The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
New Haven’s vast public art is often unseen
Take a look around you, if you live in or visit New Haven.
Laura A. Macaluso notes the city’s landscape is “saturated with sculpture, murals, monuments, grave markers, paintings, prints and installations of diverse messages and mediums.”
Macaluso says each one of them “serves to create, support or extend city identity.”
She counted and cataloged 447 works of public art for her book “The Public Artscape of New Haven: Themes in the Creation of a City Image” (McFarland & Co.).
And yet most of them are unseen, unappreciated or don’t even exist anymore because they were lost or destroyed. The public neglects its own public art.
Macaluso thinks this is a shame. And so she set out to write the first book to focus on the public art of New Haven.
“Nobody else was paying attention to how these works came about,” she said last Tuesday over the phone from her home in Lynchburg, Va. “Nobody had taken the time to make any sense of it all.”
She added, “It’s important to appreciate it. My book is a call for preservation and awareness.”
Before Macaluso moved to Virginia in 2012, she lived in Milford and New Haven. She was an art history major at Southern Connecticut State University and worked parttime for New Haven’s Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism.
Because of her background and interest, Macaluso pays close attention to the public art she encounters. Most people don’t do this. We might glance up and see the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument atop East Rock when we drive on Interstate 95 but how many of us notice the Defenders’ Monument at the corner of Congress, Columbus and Davenport avenues when we drive past it on nearby Ella T. Grasso Boulevard?
That depiction of a soldier, a farmer and a Yale student alongside a cannon has been there since 1911. It commemorates the heroic resistance by New Haven citizens to the invasion of British troops on July 5, 1779. Monuments such as this one, if we take a little time to stop and read their inscriptions, can teach us a lot about our history. How many people even know that the British invaded New Haven in 1779?
“Everything is connected, especially in a city like New Haven with its deep history,” Macaluso told me. “The Defenders’ Monument seems to sit off by itself but it’s connected. That’s what I want people to recognize.”
Here’s something else that’s overlooked: thousands of people regularly breeze through the front room of the New Haven Free Public Library without looking up to see a large color mural by
Bancel LaFarge, assisted by Louis Agostini. Entitled “The Personification of New Haven Receiving Immigrants and Learning,” the mural was a Works Progress Administration project in the 1930s.
With the New Haven Green and its elm trees as a backdrop, the mural features a crowned female figure extending her arms to a Yale student wearing saddle shoes and an immigrant family. Yale’s mascot “Handsome Dan” sits in the left corner.
When you’re in that main library on Elm Street, you should walk down to the basement level and check out the whimsical Rip Van Winkle murals, a 1934 WPA project led by Salvatore DeMaio and Frank Rutkowski. But this is an example of how poorly public art is treated in the city; Macaluso noted nearly half of the Rip Van Winkle murals were destroyed when new walls were installed in the late 1980s.
Most of us also walk over the “Path of Stars” on Orange Street near Crown Street without looking down and seeing the mosaic tributes to the merchants and other civic leaders of the Ninth Square. This was a Percent for Art project done from 1993-1995 by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Some of the stars are for Sylvester Z. Poli, whose movie theaters included the Loews Poli; William and Jack Horowitz, who founded the dry goods business and downtown fixture Horowitz Bros.; and Emmaline Jones, the first woman to practice dentistry in America (1873).
When I asked Macaluso why New Haven’s public art isn’t more appreciated, she said, “Culture and art institutions are starved for funds. And so the institutions aren’t doing enough (education). The links are broken. Nobody’s there to tell people what these works mean and why they’re important. There should be tours of public spaces.”
Macaluso also thinks Yale University officials (while deserving kudos for accessible museums such as the Yale University Art Gallery) should be showing off their outdoor art, to make it truly public. “As someone who’s been interested in public art and spent years in the Elm City as a non-Yalie, I’ve only been inside their courtyards once, when Peter Salovey opened up the campus for his inauguration (2013). That was amazing, to finally be able to see those secret spaces. Why can’t Yale open its campus and do tours that aren’t just for prospective incoming students and their families?”
Macaluso’s 175-page book is filled with examples of public works of art that have been lost, including the “Life of Hiawatha” mural that was at Edgewood School, the Roger Sherman murals at the Roger Sherman School, the Christopher Columbus murals at Christopher Columbus Academy and virtually all of the murals created under the federal government’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) from 1973-82.
Macaluso’s book contains photos of some of this lost art. She included one of the missing CETA murals, “We Can Do It All Better Together, in Peace, in Joy, in Love,” by Terry Lennox and Ruth Resnick.
“That’s the work of art I’m most curious to know what happened to,” Macaluso said. “It was big; it was gorgeous. It was in the New Haven Welfare Office. It was taken down and nobody has seen it since.”
Few people know this, but the original Christopher Columbus statue in Wooster Square is also gone and was probably destroyed. Macaluso noted in her book that the first statue, made of copper, was installed with great fanfare and even “delirium” in 1892. She wrote it was “the first public statement of the Italian community of their place-based identity in New Haven.”
But through the years, the copper deteriorated and in 1955, a second statue was installed, made of bronze. Macaluso told me the original “got pretty smushed up. It was likely destroyed and sold to a scrap yard.”
In a time when some statues and memorials are being dismantled because the depicted figures are now seen as cruel or racist — and statues of Columbus are being protested because of his treatment of Native Americans — Macaluso sides with her fellow ItalianAmericans.
“It feels personal because it feeds into the identity of Wooster Square and New Haven. I’d really make a stink about it if they wanted to take it down. If we erase everything, what will we have left?”
Macaluso’s book also has a chapter on the city’s many war memorials, including the relatively new Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Long Wharf by Kenneth Polanski and Frank Pannenborg. But she also includes the Iraq and Afghanistan War Memorial on Broadway, a pile of inscribed stones maintained by the peace community. It lists Iraqi civilian deaths as well as the names of dead American soldiers.
Macaluso devoted plenty of ink to New Haven’s most famous war memorial, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, site of a gala dedication ceremony in 1887.
This is my personal favorite of all the public art in New Haven. I live in the East Rock neighborhood, so it’s visible from my home and as I move around nearby. The monument is always lit at night, like a beacon. And it’s a war memorial with an angel of peace on top! I love it.