An Entrepreneurs’ Memory Lane Debuts

Most New Haveners know we produced the country’s clocks and its lollipops, its corsets and pizzas, its Erector Sets and Winchester rifles, and, of course, that allegedly history-making first burger at Louis’s Lunch.

But did you know that in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries we also made sure the American people did not go without their rubber booties? Melodeans parlor organs? Combustible wooden matches made over in Westville? And don’t forget those indispensable bird cages for your beloved pet manufactured by the Andrew B. Hendryx Company over on Audubon Street.

Those nifty tidbits of New Haven’s hectic entrepreneurial history emerge in a delightful little exhibition, From Clocks to Lollipops: Made in New Haven, which opened Thursday night at the New Haven Museum and will run like, er, clock work, through May 30.

The opening reception down this fun memory lane of New Haven products and stuff — what the curatorial folks call ​“material culture”— produced over the last two centuries drew 75 history buffs.

They included some New Haveners, like Harvey Feinberg (pictured), who had memories of passing by the advertisements or eating, drinking, and even smoking some of the 100 objects from the collection on display.

“I was too young to drink” back in the 1940s, alleged Feinberg, a New Haven Museum board member, as he checked out a six pack of Hulls Brewery’s Export Beer, with the fancy new snap top.

He recalled the company, which had its factory on Congress Avenue and West Street.

Beer became a major industry in town with the arrival of German immigrants in the mid 19th century.

We learn that there were seven breweries by 1894, with the last one, Hulls, having survived prohibition, yet going out of business finally in 1977.

If you peer at the six-pack carefully you also get a bizarre kind of pleasure — or is it pain? — in noting the grocery label is still on the product, which dates from 1975. Cost then: $1.46.

Such pleasures emerge from a stroll past 100 objects, primarily consumer goods from rifles to dentures (pictured) and their often amusing advertisements, illuminated by succinct and descriptive labels.

The show has been assembled at the museum by guest curator Elizabeth Pratt Fox in small but concentrated sections with themes such as ​“Making Music,” ​“Keeping Time,” ​“Lock, Stock, and Barrel,” and ​“For the Table.”

Her only criteria for selection from the museum’s rich holdings in this area were that all the objects had already to be in the museum’s collection, and all the items manufactured in the city, as the title suggests.

The only exception is a Hendryx bird cage .

The museum had one in its collection, but not a gorgeous enameled example (pictured) from about 1900, which was purchased for the exhibition, Fox added.

The earliest item is a substantial chair dating from around 1660 (pictured, with Fox), with scroll designs on the back; families who come to the exhibition can take cards, provided near some of the pieces, such as the chair, and kids can draw on the cards their own designs for how they would have made the chair.

The most recently produced item in the show only looks like a stolen tire rim.

It was provided to Pratt by Space-Craft, the East Street manufacturer of high-tech jet engine parts. ​“It’s called a shroud. When air goes through the engine, it’s curved. It [the shroud] has blades, takes the curved air and straightens it,” and the result is to make the engine more efficient, she explained.

“Wow! I didn’t know that,” Fox said.

Another of the show’s understated pleasures: how the past co-exists with the present. You’ll see that right away in the first display case you encounter. There Chabaso breads and Palmieri sauce, both still going strong, share space and context with long gone companies who made ice cream, seltzer, and that famous lollipop.

Then, as now, food products are an important part of the evolving economy.

Another example: As with the high tech ​“shroud,” displayed above an advertisement for an extinct elevator company, the show seems to have something to say about how companies must adapt, die, or, in several instances, just move to North Haven.

That’s what the producers of the amusing Judges Cave cigars did. They established themselves on State and Wooster streets in 1884, and continue to produce their product but in the town north of ours.

Museum Executive Director Margaret Anne Tockarshewsky said the exhibition is a kind of follow-up to the very popular Beyond the New Township, last year’s exhibition that explored the evolution of Wooster Square, including its early manufacturing. The current show’s aim is ​“to tell the manufacturing story of the city. The idea of innovation is alive still today.” 

Fox said if she had her wish for a next, yet third follow-up show on New Haven manufacturing, she’d explore the idea of how companies adapted in New Haven specifically and rapidly to do their part during World War Two. That would include, for example, how the A.C. Gilbert Company at Erector Square manufactured parachutes and how other local companies shifted from rifle manufacture to making machine guns or timers for bombs.

The show is not evaluative or scholarly in the sense that it doesn’t explore in any depth whether this richness of manufacture added up to New Haven being a kind of Silicon Valley of the late 19th and early 20th century, or whether the inventiveness going on here was also taking place in other growing cities; or how the many products — that czarist baking powder and the German beer — reflected the demographics of the new immigration.

“This is a chance for people to return and have fun,” Tockarshewsky added.