In the opening minutes of the heist movie Ocean’s 12, the titular hero, Danny Ocean (played by George Clooney), is living a genteel life in East Haven, having stolen a lot of money in Ocean’s 11. When the Vegas casino magnate he stole from finds him there, casing local banks and jewelry stores out of habit, Ocean drops everything and, in the next couple shots, he’s on a train heading west.
The East Haven of Hollywood imagination is unconvincing as the real place. (Those scenes were shot, the closing credits reveal, in a suburb of Chicago.) And the movie is eager to get Ocean to Europe, where the real action is. A shot of Ocean fetching his bug-out bag from his car—parked, let’s say, in Trolley Square—was deemed unnecessary, and so unfortunately was his incognito ride to Union Station. The train gets all the credit for getting him out in a hurry, but it is the CTtransit bus that would have been his crucial, first, yet cinematically unheralded conveyance out of town.
Standing in the Trolley Square parking lot, loosely pretending to be on the run, I searched the CTtransit map on my phone for a modern trolley. CTtransit is, in fact, a direct descendant of the Connecticut Company, which in the early 20th century operated up to 500 track-bound trolley cars in New Haven. CTtransit demonstrates its inheritance by likewise traveling as many as 22 routes in the New Haven area. Buses fan out to divergent points around or outside the city, then return to the New Haven Green, then repeat, for up to 16 hours per day. I counted three of those routes grazing downtown East Haven, which places a bus in the vicinity of Trolley Square several times per hour. And so I left my car there, crossed the nearest street—Messina Drive—and waited a short spell for the 206.
The bus would have been on a swing through the Annex, traveling parallel to the harbor all the way to Lighthouse Point, then turning around to cross into East Haven at Tweed Airport. Boarding, I flashed my all-day pass—available for purchase and display on the Transit app—and the driver nodded from his Plexiglass-walled dais. The frictionlessness of it all made it easy to think of the bus as something that just reliably goes.
The route back to New Haven was steadfastly local, lumbering north from the seedy outskirts of East Haven’s Main Street. It picked up more passengers in the greener residential streets of Fair Haven Heights, then crossed the river to Fair Haven, offering a tour Chapel Street at its most dynamic, first post-industrial as it passes piles of metal and concrete and partially converted mill buildings, then affluent and charming as it articulates one end of Wooster Square Park. Arriving at Union Station after transferring at the Green, I noted the imminent departure of a Metro North train, followed by another in 20 minutes. The frequency of both westbound buses and westbound trains had made it possible to get to New York from a suburban plaza in the middle of Connecticut without pausing, which is the very stuff of a popcorn movie getaway. Ocean could have been on a train to the most disappearable place in the country within half an hour of his cover being blown.
But the boldest public transit escape conceivable by any liberty-taking screenwriter eyeing a map of New Haven would be by ferry. Cue a shot of pursuers receding like fools on the loading dock, while Ocean leans on the rail of the top deck tossing his fake IDs into the Sound. And so back on the Green, I boarded the 274, which skirts the New Haven waterfront en route to City Point. I pulled the cord as the bus drew up into the shadow of Interstate 95. The harbor was a short walk underneath the highway and across Long Wharf Drive. I stopped to contemplate it the way a puzzled fugitive might. Where in the harbor were the harboring boats? Which one of these stunted wharves was the ferry terminal?
A car and passenger ferry connecting New Haven to Port Jefferson in Long Island was once supposed to be imminent, according to a story in The New York Times. This was dated 2004, the year Ocean’s 12 came out. Meetings had been set up between the Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Steamboat Co. and city planners, as well as with “the owner of a deep-water slip in New Haven Harbor.” The owner may have had other uses for his slip. Then-mayor John DeStefano expressed doubts about the steamboat company’s intentions. The ferry, in any case, went away, leaving New Haven the only coastal Connecticut county seat from which you can’t, unless you own or steal a boat, escape south on foot.
The harbor is also haunted by the disappearance, under midcentury dredge-and-fill operations that deepened but also narrowed the harbor, of most of the fabled long wharf after which Long Wharf Drive is named. The wharf alone, now shortened to a 500-foot pier, could have been considered a leg of an escape route, especially under chase; by 1811, it reached 3,480 feet into the harbor to connect merchants ashore to boats at anchor. The engineer of its farthest extension, William Lanson, a black community leader in New Haven, had also effectively brought the harbor inland by helping build the New Haven section of the Farmington Canal. Now also filled in and paved over, the canal’s path, unlike the pier, offers a uniquely dynamic way to escape, albeit north.
So back on the Green, I hopped on the 224 bus, but first I wheeled my bicycle onto the rack mounted to the bus’s front. The newly opened downtown Farmington Canal trailhead was just three stops away, and to descend into the canal bed—where the names of towns and cities are engraved in their relative positions on its path—is to feel a vertiginous sense of possibility. A cavernous tunnel under Whitney Avenue and Temple Street invites further contemplation of the scale of the whole undertaking, with backlit information panels that trace the history of the Canal, first as a canal, then as a railway, then as a rail trail in progress.
Escaping on a bicycle is admittedly not the stuff of a sophisticated heist movie, but therein lies its brilliance as an escape route. In its first half mile or so, it cuts a diagonal below street level, in defiance of the city geometry. Later, it runs parallel to Dixwell Avenue, occupying a liminal space between the beige cinderblock backsides of box stores on the left and gated apartment complexes on the right. And just over 45 minutes later, as Hamden turned into Cheshire, I found myself simply in the woods, with neither town visible. It was already a clean getaway.
The one remaining direction to consider was east, and here the bus proved to be all the conveyance I needed. Buses connect the Connecticut shoreline like trapezes across a circus tent. CTtransit routes, by hardly ever crossing other CTtransit routes, go farther out than you’d expect. And so, back in Trolley Square, I walked half a block to the intersection of Hemingway Avenue and the Saltonstall Parkway—Route 1—and got on the 201 east.
As East Haven became Branford, then Branford became Guilford, shoulder-to-ceiling vistas of strip malls and dealerships gave way to quainter and less uniform stretches—low brick bungalows labeled “a distinctive rental community,” the turreted wood and stone castle of a lord accessibly named “Bill Miller,” homes that had been built in the 19th century, homes that had been built in the 18th century.
The bus leaves the main drag to get to Branford and Guilford centers, reinforcing their sense of seclusion. But the 201 keeps going, farther still, to Madison, which, by contrast, sits right on top of the Post Road, belting it with wide sidewalks and an enshrubbed median strip. Off the bus, toting a book bag from RJ Julia and a waffle cone from that town’s Ashley’s, I was superficially disguised as a Madisonian.
But every bus transfer further deepens your anonymity. From the same stop where the 201 terminates, you can get on the River Valley Transit bus as little as six minutes later, making your way first to Old Saybrook, then to New London. From there, you can transfer to a SEAT (Southeast Area Transit District) bus to Foxwoods Casino near the Rhode Island border. That’s a single bus route where Danny Ocean would find, respectively, a casino to rob and an Ocean State to hide in.
Written by David Zukowski. Images 1 (on Chapel Street) and 3 (along the Farmington Canal Trail at Webster and Canal Streets) photographed by Dan Mims. Images 2 (of the Q Bridge from the 206 bus), 4 (in the downtown Farmington Canal Trail bed), 5 (of a CTtransit bus passing overhead), 6 (of the bus stop at Hemingway and Saltonstall in East Haven) and 7 (at the 201’s last stop in Madison) photographed by David Zukowski.
