Harkness Tower
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Image:Harkness Tower 1.jpg Harkness Tower is a prominent Gothic structure at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, built from 1917 to 1921.
The tower was constructed as part of the Memorial Quadrangle donated to Yale by Anna M. Harkness in honor of her recently deceased son. It was designed by James Gamble Rogers, who designed many of Yale's "Collegiate Gothic" structures and was inspired by "Boston Stump," the 15th-century high tower of the parish church (of St Botolph) in Boston, England, the parish church with the highest tower in all of England, with some details from a tower at Elihu Yale's burial site, Saint Giles in Wrexham, Wales. From street level to the roof there are 284 steps. It was, when built, the only couronne ("crown") tower in English Perpendicular Gothic style that had been constructed in the modern era.
The tower contains the Yale Memorial Carillon, a 54-bell carillon. Ten bells were installed in 1922, and the instrument was augmented by the addition of 44 bells in 1961. The instrument is played by members of a university club set up for the purpose, the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs[1]. (Some residents of Branford College and Saybrook College, of which the tower forms a part of the periphery, have been known to call the daily performances "death by bells.")
Harkness Tower is 216 feet (66 m) tall, with a square base rising in stages to a double stone crown on an octagonal base, dissolving at the top in a spray of stone pinnacles. It was built of separate stone blocks in the authentic manner, and was at the time the tallest free-standing stone structure in the world; more recently it was reinforced with steel in order to more safely bear the weight of the carillon bells that were added in 1961. Midway to the top, four openwork copper clockfaces tell the hours. The bells of the carillon are located behind the clockfaces, fixed to a frame made of steel I-beams.
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 depicts 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 gargoyles on the top level depict Yale's students at war and in study (a pen-wielding writer, a proficient athlete, a tea-drinking socialite, and a diligent scholar), along with masks of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare.
The witticism, attributed to various modernist architects, 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, derivative of a similar story told of Alexandre Dumas and the Eiffel Tower).
The tower's image was adopted by the Yale Herald, a weekly student newspaper, for its masthead.