Leo Fraternity House

The Leo fraternity house at 35 High Street is a townhouse built in the mid-19th century, whose history extends long past the more recent tumultuous social history of its current occupants. The three-story Italianate-style house features a Federal Revival porch with Corinthian columns that were added around 1915. Though the house has withstood the test of time, signs of wear and tear are visible in the peeling stucco exterior and general disarray of the backyard. The house forms a polarizing image in the Yale cultural landscape, an image bolstered by photos of the house’s Federal Revival porch and exterior lion statues that frame the porch in Yale Daily News articles chronicling the behavior of some of its members.

Pettis family (1840-mid 1930s), Mrs. E. T. Freeman and L. E. Freeman (1939-1955), E. M. Seger (1955), communal office space shared by R S Fisher, S J Alderman, and F Rossoff (1956-mid 1960s), Yale Hillel Chabad (mid 1960s-1995), Connecticut Omega Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity (1996-2016), Leo Fraternity (2016-present)

The house at 35 High Street was built in 1840, a time in which New Haven was flourishing as an industrial and manufacturing city, and just after the first railroad to New Haven was completed in 1839. After the end of the Civil War, Yale constructed its “semipublic art building” at the corner of High and Chapel (where the Yale Center for British Art stands today), and the area began to develop into a “Gold Coast” of showy middle class houses and private dormitories for affluent students. The addition of the 1915 Federal Revival porch came at a time of renewed industrial activity in New Haven because of its armory.

Though the immediate block surrounding 35 High has been mostly residential since its construction (the house was constructed around the same time as the houses at both 26 and 38 High Street), the conversion of the three houses that make up “frat row” changed its relationship to its surroundings. The uses of the house will be discussed further in the social history section.

Additionally, city building records seem to indicate some sort of fire damage to the house was incurred around 1991, though the nature and extent of the fire is unclear.

Throughout the history of 35 High Street, the residential style building has functioned as a mostly private yet social space (in different specific uses). For much of the early history of the house, though the property was privately owned, the owners made use of it by renting out furnished rooms. In the 1960s into the early 21st century, the house was the home of the Chabad for Yale’s Hillel, the center for Jewish Campus Life and home to its rabbi. Presently, the house is occupied by Leo, the fraternity formerly known as Sigma Alpha Epsilon, in a continued private function, closed to the public, but open to Yale students and invited guests during party hours on the weekends. 

According to New Haven Museum Library records, the house appears to have been originally owned by Clinton Pettis. The property originally included both 35 and 37 High Street at a single address, 37 High Street. By the printing of the 1886 Sanborn Map, the house that is today 37 High Street was constructed under Pettis’ ownership and rented furnished rooms (likely to Yale students) at both 35 and 37 High Street.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, entries in the Yale Banner (the university yearbook) seem to indicate that the Decagon Club, a Yale Dining Club met at 35 High Street. George Pettis (evidence suggests he is Clinton’s son), was a Yale alumnus, and the use of the building as a dining club while it was still in residential use foreshadows its present fraternity occupants.

By 1939, the house appears to have been out of the hands of the Pettis family, as the sole residents of the house listed are a Mrs. E. T. Freeman and L. E. Freeman; at this time the Freemans were still offering furnished rooms for rent. In 1955 the house passed into the hands of E. M. Seger, who continued to offer the furnished rooms for rent.

By the time of entry in the 1961 city directory, the house had been converted into office space, in use by a civil engineer (R S Fisher), an accountant (S J Alderman), and a lawyer (F Rosoff). Though the residential design is uncommon in office programming, the house continued to serve in its historical private/social capacity.

In the mid-60s, the building changed hands yet again. The building served as part of the community building vision for Jewish life at Yale, championed by Rabbi Richard J. Israel. After the end of restrictive quotas that determined how many Jewish students could attend Yale, the number of Jewish students and faculty increased substantially. Responding to this need, Rabbi Israel and the Yale Hillel Board of Trustees launched a campaign to buy 35 and 37 High Street, one to house the rabbi and his family, and the other to house Yale Hillel. The two buildings served the Jewish community in this joint capacity until the Sept. 1995 opening of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, which then housed the previously spread out elements of campus Jewish life.

In May of 1996, the house was sold to the “Connecticut Omega Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon,” the housing corporation that still owns the house today. Upon their purchase of the house, several elements that identified the fraternity house were added, including the traditional Sigma Alpha Epsilon Greek lettering on the wrought iron railing as well as the tiling of SAE Greek lettering on the kitchen wall.

Part of the reason why the building at 35 High Street persists in Yale’s cultural memory is due to the controversies that surrounded Sigma Alpha Epsilon during its time on campus. SAE as a national organization has been plagued by numerous incidents of racial and sexual misconduct, including two incidents in 2015 — one at the University of Oklahoma in which a video of fraternity brothers singing a racist song on a bus went viral and another of sexual misconduct at Stanford’s chapter. In February of 2015, then Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway banned Yale’s chapter of SAE from campus and prohibited them from using the SAE name in connection to Yale, after a University investigation found that the chapter had violated University policies on sexual misconduct.

However, the February 2015 ban did not prevent more controversy from plaguing the house, which drew national headlines during a heated period of racial unrest on campus in the fall of 2015. During the weekend of Halloween 2015, members of SAE were accused of discrimination; according to allegations, they barred entry into their Halloween party on the basis of race. Interestingly enough, in national coverage of the incident by publications like The Washington Post and Time, the publications chose to run generic photos of Yale, not the house at 35 High. In Yale Daily News and campus coverage of the house, images of the house were used.

In May 2016, the fraternity brothers announced they were disaffiliating from the national organization, instead choosing to go by the name “Leo.” In the YDN article that broke this news, a photo of the house at 35 High ran with an American flag draping over the wrought iron railing where the SAE letters hung.

In September 2017, Leo came under scrutiny after a black student at Southern Connecticut State University claimed on Facebook that the brothers turned her and her friends away from a party because of her race. A month later, the YDN broke the news that Leo had still not disaffiliated from the national organization of SAE. The house is still listed as being owned by the Connecticut Omega Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (when asked about this, a brother from the organization said that this was due to the nature of the housing corporation as an entity that formed to buy the house). Even though the lion statues still flank the staircase out front and show the fraternity’s current affiliations, remnants of its days as SAE still remain. The tiling in the kitchen still stands. An old piece of plywood with SAE painted on in yellow lettering sits in the backyard. SAE is haphazardly spray painted on both the oven and the refrigerator. Though Leo is still in its infancy, having existed for almost two years, their future as an institution is held back by the structural ties that the house holds.

Although it was designed as a house, the life of the building was never defined by single-family occupancy. Though its owners and the specific type of boarding has changed over the years, the house has rarely been used by a single family in the ways that traditionally define home.

The house sits in a densely packed residential area that borders the Chapel Street commercial district. Though the street is rather peaceful on the weekdays (despite heavy car traffic), the Leo house, along with the adjacent Sigma Nu house and Sigma Phi Epsilon, are commonly frequented by Yale students on the weekends, with lines out the door of each of the three fraternities. Together, they are referred to as the “High Street Frats” or “Frat Row.”