Augustus was born on November 5, 1791 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Titus Street (1758-1842), the founder of Streetsboro Township, Ohio. He was the eldest of the five children of Titus Street (1758 - 1842), a prosperous New Haven merchant, and Amaryllis (Atwater) Street, and a descendant of the Rev. Nicholas Street, who came from England to Taunton, Massachussets, between 1630 and 1638, and later removed to New Haven.
He was graduated from Yale in 1812. As he became a confirmed invalid during his student days his college life was singularly uneventful. After graduation he studied law with Judge Charles Chauncey of New Haven but never practised that profession.
For a number of years Street was a silent partner in the bookselling and publishing firm of Hezekiah Howe & Company of New Haven, and in 1827 he was treasurer of the New Haven Tontine Company, which maintained a hotel facing the Green. He was later the builder and owner of the famous New Haven House and the adjoining property.
After the death of Titus Street, the whole family resided in Europe for five years, their travels extending to Greece and Egypt. This gave Street "ample time for study and close observation leading to (the) reflection upon the advantages of a thorough European culture, and the need of rounding out our ordinary American education by the study of the modern languages and the cultivation of the aesthetic arts".
A number of years after his return to New Haven he began a series of notable gifts to Yale in the fields of modern languages and the arts. These benefactions, which included the establishment of the Titus Street Professorship of Ecclesiastical History and a scholarship in the theological department, began in 1855 with a partial endowment of a professorship of modern languages, which he completed in 1863. During the first century and a quarter, though there had been some instruction, there was no official recognition of modern languages by the college. The first Street Professor of Modern Languages was appointed in 1864.
In the same year Street made another important gift. The Trumbull Gallery, the earliest art museum connected with a college or university in America, had been maintained at Yale since 1832. Street now came forward with an offer to erect at his expense a building for a school of the fine arts.
He died in 1866.
In art education and in the study of modern languages, Augustus Russell Street was the most munificent benefactor of Yale College since its foundation. He gave Yale its School of Fine Arts; Street Hall, named for him. He also established the Street Professorship of Modern Languages and the Titus Street Professorship in the Yale Theological department.
On October 29, 1815, he married Caroline Mary (b. 1790), the elder daughter of William Leffingwell (1765 - 1834), a wealthy resident of New Haven. The young couple settled quietly in New Haven and reared a family of girls, whose education their father carefully guided.
