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Hillhouses
Summer 2000

Perhaps no place at Yale demonstrates the need for attention to the campus infrastructure better than Hillhouse Avenue. Developed under the direction of James Hillhouse in the 1830s, the avenue (above in the 1870s) was an early planned community, one of the places where the distinctly American idea of the “garden suburb” was first explored. But as Yale acquired the houses over the years, much of the Edenic character of the street was lost: The street was widened, some of the original landscaping and cast iron fencing was removed, and the canopy of elms over the street succumbed to disease. By 1976, architectural historian Elizabeth Mills Brown called Hillhouse “a sad place.”

Over the last decade, Yale has been renovating the houses on the Avenue, and by now, many of them have been restored to an appearance consistent with their 19th-century beginnings. (The University also tore down one house, a work by the noted architect Alexander Jackson Davis, at 85 Trumbull Street. Yale argued that the house had been altered beyond recognition, but a group called Friends of Hillhouse Avenue disputed that assessment.) The houses’ facades, many of which had been painted a dour Victorian brown in the late 1800s, have been returned to their lighter original colors.

Now, with all but one of the houses renovated, the facilities department is turning its attention to the Hillhouse streetscape. This summer, the Avenue will receive new plantings and street furniture according to a plan by Towers/Golde, a New Haven landscape architecture firm. “By next year,” says University planner Pamela Delphenich, “Hillhouse Avenue will be a showplace.”  

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