24.7 Medicine at Yale: Sunday: Chapel Street

New Haven offers the amenities of a larger city on a scale that makes them easily accessible.

A free afternoon invites a stroll in downtown New Haven, with its museums, restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, and galleries. New Haven is centered on the Green, a distinctive public space laid out more than 350 years ago that today hosts lively festivals and performances as well as picnics and pigeons. Two nationally acclaimed repertory theaters are within close reach.

Yale University itself is a major cultural institution, drawing world-renowned musicians, actors, artists, and writers. And all these opportunities are virtually around the corner–a five-minute walk from the medical campus–making New Haven an intensely livable city.

New Haven is also special for its location on the shoreline of southern Connecticut, and Yale students quickly learn to make themselves at home in the area. Towns such as Guilford and Durham offer postcard images of New England, and they’re only a twenty-minute drive from downtown New Haven.

If you’d rather, you can hike up Sleeping Giant Mountain for views all the way to Long Island; you can take out a boat from the Yale sailing club in Branford, ten minutes up along the Connecticut coast; you can pick apples or berries at a nearby orchard; you can catch a train to New York or Boston – both Amtrak and Metro-North trains run out of Union Station, a few blocks from the medical school. But you will always come back for real New Haven pizza, widely acknowledged to be the best in the world outside Italy!