Art Thoughts // Fast Track by Tony Falcone (Lost in New Haven)
If you have ever been through New Haven, Connecticut on the highway where 95 turns to 91, you have likely been by and seen Sports Haven, which had been active with this giant mural from 1995 to just last November. Now, as the business is gone, the city has decided that very soon the process of demolishing Sports Haven is set to begin. For all of the times that I've not only driven by Sports Haven myself but seen it from the highway in my youth in a car with my parents and such, I just think of it as being such a landmark that it should be too historical to be destroyed.
Thursday night, August 13, 2026, many members of the art community and just people who enjoy came together for the closing reception of "Fast Track" an exhibit by Tony Falcone, who painted that giant mural on Sports Haven. For all of the times that I had seen those horse, I never really thought about how they got there. But the process itself was so many different steps and much more work went into it than I had ever imagined.
At first, the reception at Lost in New Haven felt like an open forum where you could just wander around and approach Tony Falcone and ask him your questions. After about an hour though it felt like he was repeating himself so he decided to open up the floor and take questions after a detailed walk through of his process for creating what eventually became 267 squares of 3 foot by 3 foot paintings in a grid which created the mural people such as myself have seen for most of our lives.
What I found most fascinating about the process of it all is that when you think about painting the side of a building with a mural, for instance, you can more easily take pauses to see how things look from afar. But having this be as big as it was, a lot of the painting felt like it was being done on blind faith. It was that idea that while you're painting it, you're so close to the building and it would take so much work to get down from how high up you were and walk out to see it, that you just kind of have to trust the process.
This, to me, is somethig that just comes from the raw talent of being an artist. This is something I feel like can't be taught and you just have to have that faith that what you are doing is working and it will all come out the way which you planned in the end. This is the true vision of the artist being executed on such a grand scale. I don't think I could paint those horses on a scale where the canvas is 18 x 24 inches, you know. So to have it in so many different sizes and just being blown up into grids is remarkable.
Aside from keeping the building standng and putting something else within it (which I don't know if that's possible because I cannot say what the interior might look like) for as big and as much of a curve this is on, there really is no way to save this mural outside of saving the building. In some ways, that just goes to show how art, like life itself, can be fleeting. There are things in the Connecticut lore that simply do not exist in reality anymore- such as those cars buried under the pavement in a parking lot in Hamden- but they only exist in our memories, in our minds.
As someone who was born and raised in Connecticut, that Sports Haven mural will always hold a special place in my heart. Being able to meet and talk with the artist behind it and then also learn about the process in which it was made just makes it feel even more special. Though it's not quite the same, the show did have signed prints for sale (all of the money went to Lost in New Haven as well, which I thought was great) so having one of those forever on any wall, wherever I may live, will be like keeping a small piece of Connecticut history and art with me for always.
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