Yesterday, I began to recount a walk I took to all nine of the city’s National Historic Landmarks.
Today, that journey ends, starting with my sixth stop: the Grove Street Cemetery. “THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED,” says the inscription above its Egyptian Revival gate, but so shall the living who step inside one of the city’s most peaceful oases. The resting place, located at 227 Grove Street, was laid in 1796, after the city’s longstanding public burial ground had become overcrowded. It was the nation’s first planned cemetery and started a movement to treat burial grounds as their own discrete landscapes separate from a municipal green or churchyard. A plaque commemorating its selection as a National Historic Landmark in 2000 prominently greets visitors, who can then stroll among the gravestones for centuries of New Haven citizens. Among them are figures from the first part of this walkabout—James Dwight Dana, Othniel C. Marsh, Thomas B. Osborne and Henry Austin—along with names reflected in the roads I walked: Whitney, Hillhouse, Trumbull, Huntington.
To get to my next stop, I cut through the heart of Yale’s campus, using Rose Walk, then took a left onto Elm Street, a right onto College and, with the sounds of bells ringing out from Harkness Tower, another right through Phelps Gate. Passing into Yale’s Old Campus and veering to the left, I soon came face-to-face (or face-to-ankle, really) with a bronze statue of Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale. He stands guard outside Connecticut Hall, constructed from 1750 to 1752, where he lived as an undergraduate between 1769 and 1773. Now home to Yale’s Department of Philosophy, Connecticut Hall is the university’s oldest extant building. When I was at Yale, my roommate Tobin proclaimed that this storied structure had the best bathrooms on campus, but that’s probably not why it received National Historic Landmark status in 1966.
My stomach was really growling at this point, so I moved quickly across College Street to my penultimate stop: the New Haven Green. Laid out in 1638, the 16-acre site has served, persistently and variously, as a central place of worship, burial, arts, recreation, military exercises and more over nearly 400 years. Changes may be afoot, but the day of my visit, the Green’s primary use appeared to be as a thoroughfare—perhaps for people like me, who had lunch on their minds. But first I had to locate, near the middle of the eastern edge, the stone that memorializes the Green’s National Historic Landmark designation in 1971.
With one stop left on my NHL tour, I finally deviated from the itinerary to visit a different New Haven landmark, Louis’ Lunch on Crown Street. I was lucky: There was no line, and despite limited seating, I was able to secure a spot after placing my usual order, two plain cheeseburgers, with Jeff Lassen, the great-grandson of the historic eatery’s founder.
Most if not all of the other patrons appeared to be tourists, getting their very first taste of a business credited, albeit not indisputably, with inventing the hamburger. Among them was an older gentleman sitting next to me, who was chowing down on his “Cheese Works” (cheeseburger with tomato and onion). “It’s incredibly delicious,” he said to me between bites. “It’s so juicy and savory, you don’t even need ketchup.” Amen, brother.
Now properly fueled, it was time for the final and longest leg of the journey: the 1.9-mile trek to the Yale Bowl. This was an exciting conclusion, because, despite many past visits to Yale’s historic football stadium, I had never walked there from downtown. I made my way up Chapel Street, the foot traffic thinning to a trickle as I moved through the Dwight neighborhood to the southern border of Edgewood Park. Crossing the West River, the venerable stadium, located at 81 Central Avenue, was soon in sight.
The Bowl was a revolutionary structure when it first opened in 1914. It was the largest athletic stadium in the world and the first football field completely enclosed by seating. It inspired other landmark stadiums around the country, including the Rose Bowl, Michigan Stadium and the Cotton Bowl, and it turned the word “bowl” into a now-ubiquitous football term. It was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1987.
As I continued up Chapel Street, I tried to imagine what it would have been like for 80,000 fans to have packed the sleepy streets of Westville—and then the Bowl’s wooden stands—as they did when Yale hosted Army in 1923. Or how the NFL’s New York Giants must have felt to play home games in the middle of those same sleepy streets, as they did in 1973 and 1974. (Evidently, they didn’t take very well to it, losing all but one of their 12 games there.)
I made a left off Chapel onto Central Avenue, remembering not only the games I’ve attended here over the years but also the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics World Games in 1995 (headlined by Hootie and the Blowfish, a big act in those days). I snaked up the front driveway, getting as close to the building’s recently reconstructed entryway as I could before a locked gate ended my advance. I craned my neck to see the press box looming overhead, a place where I had spent untold hours as a radio broadcaster, newspaper writer and statistician. Ascending the steps there used to be a regular occurrence for me, but on this day, with my feet starting to ache, I was thankful I didn’t have to.
I took out my phone. I had been walking for 3.5 hours, taking 15,000 steps across more than seven miles—and nearly four centuries of New Haven history. A landmark day, indeed.
Written by Daniel Fleschner. Image 1, featuring the front gate at Grove Street Cemetery, and 4, featuring the Yale Bowl from the press box, photographed by Dan Mims. Image 2, featuring Connecticut Hall, and image 3, featuring a view from the New Haven Green, photographed by Daniel Fleschner.
