids. Not classroom aids. I tried staring very intently into the “So, you think you can’t afford college?” pamphlet and applying my full concentration powers into a single dot above a randomly-selected “i” hoping that I could become one with it and then not hear everything I was trying not to hear. After some time (perhaps 2 minutes, seeming more like 10), the receptionist came back from somewhere else, heard the subject matter being discussed, and loudly shushed them because they obviously had no idea some old geezer was sitting in the adjacent waiting room. (I think the next tour, if there was one, wasn’t for a couple more hours.) The receptionist came over to me and started quizzing me – as if I had intentionally staked out an improbably prime spot for listening in on co-ed pillow talk (of sorts). She seemed satisfied. Maybe. I waited about 3 minutes and then just slinked outside, in the pouring rain, and sat in the rental car waiting for the class to end. You’re all the first people I’ve shared this with. I’m doing a little better now, thanks.</p>
<p>Middletown is good. If I hadn’t heard that it was crap before going to Wesleyan, I would never have even considered that it was in any way subpar.</p>
<p>The townie-student divide is a joke really. It is just funny to joke around blaming stuff on townies because to be fair, they have caused some trouble. At least they aren’t as violent as the townies in New Haven though.</p>
<p>Much of the staff is townie employed and they couldn’t be nicer. They really love us and treat us extremely well. </p>
<p>M-Town has everything you might want. You have downtown with some places for food. This past week I went to an Indian restaurant with a few of my friends and it was delicious. We saw tons of other Wes students there. The staff treated us well, they didn’t spit in our food or anything…</p>
<p>There are a few Supermarkets and a Five Guys and stuff but they are a 3 minute drive. If you have a car or a buddy who does, you’re in luck.</p>
<p>Wes is not in the middle of nowhere. You definitely feel like you’re linked to civilization. Unlike at Colby and many New England area small LACs that are absolutely in the boonies.</p>
<p>[Sledding</a> through vacation At Foss Hill - The Middletown Press : Serving Middletown, CT](<a href=“http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2010/12/30/news/doc4d1befe616191536667050.txt]Sledding”>http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2010/12/30/news/doc4d1befe616191536667050.txt)</p>
<p>(props to the Wesleyan alumni listserv for the tip)</p>
<p>OTOH, the Winter of 2011 has been hard on the North End’s century old buildings: <a href=“In New England, Snow-Packed Roofs Collapsing - The New York Times”>In New England, Snow-Packed Roofs Collapsing - The New York Times;
<p>Couple new (at least to me) discoveries about downtown Middletown, both in the Main Street Market, which is a kind of funky indoor mall.</p>
<p>Used Bookstore. Quietly, a pretty good used book hope has taken root here. The inventory seems to get more interesting by the week.
[The</a> Book Bower - Selling and Trading Gently Used Books](<a href=“http://www.bookbower.com/our%20store.htm]The”>http://www.bookbower.com/our%20store.htm)</p>
<p>New Restaurant. There are scads of new eateries along Main Street now, but I only recently tried this one, which is an unusual combo of creative sandwiches, crepes, gelato, coffee. It’s reasonably priced and in a very comfortable space for conversation, working or reading.
[New</a> England Emporium | Middletown, CT](<a href=“NewEnglandEmporium.com is available at DomainMarket.com. Call 888-694-6735”>http://www.newenglandemporium.com/)</p>
<p>As with all of Main Street, these spots are a 5 to 10 minute walk from campus.</p>
<p>Is Middletown bike friendly?</p>