Crash Kills Preservationist Scholar

Peter Dobkin Hall, an East Rock preservationist known nationally as an expert on not-for-profit organizations, died early Thursday in a crash on I‑95 in Branford.

The crash occurred at 3:37 a.m. on the right-hand northbound lane of the highway between Exits 54 and 55. According to authorities, Hall was driving the wrong way. He drove head-on into a pick-up truck traveling in the opposite direction.

It took Branford fire emergency crews ​“nearly 20 minutes” to extricate Hall from his Dodge Caravan, according to Deputy Chief Tom Mahoney. Hall was declared dead at the scene. Two occupants of the pick-up were taken to the hospital. The pick-up driver’s injuries were described as minor, his passenger’s as more serious.

Hall, who lived on Lawrence Street in New Haven, was 69 years old.

Hall was a voice for greater accountability from Yale and other not-for-profits. He joined neighbors in protesting Albertus Magnus’s decision in 2009 to chop down a line of hemlocks along Prospect Street and a copse of oaks on Ogden behind Mohun Hall.. ​“Albertus is a religiously affiliated college with many tax exemptions from us, the public. They may not have a legal obligation, but a moral one, and a Christian one to be a good neighbor,” he said at the time.

He served as an active member of East Rock neighborhood groups, including serving as a block watch captain and speaking out publicly (and passionately) about civic issues.

He played an active role as well in New Haven preservationist groups.

He served on the board of the New Haven Museum and co-founded the Urban Design League, for instance.

‘We were so fortunate to have a national leader, and original thinker about non-profit organizations help us at our inception,” stated Anstress Farwell, the league’s president. ​“He drafted our by-laws, based on best practices for open membership based organizations. He was a moral and philosophical touchstone for us, and understood the importance of an organization committed to following its convictions.

“In hard times, he was the best and kindest, and most forceful counselor. We had fun too — he called me ​‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’”

Hall’s ​“knowledge of New Haven history — business, non-profit, cultural, religious — was profound,” Farwell added, noting that he ​“served on the board, and was the leading historian, of the Grove Street Cemetery.” CPTV featured him in a 2008 documentary about the cemetery.

Hall was also among organizers who twice campaigned to turn the St. Ronan-Edgehill portion of East Rock into an historic district. The campaigns fell short. After the second defeat, Hall bemoaned the emergence of lawn signs and online arguments by opponents: ​“Email allowed people to say electronically what they wouldn’t ever do face to face.”

Hall was an academic by trade, most recently serving as a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Hauser Institute for Civil Society and a City University history and theory professor. In the past he has taught at Yale’s history department, School of Management, Divinity School.

His area of expertise was the not-for-profit sector — ​“the most rapidly growing and changing organizational domain in the world,” as he put it in one blog post.

From 1996 to 1999, Hall ran Yale’s Program on Non-Profit Organizations, which he helped found.

He wrote Inventing the Nonprofit Sector: Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, among other published works.