To the Editor:

Vincent Scully is exactly right: The high stone walls surrounding the Grove Street Cemetery should be torn down and replaced with a wrought-iron fence (“To Grove Street Cemetery: Tear down that wall,” 4/4).

My office is in Brewster Hall, on Prospect Street in the middle of the area designated for the two new residential colleges. For more than 30 years, as I have trudged back and forth between the central campus and Brewster; I have experienced first hand the barrenness, bleak cityscape and wind-tunnel effects created by the high cemetery wall along Prospect.

The Malone Center on the east side of Prospect is an elegant addition to the street. But the west side of Prospect is still dead space and will remain so until the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery, which controls the cemetery, realizes it has an obligation not only to the departed inhabitants but to the live souls who walk by every day.

There’s no need to add a second gate on the north side or to otherwise facilitate people walking through or congregating in the cemetery; after all, it is a cemetery. But replacing the high stone walls with a wrought-iron fence would make Prospect a much more attractive walkway and greatly reduce the sense of having to traverse a no-man’s land to get from the central campus area to the site of the new colleges.

David Cameron

April 4

The writer is a professor of political science at Yale.