Memorial Quadrangle was the gift of the Harkness
vast wealth, derived from Standard
by a role second only to the bequests of
ing (B.A. 1864) in shaping the physical
in the twentieth century. Mrs. Stephen
offered the university $1.8 million to
history complex in memory of her son,
Harkness (B.A. 1883), with the under-
if it cost more than that to erect the
acture that she and her surviving son,
Harkness (B.A. 1897), had in mind, she
to make her gift—enormous by the
day—larger still. The university at
was bursting out of the Old Campus, and
a shelter-skelter nature of its expansion
easingly at odds with Yale’s image of
institution devoted to the education and

FIG. 248 Memorial Quadrangle: plan of the ground floor.

ably motivated not only by a wish to give the campus
clarity, but also in part by a desire to give their urban
university some of the picturesque ease that is more
naturally associated with rural campuses. They were
especially fortunate, then, to have put so much of
their trust in James Gamble Rogers, for it turned out
to be Rogers's particular gift to be able to create build-
ings that blended the appeal of the rural with the uni-
fied strength of a healthy urban fabric. Rogers could
design in a manner that simultaneously satisfied
the desire for grandeur, the desire for picturesque-
ness, and the desire for wholeness and consistency.

The Yale Corporation took an early step toward
its goal of reshaping the physical form of the univer-
sity with the appointment, in 1913, of a consulting

development of Peabody Square, as the site just
west of the Old Campus was known. Bounded by
York, Elm, High, and Library Streets, it housed the
original Peabody Museum of 1873-76 and Pierson
Hall of 1896, both designed by J. Cleveland Cady;
the Old Gymnasium (Herrick Hall) of 1859, designed
by Chauncey A. Dickerman; the university's power
plant; and several commercial structures (FIGS. 249-
252; see also FIG. 160). The university had targeted
it for expansion, and Day, who apparently did not
share Rogers's concerns about limits on a consulting
architect, had begun working on a design. Two
deaths soon changed Yale's history: that of Charles
Harkness in 1916, which led to his family's gift for a
residential building to occupy the entire Peabody