What A Croc!

Abraham Lincoln once gave a stirring speech at Court and State Streets that compared the condition of pre-union working people to the oppressions of slavery. You can see a picture of that on a Westville gallery wall — only Lincoln appears as a crocodile.

You can see another of the Doors’ Jim Morrison’s famous mug shot after his 1967 arrest at the New Haven Arena — again, as a croc.

The pictures are part of an exhibition called ​“New Haven on the Crocs.” It opened this past weekend at the DaSilva Gallery in Westville. In it, New Haven-born artist Robert S. Greenberg has found a way to bring local history to amusing new life. 

However, there’s much more at stake in this show.

Through his whimsical pastels of Elm City political, industrial and cultural history and the extensive collection of New Haven memorabilia on which he bases his art, Greenberg is also throwing down the gauntlet to officials, educators and developers:

Call in an archeologist before you bulldoze, and, for crocodiles’ sake, appreciate and teach more of New Haven’s local history before the spirit and the material artifacts of the local glories disappear.

“I feel [local] history is being lost in New Haven,” Greenberg said at the opening reception Friday night.

Click here to read about how and why Greenberg draws crocodile heads on historical characters to help lure people into the past. He’s done it in New York City, Newport, and Sun Valley, Idaho. He’s shown in the past at Artspace. ​“New Haven on the Crocs” is his first solo exhibition in his native town.

In short, the approach has something to do with the legend of crocodiles in New York City’s sewers, Elton John lyrics, and the primitive power of the animal mask both to erase ethnicities and particularities even while it promotes, with a fine irony, a kind of everyman-ness.

Greenberg, who was educated at the Beecher and Sheridan schools, the Educational Center for the Arts, the old Lee High School, and later the Rhode Island School of Design, returned to New Haven this year to promote the crocs to help mark the 100th anniversary of the Acme Office Furniture company.

At 33 Crown St., it’s his family’s business, established in 1912 by his immigrant Russian grandfather.

“It’s the oldest still operating business in the Ninth Square,” he said proudly, So he comes by his collection of New Haveniana in part because of the business: abandoned lockers and houses full of sometimes fabulous stuff come by default to the mover.

Greenberg’s grandfathers, Joe Greenberg and Simon Evans, were smitten by the local history. They took him around as a kid to see the city’s sites, sights, and historical markers.

On a recent visit home he discovered that the plaques on the AT&T building marking Lincoln’s appearance had been stolen two years ago during a metal-swiping frenzy. Greenberg became outraged.

The croc-headed Lincoln portrait reading from that important speech followed.

“I let the artifact lead me to the story. Then I research the story,” and the image follows, he said.

Greenberg has assembled thousands of fascinating such artifacts or, as he sees them, clues to history’s stories. A small cabinet of curiosities containing of fraction of them is a centerpiece of the show at DaSilva.

They include a toy Lender Bagels van and an 1884 ice crusher from the Fairman Company; a red tin from the Bradley Smith Candy Company, which takes credit for the invention of the lollipop at its factory in Fair Haven; a box of casters invented in New Haven; a five-cent ticket for the first railroad linking Elm City with New York City; and a vial of an elixir sold by New Haven’s Kickapoo Indian Medicine company to cure everything.

“The contents were later shown to be Jamaican rum and molasses,” Greenberg said.

Also in the case are two sheets of letterhead from the Arena, New Haven’s major mid-20th century event site, which inspired the Morrison portrait.

Nearby are a cannonball and spike from the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Ticonderoga, where Benedict Arnold distinguished himself; and nearby, in the case, a vintage postcard of the hero-turned-traitor’s house. Then it stood on Water Street. That was an important clue for Greenberg.

By that hangs another tale, revealing Greenberg as not only collector and artist, but also daring salvager.

As the Board of Ed prepared a site on Water Street for a new high school, the Metropolitan Business Academy, Greenberg (by means he refused to reveal for fear of retroactive prosecution) entered and dug through the piles of excavated dirt.

Some of his finds are shown in a vitrine at DaSilva. They include broken glassware from early nineteenth-century medicine and oil bottles. ​“That’s a pipe stem,” he pointed out, likely from the 18th century.

“I see developers and thieves taking away the visual history of the city,” he said.

Thus also followed the portrait of Benedict Arnold, as of course a croc.

Several of the works displayed are newspaper articles, enlarged, with Greenberg’s croc art super-imposed on them.

In this one, the May 7, 1937, issue of the Yale Daily News, the story is of a student, Peter Belin, who saved himself by jumping 30 feet out of the swastika-tailed Hindenburg blimp that was going down in flames in Lakehurst, N.J.

“But look,” said Greenberg. What fascinated him was that the aerial photo of the Hindenburg was credited to a photographer named John H. Tweed.

“Now the airport is named after him.”

Near it on the wall is a front page from an 1871 edition of the New Haven Register. P.T. Barnum, now in Greenberg’s croc face, is advertised as coming to display his curiosities to all interested New Haveners at an empty lot on the corner of Congress Avenue and Daggett Street.

They include some kind of giant sloth or kangaroo combo; Siamese twins; Sleeping Beauty; the Last Supper; and a little girl all covered in hair.

If Barnum could do that, Greenberg could too.

The show runs through March 10.

Greenberg’s future plans include creating rolling cabinets or cases containing some of his curiosities that he can take to schools and other venues to bring local history to life.

“I would like to build cases modeled after A.C. Gilbert’s chemistry boxes,” he said.