New Haven’s Colonial inhabitants returned to the Green Friday to stage a protest against present-day protesters.
Artist Robert Greenberg made that happen by staking rubbings from 30 gravestones into the ground near the Occupy New Haven camp.
“This is my way of bringing them up and letting them talk,” the 49-year-old artist said.
He called his installation of headstones a way of reminding people what’s underneath the Green: the bodies of hundreds of early New Haveners, still interred there from back when the Green was used as a cemetery.
The reminder is also a rebuke directed at Occupy New Haven, the camp of protesters that has held a spot on the upper Green for nearly six months.
The camp has become “a mess” and it’s dishonoring the history of the city, Greenberg said. “I feel the New Haven Green has been disrespected.”
Greenberg worked with Bill and Jean Cameron, the caretakers at the Grove Street Cemetery, to take rubbings of 30 gravestones that originally stood on the Green. He clipped the rubbings onto pieces of cardboard, attached them to wooden stakes, and then Friday morning used a rubber mallet to pound them into the ground facing the Occupy camp.
“Every name is below us,” said Greenberg, who recently returned to New Haven after 27 years in New York City.
“I wanted to show the public the names of some of the people below us,” he said. “They all tell a story.”
He pointed out the side-by-side gravestones of Catherine and Woodbridge Townsend. He died in 1792 at 29 years old. ““With an infant daughter lying by his side aged 10 months,” the headstone reads. She died in 1794 at 22 years old. “Victim to the Yellow Fever.”
“Then you turn around and you have this Hooverville,” Greenberg said, pointing at Occupy. “I’m not happy with what I’m looking at here. I’m just offended at this mess.”
“These guys don’t understand that they won,” he said. “It’s like George Washington. The guy knew when to retreat. … It’s wrong. It’s wrong to the public.”
Greenberg said he’ll leave the rubbings up for the day. “I wouldn’t leave them overnight,” he said. The occupiers might take them.
Two occupiers, who gave their names as Nathan Hale and James Madison, offered their thoughts on the art installation. But they would speak only after Madison’s favorite song finished playing on Hale’s little handheld radio.
The song over, Hale, a bearded man with a black bandana, said he initially thought the gravestones were somehow a sign of support for the occupation.
Informed they were not intended as such, Hale said, “Now I’m thinking that guy’s not so good.”
Occupy could take them and use them for signs, Hale mused. “It wouldn’t be thieving. He left them there.”
Madison, who was wearing a camouflage jacket, rejected the premise of Greenberg’s project. “This is not a graveyard,” he said emphatically.
After 100 years, any property used for burying people stops being a cemetery, he said.
“Stop trying to stir up zombies,” he said.
As for the idea that the occupy camp is a mess. “It’s his opinion,” Madison said. “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got them and they all stink.”
“I think it looks kind of gnarly-looking,” Hale said, gazing over at the centuries-old gravestones returned to the Green.
