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Old Light Signal on Long Wharf, 1933.
Yale-New Haven Hospital sits on the place where a church once burned from arson and buried its dead. The Long Wharf light, now electric, was for a time lit every night by a man named Tom Wilson, who died just as he was about to light it one night in 1910. And College Street Music Hall stands where a church — the College Street Church — was built, then converted into a music hall that was lost in a fire in 1921 that killed eight people and injured more than 70.
In “Daymarks 1872,” an exhibit at the New Haven Museum running through the month of January, curator Jason Bischoff-Wurstle tracks the development of the city by observing how New Haven’s skyline has changed from the late 1800s to today. This simple device yields a wealth of detail, from the religious views of successive waves of migrants to the Elm City, to New Haven’s ever-evolving relationship with Yale, to the ways large and small that New Haveners lived, worked, and yes, died.
The exhibit’s story begins in 1856, when an oysterman on Long Island Sound was able to navigate back home to Fair Haven on Christmas Eve using the steeple of the First Congregational Church, or the Captain’s Church, on Grand Avenue as a landmark. That steeple was “the tallest manmade structure in Connecticut,” the exhibit’s extensive liner notes inform us, until it was damaged in a storm in 1877 and had to be torn down. It was rebuilt as the Grand Avenue Congregational Church, which exists today.
But in 1872, it was one of many churches deemed impressive enough from sea to be put on a map as a landmark for sailors navigating the Connecticut shoreline. This United States Coast Survey map, which forms the backbone of the exhibit, suggests that New Haven’s skyline at that time was pretty much dominated not by office or apartment buildings, but by churches and a few tall factories.
John Warner Barber
South View of New Haven Harbor and Fort Hale, 1836.
“If there is any place on earth that needs religion, it is New Haven,” British commander Thomas Hardy was said to have remarked when he learned that timber was headed here to construct Trinity Church on the Green in the early 1800s. Perhaps we’ll never know if he was being sarcastic, given the religiosity of the founders of New Haven Colony. But by the time of the coast survey, in addition to the churches already mentioned, there was South Church in the Hill, the construction of which had been financed by media magnate Gerald Hallock, who during the Civil War embraced the contradiction of being both against slavery and for states’ rights. Hallock died in 1866, and by 1874, the church had become part of a Catholic parish, as “Catholicism rose to become the predominant religious practice in the Hill,” the notes tell us. There was the West Congregational Church, which over time became a “beacon for the growing Greek population of the Hill.” Then it became an Elks hall. Then, in 1957, the city bought it and tore it down as part of its ongoing redevelopment programs.
David Sewell
New Haven from the Harbor, 1981.
There is more in “Daymarks” — much more, as the exhibit’s eye whirls around the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, and decade by decade. The parade of names, of people and buildings, of institutions religious and secular, all add up. As the notes and accompanying maps, architectural drawings, paintings and photographs offer their snapshots through history, a sense emerges of the city’s history as both deep and deeply kinetic, as generational changes pass in the blink of an eye, sweeping New Haveners along with it. New Haven in this view becomes a place with a long history that has also often rapidly changed; former mayor Richard C. Lee’s progressive — some might say aggressive — urban redevelopment seems to tap into a place already accustomed to demolition and rebuilding. That kind of change continues today, as new buildings continue to alter New Haven’s skyline.
“How fast does the landscape change?” the exhibit asks. “In the future, what will we remember, and what will our children use to mark their paths?” In “Daymarks 1872,” the question becomes all the more poignant when you leave the exhibit and step into the New Haven of the present day with a keener sense of how the city has changed, and what changes are still to come — soon.
The NH Museum does a great job educating New Haven about itself.
Bischoff-Wurstle is a thoughtful curator of physical history.
His help with my Commemoration of the Centennial of WE 1 was very helpful and brought a local impact to life.
I look forward to viewing the exhibit.
Bill MacMullen