nothin Just Don’t Call Them Gargoyles | New Haven Independent

Just Don’t Call Them Gargoyles

David P. Ross Photo

An in-plain-sight revelation in the new book Yale’s Hidden Treasures.

Michael Stern noticed a bulldog dressed as a judge, a surveyor riding a mule, and a court jester blinding justice hiding in plain sight in New Haven.

Stern, a local native, for decades noticed those and other stone carvings nestled into the century-old gothic buildings on Yale’s campus. He wondered who made them and why.

Now Stern has published a book full of photos and the back stories of those sometimes street-visible, sometimes cloistered images that, like the marginalia micro-cartoons in the old Mad Magazine, have made for delightful discoveries for New Haveners who had occasion to look.

Stern, a 74-year-old retired photographer-reporter (he got tear-gassed while photographing the Mayday 1970 protest for the New Haven Register) and marketing copywriter, set about looking for written materials on the carvings, including at Yale’s Sterling Memorial archives. He couldn’t find any. So he researched and wrote his own book, which has just been published. (David P. Ross took the photos.)

In addition to sating his own curiosity, he saw a chance to deal in his fellow New Haveners on the secrets to a fun local mystery.

He has one word of warning.

Paul Bass Photo

Author Michael Stern.

Be careful not to call them gargoyles,’” Stern said of the carvings during an interview about his book on WNHH FM’s Dateline New Haven” program.

Gargoyles, he learned in his research for the book, refer to functional stone images, like the fountain on the Green, or half-man half-beasts intended to ward off evil spirits.

So even though Yale’s images include, say, a half-bulldog judge, they don’t count as gargoyles” because they were meant to entertain or make a social point.

Yale’s Hidden Treasures

James Gamble Rogers.

The correct term, Stern said, is stone carvings.”

Hence the title of Stern’s book: Yale’s Hidden Treasures: Mystery of the Gothic Stone Carvings.

Architect James Gamble Rogers designed the carvings when Yale expanded its campus from 1917 to 1935 with a dozen new buildings. Expert stonecutters recruited from Italy made them.

David P. Ross Photos

It turned out Rogers, a Yale grad, had a playful sense of humor. To wit, the stone scenes in and around the law school building, featured in Stern’s book. There’s a student sleeping surrounded by a liquor bottle, cobwebs, and mice.

There’s a sleeping professor. Students sleeping in class. A drunken Pilgrim. And a convicted person contemplating his fate.

He had something against people that slack off. That was his pet peeve,” Stern said.

Stern needed binoculars to spot some of the busts of prominent Yalies — Elihu Yale, Jonathan Edwards, Eli Whitney, and yes, John C. Calhoun — nestled in 216-foot-high Harkness Tower.

In Davenport College he found a series of named sculptures commemorating the workers who built it, including a surveyor …

… and a man who drove to work every day on a mule.”

He’d heard about a scuplture of a young man sitting on a toilet inside Trumbull College. Stern convinced a maintenance worker to lead him to the sculpture. The worker led him to a second-floor bathroom and pointed to the window.

There he is, over there,” the man said, pointing outside to the scultpure. Stern said Rogers included that sculpture as a message of revolt against over-studying; the sculpture faces Sterling Memorial Library. Each year, he learned, a Trumbull sophomore is tasked with climbing out on the perch to paint the statue a different color.

Retired local attorney and civic leader Cheever Tyler originally encouraged Stern to write a book about the sculptures when Stern asked him what he knew about them.

Tyler contributed a foreword to Yale’s Hidden Treasures. He writes that the book teaches us that if we want to live full and fruitful lives, it pays to look up now and then.”

Learn more about the book and order it at this website.

Click on or download the above audio file or the Facebook Live video below to hear the full interview with Michael Stern on WNHH FM’s Dateline New Haven.”

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