page_title: Wolf's Head (secret society)
section_title: The Halls
hierarchical_section_title: Wolf's Head (secret society) / The Halls
caption_attribution_description: English: I took this photo depicting Yale's historic Wolf's Head Society, designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, behind its high stone wall. Picture taken June 2007.
context_page_description: Wolf's Head Society is a senior society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Membership recomposes annually with sixteen Yale University students, typically rising seniors. The delegation spends its year together answerable to an alumni association. Though Yale now counts upwards of 40 societies or similarly organized social clubs active on campus, Wolf's Head is considered a desirable one and relevant among current undergraduates.
  The society was founded fifty years after the establishment of Skull and Bones Society. Fifteen rising seniors from the Yale Class of 1884, with help from members of the Yale Class of 1883 who were considered publicly possible taps for the older societies, chose to abet the creation of The Third Society. The society changed its name to Wolf's Head five years later.
  The effort was aided by more than 300 Yale College alumni and a few Yale Law School faculty, in part to counter the dominance of the Skull and Bones Society in undergraduate and university affairs.
  The founding defeated the last attempt by the administration or the student body to abolish secret or senior societies at Yale.
context_section_description: The "Old Hall" was erected within months of the founding. The older Academical Department societies met originally for decades in rented quarters near campus. Skull and Bones opened its tomb in 1856, more than two decades after its founding. Scroll and Key did likewise; it opened its tomb in 1869 more than two decades after the society's founding.
  McKim, Mead and White, firm of. 1884, former or "Old Hall" at 77 Prospect Street, across the street from the Grove Street Cemetery, commissioned for the Phelps Trust Association, Richardsonian Romanesque.  Purchased by the University in 1924, rented to Chi Psi fraternity (1924–29), Book and Bond (defunct society) (1934–35), and Vernon Hall (now Myth and Sword) (1944–54). Currently houses the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
  A building with narrow windows, the "Old Hall" was noted as "the most modern and handsomest" of the society domiciles by The New York Times in 1903. The building was erected in 1884 soon after the founding members secured financing.
  Bertram Goodhue, architect, designed "New Hall", ca. 1924; built posthumously. Goodhue was a protege of James Renwick Jr., architect of the first St. Anthony Hall chapter house in New York City.
  The building has stone wall and wrought iron fencing, and is central to the largest secret society compound on campus. The compound commands the most prominent location on campus beyond Harkness Tower, the very icon of Yale, and the Memorial Quadrangle.
  The "New Hall" opened in the mid 1920s and sits fronted by York Street surrounded by the Yale Daily News Briton Hadden Memorial building, and the Yale Drama School and theatre, both gifts to Yale from Edward Harkness. It is near the former homes of the Fence Club (or Psi Upsilon, 224 York Street), DKE (232 York Street) and Zeta Psi (212 York Street).
caption: Goodhue's evocative Wolf's Head Society building, shown behind its high stone enclosure.
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