The Word On Chapel & East: Swirling Colors Hit The Wall

“Beautiful!” a passing motorist called out while heading downtown Monday on Chapel Street.

“Thank you!” Jessie Unterhalter said for the tenth? 20th? time of the day.

Unterhalter didn’t want to be rude. People passing by the once-blank warehouse wall at Chapel and East Streets have brightened to see the swirling bright colors Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn have been painting there for the past three weeks. Unterhalter appreciated their appreciation.

After all, that’s why she and Trunh travel from their Baltimore home to cities across the country to paint murals.

On the other hand, she did need to focus and get back to work. Invited here by the nonprofit Site Projects, she and Truhn are in the last laps of completing a 240-foot-by-40-foot piece inspired by New Haven’s Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt. It is enlivening the back wall of a 42,000 square-foot warehouse that North Haven-based Elm City Industrial Properties opened last year at the site of the former H.B. Ives Manufacturing plant.

“It’s an abstract piece,” Unterhalter said of the mural. ​“There’s two gradients. One’s a light gradient. One’s a dark gradient. They interact and flow.”

The mural project — like the recent opening of the warehouse — are the latest step in reviving a former industrial neighborhood created on the eastern flank of Wooster Square by the construction of I‑91 in the mid-20th century. A combination of businesses and housing have begun occupying old factory buildings, along with the new home of the New Haven Health Department.

“I think it’ll be a nice entry point into this neighborhood. We’ve gotten so much positive feedback,” Unterhalter said. ​“People are really excited about the brightness and colorful vibes.”

With that she cranked up the Skyjack scissor lift to bring her, her bucket of paint, and her hand roller high above the street to continue bringing new light to a once-faded stretch of town.