The White River Junction railroad station is for sale. The sale site has photos and plans. The building is an approximate contemporary and formal cousin of Thayer Dining Hall, by the same firm, and can seem like an outpost of the campus for students arriving by rail.
Thanks to Alex Hanson for the mention in “In Hanover, Architects Note A 19th-Century Sensibility,” Valley News (22 November 2008).
The Lamb & Rich monograph page has become a separate blog. Posts related to that project will no longer appear here.
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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to article removed.]
The Valley News has a story on the recovery and restoration of the game ball from the 1903 Harvard-Dartmouth game. The game was especially notable because it marked Dartmouth’s first victory over Harvard and served as the dedication of Harvard’s new Stadium. The Library of Congress has links to a remarkable panoramic photo of the game.
The Stadium is the first major reinforced-concrete building in the country. When Dartmouth students held pep rallies under banners reading “On to the Stadium,” they were not referring to a site in Hanover: the were referring to the Stadium.
A nice trailer for the film project Monadnock: The Mountain That Stands Alone.
Trumbull-Nelson’s Constructive Images, in explaining that Omer & Bob’s outdoor shop has moved out of Hanover, notes that there were about five ski shops in town in 1986, and none now. I haven’t been in the Mountain Goat to tell whether it’s an exception.
Why so many Ledyard books recently?
A review I haven’t read in JAH compares them.
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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to JAH review replaced.]
The Lone Pine Tavern, created in College Hall’s (ex-cafeteria?) basement as part of the 1994 Atkin Olshin Lawson-Bell renovation, has closed and will be replaced with something more cost-effective called One Wheelock, The Dartmouth reports. I remember buying the second beer served in the place, and although not the biggest fan of the name, I liked the change of atmosphere that it represented. It is hard to believe it has been fifteen years. One hopes that someone will document the room in a panoramic photo while the decor is still intact.
The college finished the renovations of two old buildings for sororities (The Dartmouth), is still planning to go ahead with a small number of other projects (The Dartmouth) including the Visual Arts Center (The Dartmouth).
The latest Capital Projects Schedule [pdf] has construction starting early next spring and finishing in September of 2012. The architects have not reinstated their initial page for the project.
Hanover’s elms always make an interesting topic (Valley News).
Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream provides some unusual views, including a shot of the Borwell Research Building entrance, the recently remade memorial garden by the Hop, and the Dartmouth Cup, which was made in 1848 by the Crown Jeweler.
The tech incubator in Centerra, the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, plans to expand using state and federal grants (Valley News; The Dartmouth).
Rivercrest plans have been moved back, and Dartmouth hopes to put modular houses on the site (Valley News).
The Life Sciences project page has some new information, but the best gauge of progress is the webcam. The building is beginning to take shape. This is a very long project that will not end until August 2011 (Capital Projects Schedule [pdf]).
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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to webcam removed.]
While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the nineteenth century permits represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.
It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.
Google Books also has volumes 5-6 (1870), 7-8 (1871), and 9-10 (1872).
A new list of about 675 Lamb & Rich projects should be available here in the next few weeks.
[Update 12.07.2009: It is more like 600 projects, and it is available at Lamb & Rich.]
[Update 02.14.2010: Reference to volumes 5-10 added.]
[Update 04.12.2010: Another good way to search the Record & Guide is to put this into Google:
site:www.columbia.edu “firm name”.]
The Northeast Chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills has acquired some old textile machinery and hopes to restart a mill in Claremont (Valley News).
The short-term Memorial Field renovation is finishing and football has started (Valley News, Big Green Alert Blog).
Computers can compile multiple photographs of a single building into a three-dimensional model of that building; a lab at the University of Washington is using the millions of photos people have posted to Flickr to reconstruct entire cities (story at physorg.com). The lab has examples of several European monuments.
[Update 04.12.2010: The New York Times has a story on the “Rome in a Day” project that mentions the PhotoCity game.]
The Tuck School has started a Leadership Center (news release), and the Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (“the Dartmouth Institute”) is now being cited alongside Tuck, Thayer, and DMS as a graduate or research institution (Irene M. Wielawski, “Taking Charge,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Sept./Oct. 2009), reprinted at Speaking of Dartmouth). The Dartmouth Institute was founded in 1988 and began its first degree-granting program in 2003.
The planning office has posted a presentation on parking [pdf], more interesting than you’d expect, and the College Planner has noted [Google cached version] that Dartmouth has maintained parking rates for a quarter-century.
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[Update 09.18.2016: Broken link to planner post replaced.]
[Update 07.06.2013: Broken link to PhotoCity game removed.]
The Upper Valley seems to have considerable pent-up demand for rowing facilities. UK Architects’ design for a Vermont-side boathouse near the Wilder Dam for the Upper Valley Rowing Foundation appears to be delayed by tax or land-use questions (UVRF minutes September 2008 [pdf]).
At the other end of town, past the Chieftain, the Friends of Hanover High School Rowing purchased Fullington Farm from Dartmouth in 2008 (UVRF minutes May 2008). The group plans to begin rowing there in 2010 (UVRF minutes September 2008 [pdf], Valley News). The Friends’ page on Facebook notes that Toronto architect Daniel Johnson is designing a boathouse.
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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to May 2008 minutes removed.]
Posts have become even less frequent here because of a research trip to Manhattan and New Jersey…
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Reid Buckley (of those Buckleys) tries to describe* Lamb & Rich’s clock tower in Sharon, Connecticut:
[T]he clock is referred to always as a structure in “Gothic” style, with its granite blocks quarried nearby in Sharon, its red stones imported from Potsdam, New York. But it is properly called “Richardsonian Romanesque,” I am informed by Liz Shapiro of the Sharon Historical Society, after a New York architect by the name of Charles Alonzo Rich, who is described as “renowned,” would he had not.
Reid would that Rich had not done what? The anti-Victorian sentiment seems to have been tripped up by sloppy editing.
One doubts that the tower is referred to “always” as being in the Gothic style, especially among the Buckleys, who are familiar with the Gothic architecture of Yale. It also seems obvious that “Richardsonian Romanesque” must be named for someone named Richardson — in this case, Henry Hobson Richardson, not a particularly obscure architect.
*Reid Buckley, An American Family: The Buckleys (Threshold Editions, 2008), 225-226 n3.
The Planning Board’s hearing of the VAC plans was delayed, and the Valley News gave the sense that some town residents wanted the Board to step outside its role and begin acting as an architectural review commission. But approval was not seriously in doubt when the hearing did take place (The Dartmouth, Valley News).
Town residents’ opposition seems to be consistently varied: some say the building is too urban, some not urban enough (or is inconsistent with the new-urbanist town plan). Some say it is too modern, some say it is not modern (or original) enough. The most interesting quote in the VN story is the criticism that the building is “a shameless copy of architecture that has existed in this country for decades.” Those words are usually used against traditional styles such as neo-Georgian (sometimes “pseudo-Georgian”) architecture as seen in buildings like Brewster Hall, which is being demolished for the Visual Arts Center.
In February, DHMC postponed plans for new buildings, including the C. Everett Koop Medical Science Complex, but not the offsite Outpatient Surgery Center (2008-2010, SBRA) (Dartmouth Medicine; press release; mention in Vermont Today). The building presents an interesting study in urbanism: instead of adding the needed operating rooms to its existing medical complex, the hospital is placing them in a freestanding low-rise building very near by, either because the main hospital has run out of space (!) or because surgeons in training need an experience like that of a private practice.
An aerial film made for promotional purposes shows the campus nicely.
An oral history of Dartmouth in World War II is available from the archives.
UPNE has published The Great River about the Connecticut River (UPNE, Valley News).
A photograph from this website showing Yale’s Book & Snake temple is the frontispiece in Stephen White’s new novel The Siege, set at Yale University.
The state of Samson Occom’s grave in New York is lamented in The Dartmouth.