Brian Slattery Photos
Cruz.
“You are visiting, and I live in, the most diverse neighborhood in New Haven,” said community activist Lee Cruz. “You walk around this block, you will hear English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hebrew, and French. Just on this block.”
He was talking about Fair Haven, and the occasion was a bike tour — part of Sunday’s programming for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — that led 30 participants through the neighborhood to discover the range and depth of public art projects there. Along the way, they learned about history, struggle, and the pride that binds the people in one geographical area into a community.
The tour gathered on the New Haven Green and headed down Elm Street toward Fair Haven, but then took a left, north, onto State Street. Before entering his neighborhood, Cruz had a narrative to unfold first.
“This is the mural that inspired us,” Cruz said, to start pushing for more public art in Fair Haven. It wasn’t just the mural itself, but the long, heavy lift to get public art on the concrete walls of the overpass. Cruz ran through the history, which included the initial plans to create art and trees in 2009, the planting of trees in 2011, and the first iteration of public art there, which involved large black-and-white pasted photographs of neighborhood residents. They were great, but “they didn’t last very long,” Cruz said. A team of muralists in 2014 then organized the Under 91 Project to propose two large-scale pieces on both sides of the concrete tunnel, which they implemented in the same year. It took five years, but the space was transformed.
“This wasn’t the first mural done under a highway, certainly, not even the first one in Connecticut,” Cruz said, “but it was the one that got the conversation rolling again” about creating public art on the blank walls of New Haven’s neighborhoods.
Cruz led the tour back to State Street and north, into Cedar Street, connecting to Ferry Street. There, on the wall of another I‑91 overpass, was a 227-foot mural welcoming motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians to Fair Haven. “As far as I know, this is the largest mural” in the neighborhood, Cruz said. The work of Carlos Perez — who goes by Perez as an artist — it was painted last summer with the help of a large crew of adults and kids and support from the city. It’s new enough that the neighborhood hasn’t officially inaugurated it. Cruz said that, soon, they will get around to organizing a party. For the moment, he encouraged tour participants to appreciate the way each letter in the mural was its own mural, containing neighborhood landmarks, key personalities, and the multiplicity of languages spoken there.
“Welcome to Fair Haven!” Cruz said.
Continuing on Ferry Street, the tour took a right onto Peck Street to get to Blatchley Avenue.
The next destination was Bregamos Community Theatre in Erector Square. Cruz gave a little history, explaining how Erector Square was named after the childhood toy that had once been manufactured there. He also explained that Bregamos — which translates as “we toil” — was started by city official and community activist Rafael Ramos as a community space for the arts in Fair Haven. It could be the host for world-class Puerto Rican percussionists, or a play from Long Wharf or Collective Consciousness, or an art exhibition, or the end of the neighborhood’s Día de los Muertos parade. The portraits in the upper windows, by artist David Sepulveda, are of New Haven artists and fixtures of the neighborhood.
Cruz then had the tour cross Blatchley on foot and walk over the bridge to observe a mural — less official than most of the murals on the tour — that appeared on the side of a building on State Street. “You don’t know that it’s here unless you’re walking,” Cruz said. But it rewarded those who stopped and absorbed themselves in the details.
At Elm City College Preparatory on James Street, Cruz issued a challenge. “A dollar goes to the person who can tell me who all the people are” on the building’s face. The tour ended up meeting the challenge together. The ends — civil rights icons Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela — were easy. The two women, a few people pieced together (poet Maya Angelou and Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor). The man in the middle stumped people. Cruz revealed that it was labor activist Cesar Chavez.
Visitors to another charter school campus on Dixwell Avenue, Cruz said, would find “even more challenging pictures. I want to challenge you to go there and get to know all the famous Black people who’ve made American history. It’s a pretty impressive list of people, from scientists to Supreme Court justices to, of course, a president. Some of us know some of them, but very few of us know all of them.”
The tour then cycled as a tight group on Lombard Street and took a left onto Clinton Street to get to Middletown Avenue. From there, it headed east and took a right onto Front Street. Under yet another I‑91 overpass was an enormous mural. “This is one of our community murals,” Cruz said, led by a group of self-taught young women artists, paid for with “Covid money,” and painted by a large group of adults and children. On the opposite side of the street, on pillars holding up the highway, were portraits of community members.
The artwork on both sides of the underpass, Cruz pointed out, has “helped to keep this area clean.” With more involvement and pride in place comes greater respect. At one point the portraits on the other side of the street from the mural were taken down and destroyed. New ones were made.
Continuing south on Front Street along the Quinnipiac River took the group to the Lewis Street Park, shaded with trees and containing a splash pad and a colorful mural. The mural dates from 2010 and was painted by about 30 community members under the direction of graphic artist Krista Abbott. It depicts some of Fair Haven’s history — its original name of Dragon Point — as well as still-current community fixtures, such as the man who sells coquitos outside the supermarket on Grand Avenue and Ferry Street.
The mural has been defaced a couple times, Cruz said. “Years ago somebody came along and wrote the word ‘Hawaii’ on the sun. Nobody knows who did it or why.” It’s still there. The second time, “somebody came and painted the F‑word on the green part of the mural, where the hearts are.” Cruz’s initial thought was that people didn’t respect the public art in the neighborhood. “But the next time I came by, somebody had come by. Clearly they must have had a ladder. And they climbed up there and they painted it over.”
“The sign of community is not that something overwhelmingly beautiful happens like this mural,” he added, “or something overwhelmingly bad, like somebody damaging it. The sign of a healthy community is that when someone decides to do something bad, somebody stands up and says ‘I’m not going to let that happen.’ ” The mural hasn’t been vandalized since.
Continuing along Front Street, the tour stopped at Quinnipiac River Park, where Cruz pointed out an artfully designed bike stand. It was dedicated to community activist Paul Hammer, “who did a lot of solidarity work around the world” and in New Haven, Cruz said. “He was an incredible human being.” Cruz mentioned that efforts to install more of them around the city.
Cruz also wanted the tour to appreciate the Grand Avenue Bridge itself as a work of art. “This bridge was just redone to the tune of about $29 million,” he said — the latest chapter in a storied history stretching back to 1898 that also encompassed the history of successive waves of migration into the neighborhood and the celebrations of community they entailed.
The Grand Avenue Bridge rotates from the middle to allow larger boats access to the Quinnipiac River. “If you get a chance, come here around 5:30 in the morning, 11ish, and then around 2 to 3,” when boats are heading out to sea and returning again, to watch the bridge move.
On Grand Avenue, Cruz designated the murals at the currently unused Strong School as having the most community participation. “In one weekend, 109 people painted this mural.” During the pandemic, a couple people broke into the building looking for shelter and started a fire for warmth; the fire department’s intervention destroyed part of the mural.
Cruz was hopeful about the Strong School’s upcoming chapter. “After 10 years of wrangling with the city, we finally got a proposal,” he said. Boston private developer Pennrose LLC, “known as one of the top ten best affordable housing developers in the country,” plans to preserve the building and create explicitly LGBTQIA+-friendly housing. “Fifty-eight units, 100 percent affordable housing,” also focused on artists.
There are more than a dozen languages spoken in the neighborhood and considerably more than that in terms of nationalities. “The LGBTQ is prevalent here but is not that easy to see. So to have a building that says ‘you’re welcome here’ is very important to us.”
At the intersection of Grand and Blatchley, Cruz had his hands full, whether it was pointing out sidewalk art about rainwater runoff, gesturing to Madelyn LeRose’s mural on the building housing the Centro San Jose preschool program, or discussing the art and architecture surrounding the elementary and middle school formerly known as Christopher Columbus and now known as Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration. He pointed out the statue of Rodrigo de Triana, the Black sailor who first spotted land in the Caribbean on Columbus’s first voyage. Columbus took the credit and thus the reward; de Triana’s faith was so shaken that he renounced Christianity, converted to Islam, and moved to North Africa. The intersection stops ended with Kwadwo Adae’s mural just off the corner of Grand and Blatchley, completed in November.
The tour headed down Blatchley to RIver Street and made its way to Criscuolo Park, where Cruz made a stop at the Colored Regiment Monument, “one of less than 40 monuments in the United States that recognizes the sacrifice of Black soldiers. A former Marine, Cruz considered the monument to be “sacred ground,” and remarked how the Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War would not live to see equal rights. They fought to “preserve the Union,” as Lincoln had phrased it, but could not participate fully in it afterward. The monument was designed by Ed Hamilton (who also designed New Haven’s Amistad Memorial) with money raised by Jackie Buster and the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven.
Near the park, the tour stopped at Match, which offers job training in high-end machine work. The mural on the building was created by Victoria Martinez, addressing climate change. Cruz pointed out that the text on the mural reads “the bicycle,” “the boot,” or “the bus.” In other words, “what they’re saying is ‘get here any way you can, except in cars.” The mural is even painted with cooling paint closest to the ground to keep temperatures down on the sidewalk in the summer.
Lee said that Match’s “motivation” for training young machinists “is the best. Not only do they want to help people, but they have a company that needs them. That sweet spot between needing something that helps you and helping other people — that’s where sustainability happens. Anything less is charity, and it ends at the moment your economic future becomes the least bit uncertain. But as long as you have a need, and you can help other people, that’s the sweet spot, and that’s why we want them in Fair Haven.”
The tour continued back toward Grand Avenue, passing the Site Projects-supported Frenemy mural wrapping around a building on Exchange Street.
Taking a left on Grand toward downtown, the tour crossed under I‑91 once again, to the first mural Carlos Perez designed. He learned as he went — and got ideas on process from YouTube videos. “That’s how he figured out how to do it,” Cruz said, with admiration. Shortly after the mural was finished, someone vandalized it. “He came back and repainted several parts of the mural.” It’s now done with a paint that makes it easy to remove graffiti.
“I don’t know what he calls it, but I call it community,” Cruz said. In the mural, “you’re looking at everything we biked through.”
The final stop was just off Grand Avenue on Wooster Square, which Cruz said was one of the oldest murals he could think of in the area, painted by Puerto Rican youth. The assignment was to paint the world, but in the image, “you’ll notice one Caribbean island that is slightly larger than its actual size. And of all the places in the world, you’re supposed to know what they are with no names. But the island says ‘P.R.’ ”
The mural was technically in a different neighborhood; sometimes neighborhood pride spills beyond its borders.