New Haven is full of Easter eggs, and not just at Easter.
Usually hard-boiled and dyed or plastic and stuffed with candy, standard Easter eggs are left by a certain imaginary rabbit. We’re thinking, instead, of what Wikipedia once aptly described as “an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature of a work.”
Time to grab our baskets and see what’s been hidden around the Elm City.
Many of the images carved in stone on the facades of Yale’s buildings are Easter eggs. Some honor historical moments, Classical figures, even donors. Others take themselves less seriously. Stop at the corner of Grove Street and High Street and look up at the gables of the prestigious School of Law to find humorous, editorialized figures of a wolf, a parrot and a bulldog as lawyers, their clients a donkey and a goat with money bags. They’re a handful of the more than 150 sculptures on Yale’s Collegiate Gothic buildings designed by James Gamble Rogers, who wanted in part “to illustrate that Yale didn’t take itself too seriously,” writes Michael Stern in Yale’s Hidden Treasures (2012).
Edwin Howland Blashfield’s Triumph of the Dance (c. 1894), a ceiling mural now installed in the Yale University Art Gallery, offers a much subtler Easter egg. Blashfield was working on the commission for the New York City mansion of Collis and Arabella Huntington when author Mark Twain came to call. “Upon seeing this painting in Blashfield’s studio, … Twain remarked, ‘Well, I don’t know who they are, but I wish I was up there with them, and dressed the same,’” the gallery reports. Blashfield appears to have granted his wish, painting a head in the clouds that looks suspiciously like Twain’s, peering into the armpit of a reclining nymph.
Go up the hill to Albertus Magnus College to find what is perhaps the most complicated set of Easter eggs in town. On the floor of the atrium in Tagliatela Academic Center, 12 mysterious mosaic tiles seem randomly placed. But on one day of every month at approximately 1 p.m., the sun shines through a gnomon—a small, stained glass seal of the college, pictured above—high on the atrium’s large south-facing window, projecting its ruby glow directly onto one of the tiles. Each tile depicts a symbol representing an event important in the life of the college or of Catholicism.
Downtown on Chapel Street, another visual surprise that requires proper alignment is visible all year. Stop on the sidewalk marker across from the Green and look down the alley next to ZINC. A series of seemingly random and disconnected red-orange streaks painted on the sides of the alley suddenly align with other patches of paint on the distant Crown Street Garage to form artist Felice Varini’s Square with Four Circles, commissioned in 2010 by Site Projects.
Aside from James Gamble Rogers, the city’s most prolific Easter egg planter may have been the secretive street artist BiP (“Believe in People”). In 2014, after years of painting whimsical images into the city’s nooks and crannies, he mounted a satirical National Register of Historic Places plaque on the York Street facade of the Yale University Art Gallery, which read in part: “This plaque marks the site on which Sam Dilvan used a felt marker to scrawl the minimalist yet emotionally complex tag, ‘BOOBZ.’” The plaque was removed and temporarily displayed by the gallery. BiP has since left the city for projects elsewhere, and his identity remains unknown—although Sam Dilvan, as keen minds discovered once they’d rearranged the letters, is an alter ego of Vandalism, and BiP has apparently decided to reveal his face.
Inside jokes, another type of Easter egg, dot the city as well. At Grove Street Cemetery, two Yale professors continue to compare CVs after death. The first, chemist John Gamble Kirkwood, died in 1959 and has a litany of accolades and achievements listed on his tombstone. Upon the death of Kirkwood’s colleague Lars Onsager in 1976, Onsager’s stone was placed next to Kirkwood’s, with a much simpler recounting of his career accomplishments: the name of his professorship and, noting a higher distinction than any listed for Kirkwood, “Nobel Laureate.” An asterisk marking the latter leads to the punchline at the bottom of the stone: “Etc.”
Love hunting for hidden treasures and need more? There’s always Geocaching, offering a veritable egg hunt any day of the year. Download the app on your phone and launch your search.
You can also search this story, which has an Easter egg of its own. Happy hunting!
Written and photographed by Kathy Leonard Czepiel. Image features the gnomon at Albertus Magnus College. This updated story was first published on April 19, 2019.
