Category Archives: Connecticut River

New surgical wing; other topics

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  • The college recently unveiled a plaque announcing the Orozco Frescoes’ status as a National Historic Landmark (Dartmouth Now). No images yet.

  • Dartmouth Engineer has a story on the new Center for Surgical Innovation. This addition to DHMC is one of the few parts of the complex not designed by SBRA (post).

  • A Kendal news release on master planning refers to the acquisition of the Chieftain. A future expansion of the retirement center could make a neat feature out of the Chieftain’s rowing dock.

  • The New York Times has a story on the planned demolition of the Folk Art Museum to make way for an expansion of MOMA next door. (The architects of the Folk Art Museum, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, are designing an expansion of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum that preserves and reuses Wilson Hall next door.)

  • Enjoy the retro poster (via Big Green Alert Daily) for round one of the Varsity Cup rugby tournament, held at the Rugby Clubhouse. Dartmouth won the match.

  • CurbedNY has a bit on the Guastavino family. The one grandly-scaled Guastavino-tiled space at Dartmouth, the surgical theatre at the old hospital, no longer exists, but the firm’s vault in the hospital’s one surviving wing remains on Rope Ferry Road. Also check out the entry vestibule of McNutt Hall, likely a Guastavino structure (post).

  • UPNE is listing a publication of a partner called Voice of the Åland Churches by Åsa Ringbom. How about that. Åland (Wikipedia) is an autonomous island province of Finland located in the Baltic partway to Sweden. It has its own stamps and a striking flag that reflect its largely Swedish ethnicity.

  • Dartmouth needs to name at least one building for the building’s architect. This is not an uncommon practice, although only one example comes to mind, the Norman Shaw Buildings at Parliament in London (Wikipedia; W&M’s main building was not designed by Christopher Wren). The designers who need recognition at Dartmouth are Charles A. Rich and Jens F. Larson. The bulk of the campus was created by these two College Architects in succession between about 1895 and 1939. The one building on which both architects did extensive work is the Heating Plant, which Rich built as a one-story building and Larson raised by one story. Maybe when the Heating Plant is taken over by the college museum, these artists can be credited and the building can be known as the Rich-Larson Wing of the Hood Museum of Art.

  • Brown started up its 250th anniversary celebration last month. Dartmouth’s ex-president Jim Yong Kim, a 1982 Brown graduate, gave a lecture at the Opening Celebration. The “Traditions” section of the 250th website explains that Brown chose the brown bear as its mascot in 1904 and in 1905 brought a live bear to a football game — the Dartmouth game — for the first time. Dartmouth won. (Brown doesn’t call the anniversary a “quartomillenium” or “sestercentenary” but a “semiquincentenary.”)

  • DUSA (Dartmouth Uniformed Service Alumni) has an informative page devoted to its symbols. As is traditional, the shield has the wavy lines representing the Connecticut River in the base. One wonders whether every organization, including the college, would benefit from depicting the River as a set of wavy bars thick enough to have their own colors, perhaps blue or even white (alternating with the green color of the field).

  • Interface: News and Information from Dartmouth Computing Services is back. One might recall the nice paper magazine iteration of Interface from the late 1990s.

  • The football team will wear an alternate helmet design at some point this fall, notes Tris Wykes in the Valley News. Perhaps influenced by trends in cars (Financial Times, Autoweek) or the Pro-Tec helmets worn by skateboarders or special operators, matte black seems to be gaining popularity in football. Examples are found at Cincinnati and Oregon; Missouri seems to have been an early proponent in 2009 with its Nike Pro Combat uniform (see Uniform Critics).

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Update 05.22.2014: Banwell architect Ingrid Nichols’s resume (pdf) states:

Banwell has joined forces with a national Kendal design architect, RLPS and together are completing a master plan for a new 20 acre abutting parcel they have recently purchased. We are also completing a master plan for their existing campus including: Additions for independent living, nursing, health center, fitness center (pool, locker rooms, exercise rooms and activity room).

Ledyard clubhouse in danger?

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Maybe this is a cynical view, but the framing of the story in The Dartmouth, with its quote from the college spokesman about the inevitability of mold, suggests that people are thinking about demolishing the Ledyard Canoe Club’s historic clubhouse.

The Riverfront Master Plan (image) is a guide rather than a manifesto, but it shows the building as being replaced during the next 10 years.

Ledyard Canoe Club, photo by Meacham

Campus construction and other topics

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  • The Dartmouth has an article on campus construction projects.
  • Nice photos of the Visual Arts Center are to be found in ArchDaily (via Dartmouth College Planning).
  • The Grad Studies Office is moving from Wentworth to a renovated space at 37 Dewey Field Road (Home 37).
  • Bruce Wood at the Big Green Alert Blog has this tidbit regarding Memorial Field: “Keep your eyes peeled for a significant improvement to the facility at some point this fall.”
  • Architect Michael McKee was a principal with Moshe Safdie and Associates when he served as a “Special Consultant” with KSWA to handle the design development for the North Campus Academic Center (Somerville, Ma. PowderHouse Arts Center submittal pdf).
  • The school has obtained permission from the state to extend the existing floating wharf at the boathouse from 170 ft. to 218 ft. The project will involve dredging (download state letter, wetlands permit, etc.).
  • Did you know that there’s a short line called the Claremont Concord Railroad with a transfer facility in West Lebanon near the dilapidated old B&M roundhouse? In this aerial, the red Four Aces Diner is visible in its new location and the Railroad’s classic early-1950s Alco (?) is the yellow engine on the left.
  • DartmouthSports.com has announced that NeuLion will stream home games in several sports (via the Big Green Alert Blog). NeuLion is the leader in the field, and it seems to be moving away from a dependence on Flash. (Flash has a bad reputation on the desktop, see Steve Jobs’s letter of April 2010, and does not work on many mobile devices: Adobe announced in November 2011 that it had halted the development of Flash for mobile browsers according to Wikipedia.)

An entrance gateway idea

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The riverfront master plan has already been mentioned here, but a reading of the plan’s new page on the OPDPM site has turned up some interesting proposals.

At the lower entrance to Tuck Drive, the plan recommends:

  • Preserving the existing brick pillars, built as part of Tuck Drive;
  • Replacing the metal guard rails with simple wooden rails in keeping with the school’s outdoorsy theme; and
  • Installing a new sign for the college.


Also interesting is the solution to the Fuller Boathouse problem: “Accommodate increased storage space needs by constructing new Fuller boathouse into hillside that is double current size.”

Organic Farm master planning, other topics

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  • The Planner’s Blog announced that Maclay Architects of Vermont is working on a master plan for the Organic Farm north of campus. One proposed land-use diagram mentions a possible site for a child-care center.
  • Dartmouth Now has an article on the new restaurant in the Inn, located right at the southeast corner of the intersection of Main and Wheelock.
  • Wikimedia Commons has a nice reproduction of the unbuilt 1923 addition designed by Larson & Wells. Surely the firm’s only design in the Egyptian mode, the rear range placed perpendicular to the original building is difficult to read as anything but living quarters; the firm did a similarly large and even more domestic proposal for a newbuild Dragon around the same time.
  • The Rauner Blog has a post on George Stibitz and his remote operation of a digital computer in 1940. The terminal in Hanover was located in McNutt.
  • Vermont Public Radio has a story on the Ice Chimes sculpture. See also the unrelated Alumni Relations post on Carnival snow sculptures.
  • The Victor C. Mahler 1954 Visiting Architects Lecture is now bringing one architect to campus each year for a lecture, starting with J. Meejin Yoon (Dartmouth Now).
  • The Williamson is moving ahead at the DHMC complex (The Dartmouth, Green Building Council profile).

Kendal is buying the Chieftain

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The Valley News reports that Kendal at Hanover will purchase the Chieftain Motor Inn (see also The Dartmouth. As the News reports, the fondly-recalled 23-room motel was built during the early 1950s on a 10.7-acre parcel along the River just beyond what is now the Kendal continuing-care retirement community:


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[Update 11.11.2013: Broken link to the Chieftain removed.]
[Update 04.07.2013: Link to The Dartmouth added.]

The Riverfront Master Plan

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The College Planner has made available long-term proposals of the Riverfront Master Plan (pdf) by Milone & MacBroom of Waterbury Vt.

The plan contains several intriguing ideas:

  • New buildings behind and next to (north of) the Friends Boathouse.
  • The expansion of the Fuller Boathouse and the rebuilding or removal of the singles shed next to Fuller.
  • An addition to Ledyard Canoe Club (one hopes it is an addition: it could be a replacement) and the removal of the three boat sheds behind Ledyard.
  • On Tuck Drive, a Sewer Pump House.
  • The transformation of much of the current large parking lot into parkland.

Inn updates, the story of Bean’s Art Store, and other notes

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  • The Dartmouth has a story on Bean’s Art Store, the little shop near the Hop (behind Ledyard National Bank) that has been furnishing Studio Art students with their squishy erasers and tubes of paint for decades.
  • Dartbeat has a post with photos on the progress at the Visual Arts Center. Big Green Alert Blog notes that the power lines along Lebanon Street are going under ground.
  • The Boston Globe links to a Valley News story on the completion of a large part of the Inn renovations (see also Dartmouth Now. The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the Inn’s predecessors on the site.
  • The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Interior Department has designated the Connecticut River and its watershed the first National Blueway in the country. The Valley News reports on the septennial perambulation of the riverine New Hampshire-Vermont border by the two states’ attorneys general.
  • The Valley News reports (again) that the Friends of Hanover Crew now have permission to build a rowing dock at Wilson’s Landing, a part of Fullington Farm. Hanover’s crews plan to move their boats out of Dartmouth’s boathouse and into a new boathouse to be built at the farm. An interesting report (pdf) from Engineering Ventures mentions that when the Friends of Hanover Crew bought their 2.4-acre portion of the farm from Dartmouth in 2008, they promised to allow Ledyard Canoe Club members to store 20 canoes and kayaks on the site, probably in the basement of the existing barn.

  • Dartmouth Sports announced some time ago that the new basketball office suite was completed in the old Kresge gym space in Berry Sports Center (via Dartmouth Now).

  • Thanks to Bruce for his proposal that as part of a Piazza Nervi project, the entrance to Thompson Arena should be redone (Big Green Alert Blog). This is a good idea, since Thompson’s entrance definitely needs replacing. But while one does notice that Thompson’s front facade is not parallel to Leverone’s, the lack of alignment is not necessarily a problem: plenty of urban spaces, especially in Italy, lack any right angles at all. And if the facades were made parallel, the difference in heights might become more noticeable. Who knows… The 2000 student life master plan (pdf) notes that the entry into Thompson Arena is obscured by existing houses along Park Street:

    There are, however, opportunities to reinforce the entry to Thompson Arena by moving or demolishing the College-owned houses on Park Street in front of the current entry. Doing so would relate the Arena to its cousin, Leverone Field House, both designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, and complete an intention planned but never realized.

  • The school’s Flickr page has a photo set showing the new ’53 Commons renovation of Thayer Dining Hall. The photos, along with plans, show that the red awnings in the main dining room have been removed and the bays opened up to allow free passage from north to south. Upstairs is where the real changes have taken place: there are lots of dining rooms up there now. The long, narrow Topside space is a dining room; the space above the leather-paneled Tindle Lounge/Paganucci Room is a private dining room; the spaces above the lobby (formerly offices?) look to be dining or meeting rooms. It is not clear where they put all the DDS offices that used to occupy the second level. At least some of the quadripylons out front were removed for the project (Street View): will they be replaced? Some kind of bollard seems necessary there, but the area might be more interesting with a different solution.
  • The 1994-era Lone Pine Tavern in the basement of Collis has been replaced by something called One Wheelock. It seems that a change in focus was needed, but did the room really have to be stripped bare? Perhaps people were stealing the memorabilia.
  • The Rauner Library blog has had too many interesting posts to count. See posts on the mathematics funerals and duckboards on the Green.
  • Dartmouth Health Connect opened a while back (The Dartmouth). It occupies the former Omer & Bob’s location following a renovation by Haynes & Garthwaite. It turns out that H&G designed Omer & Bob’s new location in Lebanon.
  • Lebanon is selling its Junior High School building, designed by Jens Larson (Valley News, Valley News). Note the similarities to Baker Library:



  • Some interesting things going on at other colleges: Yale is building a freestanding college in Singapore, designed by KieranTimberlake (Times article on the controversy). The University of Virginia is building a facility for its squash team at the Boar’s Head Sports Club, part of a fancy private resort (UVaToday). The Boar’s Head Inn is owned by the U.Va. Real Estate Foundation.
  • That Hanover war memorial that stands in front of the Town Building on Main Street? (Street View.) It was previously associated with the Green, where one would expect a war memorial, and shows up in front of the Inn in an old photo that was published in a recent story in the Mirror. It is interesting to note that a nearby space, just to the east of the Inn, later became a war memorial garden for the college.
  • “Chaste” might not be the right word, but “tasteful” is close: TruexCullins’ Buchanan Hall addition is very nice (Street View, school project page).
  • The Rauner Blog’s post on the Ski Jump features this photo of the jump’s outrun. The jump is gone now, but the Golf Course remains. Does that view show the same site as this one, from the Hanover Country Club’s map of the various holes? More historic images of the jump at Skisprungschanzen.com (via Big Green Alert Blog).
  • More information on the bypass mentioned here earlier, from page 14 of the 2002 Campus Master Plan (pdf):

    To reduce congestion, Hanover has explored alternatives to bypass the Inn corner. A Connector Highway linking Route 120, Route 10 and I-91 would be very desirable for both Hanover and the Medical Center, but Lebanon has not supported this proposal. The College should continue to study this and other by-pass proposals, making College properties available if necessary.

The Hospital Bridge and the Hanover Bypass

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An extremely expensive new bridge and highway could clear a route through the woods from Lahaye Drive (the hospital’s southern access road) over Colburn Hill, around Boston Lot Lake, over Route 10, and over the Connecticut River to an intersection with Vermont Route 5 at the Bugbee Street exit off Interstate 91.

Hanover/Lebanon hospital bypass routes

Mockup of potential bridge location and two bypass routes. Ledyard Bridge is at the top.

On the New Hampshire side, a bypass would affect Boston Lot Lake and the trails around it (map). The lake, which has a great name, might be artificial and appears to be owned by Dartmouth, as is the surrounding property.

On the Vermont side, the land between Bugbee Street and the bridge’s western abutment includes some undeveloped parcels; some commercial properties, including Blood’s Catering; a couple of house lots; and St. Anthony’s Cemetery (map).

This idea is sketched so roughly here that the elevations of the underlying north-south routes have not even been accounted for. Would the bridge go from hillside to hillside, flying over both Route 10 and Route 5? Or would it be more like the Hartford bridges, picking up local streets and crossing the river a few yards above the surface?

(At the very least, one wonders whether Lahaye Drive or Gould Road — of Sachem Village — should be pushed through to connect Routes 10 and 120 at the latitude of the hospital.)

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[Update 06.11.2012: Page 14 of the 2002 Campus Master Plan (pdf) suggests that the general idea of a bypass has received some attention:

To reduce congestion, Hanover has explored alternatives to bypass the Inn corner. A Connector Highway linking Route 120, Route 10 and I-91 would be very desirable for both Hanover and the Medical Center, but Lebanon has not supported this proposal. The College should continue to study this and other by-pass proposals, making College properties available if necessary.

The map on page 15 of the plan appears to indicate that Dartmouth does not own the land around the lake, contrary to the presumption of this post.]

[Update 10.17.2012: Okay, the earlier idea posted here was too radical. The hospital folks don’t need a road that leads directly to Vermont: all they need is a route that is less slow than the Ledyard Bridge. Anyway, the Boston Lot Lake area is protected by a conservation easement. So why not extend Gould Road — it needs to be extended whether or not a bridge is built — and build a bridge somewhere to the south, wherever it could be done with the least cost? Then all Hanover would have to do is add enough traffic-calming devices to ensure that Wheelock Street never gets the reputation of being the faster of the two routes.]

Fullington Farm making slow progress as a rowing venue

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The Friends of Hanover Crew project outline includes a site plan and textual overview with photos (pdf). The old dairy barn will be renovated for boat storage, placing this project in a long tradition of transforming agricultural buildings for boating purposes.

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[Update 08.03.2013: Broken link to Friends replaced.]
[Update 03.31.2013: Broken links to outline and pdf removed, link to Friends inserted.]

Completion of the new dock

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The Dartmouth reports on the project, and the Planner has some closer photos. The D also had an article in July. (The Planner’s Office now has not only a blog and website but also a domain name, dartmouthplanning.com.)

Although the dock project includes bank stabilization and plantings, it continues the trend of intensified development on the east bank of the river between the bridge and the canoe club. As recently as 1985, the docks were less noticeable, the bridge was smaller, lower, and much less prominent, and the assertive boathouse was nonexistent.

Instead of maintaining the fiction that this limited site is a part of nature, could it be developed heavily, with a broad granite pedestrian corniche? Let’s promenade on the Ledyard Malecón.

Connecticut River from Ledyard Bridge, 2008

Almost a bathing pavilion

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Dartmouth will build a relatively elaborate ADA-compliant swimming dock and a kiosk upstream from the bridge (The Dartmouth).

The College Planner’s blog has a post with a plan (pdf) and a detailed regulatory submission (pdf). This project is part of something bigger: a master plan for the riverfront (Planning post, post).

Dartmouth Traditions by William Carroll Hill (1901)

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Download

Download a pdf version of William Carroll Hill’s 1901 book, Dartmouth Traditions.

About the Book

William Carroll Hill (1875-1943?), of Nashua, N.H., received his Bachelor of Letters degree, a degree offered only between 1884 and 1904, in 1902. He was the historian of his class and wrote the Chronicles section of the the 1902 Class Day volume, a book that the printer gave the appearance as Dartmouth Traditions. Hill became an antiquarian, genealogist, and historian and apparently wrote a history of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Dartmouth Traditions was published when Hill was a junior. The book is not really about traditions and probably would be better titled Dartmouth Worthies. It is a collection of essays written by students and alumni. While the essays on Daniel Webster and other known personages are not very useful, some essays appear the contain information that is only available in this book. Examples are the report on the investigation into the history of the Lone Pine and the first-person account of the drowning death of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son.

About this Project

The transcription of this somewhat hard-to-find book began in 2003. The book has since become available in Google Books, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the project. The Google Books version has the great advantage of reproducing the attractive typography of the original, but its computer transcription is not as accurate as that of the version presented here.

[Update 05.13.2011: The Rauner Library Blog has a post on Hill, highlighting the Stowe episode.]

[Update 12.21.2010: Link to pdf posted.]

dartmo 15 logo

Rebuilding Titcomb Cabin

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Students built the original Titcomb Cabin on Gilman Island, downriver from the bridge, in 1952. It was a replacement for several Ledyard Canoe Club cabins whose sites were being submerged by the river as the water rose behind the new Wilder Dam. It seems that the power company even helped with the construction.

Someone burned Titcomb last year (The Dartmouth) and a group mostly made up of students has started the work of erecting a replacement (The Dartmouth).

The Rebuilding Titcomb blog has some superb photos. Joe Mehling’s photos at Dartmouth’s Flickr stream show Safety & Security using their boat to help raft logs to the island.

[Update 09.25.2010: The Dartmouth has an update.]

Varied topics in history and architecture

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The Neukom Institute was rumored last year to be considering a request for an addition to Sudikoff.

Ledyard Canoe Club plans to rebuild Titcomb Cabin, which burned last spring. The logs will be put in the river at the Organic Farm and rafted down to Gilman Island. This will be the closest thing to a log drive seen on this stretch of the Connecticut in many years.

David Hooke (Reaching That Peak, 1987) gave a “smoke talk” in Commons on the Outing Club’s history. The Dartmouth reports that “smoke talk” refers to the club’s journal Woodsmoke, but it might also refer to the informal lectures of that name that took place in College Hall at the turn of the century.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates that, although not mentioning it, helps explain their Berry Library project.

Check out the buildings in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream.

The Dartmouth is doing a weekly articles on Dartmouth out-of-town, starting with the riding center at Morton Farm.

Dartmouth is offering for rent the second level of the 1910s library stacks addition to Eleazar Wheelock’s house. This could make a good society hall:

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to VSBA page fixed; broken link to rental page removed.]

Historic maps

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Rauner’s blog describes a fantastic horizontal-scrolling map of the Connecticut River at Hanover (image). It was created by Robert Fletcher around the turn of the twentieth century and was found among some records of the Hanover Water Works Co. that the library received recently. The shallow box containing the map is portable, and the map contains a number of notes on related facts.

This map could be scanned, stitched together, overlaid with a current aerial, and made into a fascinating website. A lot of the landmarks noted by Fletcher have probably been under several feet of water since Wilder Dam raised the river in the 1950s; yet the River was not pristine in Fletcher’s time, and he notes that the low-water level at Ledyard Bridge was raised by six feet by the dam at Olcott Falls (Wilder).

A UNH news story notes that one of the large and notable relief maps of the state created by Dartmouth’s Professor Hitchcock in the late 1870s is being restored. This particular map came to UNH in 1894, so it is probably not the one depicted on the east wall of the Butterfield Museum after that building opened in 1899.