Category Archives: Dartmouth Row

About Wentworth, Dartmouth, Thornton, and Reed Halls at Dartmouth College.

More observations about the final strategic master plan

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The college released the final (November 2020) version of the master plan (pdf) in July of 2021 (Anna Merriman, “Dartmouth master plan calls for growth along Lyme Road,” Valley News (2 July 2021)). The plan is not getting enough press or enough praise, so here are some observations:

  • As noted earlier, the possibilities for growth in the central campus look great (page 38).

  • The north end opportunity sites are all super. Old Hospital Quad will be an incredible space 130 years in the making (pages 42-43). Fairchild Tower always did seem more than necessary for its purpose; it is really a signpost building (pages 44-45).

  • Putting student housing in Remsen-Vail might be touchy. If you wanted to reuse a dull Sixties building as housing, you should have done it with the DHMC tower. Remsen-Vail could be appropriately used for academic purposes, however (page 44).

  • Lyme Road development is inevitable, but it is not clear how realistic it is to show such development without parking lots (pages 46-47).

  • When it comes to the West End, the novelty in this plan is the meander of the Cemetery Bridge (Thayer Viaduct). It is more like a boardwalk on a nature trail and does not appear to be a suspension bridge at all — but won’t it be extremely difficult to put bridge footings in a cemetery? (Pages 48-49).

  • More on the West End: Again, the original Tuck School building here could make an amazing undergraduate dormitory, but one would hate to see Tuck School vanish into the suburbs (pages 48-49).

  • South End and Downtown: The athletics promenade between Lebanon St. and Thompson Arena is excellent and long overdue. It could be a fine linear work of landscape architecture. Annexing Davis Varsity House as a part of the “house community” for the Crosby Street swing space dorm could be a superb move. The reasoning behind the focus on wellness for an expanded McKenzie is not clear — couldn’t it be used for anything, including arts uses? — but it makes no difference as long as the building is saved. McKenzie might present a real opportunity to create a new building within the historic brick walls (pages 52-53).

  • Quibbles are minor and basically the same as before: Thayer School didn’t go from the old Experiment Station directly to the West End in 1939, it spent several years in Bissell Gymnasium (page 9); the reference to “Dart Hall” is kind of irritating (page 38); and it’s “Bema” not BEMA (page 41).

  • The map on pages 28 and 29 showing named landscape opportunities is an important document. Some offhand proposals for these spaces:

    Name in Plan Proposed Replacement
    Riverfront Park Leydard Park
    West End Green A tough one; this was the Wigwam Circle postwar housing area.
    Tuck Green at the end of Tuck Mall Tuck Circle
    Dart Row Commons Fayer Green? “Commons” is not really appropriate for an open space.
    Maynard Yard Old Hospital Yard. This really is a better name.
    Life Sciences Lawn Another tough one; there is very little historic context here.
    North End Green in a strip of Dewey Field Dewey Field. Another one that really is a better name.
    Vox Lane NHCAMA; New Hampshire something; or State College something? “Vox Lane” has always been arbitrary, which is disappointing in this richly historic precinct.
    Park Street Gateway Piazza Nervi. This is tougher to justify now that grass rather than hardscape is proposed for this space.

Dartmouth Hall renovation images

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This video of the Dartmouth Hall renovation, just discovered, has apparently been up for a couple of months now. It shows site plans, floor plans, interior renderings, and several other views. (It also refers to the auditorium as “Dartmouth 105” instead of “105 Dartmouth,” which seems to be the older, more common phrasing.)

A couple of interior views also appear in a recent Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article. (Another aside: the 1773 Gamble plans and elevation drawing depict a large stone building that was not built.)

Neither this oblique view of the northwest corner of the building nor this straight-ahead view from the Green (both provided on the project page) indicates a railing along the front of the podium. There are short east-west railings lining the stairs, and there are substantial railings to keep people from falling off the north or south end of the podium, but there is nothing along the podium’s long west facade other than a low coping fronted by some ground plantings. Is that realistic?

Various topics including two West End flythroughs

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The big renovation of Dartmouth Hall is beginning

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The Trustees have given the go-ahead (Valley News, Dartmouth News) to start the big renovation of Dartmouth Hall (design page). Apparently the project was moved up by a year because the relocation of faculty offices from the building was unexpectedly spurred by the pandemic.

Dartmouth Hall, it will be remembered, was designed by college architect Charles Alonzo Rich ’75 and was built from 1904 to 1906. Successor college architect Jens Fredrick Larson designed the gut-remodeling of the building that took place in 1935 and 1936, in which the current concrete floors and steel stairs were installed and Room 105 was created. The small gables over the north and south entrances bear the years 1904 and 1935 in reference to these construction periods. The year 1784 in the central gable refers to the original Dartmouth Hall, which stood on the site.

The most notable change in this latest renovation will be the extension of the existing granite foundation as a podium or terrace in front of the building. The three sets of steps will be there, and a ramp will be integrated into the south end of the terrace. The composition seems fitting and will probably go unnoticed by most observers.

Other changes: The building’s center doors will be made operable and will continue to give on to the shallow lobby of Room 105. In the College Yard, an east-west path leading to the center entry will return, and a new diagonal path will make the slope accessible. The rear facade will have ramps and stairs for the north and south entrances protected by simple if not utilitarian shed roofs.

Replacing the River stair, the one made of earth and wood, and other topics

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  • Dartmouth News reports that the college has dedicated Baker’s main interior hall “in honor of Richard Reiss Jr. ’66, who made a $10 million gift to pursue innovative means to explore, analyze, and create knowledge.” Good news, and the lettering (“REISS HALL”) below the lunette at the end of the old Catalogue Room looks great. This was going to be a comment about the confusion of “hall” (meaning “building”) for “hall” (meaning “room” or “corridor”) but it looks like the WPA Guide to New Hampshire (1938) calls the Catalog Room “the Delivery Hall,” so it might be that there is no harm done.
  • The college is demolishing the erratic old timber stair that runs from the boathouses up the hill to the River Cluster:
    In its place will be a metal slat stair that is raised off the ground (Planning Board minutes 2 April 2019 pdf). This project seems long overdue, but as usual one is compelled to praise the old stair, which was dark, irregular, organic, and integrated into the terrain, with an aesthetic more Moosilauke than Main Street. It provided a fitting transition between the slick campus buildings and the dangerous Connecticut River.
  • The college intends to build the Irving Institute “on top of an existing structure and renovate portions of that building” (Planning Board minutes 7 May 2019 pdf). That’s interesting. The old Cook Auditorium in Murdough will still exist, and the plaza on top of it (the characteristic brick-surface landscaping of Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty) will support the floor of the Irving atrium.
  • The Eleazar Wheelock Society has applied “to remove additions, renovate main block, and construct new ell, with associated site improvements” at the Wheelock Mansion House (Planning Board minutes 7 May 2019 pdf).
  • Creating a Port of Hanover as an entrepôt for produce coming downriver from the Organic Farm is unrealistic, but a College Barge would make a plausible addition to the waterfront. Not necessarily the Oxford type of barge (see St. John’s Barge), though that would be great for viewing boat races, but more akin to a broad houseboat, meant to provide temporary dormitory space when it is needed. In the Bronx, there is a permanent prison on a barge:
  • Abbott-Downing’s Concord Coaches at Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.
  • This is another post on Campus Galli, the project to build a monastery following the (idealized and possibly just metaphorical) Plan of St. Gall, a centuries-long undertaking. Hyper-long term projects are appealing in this modern age; see also Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain in Finland, intended to be maintained for 400 years.
  • A fascinating history of the ska-man emoji.

A BASIC historical marker

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  • The Alumni Council minutes of May 17, 2019 describe an overview of the master plan provided by Director of Campus Planning Joanna Whitcomb. The master plan site welcomes comments; it sounds like the process is moving along, and the next steps include the development of draft principles. Dartmouth’s house system still awaits its Edward Harkness.
  • The DOC House, on Occom Pond, is being renovated to designs by Randall T. Mudge & Associates.
  • Concord Monitor columnist David Brooks has been proposing tech-related historical markers for New Hampshire highways, and now the state has taken him up on the idea, placing a marker near the college to recognize the creation of BASIC. This page at this site proposed a similar set of markers for the sites of Kiewit and Bradley-Gerry back in 1999; the state’s BASIC marker, which is required to stand alongside a state highway, lacks the clever gimmick of teaching the reader a little BASIC.
  • The Dartmouth Hall renovation is finally being started, with Boston architects designLAB signed up. It’s worth reiterating that the building was completed in 1906 and extensively renovated in the 1930s.
  • Big firm Einhorn Yaffee Prescott is designing a renovation of Reed Hall, and similar renovations are planned for Thornton in 2020-2021.
  • Trumbull-Nelson sold its headquarters on Route 120 to the college in 2008 and has now moved to a new site down the hill from the airport in West Lebanon (Valley News). The Route 120 site had served as a hog farm in some previous incarnation (Valley News).
  • A guide to the improvements coming to the Tuck campus mentions some projects that will connect the Tuck campus to the new Irving Institute building fronting Murdough.
  • The idea behind the manifestly fake quotation attributed to Lincoln (see this post) seems to be spreading. Now the statement that “A nation that forgets its past has no future” is attributed to Churchill, in this Virginia sign (by the Patrick Henry Tea Party). Online searches of Churchill’s writings and speeches have so far failed to turn up evidence that he ever said that.

Various construction topics

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  • An Architectural Digest story on the Hood by Elizabeth Fazzare again refers to a gray brick supposedly used in the original building, this time stating that it was used in the iconic trabeated gateway. The gateway was made of concrete, however; Moore originally intended it to be of granite.
  • The Indoor Practice Facility weekly update includes an aerial image showing the building’s footprint.
  • Van Zelm Engineers, a firm that worked on the 1978 Life Sciences Center and has built some very interesting heating plants over the years, are working on the Irving Institute. Their project page shows a basic footprint for the Institute for the first time: it really is a screen building. The college project page now includes renderings of the side facades and a new interior view.
  • A flythrough video of the Thayer/CS building by Wilson Architects suggests that the complex will have quite a retaining wall on the west side; one hopes it’s made into “engineering” or at least faced in granite.
  • The Thayer School Parking Garage project page has some cute computer images of various stages of future excavation. Turner Construction has a camera on MacLean showing the construction site.
  • Campus Services reports on a project to remove diseased trees from Pine Park.
  • High-Profile and North Branch Construction have information on the renovation of Blunt into an academic building.
  • The Dana renovation remains an interesting project. There is a video flythrough at the Leers Weinzapfel Associates site, and it shows a little pedestrian bridge on the west side of the building. A glimpse of the building’s lobby shows the Guarini shield on an office door and a “graduate lounge” occupying a part of the building, possibly a holdover from the similarly-named space called for in the giant unbuilt dining commons that MRY and Bruner/Cott proposed for a site a few yards to the southwest. The glassy Dana frontispiece will be topped with a patio; the penthouse has a flat canopy roof that is covered in solar panels and almost gives the building the air of a pagoda.
  • Some Tuck Drive details from the July 3 minutes of the Planning Board (pdf):

    The road is about half a mile long. He stated they will be working within the existing asphalt and drainage swales in order to maintain the existing stone walls. Lighting along the road will be minimal. Fixtures will be spaced 80-120 feet apart. Better access to the loading dock at Murdough will be provided. From Wheelock Street, Old Tuck Drive will be a two way street and give access to the Ledyard Parking Lot. After the turn off to the parking lot, the drive becomes a one way access. There is a pedestrian crossing point marked by a raised speed table. Guardrails will be installed along Old Tuck Drive. There is a bike lane separated from vehicle traffic by a double yellow line. Close to Tuck Drive there will be sidewalks on both sides of the drive.

    […]

    Mr. Scherding stated the campus was open with busy streets and students were used to crossing streets and sharing roads. He stated the Director of Public Works suggested narrowing the road at pedestrian crossings to make it safer. Mr. Scherding said they talked about having a physical barrier between the vehicles and the bike lanes but currently it is not on the plans. ESMAY asked what the guardrail would look like. Mr. Scherding stated it would look like the existing granite bollards.

  • A report of the September trustees’ meeting describes a renovation project in which “the College intends to improve learning spaces throughout Dartmouth Hall to ensure that the building can meet the needs of faculty and students in the 21st century. As part of the planned construction, the College will restore some of the structure’s historic elements, overhaul the building’s systems, and upgrade its energy efficiency.”
  • Revision Energy has a page on its solar installations at the college. Some of the dormitory installations really do transform the appearance of the buildings.
  • Bruner/Cott has a page on its renovation of Baker Tower. The interior graffiti appear to have been removed.
  • The automated parking system of the UK Architects addition to the rear of the Bridgman Building is drawing some attention (ACPark.com, Parking-Net.com).
  • There is more news on the off-campus (or edge-of-campus?) heating plant project (Dartmouth News, The Dartmouth). Although a nice spot for it would be the Dewey Field parking lot (orange), my money’s on a few Lyme Road sites, shown in red:

Speculative map of potential heating plant sites

Hop expansion going ahead, and other news

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  • Nothing is left of Gilman but a hole in the ground (project update).

  • Well that was odd. The Valley News reports that the NewVistas Foundation plan for a 20,000-person new town in Vermont has been abandoned.

  • The Valley News reports on the decline of “WinCycle, the Windsor nonprofit that for 16 years has been taking discarded computers and electronic equipment from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Dartmouth College, refurbishing it, and reselling the equipment[.]”

  • A lot of naming is going on. The Valley News reports on the DEN becoming the Magnuson Family Center, to be located in the new Thayer building; the Grad School has been named for Frank Guarini ’49 (Dartmouth News); and the college is offering a large donor the chance to rename the Norris Cotton Cancer Center (Valley News). It did always seem a little odd that the center was named for the legislator who wangled the federal funding to establish it.

  • The WRJ historic district is expanding to include an area that an architectural historian calls Little Italy (Valley News). The Polka Dot will be saved (Valley News).

  • The Hood staff are moving into the expanded museum, but the opening will not take place until 2019 (Dartmouth News).

  • Hey look! The Dartmouth 250 logo has gone from four fonts to one, and that one is Dartmouth Ruzicka: Dartmouth 250.

  • The Valley News reports that Nick Zwirblia has written a novel, The Bramford Chronicles, Book I: Johnny & Baby Jumbo. You might know Mr. Zwirblia better as the Happy Hop Guy.

  • Rauner had an exhibit on the history of the Ledyard Canoe Club.

  • The Valley News business magazine, Enterprise, has an article on the Grafton County Farm, a government operation that once might have been called a “poor farm.” Grafton County’s is still operating.

  • The capital campaign confirms in a general way some building projects:the Dartmouth Hall renovations; the Hood and Hop expansions and renovations, totaling $125m; and residence hall construction including 356 beds worth of dorms for $200m. There is no word on whether the Hop expansion will follow what seems to be a smart design from 2013 by Bora Architects. There is also talk of a request for a $50m endowment for the six house communities. One hopes that each house is endowed individually (starting at, say, $8m apiece) and is named by its benefactor.

  • The Dartmouth Hall renovation plan is based on an unusual pitch for funding by women (see Inside Higher Ed). More than a century ago, the college targeted the somewhat-arbitrary classification of Massachusetts alumni as a funding source for a new dormitory.

  • Several campus buildings are getting solar panels on their roofs (The Dartmouth).

  • There was a lot of news last April about the shuttering of UPNE, the University Press of New England (The Dartmouth, Inside Higher Ed, Valley News).

  • Students are working on a new historical accountability project that will focus on the role of slavery in Dartmouth’s founding and early history (Dartmouth News).

  • On Tuck Drive, “[c]onstruction also would add a sidewalk and bike lanes to the road, which is about 20-feet wide, Worden said” (Valley News). That is unfortunate. It’s hard to see how the historic granite curbing and guttering (not to mention the retaining walls) could be preserved if a sidewalk were added. Could the college use a row of poles to delineate a sidewalk on the existing asphalt surface? The fact that Italian immigrant labor gangs built that road by hand while living in huts nearby, probably on the site of the Boathouse parking lot, is still fascinating.

  • A corrected article on the Gilman and Dana work in the Valley News states that “Broemel said that plans for a north campus academic center during the 3-year tenure of then-Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim had spurred discussion about the best use of the buildings, although Kim’s specific idea never came to fruition.” That point deserves more attention: Gilman and Dana were left vacant and available for the current redevelopment because the large North Campus Academic Center by Kyu Sung Woo Architects of Cambridge was meant to be built in their place. (Mr. Woo, incidentally, has a remarkable weekend house in Putney, Vermont.)

  • The Class of 67 Bunkhouse at Moosilauke has been completed (TimberHomes LLC).

Moosilauke Ravine Lodge construction continues

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  • David Kotz has some nice photos of the construction of the new Ravine Lodge.

  • The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the great railroad artist Howard Fogg ’38.

  • Spotted this flag at a Richmond, Virginia, area high school:

    Photo of flag at Freeman High, Richmond VA by Meacham

    The star recalls the WWII Army Air Force insignia or the Chrysler Pentastar of the Eighties. Or it could be a battlefield map depicting a star fort surrounded by infantry units. The variety of bar widths is unusual. Flags of the World explains that it is “an official symbol of remembrance of September 11th” and that when it is hoisted vertically, the wide bars are meant to be seen as the Twin Towers.

    It turns out that the flag’s designer owns a restaurant very close to the school, and that he has also designed a monument to the flag (in the shape of the flag, hoisted vertically) for a traffic island nearby. “Given that it is the home of the Freedom Flag, Henrico County is the natural choice for the location of the Freedom Flag Monument and Virginia 9/11 Memorial.”

  • Dartmouth Now seems to have changed its name to Dartmouth News.

  • Other college buildings based on Independence Hall are found at Brooklyn College:


    and Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. (see the Google Earth 3D image).

  • Amherst has chosen as its mascot the Mammoth. The blurb explaining the Mammoth proposal notes that “The Beneski Museum of Natural History famously displays the skeleton of a Columbian mammoth, unearthed by Professor Frederick Brewster Loomis and brought to the College in 1925.” Museum specimens always provide good mascot options. Dartmouth’s museum displayed both a stuffed zebra and a set of curious elephant (i.e. mammoth) bones during the late eighteenth century.

  • The University of Virginia is celebrating its 200th anniversary and will feature bicentennial-logo zipper pulls on this year’s graduation gowns.

  • The city of Krakow has a new logo in the form of a city plan.

  • Last year the New York Times published interactive articles on mapping the shadows of New York and which existing Manhattan buildings could not be built today.

  • A Times obituary of March 13 noted the passing of the architectural historian and author of the Streetscapes column Christopher Gray. I was never able to meet him, but I was honored to have my site mentioned in his column on Lamb & Rich, and I enjoyed visiting the Office for Metropolitan History to do research in his compilations of 19th-century Times building permit notices (now they are in an online database provided by OMH, an amazing resource). The New Yorker ran an article about how Gray had left his skeleton to his school, St. Paul’s. What a character —

Every tub on its own bottom

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  • A neat color view of Dartmouth Row, probably from the 1850s, appeared on Antiques Roadshow.

  • This quotation about Dartmouth is intriguing:

    Although on the surface it might sound heretical, the institution is looking to reduce future building as much as possible. Conscious of the escalating costs of higher education, the college’s senior administration has instituted a program that requires academic departments to pay rent, essentially to make them more conscious of space costs and usage efficiencies. “The greenest building is the one that is never built,” [Director of Campus Design & Construction John] Scherding says.1Russ Klettke, “The High Performance Trail,” American Builders Quarterly (2016).

    So will rents rise in the most desirable buildings as departments compete for space? Will a wealthy department be allowed to build itself a new building if it can afford it?

  • At one point, the Wilson Architects design for the new Thayer/CS building envisioned a structure of 150,000 sf and a parking garage holding 400 cars (a LinkedIn profile). The Dartmouth has an article on the proposed parking structure, which the college now seems to be emphasizing less.

  • Remember the North Campus Academic Center? Back in 2014, CFO Rick Mills explained that the project was on hold:

    “We’re actually taking this year — both capitalizing some of the expenses that were incurred [and] some implementation expenses that were utility relocation and other things. … We’re also writing down some of the planning expenses, because as originally conceived, it’s not moving forward in that capacity.” According to Mills, completely new plans for that site are “going through a completely new process of evaluation” that the Dean of Faculty is discussing with President Hanlon and the Board of Trustees. The plans will have to take into account “the external science funding environment for what we can expect from NIH and other places [and] that the Williamson Translational Research building is under way …”2Rick Mills, interviewed by Charles C.W. Jang, “Dart Kapital,” The Dartmouth Review (1 June 2014) (brackets and ellipses original).

    There are plenty of good reasons not to build the large Kim-era design, but with Gilman and Kresge now boarded up and the medical library occupying temporary quarters in a former nursing school dormitory, it would seem that something needs to be built.

  • Here’s an interesting Bldgblog post on the ghost streets of Los Angeles.

  • The Valley News covers the installation of a plaque at Harvard honoring slaves there. Although the idea is not new (see U.Va.) and the wording might be a bit awkward (in an expectedly academic way — “worked here as enslaved persons”), it seems like a good idea. Where would such a plaque be appropriate at Dartmouth? Eleazar Wheelock’s house would be a good place, since Wheelock was the chief slaveowner in early Hanover. The writers would have to be careful about using the word “here” or the phrase “on this site,” since the house was in a different location when slaves worked there. And the house is no longer owned by the college anyway, so the new owner would have to favor the idea.

  • A Google Street View image of the rear of the Boss Tennis Center, as seen from the adjoining neighborhood:


    The fieldhouse proposed for the site next door (Bing aerial) is not popular with the neighbors (The Dartmouth). Here is the latest from the April 5 Planning Board meeting (pdf):

    Submission of Application for Site Plan Review by the Trustees of Dartmouth College to construct a 69,860 sf indoor practice facility on the “sunken garden” site, east of Boss Tennis Center, 4 Summer Court, Tax Map 34, Lot 102, in the “I” zoning district. The applicant has requested that consideration of this proposal be postponed until May 3. There is concern about the proposed conditions of approval regarding the adequacy of the town stormwater system to handle the proposed stormwater flows. More research about the drainage in that section of Hanover will be done.

  • From the same agenda item:

    In addition, the College has submitted another site plan review application for an expansion of the soccer pavilion at Burham Field. Both the indoor practice facility and the soccer pavilion projects rely on the eastern portion of Thompson Parking Lot for material laydown, construction trailers, contractor parking, porta-potties, etc., as well as Summer Street for the sole construction access for both sites. Abutters to the indoor practice facility project were contacted by the College to apprise them of the request for continuance.

    The original “sports pavilion,” designed by Freeman French Freeman, Inc., has an appealing scale; one wonders how it will be expanded. Let’s hope that 19th-century suburban metro station feeling isn’t erased from the building’s south facade. (And will Dartmouth’s most notable unnamed building finally be named in honor of someone or something?)

  • “Dartmouth Dining Services (DDS) is also involved in the MDF effort by establishing a C-store (mini convenience store) in each of the house centers. The C-store will be fashioned after those in Goldstein Hall and in East Wheelock. DDS is also rolling out a new senior apartment meal plan for undergraduate students who will live in campus apartments” (“Campus Services Supports Moving Dartmouth Forward,” Behind the Green (2 March 2016), 2 pdf).

  • A contest involving drawings of the Frost Sculpture in College Park.

  • A story in the Valley News reports that a developer is buying hundreds of acres near the Joseph Smith Memorial for an ideal city. The NewVistas Foundation website proposes “a settlement comprised of 50 diamond-shaped communities of 15,000 to 20,000 people each, which are located adjacent to each other.” The standard urban building form includes an underground “podway,” a bit like the Disney “utilidor,” and the shopping is to be done in podway-level malls, protected from the elements…

    • —————————-

     

    References
    ↑1 Russ Klettke, “The High Performance Trail,” American Builders Quarterly (2016).
    ↑2 Rick Mills, interviewed by Charles C.W. Jang, “Dart Kapital,” The Dartmouth Review (1 June 2014) (brackets and ellipses original).

    Graphic design, history, Friendly’s

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  • Take a look at this fascinating 19th-century photograph of the rear of Dartmouth Row. It is dated to the pre-1904 period, but judging from the tents, one might guess that it was taken in 1869, at the time of the centennial celebration. Younger alumni, many of them Civil War vets, were housed here in tents borrowed from the Army. And take a look at the small building on the left — is that a Temple of Cloacina, an ephemeral outhouse? Middle Fayerweather Hall stands in that area now.

  • The push to apply the nickname “The Woods” to Memorial Field continues (see the Big Green Alert Blog). What about fashioning some of the walls of the replacement stands from board-formed concrete (ConcreteNetwork.com)? What about incorporating a couple of precast concrete columns in the shape of trees?

  • The Rauner Blog has an interesting post on John Smith, a 1773 graduate, Preceptor of Moor’s Charity School, early Tutor at Dartmouth, and Trustee.

  • Campus Planning & Facilities has a collection of articles on the Grant.

  • It turns out the football team last spring ran a uniform design contest through the same website that Graduate Studies used to design their coat of arms, 99designs. The winning football uniform design includes lots of Lone Pines, including on the shoulders and the back of the helmet; most interesting is the Pine on the palm of each glove. The design brief says “We would also like to see some designs that incorporate the ‘Lone Pine’ (pictured below) on the shoulders or in any creative way, similarly to Oregon’s ‘feathers’ on the shoulders of their jerseys.” The brief mentions the state motto but not the school motto, strangely.

  • Back in August The Dartmouth had an article on Bruce Wood, maestro of the Big Green Alert site and its blog companion Big Green Alert Daily.

  • The Rauner Blog also has posts on General Thayer’s gift of his library; the catalogs of Dartmouth College and Dartmouth University; and an 1829 letter from Joseph Dow describing the college.

  • The Valley News announces that Friendly’s in West Leb is closing. I’ll never forget the disappointment on the face of a logician friend when he learned that the “ham and turkey pot pies” that our server mentioned among the dinner specials were actually nothing more than ham pot pies and turkey pot pies.

  • Cognitive Marketing designed the Thayer School shield.

  • Check out the May 1957 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. The issue features Harrison’s initial design for the Hopkins Center. The plan is all there, but the details are changed. The view on pages 22 and 23 shows the long north-south corridor in a different form. The Barrows Rotunda, the cylindrical exhibition space in the front facade? It looks like it was descended from an unroofed two-level glass-walled shaft that features in this 1957 design — it was meant to go right through the middle of the Top of the Hop.

  • For Larson’s prior design for the Hop, see the December 1946 Alumni Magazine, beginning on page 11.

  • Tuck’s 2008 visual identity guide is available as a pdf. It’s cute that it calls the green color “Tuck green.” The book specifies the Sabon and Frutiger typefaces.

  • The athletics Graphic Standards Manual of 2005 is also available as a pdf. Now we know whom to blame for the gigantic TM connected with the green D logo (page 3). It is interesting that in addition to Dartmouth Green (PMS 349 C), this book also defines Dartmouth Black (Pro Black C) (page 11). The primary, “athletic” typeface is not named, but the secondary typeface is specified as Gill Sans Bold.

    The authors of the manual are SME Inc., the firm that created a shield for Manhattan College and the MLS logo with the boot striking the ball. (As an aside, that MLS logo recently was replaced by a shield designed by Athletics and Berliner Benson. A post at Brand New shows the shield partitioned by an almost typographical line that hangs over the border like the tail of a letter Q.)

    • Photography at the 1904 visit of the Earl of Dartmouth

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    Icon1647-0645-0000020A Icon1647-0645-0000023A

    These two photos from the Archives show the arrival of the Earl of Dartmouth in 1904:

    Combination of two photos of Earl of Dartmouth 1904

    The photos were taken from the steps of Casque & Gauntlet looking east toward the Inn. The righthand photo is the earlier of the two, and the Earl’s carriage appears in both photos. The student with the white collar striding down the walkway in the righthand photo is also visible at the edge of the left photo.

    In the left photo a professional photographer is visible, standing on a stepladder behind a large camera. He might have a cigar in his mouth.

    What kind of image did he capture? Here is a photo he took a few seconds after the two photos above; the Earl’s carriage has already rounded the corner:

    panorama of Earl of Dartmouth at Inn Corner, American Memory

    This photo is from the Library of Congress, which lists the copyright holder as E. Chickering & Co. A slightly cropped version of this photo is available in the Dartmouth Archives.

    Bus stop construction begins; other items

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    • The Innovation Center in 4 Currier has opened (Dartmouth Now). The design appears to be by Truex Cullins, who did the original building.

    • A little film introduces Perdido, the new sculpture on East Wheelock.

    • The Alumni Magazine has put up its electronic archive of every issue since the October 1905 Dartmouth Bi-Monthly, edited by E.M. Hopkins.

    • The post here on the topic of the new bus stop at the Hop complained about the sidewalk in front of the Inn. It turns out that that area is going to be reworked as well (Dartmouth Now). The sidewalk is growing, according to DCREO associate director of real estate Tim McNamara:

      The planned changes to the sidewalk and surrounding areas will effectively create two lanes as well as smoothing out the frost-heaved sections of sidewalk.

      “At present, pedestrians walking down East Wheelock have to pass under the porte-cochère,” says McNamara. “We will relocate the sidewalk to the outside of the porte-cochère so that pedestrians will not conflict with cars and guests coming and going from the Inn.”

      Moving the curb line out beyond the street’s current shoulder will also allow expansion of the Inn’s outdoor dining.

    • The Hopkins Center’s iconic Moore Theatre facade is also getting new double-pane windows (Dartmouth Now) ahead of the planned expansion and renovation. The D has a photo. (The Planner’s Blog has a post on the project)

    • Lebanon Junior High (J.F. Larson) is being renovated and reused, in part as the Spark Community Center. Studio Nexus is working on the building.

    • Project VetCare has purchased the 1907 house at 80 Lebanon Street and plans to rent rooms to three or more student veterans (Valley News). It’s the brown bungalow at the center of this Bing bird’s-eye view.

    • More great aerials: the Shower Towers and Kiewit, showing the committed but incongruous Bradley Plaza, and a 1919 photo of the Green showing the big tent set up for the 150th anniversary celebration. Most intriguing are this aerial and this aerial of Dartmouth Hall on fire in 1935. That was the fire that led Larson to gut the 1906 building and insert new floors and interiors, and to put up the current belfry and the three front gables showing the notable years.

    • One is relieved to see the College Usher (Dean of Libraries Jeffrey Horrell) identified as such in a Commencement photo showing him carrying Lord Dartmouth’s Cup.

    • A tidbit from the biography of the late David McLaughlin, Dartmouth President from 1981 to 1987. On the elimination of fraternities and sororities:

      In hindsight, I am convinced that the wrong approach was taken. Having been in a unique position to restructure the fraternity system, I should1David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed 2007), 135. have been more decisive early in my presidency, during my “Honeymoon” period. Perhaps I could and should have eliminated the fraternities in their current form and redefined them — brought about some positive fundamental restructuring of the campus social system. Neither my predecessor nor my successors had such a golden opportunity, both being non-Dartmouth alumni and academics and, therefore, suspect from the outset, by alumni and students, as men having little, if any, use for the Greek system. But football-playing, fraternity-member David McLaughlin was a different story. Oh, the howling would have been long and loud, and many on the board would undoubtedly have opposed me, but I believe that I could have brought a majority of my fellow trustees along with me. What I should have said, quite emphatically, in that inaugural speech of mine was, “Dartmouth needs to dismantle fraternities as they exist today.”2David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed 2007), 136.

    • The Hood now has put up a page on the expansion, with no new info since June 11.

    • Memorial Field construction is set to begin November 17 and finish by September 1 (Planning Board minutes pdf).

    —–

    [Update 07.29.2014: Link to Planner’s Blog post added.]

    [Update 07.22.2014: Link to photo of Hop windows added.]

    —–

     

    References
    ↑1 David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed 2007), 135.
    ↑2 David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed 2007), 136.

    The new OPDPM website has projects

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    The Offices of Planning & Design and Project Management (ex-OPDC, ex-FPO) have a new site with an extensive list of projects. Among the new revelations are:

    • An image of what looks like a sensitive renovation by Smith & Vansant of the Whitaker Apartments at 4 North Park. The building is now called Triangle House (not to be confused with Triangle Fraternity (Wikipedia)), and some details are given at the OPaL website.
    • Information on the new Kappa Delta sorority house by Truex Cullins. Although the house will have the address of 1 Occom Ridge, its main entrance will occupy the west or rear facade, which faces the parking lot and the campus (image). Not sure about those boxed eaves and shed-roofed dormers; it is a big house.
    • Information on the Dartmouth Row modernization plan. This project was mentioned during May of 2012 along with the NCAC.
    • News of a renovation of Fairchild Hall by Wilson Architects.

    —–
    [Update 04.23.2013: Vansant spelling corrected.]

    Dartmouth Row as a “living-learning center”

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    Dartmouth is fortunate that its “old main” and the buildings surrounding it in the original core of the campus have not been turned into a purely administrative headquarters. The four buildings of Dartmouth Row are the home to frequently-used classrooms and offices, including those of the departments of Classics and languages.

    But could Dartmouth Row be used for something else? Could it be put to a more exciting purpose? Could the upper levels of Dartmouth Hall, or of all of the buildings in Dartmouth Row, be reconfigured as traditional dormitory space?

    After decades of neglecting the original student rooms that line its Jefferson-designed Lawn, the University of Virginia created a competitive application process during the 1950s. The move invigorated the Lawn, and now living on the Lawn creates a membership in a sort of honor society. Some of the rooms are reserved for residents chosen by particular organizations.

    Reed Hall before 1870, author's collection

    Reed Hall before 1870

    Students have never lived in the current Dartmouth Hall, but they roomed in its predecessor from 1784 to 1904. The building also held classrooms the whole time, and after 1895 student rooms were limited to the top floor. Students also lived in Wentworth and Thornton Halls beginning in 1829. Although Wentworth became all-academic in 1871, Thornton became all-residential in 1898 before switching to classrooms in 1912.

    Finally, Reed Hall housed students in its third level from its opening (1840) and later installed students in its second level (1885) and first level (1904). Subsequent remodelings turned Reed into an all-academic building.

    The college could convert the top two levels of Dartmouth Hall into a dormitory. The ground-level and basement-level classrooms, including 105 Dartmouth, would stay; the department offices would move, perhaps into an expanded Bartlett Hall or to a building projected for the west side of Berry Row.

    Why do this? The change would return some life to the Green, and it would open up new housing right at the center of campus. Putting the school’s iconic building to a traditional use would provide a model for mixing academic and residential life on other parts of campus. The group of students allowed to live in Dartmouth Hall would be an exclusive crowd; if it seemed too much like a clique, then the entire row could be made into a dormitory cluster, with classrooms on the ground level.

    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.]

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