New Haven - weekend of April 21st

There are some things that we've wanted to do since we moved to New Jersey.  Some of them are the more obvious - the Statue of Liberty, a Broadway show, Boston, etc.  Some of them are more obscure, but still things we knew we wanted to do.  One of those was go to New Haven, CT.

New Haven is most notable for being the home of Yale University of the Ivy League.  It's known to be a beautiful campus, and the city is supposed to be pretty neat, too.  We left in the morning on Saturday, April 21 to spend the day there.

Our first stop was nothing unique to an Ivy League schools - like all colleges, Yale has some interesting restaurants around campus.  We got to Louis' Lunch for... lunch!  Legend has it that this is place gave birth to an American favorite - the hamburger.  Back in 1900, Louis Lassen was in his 5th year of operating a lunch wagon.  A customer needed to eat his meal to go, so Louis put his ground beef mix in between two slices of bread - and the burger was born.  We heard about the local favorite on Man vs. Food - a great show on the Travel Channel.

We got there right at noon when the tiny restaurant opened, and there was already a line.  Louis' Lunch has a very limited menu - basically you get a burger that comes between two pieces of bread (not a bun - toasted white bread), and can order it with cheese, tomato and onions.  But no ketchup or mustard - that would ruin the burger :)  You can get an order of potato salad (we got some), and aside from the beverages, that's it.  We both got the burgers and split an order of potato salad, and we thought they were a great start to our day!

We figured we should walk off some of that lunch, so we next headed to East Rock Park - which is a preserved park area just East of Yale and downtown New Haven.

East Rock is basically a cliff where you can look down on New Haven and see the city below, and Long Island from across the water.

There's a pretty cool monument at the top - this honors all the soldiers from New Haven who have died in various American battles.

You drive up to the top of East Rock, but we also did a little walking on the trails around there - we wondered what our dog Griffey would do if he got this close to a deer?!?

After enjoying the park, we grabbed some ice cream from the local ice cream place - called Ashley's Ice Cream - and walked around Yale's campus.  It's a pretty campus, with unique architecture.  

The Old College at Yale was the one that got our attention the most.  Old College is a block of dormitories where the first building of Yale College was built in 1718.  It's not there any more, but Bingham Hall is where that first building was located.  Connecticut Hall is the oldest building still standing - it was built in 1752.  Connecticut Hall used to be a dorm - and Nathan Hale who died in the Revolution uttering the famous words "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country".  He has a statue in the quad.

All of the different dormitories on the campus are called "colleges" - Katie was excited to see the "college" that Gilmore Girls was based on - Calhoun College:

Charlie, however, was most excited to see that Yale students are about the same as all other college students.  We saw some pledges being hazed - they had to crawl across the quad of the Old College while dressed in slacks and a shirt and tie.  Most importantly to Charlie - it is clear that Yale students, like all college students, still drink cheap watered down beer like Keystone Light!

After looking at some of the shops in New Haven, we ended the day going to a local pizza restaurant called Frank Pepe's.  Pepe's was founded in 1925 and was the first of the New Haven style pizza - known as "Apizza".  According to the always correct Wikipedia, what sets Apizza apart is the thin crust.  The pizzas are cooked in brick ovens and bakes the crust to a crispy shell on the outside while leaving the inside soft.  Also, at Pepe's, the mozzarella was originally - and still is - considered a topping.  So if you just ordered a plain pizza, you would get dough, tomato sauce and some parmesan sprinkled on.  They are also famous for their "clam pie" - which, yes, has clams on it.  We got the Mozzarella pizza with some pepperoni - it was delicious.

We stopped by the Yale Bowl, which is a famous venue that hosts the famed Harvard-Yale game every other year.  After a long day, we headed home to our lonely dog Griffey, tired but happy we'd seen another part of the Northeast!