New London - When three Connecticut College students began examining the history of the city's saloons as part of an architecture and art class, they uncovered stories of prostitutes and drunken sailors.

”It was mostly negative stuff,'' said Adelie Mascoveta, a senior. “But when we started looking into it, it was much more.''

Mascoveta and fellow students Brendan Kempf and Sara Carhart discovered the bars and taverns that dotted the downtown landscape in the mid-1800s were gathering places that provided more than food and drink. Newly arrived immigrants could meet people, borrow money, find work and stay warm at the saloons.

”We wanted to show the role of the saloon in a positive way,'' Mascoveta said Tuesday as she led her fellow students and professors around Atlantic Street where they had placed five Plexiglas panels along the road to mark where John T. O'Connell, one of the many Irish immigrants who became saloon keepers in the city, lived and ran his businesses between 1880 and 1923.

As part of “History, Place, Meaning,'' an architectural and studio art class offered by two Conn professors, students researched what life was like along New London's long-gone Bradley Street neighborhood and created projects on Water Street and in the Water Street Parking Garage, which is where Bradley Street once existed.

”We wish to … remind and educate the present and frequent users of the parking garage about the changes in commercial and architectural fabric that the neighborhood has endured over time,'' said Owen Stowe, who chose newspapers, signs and magnesium plate rubbings to illustrate the diversity of business that thrived on the street.

Rubbings included a meat hammer that would have been used at Soltz Meat Co.; an ice wagon representing the W.R. Perry Ice. Co., and a bottle of blood for the Prentis and Caulkins Undertakers.

Students went out into the community to research the projects, visiting the local library and historical society, said Abigail Van Slyck, art history professor who is co-teaching the class with Andrea Wollensak, a studio art professor. This is the third year the class has been offered. It is funded with a grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.

”We're hoping, through research of Bradley Street, the students can dig more deeply into their art,'' Van Slyck said. “We're hoping they develop an artistic sense based on content … that they see a different way to process their understanding of art.''

On the top floor of the garage, Rocky Delforge and Eleanor Lawson marked where Bradley Street was located in 1850, using strips of dirt to represent the roadway and two-by-fours and twine to mark the buildings. In the center of the each “building” they placed plaques that identified the uses. Businesses and saloons thrived and many structures were used as boarding houses for day laborers.

Along the center stairwell of the garage they posed questions to raise awareness about what life was like in the 1850s.

”We wanted to give the viewer a special experience of what it was like to walk around the streets,'' Delforge said. “This was a working-class community and it was a walking community.”

Some of the projects will remain on display through the end of the week.

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