John Cavaliere, who has owned and operated Westville’s Lyric Hall at 827 Whalley Ave. since 2005, poses with a repainted, larger-than-life artist’s palette and paintbrushes. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The words glowed over Whalley Avenue, in powder blues and yellows that wove across the side of Lyric Hall. On one end, a flourish dangled off a W, letters looping in and out of each other to form the word Welcome. Beneath it, Westville appeared in blocky yellow font, the word Historic tidily wedged in between. Two larger-than-life paintbrushes and a giant artist’s palette waited patiently nearby, the blooms of green and blue, red and yellow dancing in the light.
That moment, over two years in the making, came to Whalley Avenue last Thursday, as staff members from the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop installed a long-awaited sign on the side of Lyric Hall New Haven, facing out onto a stretch of Whalley Avenue that sees over 20,000 cars each day, according to the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Since 2024, owner John Cavaliere has been dreaming about the artwork, which he sees as a new gateway to Westville and a chance for the neighborhood to heal after a heated, prolonged debate about who gets to make public art in the neighborhood.
Lyric Hall is a theater, screening space, and antiques and restoration business located at 827 Whalley Ave. In the many lives that it has lived—a vaudeville theater turned garage turned commercial storefront, turned theater all over again—it has recently shared a blocks-long radius with two widely contested murals, one depicting cartoon animals playing pickleball, and the other an aerosol landscape that appeared earlier this summer at Whalley Avenue and Fitch Street, meant to welcome people to the neighborhood.
“It’s ironic that the impetus for this was a kind of controversial mural and now we have this other controversial mural,” Cavaliere said on Thursday morning, as a small crew from the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop stabilized the back of the sign and prepared it for installation. “There’s this juxtaposition of the nib of the industrial spray can [down the street] and these paintbrushes from the Renaissance.”
“We’re keeping it real,” he continued. “We have a score to settle … we need to come together and heal. There are kind of two gateways to Westville now.”
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