CC students research New London’s State Street

Professor Abby Van Slyck leads a group of students through downtown New London.

When the Lyman Allyn Art Museum asked art history professor Abby Van Slyck if she would curate a show that would attract the community, she enlisted the help of 15 students and set to work.

The fruits of their labor are now on display in an exhibit that opened on Oct 7.

Called “Commerce and Culture: Architecture and Society on New London’s State Street,” the exhibit features period photographs, historic maps, postcards, paintings, and architectural drawings of downtown New London. The show interprets the architectural and social development of State Street, the city’s major commercial avenue.

“I think the museum was interested in reaching back out into the community,” Van Slyck, Dayton Associate Professor of Art History and Architectural Studies, tells the New London Day in an Oct 4 story. “There are really wonderful buildings on State Street ... but there’s also a really interesting human history.”

Last year, Van Slyck taught a seminar on State Street. Each student was assigned to a section of the street and asked to trace its physical and social development from 1850 to 1950. They each produced a portfolio of annotated maps and an interpretive paper. Their work provides the foundation for the exhibit.

“They were surprised at how many interesting historical stories there are on this one street,” Van Slyck tells The Day, adding that children, merchants, shoppers and workers all have different perspectives when they recall downtown.

The exhibit relates the details of New London architecture to larger trends in American architecture. As in many small American cities, New London’s downtown is largely the product of a building boom that began in the Victorian era and lasted — with some ups and downs — until the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The article quotes Van Slyck as saying that history shows that change was constant on State Street.

“It’s not like there was historic State Street and then it was torn down,” she said. “The city was always in the process of pulling things down and replacing them.”

Van Slyck’s architectural studies students will conduct interpretive tours of State Street on October 15-16, November 5-6 and March 4-5. The museum exhibit runs through April 10, 2006.