Collection Stories: A New Haven Back Yard

To help mark the occasion of Historic New England’s 115th anniversary in 2025, we are sharing some of our favorite collection stories from Historic New England magazine—which turns twenty-five this year. This month, admire A New Haven Back Yard, an unsentimental ca. 1940 street scene of the Connecticut city.

Collecting images and documents that tell the stories of life in New England in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a priority for the Library and Archives. This ca. 1940 watercolor, attributed to artist Robert T. Riley, does just that. Riley and other artists of this period recorded working-class settings. New Haven Back Yard highlights a side of the city’s life that is rarely documented, illustrating the backs of houses with fire escapes and parking areas without sentimentality. The portrayal of this neighborhood provides a contrast to the Yale University campus with its grand architecture and even grander intellectual presence that often overshadows other communities in New Haven. The acquisition of this watercolor supports Historic New England’s Everyone’s History initiative, an effort to document the most varied experiences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life in the region.

Written by Abigail Cramer, formerly a Librarian/Archivist at Historic New England

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Historic New England magazine. Check the blog monthly for new posts in our Collection Stories series.