Wall Street Between College and High Street- South Side

Sanborn 1886 Map:

1879 Bird's Eye View:

Again, very little is known about the houses on this street.

102 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, after 1920

Built for: ?, 1820-1840?
This brick, three bay Greek Revival house had Ionic columns and typical brownstone trim. It was demolished some time after 1920, when it was pictured in a Yale graduation.

104 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, after 1920

Built for: ?, 1800-1820?
This wood, Federal Style house had the interesting feature of a side entrance rather than a front entrance, as shown by the one surviving photograph when it was serving as a rooming house for students.

106 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, 1892

Built for: ?, 1800-1820?
No image survives of the front of this house, but it was clearly a three bay Federal style house. It and its neighbor were demolished in the 1890s for the Berkeley Oval construction.

110 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, 1892

Built for: ?, 1800-1820?
Another unphotographed Federal gable front house. 

Block Survival Rate: 0/4: 0%

Wall Street Between College and High Street- North Side

Sanborn 1886 Map:

1879 Bird's Eye View:

Almost nothing is known about the houses in this area of Wall Street. Most were demolished for the Yale Centennial buildings.

99 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, 1850s?
A five bay Italianate house in brick, it featured a bracketed support over the door with a sloped roof and a dentiled entablature. An image can be seen here.

103 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, 1820s-30s?
A typical three bay Greek Revival house very common in New Haven on the surrounding streets, especially College Street.

107 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, 1880s

Built for: ?, 1800-20s?
This house was demolished in the 1880s for a group of vaguely Queen Anne rowhouses. It seems to have been a typical three bay, ridge front wooden Federal house.

113 Wall Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, 1860s?
This was a rather impressive, though oddly isolated brick rowhouse with a strong Italianate flavor, with heavy hood moldings and entablature, arched windows, and a heavy curved pediment over the door. There was a full three story bay window to the side.

115 Wall

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, ?
No photographic evidence survives for this livery building, listed as Donigan's Livery. 

Block Survival Rate: 0/5: 0%

Elm Street Between Temple Street and College Street - North Side

Sanborn 1886 Map:

1879 Bird's Eye View:

This is potentially the best preserved streetscape in downtown New Haven, containing some of the city's only remaining colonial houses, though rather altered through the years. It has only lost one of the buildings that existed in 1879 and it is here one must go to really get a sense of the lost five bay houses that once made up the majority of New Haven's housing.

69 Elm Street

Status: Extant!

Built for: Ralph Ingersoll, 1829 by Ithiel Town
Potentially one of the best survivng Greek Revival houses in New Haven, the Ingersoll house, built for a governor, is one of the five bay Greek houses with a central triple window typical of upper class elites in the city. Another example was the Eli Whitney house further down Elm Street as well a surviving house on Wooster Square. The most beautiful feature on this house is the exceptional recessed Doric porch on the front, at the top of a tall basement and formidable stairs, and the underside of the eave, which has palmettes and guttae attached to the underside, a rather unpretentious but beautiful touch, characteristic of architects rather than builders. Originally, the house was stuccoed and had an attic board, common in New Haven, that would have accentuated the height and hid the roof. This has been replaced by dormers, which do nothing for the design.

73 Elm Street

Status: Extant!

Built for: John Pierpont, 1767
Now the Yale Visitor's Center, this house was built for John Pierpont, and, although somewhat over restored a la Wethersfield, it contains the bones and some woodwork of the original. It is a five bay ridge front house. Originally it had a porch, removed in restoration and a variety of interesting additions.

77 Elm Street

Status: Extant!

Built for: Jonathan Mix, 1799
Now the Graduate Club, this house contains some excellent Federal details on its five bay, ridge front base, including the ever popular New Haven feature the engaged pediment with palladian window. This is the last house of its type to survive. Additionally, there is fine and delicate carving on the open pediment porch, once common and now rather rare, and nice metal strapwork on the fanlights.

83 Elm Street

Status: Demolished, 1893

Built for: Judge Mills, before 1800
This lot is now the site of Hendrie Hall, the only survivor of a plan that would have demolished most of the houses on this street. The Mills house was another 18th century house, five bays, ridge front, with a simple pedimented porch with Tuscan columns. Although its loss damages the scale of the whole street, since Hendrie is rather too grand and Renaissance for a grouping of colonial houses, at least it was for something impressive.

87 Elm Street

Status: Extant!

Built for: James Callahan, c. 1762
Now the Elihu Club, this house was a tavern owned by the Loyalist James Callahan who fled New Haven after the revolution. Later it was the home of architect David Hoadley. At some point, a two story porch was added to the house with a heavy pediment. This pediment was later removed to give it a more delicate Federal air. Mills believes the second story of the porch might be a historic porch moved there in the "restoration". Not long after 1879, a Richardsonian addition was added to the right side of the house for the club with stone facing and Syrian arches. In the colonial craze of the early 20th century, this addition was colonialized to match the rest of the house.

Wikimedia

First Methodist Church

Status: Extant, Altered

Built for: First Methodist Church, 1849 by Henry Austin
Churches are usually pretty stable stylistically. Not so with the First Methodist Church. Built surprisingly in the Federal Style in 1849 by major architect Henry Austin (potentially a characteristic of conservative ecclesiastical New Haven), the church was a statement in verticality. Bare brick walls with blind arches copied from the churches on the Green, and simple brownstone trim created a unity with the older churches. The original two stories of windows with Federal pointed arch mullions were unified later into elongated windows with Italianate Venetian style tracery. The steeple was impressive, with a clock framed by an elaborate open pediment, Corinthian columns, urns, balustrades, and a tall spire, one of the most beautiful in the city. The spire was later removed by the 1890s. In 1905, the church assumed its present form, with an unhistorical portico and a shockingly squat steeple removing the verticality of Austin's design and replacing it with a horizontal emphasis that totally alters the massing of the building. A terrible fire destroyed some of the church and the interior is now quite modern. The image below shows the church with its original windows.

Wikimedia

Block Survival Rate: 5/6: 83%

Elm Street between Church Street and Temple Street -North Side

Sanborn 1886 Map:

1879 Bird's Eye View:

This is perhaps New Haven's most famous and lamented block, the so-called "Quality Row", named for the four impressive mansions along the block. Two of these houses, 57 and 51 were designed by David Hoadley, New Haven's most prominent Federal architect, and demonstrate both his creativity as well as his attention to more urbane designs from Boston. These were all demolished in the early 20th century for the construction of the current library and courthouse. A general view can be seen here.

51 Elm Street

Status: Demolished, 1908

Built for: David DeForest, 1822 by David Hoadley

This is potentially Hoadley's domestic masterpiece and is very much a unique design. The house is four bays with two bays occupying gently swelling bow fronts. On the first two floors, there was a two story porch with spindly, double height Corinthian columns (pilasters at the ends of the house framed the whole). A strong, archaeologically correct entablature topped the porch. On the third floor, the bays continued with a small modillion cornice. The whole was topped by an open balustrade with a solid central panel that featured a carved swag. The roof had a monitor at the center with a Chippendale balustrade above. Interestingly, the entrance was from the side through a low Corinthian columned porch. The side facade featured a simpler brick design with a palladian window over the entrance and the rear had a raised two story columned porch. The central cube seems to have been the original design. The house was extended with as many as two additions, one which replicated the side facade, filling in the back porch and adding pilasters to the design, and a third addition, probably in the 1870s, which resulted in a large Renaissance tower with palladian windows and pilasters, making it a gargantuan house, probably one of the largest in the city. Some of the pilasters survive on the house at the corner of Hillhouse and Sachem. Overall images can be seen here and here. A garden gate and the greenhouse to the rear can be seen here. A view from the porch can be found here.

57 Elm Street

Status: Demolished, 1908

Built for: Nathan Smith, 1818 by David Hoadley

Perhaps one of New Haven's most grandiose Federal designs, as well as one of its most high style houses, it was built for Nathan Smith, a medical practitioner and major influence on medicine at Yale and in New Haven. It was a five bay house with a series of Doric pilasters around the central three bays joined by a pediment, following a similar arrangement as the Bishop house further down Elm Street. This arrangement divided the façade into a classical temple façade with two flanking bays. The cornice on the side bays consisted of a simple band with small backets, but the central three bays feature a full, correct Doric cornice with all the bells and whistles, triglyphs and metopes. The whole was topped by a grand balustrade. Unlike the Bishop house, however, the Smith house featured a strongly differentiated first floor, projecting in the center with blind arches around the windows and doors, a Palladian design from the English Renaissance. Hoadley especially seems fond of blind arches surrounding the windows. Two low pavilions, deeply recessed, flanked the house, with jutting Doric porches. Doric architecture was rare in New Haven, since the general preference was for Corinthian or Ionic classical orders, so the Smith house was unique in its time. Images can be seen here, here, here, and here. The only surviving pieces of the house after its demolition in 1911 for the current occupant of the site, the New Haven courthouse, are the two iron urns that originally flanked the entrance, now found in front of the New Haven Colony Historical Society.

59 Elm Street

Status: Demolished, 1912

Built for: Thomas Trowbridge, 1851

This was an impressive Italianate/Greek Revival house, a five bay symmetrical plan, built for Thomas Trowbridge, a descendant of one of New Haven's most important families. It replaced a house that was identical to 69 Elm Street (except for the central bay which featured a broken pediment and palladian window) built in 1801. This was the last house of Quality Row to be demolished, surviving for an uneasy period between the library and the courthouse. The actual body of the house is very simple, of straight brick with simple stone lintel moldings over the plain windows. Rather, the house draws its magnetism from the impressive four column Corinthian portico and balustrade, which echoed the Nathan Smith house next door in framing the central bays of the façade (minus the pediment). Also of note is the iron balcony that ran across the central three bays on the second floor. Italianate details abounded on the sides, with arched windows on the bay to the left and the oriole window to the right. Further, a more stylistically Italianate cupola with large brackets topped the whole design. The house, used as a library annex, was demolished to provide a park space, now a garage entrance and extension to the library. A side view of the house can be seen here. 

69 Elm Street

Status: Demolished, 1907

Built for: William Bristol, 1801 
The Bristol house was the oldest on the block and was a rather unique design to New Haven. It was a five bay, ridge front, Federal Style house with a central triple window and an open pediment porch. Above, a balustrade with alternately paneled and balustraded sections crowned the whole. The odd feature are the two three bay, gable front wings, connected by low single story hyphens. The three bay wings include center entrances (another odd feature) with pediments above and a semi-circular window in the gable. At 59 Elm Street, where the Trowbridge house was built, was originally a copy of the Bristol house, built for the Daggett family. The only difference was that the center bay of the Daggett house had an engaged gable with a palladian window, typical of the central pediment five bay design in New Haven. The side pavilions were the same. They must have made a sprawling pair!
The Bristol house can be seen here and here. It was demolished to make way for the New Haven Free Public Library of 1908 designed by Cass Gilbert. 

Block Survival Rate: 0/4: 0%

College Street Between Wall Street and Grove Street-West Side

Sanborn 1886 Map:

1879 Bird's Eye View:

All the buildings on this block were demolished for the construction of the current buildings, the Memorial Hall, in 1900, except for the Scroll and Key society.

Scroll and Key Society

Status: Extant!

Built for: Scroll and Key, 1869 by Richard Morris Hunt

Designed by one of America's premier architects of the later 19th century, Richard Morris Hunt, one of the first academically trained architects, the Scroll and Key society is a unique Moorish revival treasure and a unique design in New Haven. It is very fortunate to not only have survived, but survived in such an excellent state with its original iron fencing. Hunt used fine cream stone for the façade with thin bands of darker stone creating a striped façade. The central three bays of the design have three blind arches with small arched windows with Moorish star grills. Four granite columns with pink and grey tones and white capitals enframe the central door at the top of a divided staircase. The top is furnished with a balustrade with finials marking the central bays. The sides continue the same décor with blind arches bookended with plain bays. An old image can be seen here.

Numbers 132-138 can be seen here and here.

132 College Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, 1800-1840s?

A three bay Federal Style house with an open gable, semicircular window, and simple porch, one of four on the same street.

134-6 College Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, 1800-1840s?

This was a double house, three bays, Federal Style with Greek Revival door surrounds. The oddness of this design is that unlike other double houses, the doors are not placed paired in the center or at the same position in each unit, but rather are placed as far away from each other as possible, mirroring the design. 

138 College Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: Edward C. Herrick, 1830s-1850s?

This was similar to the large variety of stuccoed, Italianate/Greek Revival houses around the city, the closest being around the corner on Wall Street. The very simple entablature was set off by a grand attic board, typical in New Haven's Greek Revival period with two small runs and a very shallow central gabled section. The house can be seen here and here.

140 College Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: the Atwater family, 1743

One of the few 18th century houses in New Haven that survived into the late 19th century. The Colonial style house was a simple three bay design with a ridge front and an open pedimented porch, a New Haven specialty. It can be seen here.

144-150 College Street

Status: Demolished, 1900

Built for: ?, 1830s-50s

This was potentially one of New Haven's grandest Greek Revival rows, a set of four units of three bays each in brick. The houses featured sturdy Ionic porticoes with shallow, pointed attic boards on top. The three story façade, brick with brownstone lintels, had a thin cornice topped with another set of very elaborate attic boards featuring central paneled blocks and gently sloping sides. The row can be seen here.

Block Survival Rate: 1/10: 10%