Smoking areas designated by Yale-New Haven Hospital for years are about to be cleared, and city officials are to consider expanding the no-smoking rule to sidewalks and streets around the hospital.
New Year's Day the hospital will ban cigarette smoking on its property. Many people light up outside the front door but Thursday they can do that no more.
"I think it's problematic for the patients maybe that come out to smoke," said Colleen Barry, standing across York Street from the hospital's main entrance. "But in general I think reducing access to second hand smoke is a great idea."
Yale-New Haven will ban smoking in its parking garage. To ban cigarettes from the sidewalks where lunch carts grill up a cloud and customers fill up would take city action, and even then it might not be constitutionally legal.
"If it's a street or a sidewalk that's city-owned," said cigar-smoking John Rochette, " whether it's me or somebody else doesn't matter. They should be smoking if they want to smoke."
The woman whose hand appeared on the front page of the New Haven Register, holding a cigarette, was caught on camera again.
"Somebody's trying to tell me something big time," said Deborah Lewis. "It's rather embarrassing."
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She said she'll either have to find some place to smoke away from the hospital or not smoke at all.
