The college is requesting proposals from private companies to build a new campus power plant away from the center of town. The Valley News reports:

The plans will mean an end for Dartmouth’s power plant east of the Hood Museum of Art in downtown Hanover, including its 175-foot brick smokestack on the 1-acre site. The property, in use since the late 1890s, would be decommissioned and “repurposed” for other uses, Dartmouth said.

See also the college announcement.

It would be pretty short-sighted of the college to demolish the historic heating plant. It’s a fine old building that shows the hand of each of the college’s two main 20th-century architects, Charles Rich and Jens Larson. It encloses a vast open volume, making it useful as an art studio or a gallery space — at the center of the Arts District. One supposes that preserving as little as the smokestack would be too much to ask at this point, but that stack is a fundamental Hanover landmark (a prior post on this topic). Fifty years ago, the label of “old industrial building” might have been enough to justify demolition, but people are more sophisticated today.