Berkeley College

Berkeley College opened in 1934 and was named for George Berkeley (1685–1753), the Irish-Anglo philosopher-bishop whose writings influenced early American education and whose books went to Yale. Its Collegiate Gothic courtyards were designed by James Gamble Rogers to look “timelessly old”—yet the Berkeley site had been a very mixed patchwork before 1932 demolition cleared the block: boarding houses, small commercial structures, some tenement-scale flats, a scattering of wood-frame dwellings from the 19th century, and light service shops pinned between Elm/College/Grove. In fact, parts of the footprint straddled old blocks once considered the “edge” of campus before the Gothic expansion era. Berkeley’s signature South Court (with the five-story Branford/Entryway tower silhouette) gave it a distinct vertical profile among the early colleges—making it feel compressed, dense, almost Oxford-urban in comparison to the more open Branford/RH layout next door.