New Underpass Mural Spotlights Fair Haven

Ward 14 (Fair Haven) Alder Sarah Miller with the artist Perez, Wanda Vargas, and her son Mateo. Danielle Campbell Photos.

The July sun beamed down on Middletown Avenue and Ferry Street, setting the underpass aglow. In the half-shade, a handful of participants scanned the wall, imagining it bursting in color. Working methodically, they grabbed brushes rollers, joining the artist Perez as he directed the first step in a mural that will soon mark the city’s longest public artwork. 

On a recent Saturday, Fair Haveners joined forces with Perez for a community paint day meant to brighten the underpass, in the first step of bringing a new, 227-foot long mural to New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood. The project comes from Perez, a son of Fair Haven and the Hill, with input from the surrounding community. 

It received $10,000 in funding from a City of New Haven public art grant, $3,750 from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Cultural Fund, and contributions from the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association (CSNA). CSNA is the fiscal agent for the project.

The artist Perez at work. "I know they are forever going to talk about this," he said of the young people helping out.

“[We] really just want to support him and support more public art in the neighborhood overall,” said Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller, who lives in Chatham Square and has championed public art and artmaking in the neighborhood during her tenure. “So just thrilled that it's going forward.”

The mural, which has been roughly two years in the making, will ultimately bear the words Fair Haven in big, blocky letters against vibrant tiles of color, with representations of the city and the neighborhood scattered throughout the work. They include, for instance, a V that doubles as a slice of pizza, and an E with boxing gloves and baseball caps. 

Before painting could begin, Perez and representatives of the CSNA found that it took nearly two years for the Connecticut Department of Transportation to sign off on the work. For the artist, who has completed several other large-scale murals in Fair Haven and around the city, it was worth the wait: he sees it as part of giving back to the community and the city that helped raise him. 

At 227 feet, it’s also very much a labor of love, and will become the longest work of public art in the city.

Now, he added, it’s going up in a series of weeks. In the sticky, bright mid-July heat earlier this month, a handful of attendees from the Fair Haven neighborhood came out to prime the wall, covering it with white paint before Perez could start putting down a design. Even as the sidewalk warmed and heat turned the underpass into an outdoor sauna, several people said they were excited to help the artist bring his vision to life. 

For one of them, Wanda Vargas, it seemed there was nowhere she’d rather be. A longtime community liaison and self-described lover of arts and culture, Vargas helped coordinate the logistics for the mural, securing permits and filling out a small mountain of paperwork that made painting the underpass possible. 

This month, she worked on getting the word out and recruited friends and family members to paint, transforming them into artists for the day. When rain threatened to derail the community paint day earlier this month, she and Perez scrambled to find a new date, pulling the community together to help. 

It meant that the priming process, which can drag for hours, was finished in the span of a morning and early afternoon.  

“I've loved driving by and seeing other people's murals,” Vargas said. “But to be able to drive by and say ‘Hey, I have something to do with that wall!’ It's pretty cool.”

Julie Vargas and Caroline Tanbee Smith. 

As she chatted, Vargas’ sister Julie reconnected with East Rock resident Caroline Tanbee Smith, whom she hadn’t seen in years. For years, Julie Vargas said, she loved photography and painting, and made art an integral part of her life in New Haven. In high school, she even participated in a community mural much like the one Perez is now finishing. But when she headed to college to study communications in 2014, that part of her life got put on the back burner. 

“I haven't gotten a chance to do it [art] but being back here, I think I might pick it up again,” she said as she lifted a roller covered in white paint, and got to work. “It's definitely inspired me to start drawing and painting again.”

That was also true for Smith, who is running unopposed for East Rock/Fair Haven Alder, and made communal artmaking part of her own platform with a creative Pride Month project in June. As she worked, she said that public works like Perez’ create a sense of ownership over parts of the community people may tend to overlook. That’s especially true in Fair Haven, where the city has failed to allocate the same resources to the neighborhood as more affluent and white sections of New Haven. 

Smith and Mateo. 

She also pointed to the way that artmaking inherently brings people together: she and Julie Vargas haven’t caught up for close to 13 years. The magic of paint, trays, brushes, rollers, and underpass with a vision brought them back into each other’s orbit. 

“I feel like community paint days like this just builds community in really special ways,” she said. 

Miller, who was an integral part of the process, stopped by with her husband Lee Cruz and sons Pablo and Mateo, taking in the sheer scale of the work that was about to appear. When she and Cruz first started applying for funding two years ago, she said, they already had Perez in mind. Now, she said, it’s amazing to see the work come to fruition. 

As a lifelong New Haven resident, Miller added that she tries to focus on the positive aspects of each neighborhood—including the pride that community-led beautification projects can lend to a space. Since the initial community paint day, she’s been filled with some of that pride watching it take shape. 

Ashley Mendoza and CJ Perez.

Around her, the order of the day seemed to be gratitude. For the artist, a mentor in the city’s mural scene who has also completed work at City Angels Baseball Academy and on Grand Avenue close to Meat King, it marks a kind of homecoming. He’s quick to say that Fair Haven was one of his first creative stomping grounds, and helped make him into the artist, dad, and community member he is today. While he’s worked on commissions across the city, including in Dixwell and downtown, it’s those close to home that resonate the most.  

He stressed the importance of creative collaboration over competition, particularly for artists working on large-scale public art pieces across the city. That’s one of the reasons he likes having a community paint day, where budding artists—and those who may not think of themselves as artists at all—of all ages can come together and leave a mark on the space. 

“It’s not that much of a pay, but it feeds my soul,” he said. “This is going to be an experience for them forever and this is my third group of kids that’s helped me do a community paint day. So, I know they are forever going to talk about this.