Fourteen buildings ring the four-acre courtyard of the Old Campus, the oldest area of Yale University's campus in New Haven, Connecticut. This quadrangle is the principal residence of Yale College first years and also holds offices for Classics, English, History, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy. Fourteen buildings — including eight dormitories and two chapels — ring a four-acre courtyard whose main entrance from the New Haven Green is known as Phelps Gate.
Think of this place as Yale's historic heart: when the college arrived in New Haven in 1718 it occupied most of this ground. Yale's first building in New Haven, the College House, was erected in 1718 on the Old Campus' southeast corner to answer the city founders' wish to have a college near New Haven's Congregational church. In 1750 Connecticut Hall joined the campus as a student dormitory and remains Yale's only surviving building from the colonial era.
In 1792 the linear Old Brick Row established the first campus plan in the United States and set a template for many nineteenth-century American college campuses. After 1870 that original plan gave way to the quadrangle of dormitories and academic buildings you see around you. Notice Phelps Gate framing the entrance from the Green, the threshold into Yale's oldest quadrangle.