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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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When Daniel Harrison '86PhD returned to Yale as a professor in 2003, he was dismayed to see that the music department's quarters were "untouched" since his graduation. "There were leaks; there were holes; fire exits were blocked," Harrison recalls pointing out in a letter to President Richard Levin. "There was no hot water. In terms of our peer institutions, we were living in a dump." Five-plus years later, a solution is at hand: the department has moved out of its old office and classroom building at Elm and Temple streets (which will be renovated in the future as Dwight Hall's new headquarters) and into a former frat house. Not to worry: it's an elegant former frat house, built in a Venetian Gothic style in 1896 as York Hall, a dormitory for the fraternity Chi Phi. The university bought the building, at the corner of College and Wall streets, in 1935. In the 1950s, it was renamed Stoeckel Hall and converted to space for the graduate School of Music before closing in 2002 as part of a master reconstruction plan. Now fully restored, renovated, and expanded, Stoeckel reopened this semester as the new home of the music department. (The department, which covers music theory and history, is separate from the School of Music, a conservatory for performers and composers.) And Harrison, the department chair, is thrilled. Outside, Stoeckel Hall looks much the same except for a four-story red brick addition on College Street. The addition includes seminar rooms and a new, handicapped-accessible entrance (The original Wall Street entrance remains.) The elaborate terra cotta ornamentation that adorns the exterior -- and that had deteriorated so badly, Harrison says, that it was in danger of falling onto the heads of passing pedestrians -- has been restored at great expense.
Inside, the first floor retains some of its original wood floors and high, arched windows. New classrooms are equipped with projectors, speakers, and -- of course -- lined blackboards for musical notation. A fourth-floor computer lab boasts a row of Macs with both kinds of keyboards. Piano chords float through the wall of Harrison's sunny first-floor office, punctuating conversation. Upstairs, a closed classroom door does not obscure the sound of choral practice. But not all is perfect. In the basement, a graduate student closes the door of his meeting room against a far less melodious sound: a high-pitched whine emanating from a telephone closet. The Stoeckel renovation, which was designed by the New Haven firm Charney Architects, was planned even before Harrison came back to campus -- at which time two School of Music buildings, Sprague Hall and 435 College Street, had already been rebuilt. But, he says, his "gentle" letter of complaint about the music department's then-decrepit facility prompted Levin to bump Stoeckel ahead in line, pushing back Hendrie Hall. The project turned Harrison into a student of the building: he shows off an 1896 New York Times article [PDF] about the construction of York Hall and a pair of 1897 color drawings of the
building, which the department found on eBay. But he saves some of his
admiration for the addition, especially the newly created common spaces -- the
faculty lounge, the roomy hallways, the areas where you wait for the elevator
-- which he hopes will help "cement or create a scholarly community among
faculty and between faculty and students." |
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