Unburied Ghosts Still Haunt Plaza

The ghost cars are history. But their ghosts remain.

Richard Drufva sensed the ghosts when he stood outside of ShopRite the other day in Hamden Plaza. Strictly speaking, the place is not gone. But the cars —the ghost cars— are.

“It’s funny having a memory of a place that you used to frequent,” he said, ​“and it’s just gone now.”

The Plaza is still alive and well, with only a few vacancies. DiMatteo’s Pizza is still there. It opened the same year Drufva graduated from Hamden High School a few hundred feet to the South — 1972. So is Pearle Vision, which opened the next year.

But gone is the day when Hamden Plaza was at the front of a wave of innovation — first in the retail world, and later in the art world. And with it went the most prominent symbol of that innovative spirit: James Wines’ Ghost Parking Lot, composed of 20 cars ​“parked” along the Dixwell Avenue side of the parking lot, sinking to various levels into the pavement under a black blanket of asphalt.

“I liked it. I know that a lot of people didn’t. It was like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion,” recalled Drufva (pictured). It was 1977 after all, and still the Cold War. In 1961, a nuclear fallout shelter had been displayed in the Plaza for a short time.

“Now you could look at it and think: it’s cars that have created climate change,” he said.

For most people who roll off the Wilbur Cross Parkway and pull into the parking lot in front of ShopRite or Marshall’s, Hamden Plaza just another strip mall. Its asphalt parking lot is surrounded by a horseshoe of box stores, the emblem of the American suburb.

But the vintage sign at the entrance might serve as a clue that it was once a little more than that. It was the first suburban shopping center in the state. And the swirling cones on top of the sign are one of the last remaining pieces from the days when the plaza served as a public exhibition space for a new crop of kinetic artists and for one of the first and most acclaimed pieces of site-specific public art.

The Plaza continues to change, its storefronts getting facelifts, the composition of its shops adapting to changing consumer habits. Its art days are mostly over, though reminders remain. George Rhoads’ Windamajig, with painted steel cones swirling in the wind, stands in the middle of the parking lot, and Clyde Lynds’ Weeping Column outside Sketchers. A large wall display with photographs and a brief explanation outside of Marshalls commemorates Ghost Parking Lot. And, of course, when longtime shoppers like Drufva come back to the Plaza, the place still evokes the ghosts of those cars.

Pioneer Of Retail And Art

When paving crews laid the asphalt of the Wilbur Cross Parkway in the 1940s, the new highway snaked just south of Henry Peters’ farm.

Norman Benedict, who has been an appraiser in Hamden since 1952, used to help pick fruit on Peters’ farm. He once asked Peters: ​“Which did you grow better on that property? Peaches or apples?”

“Mobil gas stations,” Peters replied.

The parkway was a preface to the suburbanization of the American housing and retail landscape in the 1950s and 1960s. Its construction suddenly made the stretch of Dixwell Avenue that cut through Peters’ property fertile ground for more than apples and peaches. The car was becoming America’s choice mode of transportation and a symbol of its postwar prosperity. With families from all over the state now driving through Hamden every day, it was the perfect location for a shopping center.

Sears, Roebuck, and Co. came first. Longtime resident Helen Spencer recalls sitting in front of Hamden High watching a solid line of cars snake off the highway into the parking lot the day it opened in August 1954. It was the biggest store in Hamden, and it had a new novelty: ​“modern automatic stairs,” as the Hamden Chronicle called its pioneering escalator in a 1954 article.

A few months earlier, in February of 1954, David W. Bermant and David Schwartz bought a plot of Peters’ land on the other side of Dixwell from Sears. Construction began Oct. 28 of that year. When the plaza opened in November of 1955, it became the first suburban shopping center in the state, featuring an F. W. Woolworth Co., an Eli Moore, a J. C. Penney, and more. Hamden Mart came a few years later on the plot of land just north of the Plaza. It was the birth of Hamden’s ​“Magic Mile.”

Though suburban shopping centers have become ubiquitous — and often infamous for their dull sameness — at the time, Hamden Plaza was in the vanguard of a revolution in American residential and retail norms, and David Bermant was one of the people driving the change.

“He saw himself in a way as a pioneer in terms of what he was doing,” said Andrew Bermant, David’s son, who now manages the Plaza.

In Bermant’s new shopping center, Hamden residents discovered the convenience of living in what was becoming a typical American suburb.

“I was a preteen going on a teenager, so it was terrific” recalled lifelong resident Sue Hartley. ​“There were all those stores I could walk to from the high school.” She and other Hamden residents no longer had to make the trek down to New Haven to go shopping.

Under Bermant’s watch, Hamden Plaza became in many ways a typical suburban shopping center. It was a horseshoe of box stores around a parking lot in a suburb. It had its anchor stores: Woolworth and J.C. Penney, then Shaw’s, and now ShopRite and Marshall’s.

But in one way, it was far from just a normal shopping center.

At some point in the 1960s, Andrew Bermant recalls, his father took a trip to Israel. There, he saw a piece of art that captivated him, beginning his fascination with kinetic art — ​“anything that moves,” in the words of Artist Clyde Lynds, whom David Bermant patronized.

Bermant befriended Ivan Karp, who owned the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York City. Karp mentored him in the art world, and Bermant began to befriend artists. Through his patronage, he began to support dozens of artists whose works he commissioned both for his own collection and for his shopping centers. (Read more about his work in the art world here.)

Art, said Andrew Bermant, became his father’s main passion. By commissioning works for his shopping centers, David Bermant found a way to wed this passion with his commercial endeavors.

“He thought the artwork would bring people to the shopping centers,” said Andrew Bermant. ​“My father swore when he put in a new piece in the shopping centers, sales would go up.”

David Bermant, Lynds recalled, would sometimes talk about his shopping centers as an ​“agora” (the ancient Greek marketplace).

“He liked the thought of his shopping centers working that way. Historically, a shopping center was an agora, in some sense,” said Lynds.

Bermant installed works in many of his 22 shopping centers, giving some of them notoriety. Cermak Plaza in Berwyn, Illinois featured Dustin Schuler’s Spindle, a fifty-foot spike holding aloft eight impaled cars. Cermak Plaza also had a floating McDonalds, designed by James Wines to look like it was floating a few feet off the ground.

And in Ghost Parking Lot, Hamden Plaza, too, got a piece that quickly won worldwide renown in the art world, and a mixture of bemused interest and disgust among locals.

20th Century Archaeology

On Saturday, May 27, 1978, David Bermant’s National Shopping Centers, Inc. ran an ad in the New Haven Register.

“The Hamden Plaza is paved with good intentions,” it announced. Though the cars had already been embedded in the pavement for months, it was the day of Ghost Parking Lot’s dedication.

“Shopping Centers like ours are perhaps the collective symbol of America, a crossroads,” read the ad. ​“What better co-symbol of America to implant in The Plaza as an art-fixture than the automobile? Yes, it is provocative. But so is America. ​‘Long Live the Ghost Parking Lot.’”

James Wines said people often ask him how he ever got away with a piece like that — an almost sarcastic commentary on car and consumer culture right in the belly of the beast. The best actors and filmmakers, he said, always make a critique of their medium. Bermant, he said, understood that.

“When you’re making fun of yourself in public, the public joins in with you,” he told the Independent in an interview. ​“You are, you’re making fun of yourself in the public domain. And that has a lot more [power] than just trying to butter up your potential clients.”

Before designing Ghost Parking Lot, Wines and his architecture firm SITE had designed a series of box stores for the BEST Products Company. One in Houston looked like its rectangular white brick walls were crumbling from the top, with a cascade of bricks flowing into a pile beneath a gash at the top of the front wall.

Bermant contacted BEST’s owners about Wines and then got in touch with him directly. Wines said he told Bermant that he was interested in context. Individual pieces that could be installed on the sidewalk or in other places in the Plaza didn’t interest him.

There was a part of the parking lot, Bermant told Wines, where few people ever parked. So, they decided to use the parking lot, and from there Wines began to think up a piece that involved cars ​“because, again, they’re so iconic.”

They put an announcement in the paper asking for contributions of old cars. A lot of people, said Wines, wanted their car ​“memorialized,” so they had their pick of an array of iconic cars. There was a Cadillac, a Mercedes-Benz, and even a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. The Karmann Ghia had belonged to a soldier killed in Vietnam. His mother contributed his car, along with his medals to be buried in it.

Wines and his crew removed all internal fixtures, sandblasted the cars to remove paint, reinforced the bodies, and with the help of a construction company they hired, placed them in excavations in the pavement to varying depths. They filled the cars with concrete, and sprayed them first with Bloc Bond to create a ​“skin” effect, according to a brochure, and then with a layer of asphalt.

“This fusion of typically mobile artifacts with their environment takes advantage of people’s subliminal connections with the rituals of shopping center merchandising and the fetishism of American car culture,” explains SITE’s website.

Wines said he wanted the piece to evoke something archaeological. ​“It was in a sense the archaeology of the 20th century transportation industry,” he said. He had lived in Italy, and was captivated by how ​“everything in the streets speaks to you.” The buildings and streets ​“were communicating, telling stories in art, in the public domain.”

Ghost Parking Lot was one of the earliest examples of site-specific environmental art. Wines was a part of the environmental art movement, which tried to take art out of galleries and create something that wasn’t ​“just decoration…” or ​“just passive exhibition material.”

“The idea was to get into the streets and the landscapes and get art out of that kind of precious context,” Wines explained.

The shopping center context of Ghost Parking Lot, and of Wines’ BEST buildings, was less the product of artistic choice, and more the result of where the patrons were. At the time, said Wines, ​“the wealth was in manufacturing and in service industries” like retail. ​“Art goes where the opportunity to sponsor it goes.” Fortunately, in the case of shopping centers, that meant art could be displayed somewhere with a ​“Democratic foundation.”

Many of those for whom Ghost Parking Lot was so accessible, however, did not appreciate it.

“I got it, OK. I understood the artistic concept. But I didn’t like it. Count me among the majority,” said Dave Johnson, who has lived in Hamden his whole life and is now the town’s historian.

“I did not like it at all. It was ugly,” said Sue Hartley.

The work became a favorite site for skateboarders and bikers, and families posing for pictures in the convertible. Soon, however, it began to give way to the ravages of weather and wear. Cracks formed in the asphalt, revealing the metal beneath. Over time, weeds grew up between the cracks. A few cars were removed to make space for more parking. In an attempt to save it, Bermant had more asphalt poured over it.

Wines said he did not want the piece repaired. From the beginning, he had told Bermant that it would be a temporary work. The lumps of concrete that had been applied in a futile attempt to save the work blotted out the subtleties of the cars, ruining the look of ​“something lying under a wet cloth.”

Wines said he would have preferred ​“if it had just been reclaimed” by nature. ​“Then it would have just been an extension of the project. A natural extension” through ​“weeds and the dematerialization” of the materials. But repairing it destroyed the concept, and in Wines’ view, ​“if it’s no longer art, why have it?” So, it was a relief, he said, when efforts to preserve it failed and it was removed in 2003.

“A Thousand Little Lights”

Flat asphalt has now reclaimed the ghost parking spots, and most of the other pieces once installed in the Plaza are gone, except for three. Two are early pieces by George Rhoads: Windamajig, a tall mobile of painted steel cones in the center of the parking lot, and a similar, smaller piece on top of the Hamden Plaza sign. The third is Clyde Lynds’ Weeping Column.

Weeping Column sits nestled next to a row of bushes outside of Sketchers. It’s a concrete column, broken-off at the top, mounted on a plinth. During the day, it is rather unassuming, but at night, its surface lights up with little points of glowing and fading light from fiber-optic cables that run through the concrete.

It was one of Lynds’ first fiber-optic sculptures, and was the precursor to a number of more elaborate works using similar techniques that are displayed all over the country.

“He said to me one time,” Lynds recalled, referring to David Bermant, ​“he said: if you show me two pieces of art, and one has a thousand little lights in it and they’re both equal artistically and one doesn’t have a thousand little pieces of light in it, I’ll take the one with a thousand little lights.”

Lynds’ first piece for Bermant was called Rosetta’s Stone, and displayed illuminated hieroglyphs in the surface of a slab of concrete made to look like the famous stone. ​“Fiber optics had just come out, and I got my hands on some of the material, and I said ​‘oh shit, this is it,’” Lynds said.

Ancient civilizations and ruins, said Lynds, have always provided a source of inspiration. The ​“mystery of not knowing what it said,” intrigued him. Through sculptures like Weeping Column and Rosetta’s Stone, he wanted to ​“resurrect [that sense of mystery] in a modern context.”

Before coming to Hamden Plaza, Weeping Column was displayed in the World Trade Center in 1983, along with George Rhoads’ Magic Clock, which also came to Hamden.

“Weeping column was a weeping column. It was a broken column, oddly prophetic that it was in the World Trade Center years before.” It represented ​“the kind of loss of something. Civilization probably. It was meant to be a kind of mourning piece for lost civilization in a sense.”

Unlike Ghost Parking Lot, Weeping Column was not designed with a specific site in mind. Lynds, too, became interested in site-specific work, but not until later.

Bermant’s commission gave Lynds the ability to experiment and develop the techniques that he would use in later works. Weeping Column was a simpler, smaller version of many of the pieces Lynds would make later. For example, he made a fifteen-foot Stele for the Hewlett Packard Corporation in Boston. Geometric shapes, etched in light, overlap and shift over its surface.

David Bermant, said Lynds, gave him complete artistic freedom. ​“It was one of the wonderful things about him,” recalled Lynds. ​“He wasn’t an editor in any way. He was an… an abilitator.”

Ghosts

Perhaps it’s fitting that Bermant’s artists were so compelled by art that referenced some lost past — an ancient civilization for Lynds, or an archaeology of car culture for Wines.

David Bermant ended up selling most of his shopping centers. Andrew Bermant still owns only two of the centers that his father developed: Hamden Plaza, and Cermak Plaza in Berwyn, Illinois. When other developers bought the centers, said Bermant, the first thing to go was always the art. And even in the two centers that he still owns, wear and tear has forced the removal of most of the works.

Only a handful of longtime tenants are left. Andrew DiMatteo still runs DiMatteo’s pizza on the southern side of the Plaza. His parents started the restaurant in 1972, and he started working there in 1997, when he was 16. Eddie Elias still owns Pearle Vision on the western side of the horseshoe. The practice has been there since 1973, and Elias has run it since 1996. On the northern end, Ashley’s is alive and well. It’s been there since the early 1980s. The last of the original stores, Cobbs Stationers, closed in 1996.

Andrew Bermant said he has no plans to commission more art. He would love to, he said, but his first priority is filling the vacancies that have opened on the northern end of the Plaza in the last few years. That, he said, requires keeping up with shifting consumer trends.

The art that does remain, Bermant will continue to maintain. Rhoads’ Windamajig got fresh coats of paint on the colored insides of the cones last year. Bermant said he will have the white exterior painted this year. The vintage Hamden Plaza sign with the Rhoads sculpture mounted on top will also need a fresh coat of paint soon.

Bermant said he plans to carry the design of ShopRite’s façade over to the rest of the plaza, giving the whole horseshoe the subtle neo-classical red-brick elements that are common in New England architecture, echoing Hamden High next door.

Whether it’s the art, the landscaping, or the businesses, there’s some subtle uniqueness to the Plaza. It has ​“that feeling,” according to Ashley’s Owner Brian Anderson, who has been working in the Plaza since he was a student at Hamden High in the early 1990s.

“I just know that when I’m walking around the Plaza as opposed to say the Mart… you just feel like there was some thought put into it,” he said. When he’s at the Hamden location, he said, he sees the same people out walking around the parking lot, using it as a walking track.

Perhaps when they walk along the edge of the parking lot that abuts Dixwell Avenue, they see in the now smooth pavement the ghost of a Karmann Ghia, Vietnam medals resting inside, covered by a thin layer of black asphalt like a wet blanket.