The Yard Welcomes New Rutgers Students with New Grass, Beefed-Up Programming

NEW BRUNSWICK – It was a day of firsts for Donna, a freshman with her eye on studying history at Rutgers. As the new school year kicked off Tuesday, she took her first Rutgers bus ride, went to her English class and stumbled upon The Yard.

“You mean they do that all here?” she said, when told that this 25,000-square-foot space near the corner of College Avenue and Hamilton Street has been home to everything from raucous football pep rallies featuring coach Greg Schiano to meditative yoga classes on Sunday mornings to job fairs, to silent discos for students.

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Welcome to The Yard, the open public space and its surrounding amenities that has quickly become the heartbeat of the college experience in New Brunswick since opening in 2016. The Yard is rolling out the red carpet – or actually a green one – to the new class of freshmen and the thousands of transfer students who find themselves On the Banks this September.

A verdant lawn of new grass cultivated during the summer awaited students Tuesday as they grabbed some grub from the nearby casual fast-fare restaurants and sat at the umbrella-shaded tables. Elsewhere, the glass garage doors were opened on The Yard Commons, a 1,678-square-foot lounge where students sipped their grande mocha Frappacinos and chatted.

Other students were rushing from the Sojourner Truth Apartments to the College Avenue bus stop without so much as glancing up to the HD jumbo-tron as an episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants” played.

The vision for The Yard can be traced to Chris Paladino, the president of the New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO), and Merissa Buczny, DEVCO’s vice president.

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“One of the things I’ve always said was Rutgers had no sense of place,” Paladino said. “It lacked a place where Rutgers could identify with, where students could identify with, where people could just hang out.”

Paladino said on any given day, September through May, 11,000 people converge on The Yard, including the thousands of people who pick up the bus at the adjacent stop. “I think it gives Rutgers students – commuters and students who live on campus and adjacent to the campus – a place where they can all meet and be outside and participate in events,” Buczny said. “This is for everybody.”

Buczny pointed out that some of The Yard’s programming is created with New Brunswick residents not affiliated with Rutgers in mind. Previous events - an Easter egg hunt for children of all ages and Saturday morning soccer games featuring South American teams, to name just two examples - were geared toward the greater community. Paladino said DEVCO reinvests the rent money it collects from the surrounding eateries such as Honeygrow, RU Hungry? and El Jefe’s Taqueria back into The Yard.

“That’s why we’re able to change the sod and do all this programming,” Paladino said.

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