House professors’ dwelling sites selected

The Valley News reports on the sites of the six dwellings of the house professors. (Each of the future “residential colleges,” also called “residential communities,” “houses,” and sometimes “clusters,” will have a resident professor.) Correlated with what are presumed to be the corresponding residential communities, the sites are:

  1. The existing Frost House (White House), part of the East Wheelock Cluster. (The continued use of this house is only implied in the article.)

  2. A new house at 16 Webster Avenue. The college will build a “two-story, three-bedroom building of about 3,000 square feet with an attached two-car garage” on vacant land west of the President’s House. Street View. This house presumably will serve the Russell Sage cluster.

  3. A new house at 5 Sanborn Road, near the Howe Library. This house and its southern yard will occupy the site of 18 East South Street, a corner house demolished recently, as well as 5 Sanborn Road, a house slated for demolition (June 2 Planning Board meeting minutes pdf). Street View. This house presumably will serve the Topliff cluster.

  4. The existing house at 2 Clement Road, a Tudorbethan cottage behind LALACS. Street View. This house presumably will serve the McLaughlin cluster, although it is not close by.

  5. A new house at 12 Allen Street, next to Panarchy. “On the corner of School Street and Allen Street, the college owns land zoned for three single-family homes, on which it plans to build two residences with a shared backyard.” According to June 2 Planning Board meeting minutes (pdf), “[t]he ravine will be filled to create a lot with less topographic relief. Tim shared a little history about the lot. A person had excavated a cave in the side of the ravine and lived there for some time.” Street View. One of the two new residences presumably will serve the Mass Row cluster, blocks away.

  6. The existing house at 3 ½ North Park Street, a rambling Victorian dwelling across from Triangle House. Street View. By process of elimination, this house is presumed to serve the Fayers cluster, although it is closer to East Wheelock.

The college plans to begin site work on the new buildings in the fall “and may break ground as soon as next spring” (this and all other unattributed quotations are from the VN article).

Some of these houses are quite distant from the clusters they are meant to serve; perhaps this is only an interim step, useful during the ten or twelve years before a major gift allows the construction of a permanent (non-prefab) dwelling within the bounds of each Residential Community.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *