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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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When the photograph that appears in Last Look arrived in the Yale Alumni Magazine offices last year, it came with an unforgettable backstory. It’s a 1936 photo of Hewitt Quadrangle, today the site of Beinecke Plaza. Richard Nash Gould '68 had found it in Yale’s archives while researching his forthcoming photographic history of the college, and when he showed it to the magazine staff, he mentioned he'd once heard a rumor that the paving stones in the quad had originally been ballast on a slave ship. I wanted to print it immediately. The image of the feet of the privileged walking to Commons over the figurative chains of slaves was too powerful to pass over. But first we had to verify the rumor. I asked around, and another member of the Class of 1968 recalled a story, but it was a different one. When he'd been a freshman, Beinecke Plaza was brand new. He'd heard grumbling that the cobblestones, sacrificed to make way for the plaza, had come from World War I battlefields—the same battlefields whose names are carved in the memorial in front of Commons. This too would be a gripping reason to print the photo: a reverent tribute to the dead had been eradicated by the sterilizing aesthetic of Modernism. But now we had two contradictory rumors. We turned to Judith Ann Schiff, author of the magazine’s Old Yale columns. Judy is Chief Research Archivist at the university library and Yale’s muse of institutional history. Any unanswered question about Yale’s past finds its way to her. Judy was interested but skeptical. The slave trade, at least the legal slave trade, ended in Connecticut right after the American Revolution, she pointed out. And Yale didn’t pave Hewitt Quad until 1928, the year after the war memorial was built. I admitted that it was hard to imagine ballast stones sitting in a warehouse, waiting for the right construction project, for a century and a half. As for the battlefields, Judy had a copy of the Yale treasurer’s 1928 statement for construction and landscaping of what was then called the World War Memorial. The paving stones, listed at $5,650, had been supplied by a local contractor, Sperry & Treat. No mention of shipping costs from Europe. No mention, either, of anything noteworthy about the stones in contemporary issues of the Yale Alumni Weekly (forerunner of this magazine). A rumor needs a starting point. The cobblestones weren’t actually cobblestones; they’re listed on the statement as “Belgian block pavement.” That’s a style of pavement, not a place of origin. But some historically sensitive, architecturally ignorant student may have misconstrued the information that there had once been Belgian blocks at the World War I memorial. As for the ships, Gould believes ballast stones became pavement stones on many Manhattan streets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it’s plausible in New Haven too. And the mental leap to slave ships is a short one in this city. (Four blocks from Hewitt Quad, at City Hall, is a memorial to the Amistad.) We’re printing the photo in this issue without any story. It doesn’t need one; it’s a beautiful artifact. As it happens, Beinecke Plaza has just been ripped up once again, so leaks can be fixed and worn pavement replaced (see L&V). But I’m trying to start a rumor that they’re actually building a secret underground passageway between Commons and the president’s office in Woodbridge Hall. You heard it here first. Just don’t check it with Judy. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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