On Chapel Street, in New Haven, Connecticut, opposite the Old Campus: from the time of glaciation, cultivated by the Quinnipiac; in 1614, charted by a Dutch explorer; in 1638, colonized by the Puritans; throughout the American Revolution, home of the signer, Roger Sherman, his second wife Rebecca Prescott-Sherman, their fifteen children, and the family store; in 1860, industrialist Gaius Fenn Warner's Italianate villa, by Henry Austin; in 1880, Marshal Peter R. Carll's Opera House; in 1884, the Republican League; in 1887, the Hyperion; in 1903, the Union League addition, by Richard Williams; in 1926, the Roger Sherman Theater; beginning in 1976, a tradition of French fine dining, that continues today. While the Roger Sherman house is no longer standing, it holds up all right.
"'This garage is the inside of my brain,' said Mundy Hepburn, gliding his arm through the air. Standing in the bed of a Chevy pickup, his frame backlighted by one of his neon sculptures, 'The Wave,' he described with reverence the 'mystical beauty' of neon."
"A culture that is primarily visual leaves no trace of its passage. It is unrecordable. Knowing this, it's still possible to get fragments of narratives, to imagine a grander architecture from the imprints of a crumbling building, and to reconstruct a small look at the past -- albeit inevitably colored by the present, by nostalgia and television and regret."