Hillhouse Avenue

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Hillhouse Avenue, described by both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as "the most beautiful street in America," ^[1], is in New Haven, Connecticut and is home to the president's house at Yale University.

The avenue is named for James Hillhouse (1743-1832) and his son James Abraham Hillhouse (1789-1841), innovators in land use in New Haven, who began the program of tree planting that gave New Haven its nickname, The Elm City, and who laid out the Trumbull Plan for Yale College and the Grove Street Cemetery.

Hillhouse Avenue was initially called Temple Avenue, and was staked out, 150 feet wide, by Hillhouse employee, and later Yale president, Jeremiah Day, in 1792. The avenue ran from the Green at Temple Street to a hilltop location where James Abraham Hillhouse built the family mansion, Highwood (later called Sachem's Wood), in 1828. The avenue was privately owned until 1862. Because of the nature of the street, its lots, and its orientation to the nine-square-grid of New Haven (the nation's first planned city), Hillhouse Avenue is sometimes considered to be the first suburb in the United States.

James Hillhouse's mansion was razed in 1942. The elms which once shaded the street were lost to Dutch Elm disease, but large oak trees have largely taken their place.

In time, Hillhouse Avenue came to be divided into an upper, residential area, and a lower portion for public buildings and the Farmington Canal. It is now just two blocks long, running from Grove to Sachem. Yale now owns almost all of the properties on Hillhouse. Many of the mansions of the upper area have been converted for use by the School of Management and other academic departments. Lower Hillhouse primarily includes university buildings, a number of them formerly part of the Sheffield Scientific School.

Structures on Hillhouse Avenue include several houses designed by architects Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, 43 Hillhouse, the home of Yale's presidents since 1937, Dunham Laboratory, the Yale School of Management, Kirtland Hall, and St. Mary's Church.

[edit] References

• Holden, Reuben A., Yale: A Pictorial History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967.
• Pinnell, Patrick L., Yale University: The Campus Guide, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999.