Allan Appel Photo
Greenberg at Lost New Haven's Benedict Arnold display.
Paving stones dug up by developers' excavation at 294-300 State St.
Robert Greenberg wants to “read the dirt” at one of New Haven’s latest downtown apartment construction sites.
He’d like to sift through the speckled ground for signs like oyster shells — which serve as a “tell” that a little further below may be an old smoking pipe, coins, buttons from military uniforms, medicine bottles, a spout from a once elegant tea set from the China trade.
He’s asking permission to do that at the southeast corner of Chapel and State Streets, where Beacon Communities has begun excavation to create a 76-unit affordable housing complex.
The site is behind the Greek Revival “Street Building” at 756 – 758 Chapel and the 1890s Horowitz Brothers Building.
Based on Greenberg’s careful overlay-of-historical maps research technique, it’s right smack dab on top of mariners J. Cock’s and R. Talmadge’s houses, per the 1748 map Wadsworth map.
These, Greenberg said, would be the earliest industrial buildings that in the mid 1700s overlooked the harbor whose waters lapped up right then near at that corner.
Through his mapping techniques, he said he knows precisely where to find areas that have been least disturbed over the centuries and therefore have the most potential to yield great stuff.
Greenberg has been doing this kind of work for years amid New Haven’s construction boom. He researches and displays these fragments from a lost New Haven’s economic, cultural, and political history that reveal the unseen pre-photography city that lies ten or 15 feet below every step we take through the Elm City.
Greenberg has dug in at least 20 locations — sometimes with permission of developers laying a new building’s foundation in historical ground, but not always. Click here and here for previous articles describing the kinds of artifacts, memorabilia, ephemera, and beloved relics Greenberg’s been accumulating and the odyssey, sometimes occasioned by eviction of his 5,000-plus collection, from his previous temporary locations.
The result of Greenberg’s work is a cabinet of curiosities of New Haveniana, by turns eccentric and illuminating, called Lost New Haven. He’s been hard at work creating a museum by that name in a renovated warehouse building tucked away at 80 Hamilton St.
Glazed clay pipe bowls, including one with an African-American head from the 1840s, retrieved from a parking lot site at State and Crown.
1748 Wadsworth map superimposed over Google Earth pinpointing locations.
Greenberg said he’s running into familiar barriers in his Chapel-State quest: a lack of any set policy or procedure built into how the city goes about its development that would permit an opportunity for someone like Greenberg to enter the site when interesting stuff is raised up in a Bobcat’s bucket and examine it before it’s trucked away.
“I’m pissed off because New Haven just doesn’t want to tell this story,” he said on Thursday morning as you could practically hear the excavation equipment grinding away down Chapel Street.
“I’m the only one who’s yelling about this, how important it is to analyze the ‘city below.’ There’s an entire city below us!”
With researcher Yale Presidential Fellow Nicole Manning (center) and Lost New Haven board member and jewelry-maker Alexis Gage.
“Look, they’re digging right now. You’re hitting oyster shells, put it aside and let me extract” items, should they emerge “for future exhibitions,” he said.
And of course time is of the essence, with the window disappearing when the hole gets filled.
Beacon Community principal Dara Kovel told the Independent that her company supports the mission of Lost in New Haven and ” shares a deep commitment to historic preservation,” as evidenced by past preservation projects across New England, including at the Montgomery Mill in Windsor Locks.
“The work of renovating historic properties into affordable housing is heavily regulated and involves layers of oversight and involvement from our many public and private partners, including those in historic preservation,” she wrote. “For Beacon’s site at State and Chapel, The Atwater at Ninth Square, the sensitivities around historic redevelopment are factored into the construction activities, which are already well underway.”
Beacon, which operates the nearby 335-unit Residences at Ninth Square, has already received a 17-year tax break from the Board of Alders, a $2.5 million Urban Act grant from the state, and most recently through the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) a much-sought-after $1.8 million in federal tax credits.
All this help with Beacon’s financing of the much needed affordable housing project also comes with an arrangement with the state’s historical preservation office for the company’s gut rehab of the Street and Horowitz properties to respect the integrity of the buildings and to preserve moldings, trim, and other items found, instead of sending them to the dumpster.
“They just got tax credits to preserve the historical look of the buildings,” Greenberg declared. “Why not a similar financial consideration to analyze the ‘dirt’?”
Greenberg stressed that his goal is to “rescue rare artifacts of past inhabitants. This is not an archeological dig. What we’re doing here is a very first and fast extraction of material out of the dirt before it gets thrown away. It’s a short amount of time, and they’re digging right now!”
And it’s not only a new local history museum, complete with nonprofit status, a board, and dedicated, local history-loving backers that Greenberg has created.
His latest initiative is having attained ownership of the site of Benedict Arnold’s house a short walk away on Water Street. There Greenberg has already unearthed bricks from the hero/traitor’s chimney and exhumed stuff from his basement, and all that is on view already at Lost New Haven.