History Found At Lost In New Haven

Billed as ​“an adventure into the Elm City’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” around 35 tourgoers braved rainy conditions to attend a second, sold-out visit to New Haven’s newest depot of historic artifacts and memorabilia. ​“But don’t call it a museum,” said Robert Greenberg, tour guide, owner and curator of the thousands of objects on display.

“It’s really a sculpture,” he said.

The tour was part of the programming in the final days of the Arts and Ideas Festival last Thursday. Above the nondescript entryway at 424 Grand Ave., in a 1920s structure that once housed a trolley garage and New Haven’s first bus depot, a temporary sign reads ​“Lost in New Haven.” Like many of the New Haven-sourced objects and displays behind the door, the sign is expected to be ungraded soon as part of the massive work-in-progress Greenberg is sculpting daily. 

Located on the edge of Fair Haven, Lost in New Haven takes up 3,500 square feet of the 20,000 square-foot building housing Reclamation Lumber, an old-growth lumber supply business owned by Robert Fecke. Two years ago, at a critical transition period for Greenberg and his collection as he faced eviction from his studio in the family-run Acme Furniture business at 33 Crown St., Fecke came to Greenberg’s rescue. He offered a storage refuge for thousands of artifacts Greenberg collected over a lifetime, all pieces of Greenberg’s long-held vision to create a historical, interactive homage to his beloved hometown. The Acme building, purchased in the 1940s by Greenberg’s grandfather and home to an office and mid-century furniture business run by Greenberg’s father, had run its course. The building was put up for sale.

The major tasks and expense of packing, transporting and storing the collection, including oversized pieces of furniture and artifacts, was supported by friends and area businesses aware of Greenberg’s mission. The Regicides, an improv offshoot of the New Haven-based Broken Umbrella Theatre, with original plays exploring New Haven history and its characters, performed at a fundraiser held in Greenberg’s Acme Furniture studio to help with moving expenses.

The Grand Avenue location, though not centrally located, gave Greenberg a chance to store, organize and then begin the process of examining the full breadth of his collection. Greenberg had floated the idea of a centrally located, downtown museum in the fraught space on the street level of the city-run Crown Street Garage. City officials did not fully embrace it.

In the comment section of a New Haven Independent article in May 2018, Matt Nemerson, then chief administrator for New Haven Economic Development, said of Greenberg that ​“most of us at the City are huge fans of his and visited his former collection on Crown Street many times. If he can find a sponsor, his concept might have legs as well. However, given even the evening attendance and demographics of the excellent New Haven Museum on Whitney Avenue, it’s hard to think that even a collection as excellent as Robert’s would bring in enough people to have a big spillover impact for the restaurants and clubs on College and Crown Streets. We continue to look for other locations where parts of his collection can be displayed.”

Greenberg continues to disagree with Nemerson’s assessment about the potential for his idea for a centrally located museum that could benefit from foot traffic while helping to generate more. He was not positioned to submit an application or provide financial backing to win occupancy of the Crown Street location, but maintains that the city would reap dividends by boosting its own history and image with a lively, high-visibility museum space that might include a cafe or wine bar, anchored by creative programming, city tours, outreach and engaging, and interactive displays. The city, he believes, stands to gain exponentially, as a full sponsor of his vision for a different kind of museum.

A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Greenberg is a skilled visual artist and graphic designer who has demonstrated an acumen for display craft even with limited resources at his current location. Lost in New Haven exhibits offer a window into Greenberg’s curatorial capacity and his educational outreach efforts are not waiting for a larger, more centrally located home.

Greenberg’s current community engagement portends a comprehensive approach to boosting New Haven. He conducted a visiting artist workshop at St. Thomas’s Day School on Whitney Avenue, with take-home educational materials and artifacts he prepared in collaboration with visiting artist Alexis Gage, a goldsmith and St. Thomas’s alumnus. Gage has begun producing a line of jewelry incorporating actual historic elements that will be sold through the museum’s gift store alongside made-in-New Haven offerings by other artisans.

Graduate classes led by Elihu Rubin, assistant professor of urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture, have visited the collection on several occasions.

“The collection,” said Rubin, ​“inspires curiosity and awe. We are lucky that Robert is such a gracious steward of these materials and that he is committed to make them as public a resource as possible.”

In 2018 Greenberg served as a mentor-instructor at Site Project’s Public Art Fellows Summer Boot Camp program, where he introduced city high-school students to historic and public art sites around New Haven. Earlier this year, Greenberg loaned out a collection of historical New Haven windows to Collective Consciousness Theatre for a turn-of-the-century set design of a boxer’s gym.

During the nearly two-hour tour of discovery last Thursday, Greenberg was never at a loss for words as he recounted the historical significance of objects and the stories related to their acquisition. Many of the artifacts and memorabilia are connected to personal stories of people who share Greenberg’s mission of wanting to preserve and present a physical narrative of Elm City history, its culture of innovation and its important contributions to the nation.

One of the more eye-catching displays was a whimsical neon sign Greenberg had restored by Elm City Neon. Designed locally by Curtis Gaulin of C & G Signs in Morris Cove, it had been a commercial beacon for decades at the corner of Whalley Avenue and Sperry Street above the Rubber Match, a waterbed, futon and head shop store owned by George (Gennaro) Zito. Zito, who had been in business for 45 years at the site and had put the sign up for sale after closing his business in 2018, had a change of heart about selling the piece.

“When I heard about what Greenberg was doing — his concern for local history and the people who built businesses like Cutler’s and Yankee Doodle, I gave him that sign … I loved what he was doing,” said Zito.

Among the myriad New Haven-area innovations on display is a rare antique bicycle made of wood and metal colloquially referred to as a ​“bone shaker.” Devil’s Gear Bike Shop owner Mathew Feiner, who visited the museum after the tour, marveled at the bike’s structure and materials as he mused about New Haven’s place in the development of the precursors of today’s modern bicycle. The first patent for a bicycle was made in 1886 by Ansonia-based Pierre Lallement, a French immigrant. Feiner estimated 1875 as the probable year of the bike’s creation.

Throughout Lost in New Haven, colonial-era detritus — ceramic, glass, wood and metal fragments — evoke the work of several artists whose own cabinets of curiosities have inspired Greenberg along the way. While at RISD, Greenberg studied the work of Charles Wilson Peale, a prolific 18th to 19th-century American portrait painter with a great interest in natural history. Peale is credited with establishing one of the first museums in the United States notable for its inclusion of a mastodon skeleton. A more recent influence on Greenberg’s installation sensibilities is Mark Dion, an American conceptual artist ​“whose practice embodies the history of the museum and the presentation of knowledge,” according to Artnet. Dion’s creative installations included cabinets of densely arranged specimens collected from his digs around the world.

Lost in New Haven also has mugshot photos and ephemera associated with the infamous clash between police and rock star Jim Morrison of The Doors. On Dec. 9, 1967, police shut down the band’s concert at the now defunct New Haven Arena after several acts of alleged inappropriate behavior and defiance by Morrison, resulting in a near-riot by disgruntled concertgoers. The event was later immortalized in The Door’s ​“Peace Frog” song lyric, ​“blood in the streets of the town of New Haven.”

Throughout his career as a New Haven history sleuth, preservationist and activist, Greenberg’s knowledge and instincts have often combined with serendipity to produce new discoveries about the city’s past. An august tree on the New Haven Green known as the Lincoln Oak was uprooted by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, turning up the remains of early New Haven inhabitants and a strange object that Greenberg correctly surmised was a time capsule. Tests by the New Haven police bomb squad confirmed Greenberg’s hunch. The contents of the time capsule, buried under the tree for the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth by members of the Admiral Foote Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, included some ordnance, Civil War medals, coinage, business cards and letters. The New Haven Museum currently has possession of the items. A slab of the historic tree milled by Robert Fecke was turned into a creative timeline with miniature newspaper headlines corresponding to specific years on the slab’s tree rings.

Robert Gibson, a retired New Haven history teacher and librarian, attended Thursday’s walking tour sporting a pith helmet and looking like someone ready for an adventure.

“This museum presents a graphic documentary history of New Haven from its settlement in 1638 to the present day with artifacts and relics from the past and present. Every piece in the collection tells some story of the social, cultural, political and economic history of New Haven. So much information and inspiration is provided here to learn about our city. Great presentation by museum creator Robert Greenberg!” said Gibson after the tour.

For Greenberg, the opportunity to keep connecting people with their collective past is not a given. The museum curator credits the largesse of people in the arts community whom he says are making it possible for his collection to continue evolving. Laura Clarke, founder of Site Projects, a nonprofit public art organization, and Jerry and Roslyn Meyer who was one of the founders of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, have been instrumental in helping Lost in New Haven get to where it is now. In a letter to help Greenberg secure the backing of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven as a fiduciary, Roz Meyer wrote: ​“We hope the Arts Council will be willing to act as his fiduciary in raising money for this project. It is an extremely worthwhile project that deserves funding and support. In terms of its appeal to the public, it was given a slot [two slots] at the International Festival this year which sold out immediately.” 

Greenberg’s ​“sculpture” is among the listed points of interest on the Mill River Trail Walkway, a corridor connecting people and communities between the East Rock Park neighborhood and Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven. Although Lost in New Haven is not fully operational and open to the public, Greenberg said that inquiries for fee-based private viewings, tours, and events can currently be made through email: [email protected]. A website is under development and a grand opening date is soon to be announced.