Audioguides New Haven

New Haven is best understood as two cities that coexist with occasional friction. The Yale University campus, founded in 1701 and containing some of the finest Gothic Revival architecture in the United States, occupies the western portion of the city center. Harkness Tower, completed in 1921, rises 216 feet above Cross Campus and carillons out across the Green at certain hours of the day. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, opened in 1963 with its translucent marble walls that glow amber in sunlight, houses original Gutenberg Bibles and Audubon prints. Beyond the campus gates, the city has an industrial history, a dense Italian American community on Wooster Street, and a fierce local pride that Yale occasionally tries and fails to contain.

Frank Pepe opened his apizza joint on Wooster Street in 1925 and created something that New Haven residents will argue about, at length and with great intensity, until the end of time.

Whether Pepe's or Sally's (which opened nearby in 1938) makes the better pie is a question that has divided families and ended friendships. The style itself, the New Haven apizza, is coal-fired, slightly charred at the crust, with a thin and irregularly shaped base, and it is genuinely distinct from any other American pizza tradition. The Long Wharf Theatre and the Yale Repertory Theatre have made the city one of the more significant theater towns on the East Coast for sixty years.