Michael A. Vuksta
The benefit of exploring our feelings and thoughts about artifacts, i.e., our deductions and speculations, lies in that these new meanings uncover and define new problems. (It is just such a problem that the Thanksgiving holiday presents.) While our image of the city has gotten larger, our sensitivity to monuments has increased. This image has emerged from broad, open natural spaces, dotted with manmade artifacts. Wooster Square Park and the New Haven Green are now characteristic places which refer to the past.
Because of the lack of an appropriate monument to correspond with Thanksgiving, the Wooster Square Historic District will become our object of analysis. Aside from my having established architecture as appropriate to the study of monuments, one may still be able to recall that from the first monument I selected that this object also allowed this inclusion. The houses of Wooster Square will be the object of our scrutiny at this time. In examining Elizabeth Brown’s guide to architecture in New Haven, it becomes clear that these houses continue to be identified by the names of their owners. The survival of these buildings and their continued use as dwellings, make them monuments for living. Lacking a monument more appropriate to the traditional holiday theme of feasting and agricultural plenty, the harvesting of another basic need, shelter, can provide a thematic correspondence. These domestic monuments permit a counterpoint to the memorials in the park. They are monuments to survival and deliverance.
