how can you be going to trinity college

and NEVER set foot on park street? it's unbelievable. it's WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE too.

Trinity Explores Park St. Students Encouraged To Learn From Area
By ROBERT A. FRAHM
Courant Staff Writer
December 19 2005
It was not until this year that Trinity College senior Bridget Reilly, a Hispanic studies major, set foot on Park Street, the lively thoroughfare of Hispanic food markets, restaurants and shops a short walk from campus.Reilly spent her junior year in Spain, but knew little about the mostly Puerto Rican neighborhoods surrounding the private college in Hartford.All of that changed when she took a new course requiring students to immerse themselves in the city's Hispanic culture by exploring neighborhoods, meeting business owners and talking with residents."I had been to the Bushnell, the Atheneum, the typical things in Hartford, but I never made it to Park Street," said Reilly, 21, of Fair Haven, N.J., who is completing a photography project about life along the street.The "Hispanic Hartford" course, a requirement for students majoring in Hispanic studies, is another part of the effort by Trinity to build an identity as an urban liberal arts college by establishing closer ties with the surrounding community. The course, taught in Spanish, was offered for the first time last spring.For homework, modern languages Professor Anne Lambright assigned weekly essays about the community, asking students to walk down Park Street, interview a Latino employee at Trinity, eat in a Latino restaurant, talk to the owner of a Hispanic business and work in a class at the largely Hispanic Moylan Elementary School.With Hispanics making up 40 percent of its population, "Hartford is the most Hispanic city east of the Mississippi and north of Florida," Lambright said. It is also the nation's only state capital headed by a Hispanic mayor, Eddie A. Perez.The idea for the class arose two years ago, Lambright said, after two colleagues took some graduating seniors to lunch at a neighborhood restaurant............