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The Secret Chapel of Harkness Tower

Yale’s Harkness Tower is, by my estimate, the finest tower in the United States and its designer, James Gamble Rogers, one of the best American architects of his day. JGR is in the Pantheon of his craft, though not quite as highly appreciated as Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue or Ralph Adams Cram.

Harkness Tower is a monument to verticality: from the ground up at each and every stage you expect it could end right there in completeness and beauty — but then it goes another stage higher. Rogers was inspired by the “Boston Stump” of St Botolph’s Church in Lincolnshire but he took that form and creatively expanded and elaborated upon it.

The tower rises 216 feet — one foot for every year Yale existed by the time of its construction.

Yalies – “Elis” – are inveterate founders of drinking clubs which, in order to cultivate a deliberate air of inscrutable mystery, they call “secret societies”, even though many of them are (thankfully) nothing which might rightly be called such.

It was years ago on one of my occasional stays in New Haven for some convivial merriment organised by just such a cabal that my old friend A.B. and I were passing Harkness Tower and I was expounding upon its beauty.

“You know, of course,” A.B. alleged, “it has a secret chapel in it.” I had no such knowledge, and pressed for more information. “Well it’s not quite a chapel, but it feels like one. The university almost never lets anyone use it.”

Universities never do. Once a university has anything, they do their best to stop people using it. (Anyone at Edinburgh University: just try throwing an event in the Raeburn Room in Old College and find out.)

The ‘secret chapel’ my friend alluded to does actually exist: the Memorial Room of Harkness Tower. It was described by one academic as “withdrawn from the public eye, a place of mystery only hinted to the outside observer through its large traceried window”.

A very tall room compared to its footprint, as you enter you view a fireplace opposite which bears the inscription commemorating Charles W. Harkness in whose memory everything surrounding was built. A Standard Oil man who died in 1916 aged 55, his mother Anna funded the construction of the entire Memorial Quadrangle out of grief for her son. Charles died with a fortune worth well over $4 billion in today’s money, most of which he left to his brother Edward.

In the years after the Quadrangle was finished, Edward Harkness donated the money to establish the residential college system at Yale, just as he did to establish the ‘house’ system at Harvard. Harkness was concerned at the rapid expansion of the old colleges-turned-universities, and thought that creating small communities along the lines of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge would help preserve the humane intimacy of these institutions. (For similar work today, see Dr Robert J O’Hara’s Collegiate Way website with its many resources.)

Edward Harkness was also proud of his Scottish roots – William Harkness of Dumfries having arrived in Massachusetts in 1716. His generosity to the University of St Andrews allowed my old hall of “Sallies” (St Salvator’s) to be built, and Harkness is commemorated in a stained glass window there as well as one bearing his coat of arms in the university chapel.

“It is not a large room,” the old Yale Professor of English Robert Dudley French wrote many moons ago, “nor one that makes any attempt to assume a dominant position in the design of the buildings.”

In this secluded place, where the world is quite shut out, and even the sounds that belong most intimately to the life of the college come but faintly—the voices of good friends, shouting confidences to one another from pavement to top-story window, after the fashion of an intimacy that is entirely unabashed; the rising and falling of some tune, that echoes through these courts as in the minds of men who heard it for the first time at Yale; the chimes in the chapel belfry, answered by the tones of the bells in the tower above—in this spot, the affections that lie beneath the noisy surface of the life of Yale may be spoken freely.

While other rooms serve their practical purpose, the Professor contended, “not this room”:

It must remain a place apart, its own beauty the sole reason for its being. Men will come and linger here, of course, for one reason or another; and if they stand solitary under its vaulted ceiling, they will know that they are not quite alone, for the vague stirring of love and grief and joy will quicken the still air about them. Here… they will learn that these buildings were the product of the most genuine feeling and that they hold within them the finest things that lay within the gift of many natures.

The Memorial Room was the last room of the Quadrangle to be completed. Professor Robert Dudley French, again, relays a tale of its construction:

The man who was given charge of the construction of the fan vaulting in the Memorial Room — the only vault that has been so built in this country or in many years — looked thoughtful when they told him what he was to do; and presently, he slipped quietly off to England to study the principles of fan vaulting avroad, where he might have examples of the finished thing before his eyes. When he returned, he knew the art from A to Z. His workmen, however, were a little skeptical, not feeling so very sure of what they were about. They had never built anything that held itself up in this preposterous fashion, and they mistrusted the mysterious mechanical laws which the old Gothic builders had discovered. To convince them, he placed an egg just where the strain would crush it if they were right and the Gothic builders wrong; and when the work was finished, he had the satisfaction of showing them the egg as whole as it had ever been. All part of a day’s work, these experiences, yet not the sort of thing men encounter nowadays on the usual job.

But my friend was not entirely wrong: for a number of years in the 2000s, the Memorial Room was used as a chapel by a Buddhist group which eventually moved to Battell Chapel (as reported in the Yale Daily News).

No matter: I was simply happy to discover this ‘secret chapel’ does exist.

Photo: Henry Ehrenberg / Yale Daily News
Published at 12:35 pm on Wednesday 11 December 2024. Categories: Architecture History Tags: , .
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