On a picture-perfect fall day under Yale-blue skies, 35,000 guests from New Haven and beyond came to Yale's first open house on Oct. 21 and helped the University launch its year-long 300th birthday celebration.
Most of the guests for "Opening Yale 300" jammed Hewitt Quadrangle and Cross Campus for a morning welcoming ceremony that featured a marching band, a parade of undergraduates and an immense 300-pound birthday cake in the unmistakable shape of Old Campus.
The tightly packed crowd, which included everyone from infants in strollers and backpacks to octogenarians, stretched from Commons to Elm Street and from College Street to Sterling Memorial Library. Among the assembled dignitaries were New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr., who shared the stage with President Richard C. Levin, New Haven aldermen and state legislators, officials from surrounding communities, and New York Governor and Yale alumnus George Pataki.
Before and after the ceremony, visitors fanned out around the campus, strolling through buildings and courtyards and sampling some of the more than 100 activities, talks, exhibits, tours and performances showcasing the arts, sciences, medicine, athletics, college life and more. Visitors checked the schedules and consulted maps that the University printed to lead them to the day's attractions. (See stories on the Science area and the Museums.)
Wall Street hummed all day with thousands of people who sampled the food and drink from a score of local restaurants that set up booths in tents, including the Ivy Noodle, Sandra's Place and Roomba.
Among Yale's other "guests" were 30 bulldogs who cavorted under a tent on Cross Campus and kept Yale's mascot, Handsome Dan, company during the morning. Some of the canines, owned by members of the Bulldog Club of Connecticut, headed for the Yale Bowl and the football game against Penn while others paraded the campus.
"I've lived in New Haven for many years and never visited Yale before," said Elinor Hill, with her son, Corey, a Conte-West Hills student, in tow. "I'm impressed with the campus... Before, I thought it was a closed atmosphere, segmented, secluded and secret. Now, I see it's very open and very beautiful, not dark and foreboding as you expected it to be. We're going to visit every spot that we can that's open today."
The opening ceremony on Hewitt began with a procession of students from Yale's 12 residential colleges led by the Yale Precision Marching Band. The student standard bearers held their banners high as they lead their respective college classmates onto the plaza. The students, competing for the best college Tercentennial T-shirt, sported colorful tops bearing such slogans as "Pierson founded Yale," "Trumbulldog," "God-Silla: No other college is safe" and "Ezra Smiles."
"I can tell it is a special day," Levin told the gathering as the last students marched up the quadrangle. "It has been many decades since so many of our students attended an event this early on a Saturday morning."
After the laughter passed, Levin said, "We wanted to start this historic year by inviting everyone in the greater New Haven community to share in this celebration with our entire campus community -- students, faculty and staff. ... This is an occasion for everyone -- long-time employees or first-time visitors -- to experience our campus, to sample the amazing range of activities pursued by faculty, students and staff."
As the President spoke, the band punctuated his speech with music. "Yankee Doodle" sounded as Levin described how General George Washington marched to Cambridge accompanied by Yale student musicians, who turned back to New Haven within two weeks. "Cambridge was not to their liking," quipped the President. Later, when Levin explained that "Boola Boola" might have its origins in a Maori war cry, the band burst into the Yale fight song. And when Levin reminded those assembled that Cole Porter penned the famous "Bulldog! Bulldog!" song, the band struck up the music as the crowd joined in.
Levin said that although Yale was situated for a time in Killingworth, it moved to New Haven after the city outbid two other Connecticut towns for the honor. "Thus, we celebrate our 300th birthday not in Hartford or Saybrook, but here in New Haven, where we were most wanted," said Levin.
"Today, we are thankful to be here in New Haven, a city large enough to be interesting and small enough to be friendly," added the President. "In this last decade of our third century, we have committed ourselves to working with the city and its citizens to create economic opportunity, a vibrant downtown, and stronger neighborhoods marked by home ownership. We have also reached out to the children of New Haven by participating in on-campus programs in our classrooms, museums and athletic facilities.
"We begin our fourth century in a strong and vital partnership with our neighbors," Levin said, who thanked Janet Lindner, the director of the Tercentennial, and Martha Highsmith, deputy secretary, for their "Opening Yale 300" planning efforts.
The President then introduced "Yale's neighbor and friend, the Mayor of New Haven, John DeStefano," who spoke about the mutually rewarding relationship that Yale and the city enjoy.
After the speeches, Levin and DeStefano joined Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer, Provost Alison Richard and Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead in front of the birthday cake, which the Yale Bake Shop created for the occasion. (See related story.)
Levin and DeStefano each picked up a slice and stuffed some into one another's mouths to great amusement all around. Yale Dining Hall staffers then separated the cake into four sections and, with the help of ushers, moved each section to a corner of Hewitt so that all in attendance could sample a piece. By 1 p.m., not a crumb was left.
Learning about Yale for the first time
Among the many guests were first-time visitors to Yale from near and far.
"My husband and I are visiting friends in Essex and they asked us if we've ever been to Yale," said Gracia Henkle of Lincoln, Nebraska. "I said 'No, but we'd like to' and here we are. They'd heard about your anniversary so we decided to come today.
"We recently visited the Notre Dame campus in Indiana," she went on, "but the Yale campus outshines it 100%. It's just great to see so many people here. We're going to visit the Grove Street Cemetery, where so many famous Americans are buried. I've heard about Yale from friends and I've known about it all of my life, and in person, it's better than I ever thought it would be."
Henry Dynia, of Neighborhood Housing Services, said, "Yale should do this every year or at least every five years. I've lived in New Haven for 48 years, and I'm third generation New Haven. I saw an 1886 fire department map that showed my family's ancestral home -- the house where I grew up. I asked the librarian how I could get a copy of the map and he went and xeroxed it for me! I couldn't believe it."
New Haven resident Ernestine Killings came to the open house with her friend, Laura Mason, also of New Haven. While Ernestine has often visited the Sterling Library and attended concerts in Woolsey Hall, Mason had never been to campus. "I'm dying to see the Gutenberg Bible," Killings said. "I've never been inside the Beinecke Library before and seeing the Bible is the most important thing I want to do today."
Marisol Osorio, who moved to New Haven recently, brought her three children. "This is a really interesting thing for the kids," she said on her first visit to campus. "They'll get to learn a lot about Yale." Her 9-year-old son, Kidannys, said he loved the drums of the Yale Precision Marching Band.
Jimmy Liang, an 8-year -old from Hamden, enjoyed his trip to the Peabody Museum the most: "I liked seeing all the different rocks and minerals and going to the place where you could smell different things, like musk. That was cool."
Many campus guests visited Woolsey Hall to learn about the Newberry Organ. Organist Thomas Murray held up his shoe to explain that organists wear specially shaped, flexible footwear with extra-thick heels that allow them to play two notes with each foot. He demonstrated how much music he could make with his feet alone by playing a complex theme from a Bach gigue while waving his hands in the air.
The organ, with 12,617 pipes in a three-story chamber, dates back to 1903, when the oldest parts in existence were installed. The "echo room," added in the basement of Woolsey Hall in 1915, has 700 pipes of zinc, lead and sugar pine, producing tones that sound like horns, flutes and whistles. The instrument, which requires tuning three times a year due to changes in humidity and temperature, is powered by two 20-horsepower motors that make a constant roaring noise, either of which can provide the necessary air pressure to the organ.
"That was so amazing. One bass key weighs a ton!" exclaimed a woman from Guilford as she emerged from behind the organ pipes. "That sounds like thunder," exclaimed a young girl as she listened to a bass note she generated by pressing a doorbell-like button set up behind the pipes.
More than 1,000 people walked through the President's office in Woodbridge Hall; another 2,500 visited the President's House on Hillhouse Avenue.
"I'm impressed with all the art, the mix of the modern and the traditional," Peggy Rooney of Hartford said of the Hillhouse mansion. Madeline Follachio of Milford, added, "I'm impressed by the openness of the house, how it brings the outside in and the inside out."
Nearby at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies at Luce Hall, children received a "passport" for travel to different parts of the world including Africa, Latin America, East Asia, South Asia and Europe. The children had their passports stamped after joining an activity focused on a particular region. In Africa, they made an African mask; in East Asia, they learned how to write a few words in Chinese or Japanese; in Latin America, they learned how to do the meringue.
Children were also invited to play "Name That Country," a game in which a host spun a dial that pointed to various countries on a map. Along the way, children won goodies including Mexican cookies, a piece of leftover wood from the construction of the Amistad replica, and Asian candies. For their biggest treat, children enjoyed taking a whack at a piñata, and the youngsters had a great time picking up the whistles, frisbees and other goodies that fell from inside.
Each child also received a raffle ticket for a prize drawing featuring United Nations flags, a glow-in-the-dark constellation set, snake pens, travel clocks and other gifts with an international theme.
T H I S
W E E K ' SS T O R I E S
Yale kicks off 300th birthday
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Opening Yale 300: Images from the Celebration
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