Renaming New Haven: Hillhouse City?

Thanks to one of the fine free tours orchestrated by the Arts & Ideas Festival, a lovefest developed on Hillhouse Avenue Thursday afternoon. The love was for the New Haven of the past and of the present, specially where they exist as one, along the avenue that Charles Dickens in 1868 called the most beautiful in all America.

Seventy-five people, including Elaine and Herrick Jackson, accompanied landscape architect Channing Harris, pictured in the fine summertime Dickensian hat, on a New Haven Preservation Trust tour of the grand avenue originally laid out by James Hillhouse in 1792.

“I think,” said Harris, ​“that New Haven really should be called ​‘Hillhouse City.’ He was a classmate of Nathan Hales at Yale, he established the Grove Street Cemetery, he planted the elms of the city, and he was a close personal friend of George Washington.”

Most pertinent for the perfect afternoon, he decided to turn his apple orchard into the city’s first development. Unfortunately there were economic downturns. (Take heart, developers, said Harris.) The project didn’t take off until Hillhouse descendents built Sachem’s Wood, a kind of Greek temple-style house.

Although the house was torn down in 1942, the land where it stood, behind the crowd on Sachem Street, is empty now because by deed Yale can never build on it. It was part of the deal brokered by the pace-setting family whose house was part of a growing tradition in early 19th century America, such that many towns had ​“temples on hills.”

For his evidence Harris charmingly recalled lines from a patriotic song: “… thy rocks and rills, the templed hills.” 

Moving south down the avenue, Elsie Chapman found herself standing in front of the Egyptian-style house built by Henry Austin and A.J. Davis. A 30-year employee with IBM, she said that after a friendly divorce, she decided to retire to New Haven. ​“I absolutely love everything about this city,” she said, ​“the architecture, the diversity of buildings and of people.”

She said she has lucked out and lives in historic Wooster Square. She said what she was learning was just how active the architect Henry Austin was.

In front of the John Pitkin Norton House, an Italian villa style about a third of the way down the block on the west, Harris held up a pattern book pioneered by local architects to show to clients. ​“Then the family would say, I’ll take this one, three arcades please, and move the tower to the other side of the house.”

The next stop was in front of one of the loveliest houses on the block, the 1832 Skinner-Trowbridge mansion lived in by famous Yale professors. Frank Pannenborg, an architect himself with New Haven’s City Plan Department, was asked whether in the mid-19th century homeowners had to go before city bureaucrats when they made change to their houses.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. ​“The taste was set not by the city but the developer.”

Channing Harris took a particular interest in the wrought-iron fence. ​“When these houses were built,” he said, ​“the fences were simple wooden affairs with a long base to keep the rabbits out.

“However, after the Civil War, there were all these iron manufacturers and no cannonballs to make. Suddenly iron fences came into vogue.” At the end of the fence are self-closing gates, circa 1870, whose mechanism has been working fine for 138 years.

Harris added that by the time Dickens came to tour the street, the Elms were 80 years old and they had been supplemented on the Skinner property and other imposing home by evergreen trees. ​“At that time evergreens and plush greenery of any kind were a symbol of wealth. It had begun, the style, that is, in Regent Park, in London.”

So when Dickens declared Hillhouse Avenue to be so beautiful, he was looking at it filtered through very British eyes. Maybe what he meant was that it was the most beautiful English street in America.

The Skinner house was the last lived in by a private family. Yale has invested millions in preservation and now many of the buildings house academic departments and schools. In the Skinner are offices of the School of Management.

A reporter had to leave the tour, but not before Harris pointed out one of the oldest elms surviving on the street. This one, he said, was still third generation, the originals having long been destroyed in the elm diseases of the 1940s through the 1960s. Apparently what really did the stately elms in was the hurricane of 1938, which downed many of the originals.

Oh, and the house beyond the Elm #37 Hillhouse was the residence to which George Herbert Walker Bush brought his wife and little baby, George, in 1946, to live.

Someone commented that it was to be no G.I. modest dwelling for the future presidents.
Good researcher he, Harris pointed out that at the time, the house had been subdivided for the returning soldiers, so that some 30 or 40 people lived there.

Hillhouse Avenue a slum? Perhaps the most beautiful slum in America.

For the other many local tours that keep New Haven and its local treasures front and center in the midst of the festival’s international focus, click here.