Francis Dzikowski

In September of 2014, three student governing bodies at Yale — the Yale College Council, the Graduate and Professional Student Senate and the Graduate Student Assembly — came together and issued a joint report calling for a University-wide student center. In this report, they noted the need for more opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students and professional students to connect, collaborate and construct relationships with each other. They also requested that the University create more arts spaces on campus.

In response — following a $150 million gift from President Donald Trump confidant and business magnate Stephen Schwarzman ’69 in May 2016 — the historic Commons dining hall closed its doors and long-term renovations for a new campus hub, The Schwarzman Center, began.

“The mission of Yale Schwarzman Center is ‘to leverage dining, conversation, and the arts as part of students’ educational experience, convening people across schools, disciplines, and communities for moments of discovery and connection,’” Garth Ross, the Schwarzman Center’s executive director said. “We like this verbiage because it summarizes what students can expect to find: dining, conversation, the arts and moments of discovery and connection with people across schools, disciplines, and communities.”

Construction for the Yale Schwarzman Center, or YSC, broke ground in September of 2018. University administrators envisioned the renovated space as a locus for students across campus. Plans for the center featured a bar, bistro and dining hall, as well as various performance spaces and galleries for student art.

YSC was slated for unveiling in September of 2020, but the pandemic postponed its grand opening to the fall of 2021.

According to Schwarzman Center Director of Marketing and Communications Maurice Harris, the University delayed the center’s opening because its functions would focus on gatherings and performances — activities out of line with 2020’s social distancing guidelines. 

While the physical building remained closed, the team behind YSC hosted virtual programming throughout the semester. Some of the center’s digital offerings included the web series “One,” which highlighted collaborative approaches to the arts. 

Sept. 1, 2021 marked the long-awaited opening of the Schwarzman Center, commencing with lunch for Yale undergraduates in the Commons dining hall for the first time since 2017.

“The activation of lunch in Commons, seating in The Underground and grab-and-go service at The Bow Wow marks a busy start to the process of bringing the center’s spaces online,” Ross said in an interview with the News. “We’re so grateful to our partners in Yale Hospitality for these achievements.”

The Schwarzman Center’s focal point is Commons, the University’s historic dining hall, which first opened in 1901. The now-renovated space preserves its long wooden tables and chandeliers, complemented by a new PA system, air conditioning and projection screens.

According to Yale Hospitality Marketing and Communications Senior Manager Christelle Ramos, meals at Commons are different from the “all-you-care-to-eat” style of residential college dining halls. This supports Yale Hospitality’s 2019 Food Organic Waste Reduction Initiative.

“I was very pleasantly surprised and impressed by how good the food was,” Max Heimowitz ’23 said. “It feels like a fancier experience than the [residential college] dining halls.”

There are two cafes located in the Schwarzman Center’s Underground area. These shops are named The Elm and The Ivy as tribute to the “Elm City” and the Ivy League. The Elm is an all-day cafe featuring gelato and brewed coffee, while The Ivy serves “late night pub fare” in the evenings. 

The Ivy opened on March 29, 2022, and now offers late-night snacks and meals available for purchase. With most residential college dining halls closing at 7 or 7:30 pm — besides the Morse College and Ezra Stiles College dining halls, which both close at 8 p.m. — many students often look for late-night meal options on campus. The Ivy provides that option, offering late night dining and meals until 11 p.m. However, the new vendor does not accept dining swipes.

Yalies over 21 years of age can come to The Well, a dimly lit pub carved into the building’s granite foundation, which serves beer from Handsome Dan-shaped beer taps. Schwarzman Center marketing and communications director Maurice Harris said that the name applies not only to the room’s appearance but also to its mission of wellness. 

Another snack stop in The Underground is The Bow Wow, an unofficial replacement for Durfee’s convenience store, which closed in the spring of 2020. Here, students can use lunch swipes to pick up snacks such as sushi, kombucha and seaweed, and they can also purchase toiletries and Yale merchandise. 

The Underground also hosts a theater and dance studio. The theater is Yale’s only proscenium theater — a type of ancient theater where a rounded stage juts out to the audience — and viewers watch from four small booths with fireplaces called “inglenooks.” The dance studio, on the other hand, includes pan-tilt-zoom, or PTZ, cameras that swivel in several directions, AV systems, mounted speakers and a drop-down projection screen — adapted to the post-Zoom world. The space is currently used as a COVID-19 testing site.

“The studio is gorgeous; they’ve put a lot of time and energy and money into it, which the dance community is really grateful for,” said Nora Faverzani ’23, co-president of Yale Dancers. “The hope is that as the need for testing declines, the studio can be used for dance — there’s a lot of places you can do testing but not a lot of places you can dance.”

YSC is primarily a space for arts in addition to community building, and its arts offerings begin in Commons, where exhibitions can be displayed on screens. Visitors can experience student and professional art in two galleries, and students can request these spaces to display their work or book performing arts venues via YSC’s website.

On the center’s second floor is the Annex, a naturally-lit hallway with alcoves for students to meet. The Annex includes a graduate student lounge and houses a satellite location of Silliman’s Good Life Center. 

Alexa Vaghenas ’20, a Woodbridge Fellow at the Good Life Center, or GLC, said that graduate and professional school students often find the GLC’s Silliman location inaccessible. She looks forward to the GLC’s new reach and envisions other campus wellness centers in the future. 

“Creating a Good Life Center in YSC not only emphasizes the communal nature of student life, but also helps create a campus culture that promotes wellness as a fundamental, accessible human right,” Vaghenas wrote in an email to the News.

On the third floor is The Dome, a performance space that is equipped to serve any artistic purpose and exemplifies YSC’s call for creation and innovation. It includes a sprung floor, a PTZ camera, projection screens and a stage in the center of the room. 

Controversy has also surrounded YSC, as some students and faculty do not want the name of Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive officer of the Blackstone Group and loyal donor to former President Donald Trump, to be emblazoned on a building in the heart of Yale’s campus.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, some professors renewed calls on the University to remove Schwarzman’s name from the student center. They argued the symbolic cost of Schwarzman’s naming rights may be too high — even when offset by the $150 million donation the businessman gave to the University. 

University President Peter Salovey disagreed. In an interview with the News, he said that Yale would not place a moratorium on donations from Schwarzman or rename the Schwarzman Center — actions the University has taken against others in the past. Schwarzman, Salovey argued, has broken from Trump in the wake of the insurrection.

“I think it’s really important here to report the facts,” Salovey said in an interview with the News. He quoted from statements that Schwarzman made on Nov. 23 and Jan. 6. “He’s saying here, within weeks of the election, that the outcome is very certain and the country should move on.”

Still, professors disagree with the notion that Schwarzman’s allegiance to Trump should be ignored. Mark Oppenheimer, former program manager of the Yale Journalism Initiative, said any moves by Schwarzman — who has donated almost $4 million to Trump’s campaign efforts — to distance himself from Trump came “too little, too late.” 

Commons is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for lunch daily.