Harkness Tower

Harkness Tower is a prominent Gothic structure at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. \nThe tower was constructed as part of the Memorial Quadrangle donated to Yale by Anna M. Harkness in honor of her son. It was designed by James Gamble Rogers and inspired by Saint Botolph's Tower in Boston, England and a tower at Elihu Yale's burial site, Saint Giles in Wrexham, Wales, and was, when built, the only couronne tower constructed in the modern era. It is 216 feet tall, with a square base and an octagonal crown. Four copper clockfaces tell the hours midway to the top of the tower. The tower contains a 54-bell carillon, which is played by members of a university club set up for the purpose. (Residents of Branford College, of which Harkness forms a part of the periphery, are known to call the daily performances "death by bells.") Its decorative elements were sculpted by Lee Lawrie (1877-1963). The lowest level of sculpture depicts Yale's Eight Worthies: Elihu Yale, Jonathan Edwards, Nathan Hale, Noah Webster, James Fenimore Cooper, John C. Calhoun, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Eli Whitney. The second level of sculpture are Phidias, Homer, Aristotle, and Euclid. The next level of sculpture consists of allegorical figures depicting Medicine, Business, Law, the Church, Courage and Effort, War and Peace, Generosity and Order, Justice and Truth, Life and Progress, and Death and Freedom. The top level depicts Yale's students at war and in study along with masks of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. The witticism, usually attributed to a famous architect, that had he "to choose any place in New Haven to live" he would select the Harkness Tower, for then he "would not have to look at it," is apparently apocryphal (and is in any case derivative of a similar story told of Alexandre Dumas and the Eiffel Tower). The tower's image was adopted by the Yale Herald, the undergraduate weekly newspaper, for its masthead.