Yale University and Environs

New Haven

Connecticut

Thanks to the miracle of medium-speed rail (America is still on the fence about ever developing high-speed rail like nearly all of Europe….), it is possible to travel from Manhattan to Connecticut in two hours for about $20. That makes a day-trip to visit Yale University’s many free museums quite doable. Even better, though, is finding a cheap apartment on airbnb.com and making it a two- or three-day weekend so you can explore what else New Haven has to explore. Though, be warned, the joke about how many Yale students it takes to screw in a light bulb makes perfect sense the moment you wander away from the main campus area… 

Many people find Yale University’s gray-stoned buildings charming. I personally am annoyed that every structure looks like a late English Gothic church. Note: none of them is actually an church. They are actually residence halls or college buildings filled with classrooms. The churches tend to be American colonial revival on the outside and Gothic revival on the inside and are lovely. They look like churches and they are churches. Several are even filled with gorgeous Tiffany stained glass, despite having been poorly renovated as to cover much of said gorgeous stained glass. Yes, my boyfriend will tell you it can be bothersome to visit New Haven with someone who gets easily annoyed with architecture, though we do come in handy from time to time. 

If fabulous architecture is your thing, Yale has more to offer than fake churches. Its two major museums, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Center for British Art, were both designed by Louis Kahn. The Art Gallery, 1953, was his first major commission and the Center for British Art, 1974, was his last. While the art in the Gallery might be more famous, the Center’s actual structure is far more striking. Not that the works at the Center are none too shabby—there’s plenty of Turner and Stubbs, plus many fabulous paintings of horses and boats, English specialties. Kahn designed the Center for British Art to be airy and open; at any time you can see through and around spaces. It makes you realize how claustrophobic most art museums are. 

The design for the Yale University Art Gallery is less successful, mainly because he designed only the core building where visitors enter and exit. The Gallery branches off into another building that looks like (you guessed it) yet another one of those pseudo English Gothic churches. The large windows in the ancient art galleries works, but the rest of the space is dark and heavy, and surprisingly densely packed with artwork ranging from African to Asian to Medieval to Modern. Indeed, the Gallery’s collection is so tightly displayed that it rather fatiguing. Best to break this museum into two separate visits. What’s the point of finally getting to Van Gogh’s Night Cafe if you’re so tired and cranky you can’t enjoy it? 

For a real visual treat be sure to visit the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1963, on a sunny day. This stunning building was built with translucent marble walls in lieu of glass windows. Rather than make the building a dark box or put in windows that would just be shuttered off to protect the books, Gordon Bunshaft made a visually striking structure that appears to glow when you’re inside it. Some of the books are rather impressive, too—an original Gutenberg Bible and a double elephant folio of Audubon’s Birds of North America. 

Travelers not afraid to explore beyond Chapel Street might want to check out East Rock Park. The hiking trails make a nice change of pace from museum walls and the various summits offer wonderful views of New Haven. Parts of the walk to the park demonstrate some of New Haven’s local color, but nothing so untoward that trekkers should be deterred. A fair warning: it’s at least two miles from downtown New Haven to East Rock Park. Then after hiking up and down overlooks for a few hours, and maybe checking out the Eli Whitney Museum, it’s probably for the best to take a bus or taxi back downtown. My boyfriend and I did not do this, and we greatly regretting the seemingly endless walk back to our rented apartment. 

Also off the beaten Yale path are the Divinity School and the Peabody Museum of Natural History, both about halfway between the New Haven Green and East Rock Park. The original Divinity School structure was recently rebuilt and its red brick is a change from the usual Yale buildings. There are also several picturesque private Victorian-style homes and mini-mansions along the way on Hillhouse Avenue and Prospect Street. Visitors familiar with New York’s Museum of Natural History will find the Peabody Museum to be a bit ho-hum, as well as overpriced. Ticket enforcement is rather lax (there are none), however, so if you go to the gift shop you can continue to walk around the museum without paying. Most of the displays are text-heavy and laden with mediocre objects. The display on the exposition to Machu Picchu is rather interesting, but the most fun room in the museum is the kids discovery room which contains an entire tropical leaf-cutter ant colony. Don’t worry, adults without children can see it, too. 

A bit closer to campus are the Grove Street Cemetery and the New Haven Museum. Be sure to download a map of the cemetery if you want to find some of the more famous residents, like Charles Goodyear, Noah Webster, and Eli Whitney. The New Haven Museum houses a modest collection of local industrial artifacts like Goodyear’s rubber inkwell and one of Whitney’s original cotton gins, as well as folk art. 

For something TOTALLY unexpected—and a little bit creepy—head down to the free Knights of Columbus Museum. Walking through the corridors of this museum it becomes very apparent that this place is loaded with cash. The exhibits and displays are of a far higher quality that most small museums, like the Peabody or New Haven Museum. This is despite the fact that the Knights of Columbus Museum receives very little foot traffic and charges no admission. Several parts of the collection were donated directly from the Vatican. There’s even a reliquary room. Catholics will love it and the rest will be awestruck up until they feel a burning desire to get out the place as fast as possible.

As for food, forget all the hype about New Haven pizza, especially if you’re from New York City. The white clam pizza from Frank Pepe’s is gross and hardly worth waiting in line for an hour or more. Instead, head in the opposite direction and check out Miya’s, an eclectic sushi restaurant that serves fusion rolls with brie and goat cheese alongside more traditional Japanese fare. Hippie bonus: everything is local, organic, and homemade. A good breakfast option is the Atticus Bookstore Café which opens an hour before most other places. 

If you visit New Haven between April and October, the Center Church on the Green offers tours down into its crypt. However, except when visiting one of the three churches on the New Haven Green, it’s best to avoid the small green area flanked by Phelps Gate and City Hall. What should be a nice, relaxing place to stroll and lounge is actually a rather sad plot of land that serves as a sleeping area for New Haven’s homeless. Why New Haven or Yale hasn’t done something along the lines of outreach serves to clean up the Green is beyond me. Lord knows parents paying $35,000 a year to send their children to Yale don’t want the entranceway to the campus filled with makeshift cardboard beds and dwellings. The New Haven Green is a perfect example of how everything in the town isn’t as peachy as visitor brochures would have you believe.

For those who haven’t heard it, the joke goes:

How many Yale students does it take to screw in a light bulb?

None: New Haven looks better in the dark. 

It’s not as bad as all that, though, and certainly nice enough for a relaxing weekend. If you go when school’s not in session things are much quieter. But, if you’re itching to see a play or attend a concert, you’ll need to visit when the area is crawling with co-eds.

Dyker Heights Christmas Displays

Dyker Heights

Brooklyn

You wouldn’t expect tourists from France, Germany, and China to travel almost to the bottom of Brooklyn to see anything other than Coney Island in the summertime. Yet the Dyker Heights Christmas displays attract an astonishingly varied international set. When I went to visit the much-lauded displays the weekend before Christmas, I heard precious little English being spoken. Locals who haven’t checked out this amazing display of electrical drain should consider making the trek down the D-line before the end of the year. Hopefully, these displays will stay up for a few weeks after Christmas.

Sources are vague as to how the whole Dyker Heights lights thing got started, but it’s generally believed to have begun in the 1980s. I like to think it was an elaborate, expensive holiday version of keeping up with the Joneses. Indeed, most of the homes clearly demonstrate that this is not a working-class neighborhood: pediments, columns, fountains, and French-manicured shrubbery abound. Some of the most elaborate displays are professional jobs that cost up to $20,000. 

While there are pockets of homes with copious lights and large displays throughout Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst, the grandest are centered between 85^th and 80^th Streets and 11^th and 12^th Avenues. Some of the craziest homes are on 82^nd and 84^th Streets. 

Be prepared for large groups clustered around the grandest homes; there are even tour buses parked nearby. Also be prepared for screaming children, both with joy and with crankiness. I heard one bewildered three-year-old ask, “Mommy, why are we here?” I also got to watch parents encourage their children to trespass. Some homes have fences and dividers intended to keep viewers away from their front door, yet that didn’t keep one family from instructing their four children to duck under the garland rope to pose with a nutcracker soldier. I imagine the, “Corre, rapido, rapido!” was supposed to make it better. 

Not all of the displays are bright and cheerful, however. Several homeowners failed to take into account that under-lighting things makes them scary at night, even if they are Mrs. Claus or Frosty the Snowman. 

A home on the corner of 80^th and 12^th was particularly disturbing—the mechanics on the old figures didn’t work very well and the jerky movements only added to the frightening effects of the lighting. There were also some humorous instances of inflated displays losing too much air. 

Still, the area is much nicer to walk around than Rockefeller Center, which has but one measly tree. It is far less crowded, though not so much as to keep panhandlers in off-brand Sesame Street and Disney character costumes from earning buckets of cash by posing with tourists. Though, I don’t see what Elmo has to do with Christmas. 

Brooklyn Historical Society

Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn

The New York Historical Society is next door to the Museum of Natural History and is just a stone’s throw from the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park. It boasts an enviable collection of Hudson River School paintings, original Audubon drawings, and Tiffany lamps. As such, it has much greater success pulling in visitors than the far-less-known Brooklyn Historical Society. The Brooklyn Historical Society is geared toward all things Brooklyn and so can come off as exclusive to non-residents. The NYHS definitely caters to a larger audience. However, the BHS building is far more interesting than its Manhattan neighbor; so, if you’re around during a weekend when BHS is offering a tour, you might consider crossing the East River. 

When the Queen Anne style building designed by George B. Post opened in 1881, Brooklyn Heights was the place to be: the Brooklyn Academy of Music hadn’t yet moved away and Saint Ann’s was the tallest church in the city. Post had already designed the Williamsburg Savings Bank and New York Stock Exchange and was a hot name in architecture. Due to budget constraints, the exterior designs were modeled from red terracotta. It is the red color that makes the building stand out in a sea of brown and gray, although there are obvious long-term preservation issues with using such a material outdoors. The heroic busts of Michelangelo, Beethoven, Columbus, Franklin, Gutenber, and Shakespeare seem to be holding up just fine, and are looking perky due to a recent cleaning that removed decades of coal smoke residue. 

Despite a glorious beginning, the building that houses the BHS has had a rather checkered past that has caused some of its former features to be lost. The ground floor had originally been a grand theater, but when the Great War diminished the demand for performances and dances, the chairs were pulled out and it was converted into a nurses’ station. Then, alas, during WWII, when it was once again a nurses’ station, the stained glass in the windows was removed to allow in more light. For several decades lawyers rented the rooms left vacant after the end of the wars. Now, finally, the first floor is being renovated. It will return to being a theater space as well as a lobby gallery. And, thankfully, there are still a few windows in the building that retain their original stained glass.

It will be several months before visitors can see if the renovated theater space lives up to its former glory. The real jewel of the BHS, the Othmer Library, thankfully can never be altered as it is a designated interior landmark, one of only a few in Brooklyn. It is entrance into the Othmer Library that makes taking the tour worthwhile. The library is open only 1 to 5, Monday through Friday—hardly hours most working adults can take advantage of. The library doors get thrown open, however, during the public tours offered one or two Saturdays a month. 

The contents of the Othmer Library will seem ho-hum to most; the collection focuses on mainly Brooklyn housing information and genealogy. There is nothing ho-hum, however, about the gorgeous carved oak interior. Despite being surrounded by dark wood, the room feels very light an airy, thanks to Post’s application of the bridge construction technique of a truss system in the roof that suspends the fourth floor. Post deliberately designed the shelves to be short of the ceiling in order to prove that they don’t offer any structural support. The Corinthian-style columns are actually strong iron that has been wrapped in oak; the bases are looped with art nouveau-esque plant tendrils.

 As you walk around the building, keep an eye out for little design details. Post was very thorough; even the door hinges and keyholes are decorated. The lamps in the stairwells are also original, though they now use electricity instead of gas.

If you are interested in viewing the exhibits, you may want to get to the BHS early. Our 45-minute tour lasted almost 90. Tours generally start at 3pm, and the building closes at 5pm. It opens at noon, so you can get there well before the tours. Not that you’ll need hours to view the four small exhibits on display, three of which were designed by college and high school students. As such, they are a bit lacking in places, but offer some bright moments. 

The third floor holds Say Cheese and Inventing Brooklyn, both of which were curated by high school students through the Historical Society’s Ex Lab (Exhibition Laboratory) program. Say Cheese is on the development of portraiture and contains images ranging from tintypes to digital prints. It’s always nice getting to see tintypes which are usually kept in storage for preservation purposes. The didactics, however, were clearly written by the students, and, as such, some fair better than others.

Inventing Brooklyn begins in the hall with a rather loud television broadcasting clips of Brooklyn in movies. Keeping with the loud theme, the walls are covered in movie posters and advertisements. The part of the exhibition through the doors, however, is quiet as can be. It’s a bit small and cluttered, but not claustrophobically so, and the didactics appear to have been written by the BHS curators.

The second floor has a surprisingly interesting little display on the journals of Gabriel Furman, an early 19^th-century writer who chronicled Brooklyn. There are some rather timely excerpts, including a piece he wrote about “those crazy fanatics” the Mormons in a journal entry titled “American Superstitions.” Furman had been a prominent citizen who died in poverty and obscurity after becoming addicted to opium after an 1832 cholera outbreak. Furman (wrongly) believed opium prevented contracting the disease. This exhibition was put together by college students through the Historical Society’s Students and Faculty in the Archives (SAFA) program.

Also on the second floor is a small room with 18^th and 19^th century paintings of Brooklyn, including a map from 1770. All the information from this room is on a printed card that does not make it at all clear which painting is which. On the plus side, there are lovely views of St. Ann’s tracery from the windows. 

It is rather odd for such a small museum to allow three-fourths of its exhibitions to be curated by people between the ages of sixteen and twenty. And it does create a sense of something being wanting. Fortunately, not to the point where it’s not worth the effort to take one of eight different subway lines that stop in Brooklyn Heights. On a final note, the tiny gift shop located in the vestibule is surprisingly interesting. It’s filled with books specific to several different Brooklyn neighborhoods filled with history and walking tours. The register also has a few local walking tours visitors can snag for free. 

www.brooklynhistory.org