New Haven Green - Around The Green

Around The Green

Bordering the Green are municipal, commercial and university structures. On the northwest side of the Green, across College Street, stand Phelps Gate and the Yale University buildings bordering Old Campus. Before the Old Campus was built, the buildings of Yale's Old Brick Row bordered the Green here. On the southwest side along Chapel Street are stores, bars, and such popular restaurants as Claire's Corner Copia. On the southeast side of the green, across Church Street is The Exchange Building (1832, restored in 1990) and the Federal Courthouse (James Gamble Rogers, 1913). This was once the site of the Tontine Hotel, built by David Hoadley. New Haven's Victorian City Hall (by Henry Austin in 1861; restored and added to by Herbert S. Newman and Partners) and the Amistad Memorial are also at this end of the Green. The memorial stands on the site of the jail that held the Amistad captives during their time in New Haven. Spectators came to see them when they were brought out to exercise on the Green and paid 12 and a half cents to view them in the jail.

Opposite the eastern corner of the lower green is the Union and New Haven Trust Building (now Wachovia Bank) designed by Cross and Cross in colonial revival style in 1927. The design is a tribute to the federal churches on the green and even borrows the cupola from the United Church. On the northeast side along Elm Street by the lower Green is the New Haven Free Public Library (Cass Gilbert, 1908). The library was once the site of the Bristol House, also designed by David Hoadley, whose doorway is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next to the library is the Beaux-Arts, neoclassical New Haven County Courthouse. The courthouse was designed by New Haven architects William Allen and Richard Williams, modeled after St. George's Hall in Liverpool, England. The statuary in front of the courthouse is by the sculptor J. Massey Rhind and murals and lunettes inside the courthouse are by the painter T. Thomas Gilbert.

The upper Green on Elm is bordered by "Quality Row", containing some of the oldest structures in New Haven: the federal style white clapboard Nicholas Callahan house, once a tavern (now the Yale Elihu Senior Society), the federal Eli W. Blake House (now the Graduate Club), the federal John Pierpont house (now the Yale University Visitor Center) built in 1767 and the brick Greek Revival Governor Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll House, designed in 1829 by Town and Davis (future home of Dwight Hall, the student community service organization at Yale).