“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year [2000] History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony’s founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”
— Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001
“Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,” XXVIII
See also Art and Man at Yale.