FitzRandolph Gate is the ornamental main entrance to Princeton's campus — two stone pillars topped with eagles and an iron arch — opening from Nassau Street directly onto the Nassau Hall lawn. The view through the gate, with Nassau Hall framed beyond, is one of the most photographed in the country.
There is a small, well-known student superstition about not walking out through it before graduation, which keeps the central gate slightly less worn than the side ones. Open all year.
A story
The gate was a 1905 gift of Augustus van Wickle, a Princeton alumnus who had married into the FitzRandolph family — descendants of Nathaniel FitzRandolph, the eighteenth-century landowner who donated the original four-and-a-half acres on which Nassau Hall was built. Tradition holds that no undergraduate should walk out through the gate until commencement day; doing so before then is said to guarantee that you will not graduate. Most students duly use the side gates for four years, then march out through FitzRandolph in their gowns.