Round a few corners in downtown New Haven and you’re bound to see a piece of public art. Harder to spot is a certain category of it: sculptures of animals, specifically the non-human ones.
Turns out they’re around, but you often have to look in nooks and crannies to find them. Expanding the search above eye level, and beyond downtown, is a help.
Atop a huge granite slab, the 21-foot torosaurus outside the Peabody Museum is an awe-inspiring image of strength and power. Roosting 10 or 11 feet from the ground, the magnificent eagle in Monitor Square—really a triangle, framed by Chapel Street, Derby Avenue and Winthrop Avenue—is vision and resolve incarnate. The carved animal heads adorning the High Street overpass of the Yale University Art Gallery—including a pig, a monkey, an owl, a ram and others—are both whimsical and unsettling.
The dragons above the portal to Grove Street Cemetery, meanwhile, evoke an otherworldliness befitting their locale. The sculpted Handsome Dan tribute outside the Yale Bowl symbolizes, of course, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The lions tucked into a corner of Yale’s Old Campus are noble sentinels, clutching shields to drive home the point. They’re very different from the lion behind the patio at Book Trader Cafe, a sort of jolly Zen master spitting a steady stream of water into a fountain, helping readers relax and real birds bathe.
Actually, that last one’s kind of a mismatch.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
