115 Howe Street

A few steps up the block where Elm Street and Howe Street meet lies a tall, narrow house that stands out from its neighbours in both colour and style (Images 1 and 2). 115 Howe Street’s bright red bricks and dark green, glass-sided vestibule make the house unmistakably recognisable among the rows of clapboard built Greek Revival houses and tall apartment buildings that surround it. Built in 1879–80 in the Victorian Gothic style, the house is a modest example of what the 1979 state surveyors compared to renowned New Haven architect Rufus Russell’s “High Victorian Gothic,” though with less exterior ornamentation and more influence from Stick style. Despite its additions, including the pedimented entrance to the house itself, the original brick form has been largely unchanged; its steep gable roof and stone lintels over the windows have now become a historic part of the Dwight Street district.

Its story begins with an unusual owner. In 1879 the lot was bought not by a husband but by a wife, Mary L. Clinton, in her own name, only two years after Connecticut began to recognise married women as owners of property. Since then, the house has been a grocer’s family home, a lodging house for clerks, nurses and dressmakers, the family home and medical office of an Italian-American doctor, and, after 1979, a set of rented apartments. Today it is lived in for the first time by Yale students. Despite its striking exterior, the house’s history is more in common with its peers, following the wider story the city around it from prosperous industrial town to immigrant boarding district to a neighbourhood increasingly shaped by the university next door.