New Haven is a very walk able city, and it is recommended that you try to see the central section on foot, as the Green, Yale, shops, restaurants, theatres and museums are all within a few blocks of each other. It is an easy and enjoyable navigation, so tighten your laces and get ready to go!

Yale
A visit to New Haven wouldn’t be complete without a visit to Yale, one of the world’s most famous universities.

Yale University offers free, guided tours, originating at the Yale Visitor Information Center, 149 Elm Street, +1 203 432 2302. Tours last about an hour and fifteen minutes, and are a fun mixture of history and Yale lore, architecture and current student life. The tours are conducted Monday through Friday, at 10:30am and at 2pm, and on weekends at 1:30 pm.

The tour starts at the historic Phelps Archway on College Street, across from the New Haven Green. As you enter the Old Campus, you will delight in the feeling of being on an Ivy League Campus— even if it is now known that ivy is bad for buildings, so, as at Harvard and Brown, the ivy has been removed from the walls. Dormitories occupy many of the buildings in this quadrangle, which includes the school’s oldest surviving structure, Connecticut Hall, completed in 1752. One of its earliest residents was Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale. A dashing young student from the class of 1901 posed for the statue of Hale that stands next to the building.

Across High Street stands Harkness Tower, a landmark of the American Collegiate Gothic style completed in 1920. Within the tower, the Yale Carillon Memorial plays daily during the school year. Harkness Tower is part of the Memorial Quadrangle. The gate to the quadrangle is only unlocked on commencement day, and there is lore that any student who gains entry through the gate at any other time will not finish school at Yale.

There are 12 colleges within Yale. Each has a distinctive courtyard, which offers respite from the city streets. Inside Jonathan Edwards College, for example, you will find a courtyard replete with outdoor sculptures, teak benches under shady trees and a swing attached to a branch. Music can be heard from the common room, where the piano is often played. Each college is a distinct unit with its own library, common room, dining hall, gymnasium, recreation rooms and squash courts.

Other highlights are scattered across campus, but be sure to visit the Gothic-style Sterling Memorial Library, designed by James Gamble Rogers. The library has beautifully painted vaulted ceilings and frescos. Yale’s library system is the third largest in the nation and the seventh largest in the world.

If you have the chance to slip into the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, take note of its post modern architecture, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, completed in 1963. The building is designed to hold 800,000 volumes, most of them underground, in humidity- and temperature controlled vaults. If it is a sunny day when you enter, you will observe the sun glowing through the translucent marble slabs that make up the building’s facade. The library is open to the public and its holdings include an original Gutenberg Bible and original manuscripts by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

Sauntering through other quadrangles and buildings, head south towards Woolsey Hall, the largest auditorium on campus, seating 2700 people. Many of the concerts and lectures held here are open to the public, as are the exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery. The gallery, with more than 80,000 holdings, is the oldest college art museum in the Western Hemisphere. The Yale Center for British Art is the most comprehensive collection of British art and illustrated books outside the United Kingdom, and the The Peabody Museum of Natural History is a showcase for rare items from the natural world, including an outstanding collection of dinosaur bones. The holdings in the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments is second only to the Smithsonian Institution.

Downtown New Haven
A wonderful complement to the Yale University tour is a tour of New Haven, which focuses on the important downtown sites, the city’s history and architecture. These tours are given April-October on Thursdays at noon (be sure to arrive a few minutes early). Like the campus tour, the town tour originates at the Yale Visitor Information Center, 149 Elm Street, +1 (203) 432 2302.

If you can’t make the guided tour, you have a choice of two pleasant self-guided tours staring from the intersection of Church and Chapel Streets at the Southwest corner of the New Haven Green.

The first walk takes you west on Chapel Street through the city’s most cosmopolitan shopping, dining and theatre area. You will find a high concentration of restaurants conveniently located to businesses and to Yale, as well as art galleries, gift shops, clothing stores, bookstores and hotels.

Chapel cuts through campus and, if you haven’t already seen them on your tour of Yale, you will pass by the Yale Center for British Art, and across the street, the Yale University Art Gallery— outstanding museums well worth the visit. A stone’s throw away is the famous Yale Repertory Theatre.

The second walk takes you east on Chapel, past the Green towards Wooster Street. Use caution once you pass the southeast corner of the Green, as the neighborhood starts to get a bit less desirable. Once you cross the railroad tracks and reach Olive Street, however, Chapel Street resumes its charm and brings you through quiet streets lined with brownstone homes. You will pass the Historic Mansion Inn, a bed & breakfast near fine Italian restaurants and accessible to downtown. A short distance further brings you to Wooster Square, where a statue of Christopher Columbus proudly stands over this Italian neighborhood.

One block south of Chapel and Wooster Square is Wooster Street, welcoming visitors with a beautiful wrought iron archway decorated with New Haven’s symbolic Elm Tree. In the spring, exploding cherry blossoms line the street, and there is plenty of al fresco dining when the weather warms up. Here you will find restaurants and pizzerias boasting the best pizza in New England— if not the world—and intoxicating smells from local bakeries fill the air. In the 1930’s, Stamford turned its attention to maintaining the status quo. Stamford was one of the few unzoned communities within the New York metropolitan area. There was a plan of development authored by Herbert S. Swan, but what with the Depression and then the second World War, the plan was apparently forgotten. The only recommendation of the plan that was carried out was the construction the Merritt Parkway.