LOCALS.(The Talk of the Town)(trading cards)

In 1646, the townspeople of New Haven, Connecticut, feeling squeezed by the neighboring settlements of Boston, to the north, and New Amsterdam, to the south, sent a ship full of their finest wares and personages to England, to assert their primacy as a New World trading center. The ship sank. In the intervening years, as the locals rarely hesitate to tell you, New Haven gave us such invaluable commodities as the cotton gin, the Frisbee, and clam pizza, but its commercial and cultural standing never recovered; to many, it is little more than a university town.

And yet, Leslie Kuo was insisting the other day, New Haven remains as vital a city as any. Just look at all its colorful characters--ubiquitous layabouts and downtown clerks with nicknames like Frenchy, Smelly, Icebucket, Titanium Joe, Casablanca Man, and Sixteen-Year-Old Liz. Kuo, who graduated from Yale in 2003 with a degree in biology and then stuck around, spent two years creating a deck of trading cards to celebrate these and other local eminences. The cards, which feature black-and-white photographs on one side and biographical data ("Most likely to be seen: ___"; "Known for: ___") on the reverse, are now sold in packs of ten at independent bookstores.

You know the type. For instance, there is Kyle Mullins, a gentle thirty-five-year-old with thick sideburns and a long, Merlinesque goatee, who works at the favored record shop and seems to know everyone. Kyle's father visited him once and, during the course of a coffee break, was so startled by all the strangers stopping to pay their respects that he asked, "What are you, the mayor of this town?"

Like Kyle, John DeStefano, the actual mayor, merited a trading card, as did four of DeStefano's previous opponents, including one, Bill Saunders, who crashed a 2001 mayoral debate in drag, dressed as his alter ego, Little Miss Mess-Up, and another, Roger Uihlein, who received just nine votes, but who wrote a loving poem, "New Haven Is an Island," in which he likens his native city to a phoenix rising "on a dead-end vacant lot."

There are sixty local characters in the set, and the selection process, as Kuo explained, while leading a walking ...