Payne Whitney Gymnasium

The Payne Whitney Gymnasium is the gymnasium of Yale University. Built in the prevailing Gothic architecture style of the campus in 1932, the building has a Gothic tower, third-floor swimming pool, a polo practice room, and a rooftop running track. It is the second-largest gym in the world by cubic feet and the ninety-fourth largest in the United States by square footage. The building houses the facilities for the basketball, fencing, gymnastics, squash, swimming, and volleyball teams.

The building was donated to Yale by John Hay Whitney, of the Yale class of 1926, in honor of his father, Payne Whitney. One possibly apocryphal story holds that Mrs. Payne Whitney wanted Yale to build a great cathedral with her money, but that the University preferred a gym. Since she was getting old, the story goes, administrators thought they could get away with a bit of fraud. They instructed architect John Russell Pope to design a gym that could pass for a cathedral. Then, when it was completed, the President drove Mrs. Whitney past the finished building. She died not long after, content in the knowledge that she had given Yale such a grand house of worship, and not what came to be known as "the cathedral of sweat".

For the design of Payne Whitney Gymnasium, architect John Russell Pope was awarded the Silver Medal at the 1932 Olympic Games Art Competition.

The stuffed original Handsome Dan, the bulldog mascot of Yale and the first college mascot in the United States, resides in a glass cabinet near the entrance to the building.