New Haven’s High Victorian Gothic Architecture
British art critic John Ruskin’s legacy extends to the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where architects P. B. Wight and Henry Austin erected Street Hall and New Haven City Hall guided by Ruskin’s aesthetic principles. Street Hall, located on Old Campus of Yale University facing Chapel Street and High Street, was Yale’s first School of Fine Arts with classrooms and exhibition halls. It fills in the southwestern perimeter of Old Campus. New Haven City Hall faces the New Haven Green on Church Street, serving the city’s administrative functions. The two buildings embodying Ruskinian principles, now referred to as the High Victorian Gothic style, share some common features including polychrome stone, the Gothic pointed arch, asymmetry, turrets and dormers, as well as a sense of durability and historical longevity. Both buildings possess eclectic and unconventional qualities. However, the two buildings also give distinct overall impressions that reflect unique inspirations of each architect.
Some of the common impressions of Street Hall and New Haven City Hall are considered general features of High Victorian Gothic. Polychrome, a legacy of Byzantine architecture, contributes significantly to these attributes. Polychrome in Street Hall makes it stand out among surrounding buildings like Vanderbilt Hall and McClellan Hall, which are both monochromatic. Polychrome in Street Hall is used in the arch motifs, quatrefoil ornaments and the roof. The arch motifs are constructed by alternating between white and brown sandstone. Using two colors makes the arches more salient, thereby also placing a visual emphasis on the windows, which the arches preside over. In Street Hall, lighter stones have the effect of highlighting, as most of the building’s composition is of the same tone of light brown, with some ivory or white being brought in to accentuate certain features. In this way, polychrome in Street Hall is used selectively on certain parts of ornaments with an accentuating effect. Polychrome ornamentation in City Hall, on the other hand, is much more involved in the overall backdrop of the building as opposed to accessory features, thus contributing to a less restrained and less austere quality to its façade. Moreover, City Hall’s composition involves four to five colors, again imbuing it with more expressive and less reserved qualities, which bring out City Hall as an oddball among a sea of stylistically uniform, modern buildings as if transplanted across time.
Just as City Hall’s use of polychrome is less restrained than Street Hall’s, its other ornamentation such as colonnettes, arches, floral motifs and quoils, is also much more expressive and densely used than the ornaments on Street Hall. Nonetheless, ornaments on both buildings share Gothic and pluralist elements. The dense ornamentation on City Hall leaves little negative space, which provokes an overflowing, eventful and even chaotic sensation. Street Hall, as mentioned before, is more serene and simple in composition than City Hall; most of the façade is white space, with sparser, more spacious distribution of features like window openings, arch motifs, quatrefoils, dormers and turrets. The more “spread out” appearance is also magnified by more use of third-dimensional space in Street Hall, including a protruding balcony and portico.
Fewer window openings on Street Hall that give it a more spacious and less densely ornamented appearance also gives it a quality of impenetrability, since the few windows allow for less light to penetrate the building. Street Hall’s Chapel Street façade has only five full-length windows, four half-length windows of the basement that rises to a half-story above ground level, and four minute triangular window openings each of the four gable-fronted dormers — three on the left of the Chapel Street entrance and one to its right. On the other hand, windows compose the bulk of the surface area of City Hall’s exterior, with 30 arch-shaped window openings on the front façade alone. These numerous windows allow for a much greater extent of illumination of the interior from the outside. This difference in manipulation of light in City Hall and Street Hall can be explained by the disparate functions of the two buildings. The penetration of natural light through transparent windows — transparency in form — represents transparency in function, of the City Hall’s operations that are transparent to the city’s residents. Natural light entering the building is pleasing, especially in the foyer, which will be described in detail in following paragraphs. However, in Street Hall, which serves the function of an exhibition hall and formerly a place of art instruction, requires less penetration of natural light in order to preserve sculptures and paintings that are sensitive to sunlight, thus explaining the fewer windows and strategic placement of artwork to reflect the entrance point of light.
Asymmetry, like the manipulation of light, is another important element of City Hall and Street Hall, with some commonalities as well as differences. Both structures are asymmetrical; however, Street Hall, the centerpiece is still the tallest and the principal component, with a horizontal asymmetry between the left and right sections, while City Hall’s tallest point is its left tower, a Gothic pointed spire, which serves as its focal section. The point of emphasis thus differ in the two buildings, although both utilize asymmetry as visual manipulations. As a whole, Street Hall is a tripartite structure, with the left part consisting of three identical subsections with identical motifs, the center being the protruding Chapel Street entrance on the portico, and the right part identical to one of the three subsections of the left. The three pointed, spear-like ornaments on the roof of Street Hall are aligned symmetrically on the roof, evenly spaced, just as the three dormers on the left side of the façade are evenly spaced and two small turrets placed evenly between two dormers. These ornaments create an element of sub-symmetry within the subsections of the façade, while also creating a defensive edge to the already weighty, massive structure.
New Haven City Hall, like Street Hall, also contains symmetrical forms within an asymmetrically balanced composition. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the numerous variegations within the design of the façade, which combines elements of asymmetry and symmetry to create a unique balance to the overall composition of the façade. Asymmetry of the three parts of the tripartite façade creates a visually complex relationship among elements that embellish it. The visually heavy element of the tower is balanced by a quantity of lighter elements within the centerpiece and right section, which has more windows and larger horizontal dimensions. This visual effect of balancing a dominant element with more numerous but smaller focal points is powerful. This asymmetrical interaction between parts to form the whole serves as an apt metaphor of society, where unequal parts coexist in interaction with one another to form the whole, with a somewhat strained balance that is maintained nonetheless. The left tower brings the most salient asymmetry to the composition of the tripartite façade. This asymmetry effectively draws the viewer’s attention to its intricacies: identical clocks placed on each side of its tetrahedral roof, particularly long vertical windows and the dormers with pointed arch-shaped windows.
New Haven City Hall has a more salient vertical hierarchy than Street Hall, although Street Hall’s unique feature, the half-visible windows of the basement level, introduces some level of vertical asymmetry. On the first level of the left tower are two arch-shaped window openings, on the second, three narrower, more pointed arch-shaped windows, and above it, two very vertically long arch-shaped windows. The large dimensions of the top two windows give the tower an appearance of vigilance or surveillance, like the two eyes of the city. Above the two windows are a conical roof, ornamented with dormers and clocks. These dormers, below the clocks, are more rounded than other Gothic Revival dormers, which tend to be more angled. They also have window openings, but are much smaller and more discreet than the other windows on City hall with a more modern in appearance than the other windows of the building. This conical roof appears a little stylistically incongruent with the rest of the façade, partially due to its more modern-looking dormers and the alternating use of green and brown stripes, a somewhat atypical color scheme.
Transitioning from exterior observations of the two buildings to the interior, the viewer is met with the buildings’ entrances. The tall, light brown, double-doored Chapel Street entrance of Street Hall, symbolizes a historical trend of Yale’s isolation from the city of New Haven. P. B. Wight intended the Chapel Street entrance to Street Hall to serve as a connection between the greater New Haven community and Yale. The double doors of this Chapel Street entrance now lack doorknobs or door handles. These doors no longer open from the outside. The fact that the Chapel Street entrance is no longer in use, illustrates the increasingly severed interactions between Yale and the larger New Haven community, also exemplified by the tall gates before the Chapel Street façade of Vanderbilt Hall and Bingham Hall, which segregates Old Campus from commercial buildings across the street. Street Hall was built at a time when many questions about Yale’s place in New Haven were being asked, and what levels of delineation or separation between the university and the town was necessary. Currently, Street Hall is accessible only through the Yale University Art Gallery through the Art Gallery bridge on High Street, which covers most of what used to be Street Hall’s western façade. The lack of a direct, external entrance renders Street Hall a somewhat underexamined, overlooked feature of Old Campus, and even visitors of the Yale Art Gallery often do not realize that they are entering Street Hall when they cross the High Street bridge.
New Haven City Hall’s entrance is much more inviting, also double-doored, with a multi-layered arch and florally ornamented quatrefoil presiding over it.
The innermost lining of the arch is coiled like a rope. The quatrefoil’s outer perimeter is circumscribed by layered circles. The doors appear to be made of glass, adorned with dark brown outer metal that delineate contours of Gothic motifs. Upon entering New Haven City Hall, a cast iron main staircase is visible. The staircase is black, ornamented with vine-like motifs, which are uniform throughout the staircase. The staircase has a quality of partial transparence, as the ornaments utilize empty space to create these vine-like motifs, and through these vacancies we can see past the staircase. Past the staircase immediately in front of the entrance is a wall with three arch-shaped openings, beyond which is a grand, vertically spacious foyer. Standing in the center of the foyer, the viewer may have a full, 360 degree view of the second story and steeply gabled glass panels forming a vaulted ceiling. The vaulted glass ceiling across this spacious area encompassing the central foyer allows a vertically uniform penetration of light, which illuminates the entire space. This ceiling and its trigonal prism-like structure create a much more modern ambiance to the building’s interior when compared to its exterior embellishments. Embellishments in this area are minimal, characterized mostly by linearity, angularity and simplicity. The design of the window facing the wall of arch-shaped openings is characterized by geometric uniformity of right triangles. Overall, the design of this space is very utilitarian, with every structure performing a function, whether it be illumination or structural integrity. Smaller, detailed features like the hollow cylindrical lamps or second-floor railings, also contribute to this geometric, linear, stylistic uniformity of the foyer. The wooden railings look like concatenated squares; for lack of a better description, like the French window rotated horizontally. The two metal rods that support each of the overhead lamps from each diagonal form a rhombus with the vaulted glass ceiling.
The simple, utilitarian interior conveys the City Hall’s function, which is to perform the official business and operation of the city. It is not a place for leisurely lounging but rather a place with straightforward operations, and these practical functions of City Hall align with its utilitarian ornamentation of its interior. Compared to its elaborate embellishments on the exterior, the interior’s simplicity is somewhat striking. A disjunction between the exterior and interior is apparent, although justified in the sense that the exterior of the building is the face of City Hall it gives to the city, accomplishing a primarily aesthetic and ideological purpose, while the interior accomplishes a more pragmatic purpose. The interior is also more likely to have undergone extensive renovations to incorporate technological innovations and meet new, modern necessities, and is also easier to renovate than the exterior.
Like the renovation of City Hall’s interior that incorporates many modern designs, Street Hall in its modern form also offers interesting insights about its transformation. Street Hall, the first School of Fine Arts at Yale, used to be a place of instruction, where the first female students and art students at Yale received formal training in the arts. The building also had exhibition halls, but its primary purpose was instruction. Now, its role in instruction has diminished; Street Hall is part of the Yale University Art Gallery, serving only the purpose of exhibition. This transformation of Street Hall’s function from a place of instruction to a place of exhibition marks a transition from a place of the present to a place of appreciation of the past; this transformation therefore draws an interesting parallel between its function and symbolic meaning.
The present form of these buildings reveal significant differences in how this new style was received by Yale and New Haven. The city of New Haven appears to have been more receptive to Victorian Gothic than Yale University, as evidenced by the persisting strong presence of City Hall on Church Street, not concealed by other structures or significantly altered from its original form. Street Hall, on the other hand, reveals very little of its original façade, diminished by many surrounding structures on Old Campus. Street Hall is concealed not only by the High Street Bridge but also by Vanderbilt Hall, McClellan Hall and Linsly-Chittenden Hall. Vandy, McClellan and LC diminish the prominence of Street Hall’s eastern, northeastern and northern walls, respectively, by closely encompassing it, almost as to engulf the structure. These modifications illustrate that New Haven was more receptive to change, while Yale sought more uniformity and tradition in architectural style, at least at the time most of the Old Campus buildings were built. Perhaps this backlash to architectural novelty is representative of emphasis on traditions and history in academic institutions.
It is amusing to think about how Street Hall and New Haven City Hall, at the time of their construction, were seen as too “experimental” or “avant-garde,” whereas for the present-day observer, these structures are also anachronistic and atypical in the reverse sense, where newer, towering multi-story modern buildings of New Haven starkly contrast with Street Hall and New Haven City Hall.
These buildings survived numerous criticisms from people who sought stylistic uniformity of either traditional Gothic Revival forms or Neoclassical forms, since they both introduced an aesthetic challenge to established forms of architectural style. Yet both buildings maintain the intended appearance of durability and perseverance withstanding the test of time.
