The Lost in New Haven Museum welcomes objects donated by New Haveners, preserving a history at risk of being forgotten.
On 80 Hamilton Street, the Lost in New Haven Museum stands with its industrial black brick façade. Every day, Robert Greenberg, the museum’s founder and executive director, greets visitors with the animated fervor of a magician unveiling a new trick—rattling off the history of a dozen exhibits in one breath, all perfectly cataloged in the chaotic archive of his mind. As he begins to weave visitors through the museum, light illuminates each artifact while house music pulses softly in the background. Visitors step into a living record of the city’s subconscious, as dynamic and vibrant as Greenberg.
Since the summer of 2024, I have worked with Lost in New Haven as a Yale President’s Public Service Fellow and Community Associate. Wandering through the maze of artifacts has trans- formed how I engaged with complexity, contradiction, and the responsibilities of telling stories and sharing history.
Silly putty, corsets, lollipops, the first commercial telephone exchange, and even the first hamburger—New Haven has been a wellspring of invention for hundreds of years. Greenberg does not just give tours of these objects; he lets them speak. One moment he is explaining the history behind New Haven’s original nine-square street-grid, encouraging visitors to look for their neighborhood on the illuminated New Haven City 1879 map. Next, he is inviting visitors to smell domestic pottery jugs from New Haven, where the scent of molasses still lingering inside. Kids play with typewriters and silly putty. Meanwhile, parents and grandparents remember their childhood upon encountering the AC Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab toy set, marketed to children with real radioactive material. Objects, for Greenberg, bring history alive. “You can’t bring back the past,” he said, “but you walk down the street and look at the brick on a building and see that there is a spark of memory on that brick.”
As a child, Greenberg—born in 1962—would wander around New Haven with his grandfather, Simon Evans, an antique dealer. From the top of East Rock to the crypt in the Center Church, their outings immersed Greenberg in the city’s past. Growing up surrounded by unusual objects and family heirlooms cultivated his propensity for collecting. His collection grew over the next few decades, until he was finally able to give his artifacts a permanent home on Hamilton Street in 2020.
Robert Greenberg leads visitors through the Lost in New Haven museum.
But Lost in New Haven is not just an individual collection. One of the museum’s core practices is its ‘open-door’ policy for contributions—any New Havener can donate their objects.
When people donate to the museum, Greenberg and John Guillemette, the Museum Services Coordinator, collect their oral histories and tag each artifact with the donor’s name.
“Historical preservation is a shared activity, made the strongest when many people of all backgrounds are able to get involved,” said Guillemette. “Museums that treat local history as a scholarly specialization end up alienating their greatest resources: people are repositories of history.”
Lost in New Haven rebels against what Greenberg calls the “cultural for- getting” that often accompanies urban progress. Roslyn Meyer, current chair of the Museum’s Board of Directors, notes that an artifact “gives us the perspective that life didn’t start when you were born—that we are the product of generations and generations of innovations.”
For New Haveners like Marcella Monk Flake, founder of the Monk Youth Jazz & STEAM Collective and cousin of jazz icon Thelonious Monk, Lost in New Haven’s objects are personal as well as historical. “When I walked in and saw these artifacts and relics from Seamless Rubber
Company, it just thrilled my heart,” she said, referring to an important New Haven manufacturer that altered the course of the city’s industrial history. “I was like ‘Oh my god, my daddy worked there.’”
Flake’s family came to New Haven during the Great Migration. Much of her family’s history of resilience and sacrifice was nearly lost to the urban renewal of the 1960s, during which city officials deemed neighborhoods undesirable. “New Haven has historically been pretty much a tale of two cities,” as Flake put it, marked by the coexistence of working-class, Black
and Latino neighborhoods and wealthier, more insulated versions of the city. The divide only deepened in the 1960s when Mayor Richard C. Lee enacted initiatives to replace working-class neighborhoods with what he called “functional infrastructure.” These measures were intended to improve transportation accessibility for surrounding suburbs, transforming the city into a commercial hub. However, they only proved to divide the city further.
Whole communities end up severed from their neighbors by large, domineering concrete infrastructure,” said Guillemette, referencing bridges, high- ways, and garages. “The Hill neighborhood in New Haven, where Black, Jewish, Latinx, and immigrant populations resided in the 1960s and reside to this day, were severely disadvantaged by urban renewal and disconnected from the rest of the city.”
After riots against racial mistreatment and poor housing broke out in 1967—sparked by a white restaurant owner shooting a Puerto Rican man—the National Guard arrived at the Hill neighborhood in tanks, “setting up floodlights and rifles on residential rooftops,” said Flake. She also recalled how the militarized environment led to enforced curfews and instilled fear in the neighborhood’s families. What remains of this history today, Flake emphasized, must be preserved with care both to honor those who lived through it and challenge its erasure. Remnants of this displacement, from weathered glass bottles to chipped ceramic
fragments, sit illuminated in the museum.
Lost in New Haven continues to bridge past and present through its partnership with Discovering Amistad. The organization dedicates itself to preserving the legacy of the pivotal 1839 Amistad Rebellion, which led to a landmark Supreme Court case that challenged the legality of the slave trade. After revolting aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad, African captives from Sierra Leone were tried in New Haven for murder, where local and national abolitionists eventually won their freedom and acquittal. While Discovering Amistad enlivens this story aboard a replica schooner at Long Wharf, Lost in New Haven drops visitors on the New Haven pier where La Amistad docked. The permanent exhibition allows visitors to see local history through objects such as sails, the ship’s compass, and the mass hoop of the replica schooner. “By preserving this story,” said Amistad’s Director of Education Chris Menapace, “we can help make sure this story does not become lost, especially at a time when some want to erase stories of oppression and resistance.”
When he is not giving tours, Greenberg sits at a high-top table covered with photographs and newly collected items, eyes fixed on the screen in front of him. Dozens of black-and-white photographs are tiled across his monitor—old storefronts, maps, candids of life in New Haven. His fingers hover above the keyboard, pausing.
“This isn’t an institution—it’s a living, breathing archive,” he said. “Built from everything we’ve forgotten—or have been told to forget.”
— Nicole Manning is a sophomore in Berkeley College.
