Dioramas Dive Deep Into Canal History

Lean in …

Just a little bit closer …

And tumble on through a dollhouse-sized portal into New Haven transportation history.

These time-warping windows into past Elm City eras have been set up around downtown and Dixwell by the real-life adventure game designers at Escape New Haven.

The outdoor puzzlemakers have installed five plywood diorama boxes around this part of the city for their latest game, ​“Time Crimes: Pursuit of the Wallaby.” The game challenges players to piece together custom-built clues and use their visual, analytical, and logical skills to solve a series of puzzles related to a time-traveling ne’er-do-well.

The dioramas are more than just props in a sometimes brain-breaking (at least for this reporter) outdoor puzzle game.

They’re also permanent miniature public art installations that — when peeked into — illustrate the history of New Haven’s evolution as an industrial and manufacturing hub, all by focusing in on five key locations related to the Farmington Canal and New Haven Railroad between 1825 and 1925

Those five mini-history locations include the former ​“Hillhouse Basin” at Whitney Avenue, Temple Street, and Trumbull Street; the former ​“Lock 25” along the Farmington Canal Trail near Scantlebury Park and Bristol Street; a former railroad-focused spot along the canal trail near Foote Street; a former Winchester Arms factory-focused spot along canal trail near Canal Street and Munson Street; and a former McLagon Foundry-focused spot in the backyard of the Koffee? shop on Audubon Street.

Each diorama box displays a QR code that, when scanned by a smartphone, allows gameplayers and members of the public alike to learn more about the site-specific history on display within the 20″ by 12″ by 15″ wooden box before them. (Click here, here, here, here, and here to read those game-related online histories.)

“We like tactile interactions. We like to make things that people can touch and use,” Escape New Haven Co-Founder and Chief Producer Ethan Rodriguez-Torrent told the Independent on a walking tour of the game alongside ​“Time Crimes” diorama designer and artistic polymath Sooo‑z Mastropietro.

Even more so than with Escape New Haven’s downtown architecture-focused outdoor game ​“The Chauncey Conundrum,” Rodriguez-Torrent said, he wanted this latest venture to be ​“explicitly educational.” 

He wanted it be ​“discoverable” by anyone walking around New Haven and to serve as ​“public art.” 

This game wasn’t cheap to make, he added. He hopes that people continue to come out and play the paid, puzzle-filled version of ​“Time Crimes.”

But, fortunately for New Haven history buffs and curious passersby, these dioramas stand independently of the game as well — and offer pedestrians a chance to enjoy, and learn from, their creative additions to the city’s landscape. They also serve as yet another way to dive deep into the rich history of the canal-rail-trail on the 200th anniversary of its founding.

Diorama #1: "Hillhouse Basin" (1828)

The walking tour began at the starting point for the ​“Time Crimes” game: Escape New Haven’s outdoor adventure outpost at 105 3 / 4 Whitney Ave., a former Bank of America ATM alcove that has been turned into a code-protected storage locker for puzzle pieces.

After retrieving the game instructions and box of clues, Rodriguez-Torrent and Mastropietro led this reporter over to the first diorama stop, a few steps away at Phelps Triangle.

The inspiration for ​“Time Crimes” came in part from a conversation Rodriguez-Torrent had several years ago with city Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana. He recalled Fontana encouraging him to consider building out a scavenger hunt that would have New Haveners and visitors alike explore the city and learn more about its history. 

Rodriguez-Torrent didn’t act on that idea right away, focusing instead on the host of other indoor and outdoor games Escape New Haven has designed over the years. The idea ​“percolated.”

By the time he decided to start building such a game — focused on local transportation history, and told with the help of public-art dioramas — Rodriguez-Torrent had a few hurdles to clear. 

First, he and Escape New Haven Co-Founder Max Sutter had to win permission from the city Parks Commission to install four of the five dioramas on publicly owned land. (The only one that stands on private property is behind Koffee? on Audubon Street. Rodriguez-Torrent shouted out Koffee?‘s Duncan Goodall, the city parks department’s Bill Carone, and the Garden Club of New Haven, which takes care of Phelps Triangle, for being particularly helpful in ensuring that these dioramas could be installed.)

Next, he had to learn all about the Farmington Canal’s history — from its founding as a water-based commercial and recreational transportation route in the 1820s, to its conversion to a railroad in 1848, to its diminishing relevance with the onset of the automobile and highways in the mid-20th century.

That’s where canal historian Carl Walter and the New Haven Museum came in, directing Rodriguez-Torrent to a wealth of maps, woodcuts, rates of toll, early photographs, and other primary and secondary source documents that informed the QR-connected online histories that ​“Time Crimes” tells.

Finally, as fellow Escape staffer Trevor Frederiksen took the lead on building out the exterior boxes and posts that would hold the dioramas, Rodriguez-Torrent connected with Mastropietro, the artist who would make the miniaturized historical scenes critical to the ​“Time Crimes” functioning as an outdoor game, public art, and educational initiative.

Mastropietro is a Westport-based birth doula and fiber artist who has spent the past two decades playing the upright bass in the Civic Orchestra of New Haven. Before signing on for ​“Time Crimes” dioramas, she worked with the Town Green District to install a piece of fiber-based art in an empty storefront on Chapel Street as part of the Windowed Worlds program.

“I was working on a dollhouse for a private client” when she found out about the ​“Time Crimes” diorama project, Mastropietro recalled. ​“I liked the historical component. Each diorama tells a story.” 

So she dived into each site’s histories, started making drawings, and wound up crafting the finished miniature scenes out of Sculpey clay, wood, leather, cork, and resin.

The Phelps Triangle diorama tells the story of the Hillhouse Basin and the beginning of the Farmington Canal in 1828.

“The Farmington Canal opened to great fanfare in the spring of 1828,” the online history for this location reads. ​“Already five years in the making, the canal was intended to improve the transportation of goods between the harbor and the interior of the state, ultimately meeting up with the planned Hampshire and Hampden Canal in the north (completed in 1835) to connect New Haven to Northampton, Massachusetts. Eventually, the planners of the two canals hoped to stitch together a water route stretching all the way through Vermont to the St. Lawrence Seaway in Canada.

“In the first year of the canal, it was navigated mostly by ​‘packet boats’ designed for pleasure travel. Upper class New Haveners would travel up the canal for day or weekend excursions to towns in the interior of the state. These ships launched from a boathouse known as Hillhouse Basin or ​‘Hillhouse’s Basin,’ conveniently located across from the local canal repair shop. Well dressed passengers would sit on the boats’ roofs, watching the scenery glide by at the frantic pace of 2.5 miles per hour.”

Rodriguez-Torrent was asked which one piece of this site’s history has stuck with him the most after building out this game.

“I didn’t even know that canal boats were towed” by horses and mules, he replied.

Looking ahead to the next diorama, he said, he also always assumed that the railroad that replaced the canal was laid atop the former waterway, whereas in fact it was laid atop the former towpath.

Before the two left Phelps Triange for the second diorama stop along the canal walking-biking trail in Dixwell, Mastropietro complimented Rodriguez-Torrent for the shingled design of the wooden container boxes. ​“It really integrates nicely with the landscape,” she said.

So far, these dioramas have held up well, Rodriguez-Torrent said. They survived their first winter intact. And, fortunately, they haven’t been tagged with graffiti or otherwise vandalized.

Diorama #2: "Lock 25" (1835)

Rodriguez-Torrent and Mastropietro then walked west along Trumbull Street to Lock Street, and then onto the Farmington Canal Trail itself to get to the next diorama near Bristol Street.

This artwork — and ​“Time Crimes” puzzle box — tells the story of the former Lock 25.

“In 1835, the Farmington Canal linked up with the Hampshire and Hampden Canal in Massachusetts to allow passengers to travel all the way to Northampton, MA (84 miles) by boat for the steep price of $3.75 — about $113 in today’s dollars,” this site’s online history reads. ​“It was a 24-hour journey, and a sleeping compartment was included. But passenger travel was no longer the primary use of the canal: beginning in 1829, goods and raw materials — flour, meat, rice, tea, lumber, coal, stone, ore, and more — were transported up and down the canal in cargo boats.”

Most of those small boats were towed along by horses or mules, the history write-up continues. Only in 1835 did the canal start to allow small steamships that could travel on their own power.

What exactly does ​“Lock 25” refer to?

“There was a 292-foot elevation change along the route of the canal between New Haven in the south and Granby in the north, but canal traffic requires a level, placid body of water — not a rushing river,” the online history reads. ​“So each section of the canal was kept as flat as possible, and elevation changes along the route were handled by locks, which acted as ​‘boat elevators,’ raising or lowering boats between canal sections at different elevations. On the Connecticut section of the Farmington Canal, there were 28 locks, and each one could raise or lower a boat as much as 9 feet. Each lock was operated by a lock keeper. In New Haven, the lock keepers were mostly farmers whose lands abutted the canal; they would come running to operate the lock when a passing boat rang its bell, and were paid a small fee for their service.”

“The resin for the canal was very challenging” to work with, Mastropietro said as she peered into the ​“Lock 25” diorama. ​“But it’s really holding up well.”

At this point in the ​“Time Crimes” game, Rodriguez-Torrent explained, players have to a solve a set of puzzles — with the help of a handheld mirror — regarding different colored dyes purportedly stored in the clay-sculpted cargo boat on display in the diorama.

This reporter left it to the puzzlemaster to figure out exactly how to solve this part of the game. As he juggled the game pieces and strategically positioned the mirror inside the diorama, one could almost hear the sounds of a bell tolling and a 19th century New Haven farmer rushing down to open the lock to let the cargo ship through. 

Diorama #5: "The McLagon Foundry" (1924)

The fifth and final stop for the ​“Time Crimes” game is a diorama that stands behind Koffee? on Audubon Street. (This reporter didn’t have time to visit dioramas 3 and 4 during this particular outing. Click here and here to read more about those spots.)

This last mini-history diorama focuses on The McLagon Foundry in 1924 and the canal-railroad destroying era of the automobile.

“From the mid 19th to mid 20th century, this neighborhood — which would later become the Audubon Arts District — was a major New Haven industrial center,” the site’s online history reads. ​“The McLagon Foundry was built on this site in 1848, the year the Farmington Canal closed for business and fully transitioned to railroad use. At the time, the area around the new foundry was still dense woods, but soon it would become home to the Andrew B. Hendryx Co. (“manufacturers of birdcages and metal goods”), A.A. Ball & Co. (“iron railings etc.”), the F.D. Butricks Steam Engine Manufacturers, the New Haven Folding Chair Co., and the New Haven Manufacturing Co.

“The McLagon Foundry cast metal products used throughout Connecticut: anchors, parts for ships and bridges, tools for the Whitneyville Armory, dies for the first stone crushing machines, machinery for the Diamond Match Company, and much more. The foundry had its share of turmoil — including strikes in 1907 and a devastating fire in 1911 — and would eventually closed its doors in the 1960s. Yet its work survives to this day: If you keep your eyes peeled, you can still spot the McLagon name on the iron fences that surround the New Haven Green, and on many of the manhole covers throughout the city.”

Rodriguez-Torrent said he wanted to conclude the game — and the public art/history tour — at the site of the former foundry because of its role in the nascent automobile manufacturing history, and therefore its representation of an industrial era that ended the commercial usefulness of the canal and railroad.

Shuffling through the final batch of clues and materials needed to solve this last puzzle in ​“Time Crimes,” Rodriguez-Torrent held up a laminated copy of a 1911 newspaper clipping describing a fire that destroyed much of the foundry building.

Inside the diorama itself, one can see workers walking along Audubon Street and Whitney Avenue while, inside the exposed brick factory building itself, red-hot molten metal pours down from a giant cauldron.

“In its early days, the foundry operated a dock next to Hillhouse Basin, where it would receive shipments of pig iron brought down the canal from upstate,” the online history concludes. ​“But the canal quickly gave way to the railroad as the primary method of transporting goods throughout the interior of the state. And by 1924, when New Haven’s population plateaued, the city was already in the midst of a transportation revolution. The trolley that ran past the foundry and up Whitney Avenue was facing new competition in the form of a public bus. The New Haven Manufacturing Co. across the street had been replaced by the Driggs Ordnance Co., which built automobile engines. And as steam power gave way to the internal combustion engine and manufacturing became less dependent on sea and rail, New Haven and other industrial cities like it would soon face the existential question of how to fill the gap that the factories would leave behind.”

Click here to book a time to play ​“Time Crimes: Pursuit of the Wallaby” and other Escape New Haven games. And see the image to the right for a map of all five mini-history diorama locations.