You don’t have to wait for nightfall to go stargazing in New Haven, Connecticut. If you’re near the corner of Orange and Crown Streets, you don’t even have to look up at the sky. In fact, it’s best to go in daylight and turn your eyes downward to see the “Path of Stars.” On either side of Orange at it’s crossing with Crown, and on Crown approaching the intersection of State Street on the east and Church Street on the west observant pedestrians will find twenty-one gray granite stars within white concrete circles that are themselves set within pink concrete squares and embedded in the sidewalk. Each star bears the name and a bit of story about a person who lived or worked in the area from the late seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth. They are not the famous people whose names were frequently in the newspapers of their day and who are now found in history books. They are people you’ve probably never heard of whose lives nevertheless made a difference.
Among those commemorated is John Brocket, a surveyor who in the mid 1600s staked out the city in a regular grid and lived in this neighborhood now called Ninth Square. Lee Chong opened the first Chinese
The “Path of Stars,” competed in 1994, is the brainchild of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a graphic designer and public artist teaching at Yale since 1990, where she became the first tenured woman professor in the art school. She won a $25,000 competition with the intention of memorializing the “residents and landlords, merchants and laborers, managers and employees” who have made a vibrant neighborhood for centuries. Since she lived in Los Angeles before coming east, it’s not surprising de Bretteville’s work echoes the “Hollywood Walk of Fame,” which includes more than 2,500 terrazzo and brass stars celebrating people in the entertainment industry. A big difference is that many of the names embedded along Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street have no need of sidewalk emblems to preserve the memory of their presence.
Just southeast of the New Haven Green, Ninth Square is one of the oldest parts of the city and had great success as a manufacturing center from the mid 1800s until well into the 1900s. By the end of twentieth
Sometimes the sidewalk stars and the buildings echo one another. A member of a multi generational furniture making clan, Abel C. Chamberlain merits a star commemorating the 1832 opening of his furniture store which was run for
There’s a less obvious relationship between the star for twentieth century firefighter Ed Lawlor and the Firehouse 12 building where he was stationed. For fourteen years he drove the only city “fire engine that combined firefighting and emergency rescue apparatus.” Firehouse 12 is now a bar, recording studio and performance space.
Even today, the individuals recognized by these stars can resonate in our lives, however tangentially. I
Walking through this tiny galaxy of stars, I feel the energy of time’s continuum and a sense that the ordinary people I see on the street today may be making similar significant, but unknown contributions to the area and maybe even the world. Here the past is concretely and literally embedded in the present. It’s right beneath our feet, inviting us to walk and explore further.