Two views of campus in 1885 show the “beautiful green arches” that Ezekiel Porter Belden '44 had written about four decades earlier in Sketches of Yale College. Shown here is a view south toward Chapel Street. Within 15 years of these photographs, the elms had been cut down to make way for new campus buildings along College Street.

Similar scenes existed in the nineteenth century throughout New Haven. Nathaniel Parker Willis '27 called the city a “vast cathedral with aisles for streets.” New Haven had the “appearance of a town roofed in with leaves,” Willis wrote in his 1837 book American Scenery. “A bird flying over would scarce  be aware of its existence.” The elms, many of them planted in the late 1700s by local businessman and politician James Hillhouse '73, created a city that, Willis stated, “breathes of nature. … If you were to set a poet to make a town, he would probably turn out very much such a place as New Haven.”

Photograph ©Richard Nash Gould '68, '72MArch