Lake Place, one of the city’s shortest roads, gets one of the shortest entries in Doris B. Townshend’s 1998 edition of The Streets of New Haven: “First in 1870-1871 Directory… Named for Birdsey C. LAKE, realtor. His office was at 65 Church St. and his home at 15 Dixwell Ave.” Which actually tells us more about Birdsey C. Lake than the entire Googleable internet.
Today, a walk down Lake Place, which was created mere steps from Lake’s home and now tracks the backside of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gym, offers a stretch of aged Queen Anne Victorians I suspect are mostly or entirely inhabited by Yale students. Facades with uniquely appointed and arranged yet occasionally reused gingerbread house flourishes (among other through lines) suggest they were developed by the same person at about the same time.
Was that person Birdsey C. Lake? I think it was. Townshend’s description—backed up in at least one corner of the non-Googleable internet, where a digital copy of the 1871-72 Benham’s New Haven Directory and Annual Advertiser lists Lake as a “real estate broker”—supports that theory, since, then as today, it wasn’t a huge leap from brokering others’ real estate transactions to buying, developing and selling your own real estate. Meanwhile, the 1870 timing of the street’s creation and presumed development aligns with the ascendance of the Queen Anne Victorian style in the decades after the Civil War.
But the most significant piece of evidence may be the words on the map. Like today, it would’ve been the developer’s privilege to title the street they’d made. And who can blame someone for wanting to put their name on their work?
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
