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Mark Alden Branch ’86
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Mark Alden Branch ’86
The cherry blossoms marking the advent of spring appeared in the courtyard of Vanderbilt Hall in April, an annual reminder that the end of the school year, commencement, and reunions are fast approaching. “A lot of pictures get taken in front of them,” says William Carone, Yale supervisor for landscape, grounds, and sanitation.
Back in 1894, when Vanderbilt was completed, Yale administrators hoped that the swanky building would bring wealthy students back to campus, after many had decamped to luxurious private dorms on the “Gold Coast” across Chapel Street. Cornelius Vanderbilt II donated the building in honor of his son William H. Vanderbilt ’93, who died of a typhus a year earlier, when he was a Yale junior. At the time, The New York Times predicted it would be “the finest structure of its kind in America.”
Although tour guides used to claim that the Vanderbilt courtyard faces Chapel Street rather than Old Campus because someone read the plans upside down, it was designed that way to allow carriages to enter the grand gates from Chapel and take students and their visitors to their door. Its south-facing position also provides a lot of sunlight for cherry trees and other flora.
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