Tag Archives: Heating Plant

Heating plant preliminaries under way

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The future heating plant has a project page, and the college has issued a request for qualifications (pdf). The college is talking to the town about a site (Union Leader). The project includes the decommissioning of the historic heating plant but does not address the possible demolition of that building; nevertheless, an article in the Valley News includes this somewhat sickening point:

Hanover officials, who have set sustainable energy goals as well, seemed to embrace the concept. Planning Board Chair Judith Esmay said the eventual tearing down of the 175-foot brick smokestack at the oil-burning plant could turn into a “community event.”

The revived campus master plan project “will envision replacement of the existing power plant — located at the campus core — that will be replaced by an offsite biomass energy plant.”

Dartmouth should save the smokestack, if not the entire Heat Plant

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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.