“Lost” Treasures Find Permanent Home

A local museum nonprofit has purchased a Hamilton Street office and warehouse building that will now serve as the permanent home of New Haven artist and historian Robert Greenberg’s ever-expanding collection of Elm City artifacts, memorabilia, and ephemera.

That industrial-turned-cultural property is located at 80 Hamilton St. on the border of the Wooster Square and Mill River neighborhoods.

According to the city’s online land records database, on Aug. 12, Lost in New Haven Inc. purchased the 0.82-acre property from Knollwood Washington LLC for $1 million. 

The property last sold for $160,000 in 2000, and the city most recently appraised it as worth $923,700.

The new owner of the nearly 18,000 square-foot Hamilton Street warehouse and office building is a nonprofit run by Greenberg, who for years has been amassing thousands of pieces of New Haven commercial, industrial, and material history in his heretofore itinerant ​“Lost in New Haven” collection. 

That collection includes treasures ranging from the old Cutler’s record store sign to World War I military recruitment posters from Church Street to relics from the now mostly demolished former Bigelow Boiler Factory complex to Sally’s pizza boxes, Bradley Smith Co. lollipop tins, New Haven Nighthawks hockey pucks, late 19th-century porcelain teacups, and early 20th-century New Haven police photographs. It will also include two century-old elevators lifted out of the former ACME Furniture building on Crown Street as that property is converted into 18 new eco-friendly apartments.

The Hamilton Street museum property is not yet open to the public. Greenberg is still fixing it up, adding a security system, installing ADA-compliant ramps, painting walls, adding track lights, and working through supply-chain-related delays. He said he hopes to have the site ready and open to more than just the occasional school tour in the next several months.

“This means I’ll never have to move again,” Greenberg said about the recent Hamilton Street building purchase during an interview outside of his family’s former ACME Furniture building on Crown Street. ​“This is [the collection’s] permanent home.”

He thanked 80 Hamilton St.‘s previous owner, Betsy Henley-Cohn, for selling his nonprofit the property, which used to house the Joseph Cohn & Son painting company. And he praised the four donors who, through the holding company 80 Hamilton LLC, loaned him $1 million to buy 80 Hamilton St. and then gave him five years to pay back that loan.

“The people that have been helping me have been extraordinarily generous and really believe in what I’ve been doing,” Greenberg said. ​“I can’t thank those people enough. It’s like a dream for me to do this. I know my grandfather Simon Evans would be in tears over the fact that we’re creating this location.” He added that Henley-Cohn has donated to Lost in New Haven Inc. the nearby parking lot property where Benedict Arnold might have once lived.

Greenberg is the president of the Lost in New Haven nonprofit. He sits on its board with philanthropists Laura Clarke and Roslyn Meyer.

The Hamilton Street office building that Greenberg’s nonprofit now owns will be the third — and, according to Greenberg, the last — home that Lost in New Haven has seen over the past six years.

His museum’s worth of artifacts was originally housed at Crown Street’s ACME Furniture building, which Greenberg’s family owned and operated for decades before closing its doors in 2016. Greenberg then moved his sprawling collection to a roughly 3,700 square-foot warehouse on Grand Avenue, which he subsequently had to leave from in early 2020 when his lease with that building’s owner expired. The collection has been living at the Hamilton Street property for the last two years.

What does he envision for the new museum space when it’s all ready and open to the public?

“I see this space as being one of the many wonderful hubs of New Haven that will bring tourists and school kids and educators in, and allow them to learn about New Haven and then go out to other institutions” and sites that will further deepen their understanding and appreciation of local history, he said.

He said Lost in New Haven’s goal has always been to use artifacts to inspire and educate people about this city’s rich history. Now that the collection has a permanent home on Hamilton Street, he said, and now that he doesn’t have to worry about moving and moving and moving again, that goal is even more within reach.