Weekend
Excursion:
True Blue Charm at Yale University
by Richard Ruda
April 6, 2001
Perhaps the greatest pleasure Oxford University offers its many visitors is the hope, never disappointed, of unexpectedly coming upon an utterly disarming view or an exceptionally beautiful old building. While Yale University cannot match Oxford's antiquity, neither is it, at three centuries old this year, a parvenu.
Yale can also fairly compete with Oxford in architectural quality, its postwar buildings making it, in the estimation of the architectural historian G. E. Kidder Smith, "a mecca for architects from all over the world."
Yale's compact urban campus is also delightfully picturesque, thanks to its many superbly designed and meticulously detailed neo-Gothic buildings of the 1920's and 30's. Like Oxford, Yale has world-class libraries and museums, including the finest collection of British art outside Britain. Given its proximity to New York — a 90- minute train ride rather than a trans-Atlantic flight — Yale is an irresistible weekend destination.
Yale's hometown, New Haven, itself almost 400 years old, adds to the pleasures of a weekend visit. A spacious New England green graced by a row of three handsome early 19th-century churches, a historic cemetery with a majestic Egyptian Revival gateway and countless illustrious occupants, and the restaurants in which pizza and the hamburger sandwich are said to have been invented (both still great places to eat) are just a few of the city's attractions.
In 1638 the Rev. John Davenport and the merchant Theophilus Eaton founded the New Haven Colony to establish a Puritan "Bible State" in which, by its original covenant, "the word of God shall be the onely rule to be attended into in ordering the affayres of government." By 1660 the New Haven Colony extended as far west as Greenwich and even took in Southold on Long Island's North Fork. By 1665, however, after the collapse of Cromwell's Puritan regime and the restoration of King Charles II, the larger, worldlier Connecticut Colony had swallowed up the New Haven Colony.
Thirty-five years later, a dozen Puritan elders from throughout Connecticut (all but one of them Harvard graduates) established an institution to guarantee an adequate supply of reliably orthodox ministers, which the distant and dangerously heterodox Harvard could not provide. The first home of this "Collegiate School" was in Saybrook, 25 miles east of New Haven. The tiny school experienced 15 years of tenuous and peripatetic existence until it moved to New Haven, a thriving seaport and Connecticut's largest metropolis (population 1,500).
In 1718 the fledgling institution finally gained a secure fiscal footing thanks to Elihu Yale, a merchant who had made a fortune while governor of Madras and whose grandparents had been among New Haven's founders. Yale's gift included valuable books, several bales of East Indian goods (resold at a huge profit) and a Kneller portrait of King George I. Hence the name Yale College. (Sadly, Elihu Yale probably never saw New Haven or the college named after him.)
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries Yale remained a staunchly conservative institution with a distinctly Protestant orientation. But during the 1800's it also added an array of professional schools: medicine, divinity, law, music, art and the first graduate school in the United States to award a Ph.D. In the 20th century there followed schools of forestry, nursing, drama, architecture and management, culminating in today's renowned university.
The Central Core
I began my visit on a bright Saturday morning on Yale's Old Campus, across from New Haven's Green. Here, at the corner of College and Chapel Streets, the Collegiate School opened in New Haven. The Old Campus remains an epicenter of the university, providing dormitory accommodation for most freshmen and a site for major ceremonies. It has Yale's two oldest buildings: Connecticut Hall (1753), a National Historic Landmark that is a deliberate copy of Massachusetts Hall at Harvard, and the former library (1842), the university's first foray into the Gothic Revival architectural style. (It is now Dwight Hall, the center for public service at Yale.)
In front of Connecticut Hall stands Bela Lyon Pratt's statue of Nathan Hale, Yale Class of 1773, a New London schoolmaster who fought in the Revolutionary Army and then served bravely but with a conspicuous lack of success as a spy. On Sept. 21, 1776, while returning from his first mission, to British-held Long Island, Hale was captured in Manhattan. He was hanged the next day, age 21, his last words said to have been "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
Crossing High Street from the Old Campus, one enters the world of Yale's 12 residential colleges. Although there are slightly more Yale graduate students (5,688 in last fall's enrollment) than undergraduates (5,278), the residential colleges define the university. Each freshman is randomly assigned to a college, though most do not take up residence there until sophomore year.
Eight of Yale's 10 original residential colleges and the principal older buildings at the heart of the campus are the work of James Gamble Rogers, class of 1889. Rogers's fashioning of Yale's architecture in the 1920's and 30's demonstrates that a technically skilled, meticulous and practical architect need not be stylistically innovative to define an institution's physical identity. His group of Collegiate Gothic and Georgian Revival buildings in Yale's compact central core indelibly established the university's character.
Many of Rogers's most conspicuous buildings are frankly derivative, but fortunately he had impeccable taste. Harkness Tower, Yale's neo-Gothic icon, was inspired by the staggeringly beautiful 15th-century tower of St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire. Wrexham Tower is modeled on the 16th-century tower of St. Giles Church in Wrexham, Wales (where Elihu Yale is buried). The Law School library is based on the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge, built from 1446 to 1515.
Rogers did not simply parrot some of England's finest medieval structures. By placing within his larger buildings innumerable smaller spaces in an exquisitely (and often humorously) embellished neo-Gothic style, he created an academic setting in an urban locale that is simultaneously inviting, functional and secluded. Rogers's gifts are manifest throughout his eight colleges, as well as in his other Yale buildings. One of his finest works is Branford College, whose four courtyards are flanked by Harkness and Wrexham Towers and enriched throughout with neo-Gothic details.
Similar architectural attributes are evident in the centerpiece of Yale's campus, Sterling Memorial Library (1930); its initial design was by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, although Rogers took over the project after Goodhue's death. Highlights include the main entrance, with sculptures by Lee Laurie (whose statue of Atlas is in Rockefeller Center), and the vast Gothic "nave" (main hall) decorated with carved reliefs of Yale's early history. The nave culminates in an "altar" (the circulation desk) consisting of a kitschy mural of Alma Mater flanked by depictions of Truth, Music, Divinity and Literature, the creation of a Yale art professor whose name is best forgotten.
The Library's main reading room and cloistered inner courtyard are unusually beautiful places to study or converse (quietly). Rogers's Law School (1931) and Hall of Graduate Studies (1932) also have tranquil courtyards with charming neo-Gothic details like decorated Romanesque arches and oriel windows. And don't miss the amusing policeman, robber and judge carved at eye level along the Wall Street facade of the Law School.
Warmth in Poured Concrete
Just behind Mory's, a private eating club on York Street, are two of the four colleges not designed by Rogers. Built in the early 1960's, Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges are by Eero Saarinen (class of 1934), the Finnish-American architect who was as innovative and visionary as Rogers was conservative and traditional. Constructed of poured concrete, Morse and Stiles nonetheless manage to convey warmth and intimacy, and harmonize with Yale's other colleges.
(The two other colleges not designed by Rogers are Calhoun, the work of John Russell Pope, and Silliman, by Eggers & Higgins.)
Saturday ended at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1963), another of Yale's landmarks of modern architecture. The work of Gordon Bunshaft, Beinecke's walls are octagonal panels of Vermont marble whose interior faces vary in amber hue in direct relation to the level of exterior sunlight.
Early Sunday morning I visited Grove Street Cemetery, just across from Yale Law School. Founded in 1796, it was the first of the landscaped cemeteries that proliferated in 19th-century America. The entrance is a monumental Egyptian Revival gateway (1845) designed by Henry Austin, buried nearby. The rare but fittingly lugubrious Egyptian style was chosen, according to the cemetery's history, because it was "in vogue at that time and sufficiently massive, but without offense to denominational sensibilities."
Buried in the cemetery are such eminent New Haven personages as Theophilus Eaton, co-founder of the New Haven Colony; Roger Sherman, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation; Noah Webster (class of 1778) of lexicographical fame; Eli Whitney (class of 1792), inventor of the cotton gin; Charles Goodyear, who "invented" vulcanized rubber by accident; Ithiel Town, New Haven's finest architect; Walter Camp (class of 1880), the Yale coach known as the "father of American football"; and many Yale presidents. Last year the cemetery was designated a National Historic Landmark.
I walked from there to nearby Hillhouse Avenue, once called by Charles Dickens the most beautiful street in America. Its towering elm trees long gone, Hillhouse is less impressive today, although the university is now in the midst of a combined horticultural and architectural renovation along the avenue's main block. Many of its grand homes have been reincarnated as Yale offices and classrooms. Only two buildings caught my eye. No. 43, a Georgian Revival mansion, is the residence of Yale's president. To its right, 37 Hillhouse Avenue houses the economics department but has interesting associations with two recent American presidents, both named Bush.
After World War II Yale subdivided 37 Hillhouse into 13 tiny apartments for returning servicemen and their families. From 1946 to 1948 George H. W. Bush, a Yale undergraduate home from the war, his wife, Barbara, and his infant son, George W. (born in New Haven on July 6, 1946), lived on the first floor. There were disadvantages to having Yale's president, Charles Seymour, as a neighbor: one day Mr. Seymour is said to have asked Mr. Bush to remove George W.'s diapers from the backyard clothesline because he was expecting an important guest.
Hillhouse Avenue ends at Sachem Street, at the foot of Philip Johnson's three-building science complex, constructed in 1963-65. One block west is another of Yale's groundbreaking modern buildings, Saarinen's Ingalls Hockey Rink (1958), a soaring structure that prefigures his T.W.A. Terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York.
Sunday morning is also an ideal time to visit three beautiful churches on the New Haven Green: the United Church on the Green (North Church), the First Church of Christ (Center Church) and Trinity Episcopal Church, all built from 1812-16. Together they make up the centerpiece of the New Haven Green Historic District, another National Historic Landmark.
Ithiel Town designed both the Georgian Center Church and the Gothic Revival Trinity Church. Center Church is noteworthy for the portrait of Town in its foyer and for its crypt (New Haven's first burying ground), with gravestones dating back to 1687. Trinity Church played a pivotal role in America's architectural history; in the words of William H. Pierson Jr., it is "one of the remarkable churches of the period," reflecting "a decisive turn" in the Gothic Revival movement just then reaching the United States.
Three other sights surround the Green. The New Haven Free Public Library, designed by Cass Gilbert and dedicated in 1911, is at the corner of Elm and Temple Streets. The city's stunningly restored High Victorian City Hall (1861), designed by Henry Austin, is on Church Street, between Elm and Chapel. In front of City Hall is the Amistad Memorial, erected on the site of the jail in which the Africans who won control of the Amistad slave ship in 1839 were imprisoned while awaiting trial.
Walking back to the Yale campus, I stumbled upon a vestige of the short-lived New Haven Colony — a large monument behind Center Church that marks the burial place of John Dixwell. He was one of three regicides (the 50-odd signatories of the death warrant of King Charles I in January 1649) who cannily sought refuge in staunchly Puritan New Haven after the restoration of Charles II in 1660.
Two other regicides, Edward Whalley and William Goffe, hid for a time in Judges Cave, in what is now West Rock Park, before moving to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dixwell settled in New Haven, adopted the pseudonym James Davids, married twice and lived in perfect respectability until he died in 1689. The regicides are commemorated by three downtown New Haven thoroughfares, Dixwell, Whalley and Goffe.
Art and Panoramic Views
On Sunday afternoon I visited Yale's two outstanding art museums, both of which are free to the public. The Yale Art Gallery has an excellent, comprehensive collection, and its 1953 extension was the first major commission for the American architect Louis Kahn. Across the street is Kahn's Center for British Art (1977), completed after his death. His last work is light, spacious, airy and constructed of beautiful materials: burnished steel, white oak and travertine marble. It houses a notable assemblage of British paintings displayed along thematic lines.
My weekend visit ended at the neighboring Art and Architecture Building (1963), designed by the brilliant and uncompromising Paul Rudolph when he was dean of the Yale School of Architecture. This building is Brutalism (a short-lived midcentury school) at its most self-consciously brutal — an oversize, asymmetrical amalgam of rough-hewn beige concrete, colossal colliding members and large expanses of glass.
Since its completion it has been critically controversial, and reviled by art students because of its impractical studio spaces. Recently designated the exclusive domain of the architecture school, the building just received an alumni gift of $20 million to restore its shabby and much-altered interior.
But the Art and Architecture Building is indisputably superior to other Yale buildings in one respect: the panoramic views of old Yale from its seventh floor and the adjacent rooftop terrace.
As I gazed across Yale's neo-medieval skyline of towers and turrets, I fleetingly imagined, as Rogers had no doubt hoped, that I was in Oxford. But in the end I was perfectly happy to be in New Haven, an admiring bystander at the 300th birthday of a great university.
