Checking in with the Taft

Architecture and Building

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“To the theater world, New Haven, Connecticut, is a short stretch of sidewalk between the Shubert Theater and the Taft Hotel, surrounded by what looks very much like a small city.” That's how screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz—through the narrator of the film All About Eve—summed up the importance of two New Haven institutions. (Yale didn't rate a mention.) The older of the two, the Taft, turns 100 this year, and while it is no longer a haven for Broadway divas and scheming ingénues, it still figures heavily in Yale life as a popular apartment building for students. Its cachet in fiction hasn't quite disappeared, either: on the TV show Gilmore Girls, Rory Gilmore's well-heeled boyfriend lived in the Taft.

Coincidentally, a group of new owners just announced that Richter's, the bar on the Taft's ground floor, will reopen this year after being dark since June—a kind of anniversary gift to the campus.