Palladium Building

One of the last Antebellum buildings still standing in New Haven’s Historic 9th Square, (1) the Palladium Building is a primarily Renaissance Revival building composed of brownstone. New Haven’s 9th Square, located just southeast of the central Green, is a particularly dynamic site, and serves as an excellent litmus test for New Haven’s changing urban landscape. As a result, the Palladium Building has served a variety roles reflecting the ever-changing urban landscape around it. Today, it is a standard mixed-use commercial space, with storefronts on its ground floor and offices on its upper levels, although its upper stories are planned to undergo another change into upmarket apartments over the coming years. (2)

Young Men’s Institute, New Haven Palladium, Home Insurance Company, James Hillhouse High School, Nicholas Furs.

At its construction in 1855, the most direct context for the Palladium Building was the eclectic Greek-Revival Phoenix Building located across Chapel Street, which was the previous home of the Young Men’s Institute. (16) The following year, Henry Austin’s Second-Empire style Tradesman’s Bank was constructed directly adjacent to the Palladium Building. (17) These buildings, joined orthogonally, created a small alley connecting Orange Street with Union Street. By 1901, the Tradesman’s Bank was vacated, and the rest of the block was dominated by the Howe and Stetson Department Store. During this span, the alley between Orange and Union had widened into a small road: Pitkin Street. (18) By 1924, the Palladium Building was likewise vacant. The Tradesman’s Bank and seemingly every remaining inch of the block had been encompassed by the Howe and Stetson, which had then changed hands to become the Shartenberg & Robinson Co. Department Store. By 1973, the rest of the block, save for the still-vacant Palladium building had been demolished for parking. Pitkin Street remained, now as a wide traffic thoroughfare. (19) This metamorphosis reflected New Haven’s change into a commuter city, as this site stood only a few blocks away from I-95’s ramps.

The formal redevelopment of the Palladium Building’s site began with its 1981 restoration: by this time, Pitkin Street had been moved underground, forming the Pitkin Tunnel. In this new space, Pitkin Plaza was constructed in 1983. (20) In conjunction with the tunnel and plaza, a series of brick towers were erected both as ventilation for the tunnel below, and as decorations for the

plaza. (21) In 2008, the parking space that replaced the Shartenberg & Robinson Store was replaced by the 360 State Street development, marking a massive investment in revitalizing the Ninth Square.

The now-Palladium Building was first built to host the Young Men’s Institute of New Haven, now housed across Orange Street. (6) However, no documents exist to explicitly state the building’s architect. As the style of the building is fairly standard, the spatial and social context of the building can narrow down its architect’s identity. Mills-Brown cites the building as Henry Austin’s handiwork due to its similarities to Henry Austin’s now-demolished Second-Empire style Tradesman’s Bank adjacent to it. On a greater geographic scale, this quarter of New Haven was densely saturated with Austin’s work. The Ninth Square lies only a block away from Wooster Square, which at that time contained Austin’s Governor English House (c. 1845), Willis Bristol House (c. 1845), and later the Oliver North House (c. 1865). As architects often operated on a community level during this period, such connections would favor the Palladium building as a product of Austin’s office. (7) O’Gorman also subscribes to this theory of social and community association: Austin’s apprentice Robert Hill was an alumnus of the Young Men’s Institute, and Austin’s later clients included members of the Institute’s board -- who also lived nearby. (8)

The Young Men’s Institute served as a hub of cultural education for the new urban working class. Originally founded in 1826 by mechanical apprentices, the Institute’s relevance grew rapidly along with New Haven’s industrial boom. (9) The Institute served as a stopgap measure in adult education, filling a civic void until the establishment of public libraries in 1887. While housing the Young Men’s Institute, the then-Institute Building hosted a variety of other educational facilities, including New Haven’s first public high school (now Hillhouse High). However, the Institute’s membership declined precariously in the economic slump following the Civil War, and the Institute Building changed hands a number of times through the 1860s and 1870s. (10)

Eventually, the building came into the possession of another core civic institution, The New Haven Palladium newspaper. The New Haven Palladium ran starting from 1835, with changing circulations and publication schedules (alternating between combinations of daily, tri-weekly, and monthly formats) until the paper’s eventual liquidation in 1901. (11) From the mailing address listed on the Palladium, the move into the Palladium Building took place somewhere between 1863 and

1886: (12) it was also during this period that the auxiliary wing to the building was constructed to contain a print shop. Previously, the Palladium offices were located at the nearby Adelphi Building, which has been replaced by the State Street Train Station.

After the end of The Palladium’s occupancy, the building remained vacant until for the majority of the 20th century. (14) Eventually, it was bought up by the city and slated for demolition, before a mixture of public opinion and private investment led to a restoration in 1981. (15) Since then, it has changed hands a considerable number of times: currently, its occupants include Tikkaway Grill, G Cafe, and The Devil’s Gear. It is currently owned by New-Haven based NHR Group.

The current site of the Palladium Building bears little resemblance to any of the diverse sites that have surrounded the Palladium Building over the years. It remains on the busy urban intersection, and now stands directly above the Pitkin Street tunnel. Currently, it faces the current Young Men’s Institute to the West, an empty lot to the South, the fairly recently-christened Pitkin Plaza to the North, and the towering 360 State complex to the East. As a result, it is most predominantly a part of the wave of urban renewal projects centered around the new 360 State development. Pitkin Plaza is now a gathering spot for people who work in downtown, though most residents of downtown New Haven do not use the space. 

The original structure of the Palladium Building is a fairly standard model of the Renaissance Revival style, not exhibiting much of the whimsical eclecticism associated with Henry Austin, its most likely architect. (3) The three-story facade is unsurprisingly tripartite, fitting neatly into the timeless rusticated-base to piano nobile progression. The ground floor does vary slightly, with large windowed, quoin-framed bays to accommodate shop-fronts instead of the traditional solid, opaque composition. Today, wood and plaster extensions provide additional room for the shops on the ground floor, and almost entirely mask the base of the original building. The rest of the facade is fairly standard: the sides are lined with quoins in diminishing magnitude, pediments adorn each window, diminishing in scale in each level, and the overall composition is framed and divided by a series of ornamented brackets. In the center of the facade, a lavishly ornamented stone sign denotes the building’s current name. From the facade, the core of the building seems symmetrical: five bays of windows, with the main entrance centered, occupying a square footprint. However, a slightly later-built auxiliary wing to the building, a duplication of its two side bays, interferes with its idealized facade. (4) This disorienting effect made even more apparent by the jutting firewall left over after its neighboring buildings were demolished. (5) Over the last twenty years, an additional facade has been grafted onto the building’s rear as the building took on additional commercial uses: here, a triangular metal-and brick porch is attached, framing modern sliding electric doors.

(1) “Ninth Square Historic District,” The New Haven Preservation Trust, accessed Jan. 31, 2018.  

(2) “Palladium Building,” The NHR Development Group, accessed Feb. 20, 2018.

(3) Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976), 118.

(4) James F. O’Gorman, Henry Austin: In Every Variety of Architectural Style (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008), 216. 

(5) Sanborn Map Company of New York, Insurance Maps of New Haven Connecticut, Volume 1, 1924, 12.

(6) Brown, New Haven, 118.

(7) Elizabeth Mills Brown, The Historic Houses of Wooster Square (New Haven: NH Preservation Trust, 1969), 14.

(8) O’Gorman, Henry Austin, 147.

(9) William Borden, An Historical Sketch of the New Haven Young Men’s Institute (New Haven: New Haven Young Men’s Institute, 1904).

(10) ibid.

(11) “New Haven Daily Palladium Sold,” The New York Times, April 26, 1901, NYT TimesMachine Archives.

(12) See fig. 3

(13) Sanborn Map Company of New York, Insurance Maps of New Haven Connecticut, Volume 1, 1901, 8.

(14) Sanborn, Insurance Map, 1924, 13.

(15) Melissa Bailey, “Whole G Eyes Historic Bru Cafe Haunt,” New Haven Independent, May 14, 2014.

(16) Bowden, Historical Sketch.

(17) Brown, New Haven, 118.

(18) Sanborn, Insurance Map, 1924, 12.

(19) Sanborn Map Company of New York, Insurance Maps of New Haven Connecticut, Volume 1, 1973, 9.

(20) Bailey, “Historic Cafe.”

(21) As searching city archives found no information on the purported aesthetic qualities of these ventilation shafts, their aesthetic value is just personal interpretation.