New Haven Independent

The art of public memory often vanishes, even if it remains visible. Take, for example, the bas relief portrait of David Fitzgerald in the foyer of the Hall of Records on Orange Street. Fitzgerald was mayor of New Haven from 1918 until 1926; his concise political biography is incised with a gracefully uneven geometry of the handmade. Not originally an epitaph, the plaque was later amended to include the year of his death. Here is a man of substance, “educated in local schools,” his wife and children named along with him. There is a bourgeois splendor to the face, indifferent to the gumball machines which now flank it. The marble has the tonality of wood, except where it has been stained by some accident (impossible to imagine a devoted vandal seeking it out). The sculptor was salaried by the Public Works for Art Program that was the precedent for the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s, and in a tradition that goes back to the stone carver of the Romanesque cathedral at Autun, France, has inscribed the word Fecit — “I made this.” His making deserves remembering.