If you see Alex Meier-Tomkins leaning out of the front driver’s side window of his car, iPhone in hand, gawking at the exterior of your home, perhaps quietly cursing at a tree or a set of power lines, do not be alarmed.
Meier-Tomkins isn’t crazy, and he isn’t casing the joint. In fact, he’s a very pleasant husband, father of two, homeowner, Buffalo Bills fan and, more to the point, the creator of the Instagram account @newhavencthomes. And when he’s leaning out his car window lining up a shot, he’s busy helping New Haven look beautiful online, one house photo at a time.
Meier-Tomkins grew up in Buffalo, attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and, after a short stint in New York City, moved to New Haven in 2003 so his then-girlfriend, now-wife could attend the Yale School of Nursing.
“I always [tell] people that Buffalo, Philly and New Haven are like different sizes of the same city,” he says. “For people that don’t know them, they don’t have the most positive reputations. But the people who live there always love them and have a tremendous amount of civic pride. And all three cities have a ton of history. They all have amazing architecture. They all have really strong neighborhood identities.”
After working at The Wine Thief for a few years, Meier-Tomkins got a job in 2008 with Slocum & Sons, a wine and liquor distributor in North Haven, where he’s now a brand manager. When COVID shutdowns first arrived in March 2020, he found himself working from home alongside his wife and two kids in Westville. “I was taking a lot of walks during that time,” he says. “One day in September, I was out on one, and I just started taking pictures of a house in my neighborhood that I really like. In fact, it’s my favorite house in the entire city.”
He was then inspired to create @newhavencthomes after seeing a similar feed in Buffalo. (The @newhavenhomes handle was already taken, he says, “by some guy in Australia.”) He has no credentials in architecture or photography, only an amateur’s passion for both.
His first post, on September 8, 2020, features a few photos of that first house he shot, a Tudor-style home on Alston Avenue. Over the next few days, he would add photos of more homes around Westville before branching out into other neighborhoods, especially East Rock, Prospect Hill and Wooster Square.
He wasn’t aiming to generate a big audience or draw attention to himself, but after two or three weeks, a few followers beyond family and friends started trickling in. “One night, a neighbor of mine was out walking her dog, and I was outside grilling,” he says. “She came up my driveway and she was like, ‘Hey, are you the one putting all the fancy houses on Instagram?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ But when she said that—about the ‘fancy houses’—I kind of realized that that’s not what I meant to do. And that made a light bulb go off for me. I realized I could use this feed as a New Haven booster kind of thing.”
He says that’s when he decided to start posting a different house every single day, following a consistent style. Citing his appreciation for the diversity of Buffalo, Philadelphia and New Haven, and recognizing the many similarities between those three cities, he wanted to make sure he was not exclusively representing expensive houses in only the wealthiest neighborhoods. That required him to visit new parts of the city he hadn’t much seen before but soon came to appreciate. “Over the years, I've done a lot in Fair Haven Heights, I do a ton in Beaver Hills,” he says. “Newhallville is amazing. The houses there are just incredible.”
In editing the photos, he tries to give his subjects a “cheerful” and “bright” look. “I’m not trying to gloss over economic issues… or make some kind of grand political statement,” he says. “But I work with people who live in Branford or Wallingford, and when we chat about New Haven, sometimes they’re like, ‘Oh, gross.’”
Meier-Tomkins’s images serve as a counterargument. By his estimate, he’s posted around 1,200 unique homes, only occasionally posting the same house twice. He doesn’t do much research. If he sees a house he likes, usually while driving around the city, he just stops and starts snapping—hence the leaning out of his driver’s side window. “My wife pokes fun at me and says, ‘You know, you can actually slow down when you take the pictures.’”
He says he makes sure to never trespass, and when he has encountered people who seem suspicious of him, they tend to warm up when he explains what he’s doing. The account now has more than 11,000 followers, including actor Jerry O’Connell and the company of home improvement guru Bob Vila, which Meier-Tomkins proudly says has used several of his photos online.
The project has been a source of positivity both on- and offline. “You see a lot that social media causes people to be angry at each other, that it’s all negative,” he says. “I have the opposite experience on my page. Every morning, I wake up… post a house and then people like it. They say, ‘Cool!’” Meanwhile, he says he’s made lots of real-world friends who enjoy chatting with him about their neighborhoods and homes, and he was even recently asked to join the board of the New Haven Preservation Trust.
After a couple of years in which both of his parents and his wife’s father passed away, keeping his daily commitment to posting homes gave Meier-Tomkins some light in a dark time. Or, as he puts it, “a little warm buzz,” mirrored in the glow of followers’ cell phones around the city and beyond.
Written and photographed by Daniel Fleschner. Images feature Alex Meier-Tomkins.
