We don’t sit in straight lines for fun - but we’re not looking out at the street or the New Haven Green anymore, either. Now people live in the barrier between Yale and the world. The last pieces of the Yale Fence were removed to make way for Osborn Hall - but today, the Yale Fence has metastasized into the fortress of buildings that separates Old Campus from the New Haven Green. The Yale Fence supported a companionate exclusion, a socializing elitism, a friendliness within stratification. The Yale Fence was foundational to the Yale community, but he also structured a hierarchy between students, which sounds like the kind of thing that happens when your ideal social scene means just sitting in a straight line. He is now immortal, intangible - not a place but an ideology.įrom 1833 to 1888, every student at Yale perched on that fence, the essential gathering space. The physical Yale Fence was removed by 1888, but his ghost cackles, unconcerned and liberated from materiality. The Yale Fence is perhaps the most frightening ghost of all because he is more alive than ever. Connecticut Hall does not have the privilege of a time of death because his body is still alive, even if he has been forced out of himself. In the 1950s, Yale gutted Connecticut Hall, carving out his entrails, preparing to mummify him, callously renovating him as if lobotomizing a troublesome relative, because if he was still around he might as well be useful. Yale threw McClellan Hall onto Old Campus hoping to give Connecticut Hall a friend, but he remains empty inside. He is used to being surrounded with friends and now he juts out into Old Campus awkwardly - alive but alone. But Connecticut Hall was never meant to stand alone. Yale destroyed the rest of the Old Brick Row, reluctantly sparing Connecticut Hall when alumni pleaded for his life. He used to stand arm-in-arm with his brothers along Old Brick Row, a string of buildings stretching down Old Campus, parallel to today’s Phelps Gate. Completed in 1752, he held the first Yale dorm and then the Yale College Dean’s Office today he is the philosophy department. Here are the ghosts you can meet on Old Campus.Ĭonnecticut Hall is still standing, but he is only a shell of who he once was. Today, Old Campus is scattered with architectural corpses and the spirits hovering over them. Buildings have personalities, and when they are destroyed, buildings leave behind ghosts, benevolent or jealous or defeated, or maybe just disappointed. Buildings are born of someone’s desire, designed for someone’s use - and so buildings take on souls and attitudes. Many of these buildings have long ago disappeared, their footprints fading away, forgotten but never truly annihilated because construction is earth’s materials and human labor and no energy is ever fully destroyed. Since the University first laid claim to the ground of New Haven, buildings have occupied this space - but Yale continuously modernizes, forever outgrowing itself, discarding buildings every generation as it reinvents itself, buying new buildings with the enthusiasm of little kids going back-to-school shopping. Old Campus is heavy with the weight of centuries of Yale.
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