Kiva Bank, Contributing Photographer
The saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” has taken on a new meaning at Lost in New Haven, a collection of thousands of artifacts owned by artist Robert Greenberg.
Since his youth, Greenberg has accumulated nearly 100,000 items of various mediums. Housed at a 25,000 square-foot, converted warehouse on Hamilton street since 2020, the museum functions as a visual journey through New Haven.
“This is a museum that fosters the concepts of creativity and a celebration of the American story, who we are in the world today,” Greenberg said.
The museum acknowledges many aspects of the city’s history. Amongst Greenberg’s collection is a statue of Christopher Columbus that Greenberg has had on loan from the city since May.
In 2020, the city removed the statue from Wooster Square. Upon hearing the news, members of the local Italian community contacted Greenberg to inform him of the statue’s displacement.
“I must take the Columbus statue,” Greenberg said of his immediate response to the call. “That has to be in here to talk about it.”
The collector believes in truthful acknowledgement of historical realities. Rather than rewrite the past, Greenberg believes stories become enriched by allowing different viewpoints to occupy the same space.
“We can’t hide ourselves from difficult moments in the past,” Elihu Rubin, a board member of the museum and a Yale professor, said.
To source his items, Greenberg has gone as far as digging around New Haven and Manhattan Island and visiting demolition sites to recover old signs and building fragments. He has bought things from all over the world, including some Jim Morrison tickets from New Zealand and items from Germany, the U.K., Alaska and Hawaii — all related to New Haven.
“New Haven, Connecticut has gone all over the world,” Greenberg said.
Some artifacts have been donated by community members, which are tagged to acknowledge the contribution and how they relate to New Haven.
“Their story is more important to me than the actual object,” Greenberg said.
Lost in New Haven has hosted non-profit events, tours and student visits, including Rubin’s graduate and undergraduate architecture students.
Rather than a museum, Greenberg thinks of the collection as a “cabinet of curiosities.”
Cabinet, however, is an ironic term considering the monumental size of the space.
Greenberg said that when he purchased the building five years ago, the realtor questioned his sanity and asked what could possibly fill the large warehouse. Greenberg said, “New Haven is as big as any American story.”
For the last three years, Greenberg has hosted tours on Saturdays at the Hamilton Street location. At the beginning of October, the museum updated its hours to offer self-guided admission on Mondays and Thursday at a cheaper price.
Greenberg has numerous Yale items in the collection. Some of his relics include a piece of the original Yale fence, flags with different iterations of Handsome Dan and pie tins students threw across the green in the 1920s.
The collector encourages Yale students to visit not just to see the university’s memorabilia, but also to enrich their understanding of New Haven beyond Yale’s campus.
Locals Paige Lane and Christina MacLean attended one of Greenburg’s tours on Saturday. The pair is helping organize an event at Lost in New Haven in March.
Their nonprofit organization — Horizons — is hosting the fifth annual “Raise Every Voice” event in collaboration with the Foote School. Lane and MacLean hope that the museum will offer a space conducive to fostering love for New Haven and passion for education.
“We originally came just to check it out, get a visual of the space, and it turned out to be a pretty incredible experience,” Lane, a board member at Horizon, said.
For Lane, the tour experience was personal. Passing by the Winchester Gun exhibit, Lane’s curiosity was piqued because she heard stories from her 103-year-old grandmother about her experience working there decades ago. She stopped to peruse a photograph from 1944 and was shocked to see her grandmother amongst the front row of workers.
“Not only are there pieces of me and my childhood and the experiences I had, there’s also generational experiences, which is just amazing,” Lane said.
Greenberg said he gets reactions like this during “every single tour.”
Mark Tower, who worked at Yale for three decades repairing old gates, also attended the tour on Saturday. He commented that he had built a replica of Vanderbilt Gate out of pool noodles for the set of the 2008 “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
When Greenberg heard of Tower’s contribution to the film, he was ecstatic. Tower then offered to contribute photographs of the setbuilding to the museum.
Visitors were not only content with their tour, but excited to return.
“I would come back and do another tour tomorrow,” MacLean said. “I would also wander around here for an entire day.”
Greenberg’s vision for Lost in New Haven was inspired by his time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. In contrast to museums where “everything is under glass,” the curator does not want visitors to feel detached from the pieces.
“It’s not like a fine art museum where you’re seeing outstanding examples of artists or art periods,” Rubin, a professor of architecture and urban studies at Yale, said. “What’s beautiful about Lost in New Haven is being able to track these and preserve the memory of everyday restaurants and places. It’s valuing everyday activities.”
Lost in New Haven is located at 80 Hamilton St.
