One of my first tasks when I started work at the Yale Alumni Magazine was to get rid of a vintage safe. This safe, about the size of a small end table, had been manufactured around 1920, but no one knew how long it had been with the magazine. It hadn't held anything of value for at least a decade (inexplicably, it had last been used to safeguard outdated software), and it had been put to use as a lamp stand. I did an Internet check and learned that safes of that size and age might fetch $50 -- not enough to pay the moving costs on ten cubic feet of steel. We were grateful to the locksmith who hauled it away for free.
I had never before worked in an office whose most substantial piece of equipment dated to the early twentieth century, but a 300-year-old university is the kind of place where questions in the what-to-do-with-the-safe category sometimes arise. It's especially likely during construction, when disused items from the past, including buildings, must be rehabilitated or discarded.
Yale is in a remarkable construction phase now. In our cover story, Mark Alden Branch '86 provides a guided tour of the new and the newly renovated. As new edifices go up all over campus, some of the old ones, undistinguished and no longer useful, will go down. Yale Health Services will one day move out of its clinic on Hillhouse Avenue, and the site will be taken over for a new purpose. The drama school building at 149 York, a gracelessly aging former bakery, will be razed in favor of a new art study center. The New Haven Coliseum (not a Yale building, but a landmark to many Yalies) is slated for implosion this winter.
But Yale wields the wrecking ball less than other institutions might. One reason is that many of its buildings are historic, beautiful, or both. More than that, however, any university has an incentive to choose the trouble and expense of major renovation over the more streamlined route of building an up-to-date facility. The incentive is us: alumni, on the whole, love the places where they spent their youth. And so, although the interiors of the Divinity School and most undergraduate colleges, for instance, have been partly gutted and rebuilt, their exteriors are intact. A few modern spaces have been added in the colleges, such as the Davenport theater -- but they're generally confined to the basements.
Other old buildings have been meticulously preserved. The old Davies mansion at the top of Prospect Hill is now the sumptuously restored Betts House, though it has been discreetly fitted out, upstairs and in the back, with modern offices and cubicles. The interior wood paneling of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, home of the English department, has been beautifully repaired and reburnished.
Woodbridge Hall, hallowed by its historical eminence as the site of the president's and secretary's offices, also came out of its renovation with hardly a visible change, inside or out. The two modernizing exceptions I know of are the handicapped-access addition and, I'm pleased to say, the safes. There are two walk-in safes, each the size of a small office, on the first floor; one of them used to hold the ornate presidential mace and collar. Regina Starolis, the president's executive assistant for three decades, says the safes haven't been used as such since about 1987. These days, one stores books and papers, and the other has been neatly reappointed as a copy room and kitchenette. 