NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Look up and you might discover something. Michael Stern did.
Stern is from New Haven and walking around Yale University one day he looked up and and saw hundreds of stone carvings and decided to do some research on what he saw. The retired copy writer didn’t find much written about them, so he got busy and did a lot of in-depth work in the archives at Yale, and wrote the book on them so everyone will now know how they got there and why.
“The architect James Gamble Rogers designed all those carvings. He was a very stoic guy and he was a Yale Grad way back, I think he graduated in 1894 or something like that, and they hired him to design all the new Gothic buildings at Yale,” said Stern. “There are 16 Gothic buildings, before that, it was a small campus.”
“He had this alter-ego personality which was very satirical and comical, and he expressed it in the carvings,” said Stern.
The stone carvings are not to be confused with gargoyles, because Yale has those, too.
You can read all about them in Stern’s book, Yale’s Hidden Treasures.
