Yale U. Will Raze Historic Buildings in Latest Expansion, to Preservationists’ Dismay

Alumni magazines are too often merely tools of a college’s fund-raising and public-relations departments, with insipid rah-rah stories about campus figures and administration agendas. Well, chalk one up for the independence of the Yale Alumni Magazine, which reports on the controversy surrounding the university’s decision to tear down some historic structures to make way for two new residential colleges designed in a neo-Gothic style by Robert A.M. Stern, the university’s architecture dean.

“Massive demolition of historic buildings is, in its way, a time-honored Yale tradition,” notes the writer, Carole Bass. “That’s how the university cleared space for its original residential colleges more than 75 years ago.” Among the buildings to be destroyed are Hammond Hall, built in 1904; an early-19th-century Greek Revival house; and the Daniel Cady Eaton House, constructed in 1890. Preservationists, most of whom seem resigned to the demolition, hoped that Yale would move the houses, at least, to new locations. But the cost of such a move, at $5-million apiece, was too much for the university.

The magazine story also included a few digs at Yale’s neo-Gothic architecture. Anstress Farwell, a preservationist who still plans to fight the university, called the neo-Gothic tradition “a fantasy environment about what Yale has been in the past.”

“I don’t think that if the university succeeds in this plan, the debate will ever go away: why did Yale do something retardataire at a moment when architecture is looking to be innovative?” she said.