| |
Comment on this article
Buildings
come down, wall stays up
by
Mark Alden Branch ’86
November/December 2009
For
a project that is officially on hold, the planned construction of two new
residential colleges at Yale is generating its share of local controversy. As
demolition begins, preservationists are bemoaning the loss of 13 buildings of
varying pedigrees on the site, and still hoping to persuade Yale to spare one
or more of them. And in October, a board member of the nearby Grove Street
Cemetery put forward a proposal to replace some of the cemetery’s stone wall
with iron fencing; the proposal, which some saw as an effort to accommodate
Yale’s plans for the area, met strong resistance and was quickly withdrawn.
| |
Yale started tearing down the Eaton House, Hammond Hall, and four other buildings.
|
Preservationists
first voiced their objections in July, after plans were unveiled indicating
that all 13 existing buildings on the 6.5-acre site (on Prospect Street north
of the cemetery) would be demolished. The New Haven Historic District
Commission drafted a letter objecting to "mass demolition," singling out the
105-year-old Hammond Hall and the 119-year-old Daniel Cady Eaton House. But the
commission had no power to prevent the demolition, and Yale started tearing
down the Eaton House, Hammond Hall, and four other buildings on the site in
October.
Others
objected to the decision to demolish the Seeley Mudd Library, built in 1982 as
a repository for government documents and seldom-requested books. Yale had
indicated early on that it might incorporate Mudd into its plans, but
University Planner Laura Cruickshank said in May that "getting further into
site planning, we realized we couldn’t fit the colleges around the library.”
Architect
Harold Roth '57MArch, whose firm designed Mudd, believes the building is well
suited for music practice rooms, seminar rooms, and study space—all spaces that
are part of the plans for the new colleges. "It seems a little bit inconsistent
to tout the university’s support for sustainability in its new buildings and
yet go ahead and demolish recently constructed buildings that have value," says
Roth.
If
the preservation community had little luck saving buildings, it notched a
victory over the cemetery wall. The idea of replacing sections of the wall on
Prospect Street with open iron fencing had been mentioned in a 2008 Yale report
on the feasibility of the new colleges; the idea was that opening up the wall
would make the walk between the new colleges and the central campus less
forbidding. The proposal—designed by School of Architecture dean Robert A. M.
Stern '65MArch—was brought before the cemetery’s governing board by one of its
members, Charles Ellis '59. Ellis is a former Yale trustee who is married to
University Secretary and Vice President Linda Koch Lorimer '77JD. The cemetery
board considered the proposal at its annual meeting on October 6, which was
open to the public. A number of people, including some with family plots,
showed up to object that opening the wall would intrude on the quiet of the
place. Within a week, the board announced that Ellis had withdrawn the
proposal. The board said it would consider ideas for landscaping the Prospect
Street wall to make it more inviting.
While
Yale works to clear the site for the new colleges, there are no signs that the
project—which would allow a 15 percent expansion in undergraduate
enrollment—will get started in the foreseeable future. The university has
called a halt to all new construction not underwritten by donors. 
|
|
