Dartmo.

Thayer School is in the process of adding a group of five offices to the roof of its building, near the mechanical equipment (via Sue).

A nice aerial photo of the business-engineering complex appears at the beginning of the video at the Thayer site.

I. Background

The site where Leverone Field House and Thompson Arena face each other across South Park Street, with a couple of houses in between, is an interesting one (Google Maps aerial, aerial, street view entering from the south). It is getting some attention these days.

First, the transit report proposes a bus shelter here (pdf).

Second, Athletic Director Harry Sheehy commented in an interview in the Alumni Magazine that the school needs another field house. Chase Fields seems a likely site, and the building could even take over a part of the Thompson lot facing South Park Street.

Third, the owner of the private house just below the entrance to the parking lot, at 31 1/2 South Park Street, has demolished the building and is replacing it with a three-story building containing a dental office with apartments above (Planning Board minutes Sept. 13 (pdf); see also Planning Board minutes Sept. 6 (pdf)).

All of this activity gets one thinking about the two old houses in front of Thompson Arena at 25 and 27 South Park Street, both designed by Jens F. Larson.

On the one hand, the presence of the two houses preserves the historic appearance of the east side of the street and maintains the rhythm of solids and voids that stretches all the way up to Wheelock Street. Number 29, the Fire & Skoal house, is also a Larson product.

The view that the houses frame is interesting and surprising — it looks like there is some kind of hangar back there, and a walk along the beach-flat ground that reveals the ribs and upturned hulk of Thompson behind the brown shingled house can create a nautical impression. Removing the houses to create a plaza would be a bit arbitrary: very few people actually walk from the front door of Leverone to the front door of Thompson.

On the other hand, the two Nervi buildings were meant to face each other, and the two houses have always been meant to come out. Master plans have long proposed that the houses be removed and a plaza be constructed to link the two concrete arenas. The 2007 Landscape Master Plan included such a proposal (pdf).

II. Proposal

The two Larson houses at 25 and 27 could be moved across the street, above Cobra, and a plaza could be built in their place.

The plaza would be difficult to make uniform in footprint. The two Nervi buildings do not face each other directly. Each stands a different distance from the street and rises to a different height.

Piazza Nervi would become the student entrance to the whole Chase Fields complex. Pedestrians walking down Park Street would swing diagonally across the Thompson forecourt and then head eastward. The present route into the parking lot is relatively convoluted and disappointing.

As a bonus, the piazza could tie into a new path cut westward through the Crosby-Park block. The need for this path to Lebanon Street, the only cross-block route between Wheelock and Summer Streets, has been obvious for years, and the Ped/Bike Master Plan released in October (pdf) recommends it. A long brick wall built to shield the neighbors’ houses could serve as a venue for a horizontal climbing race put on by the DOC: speed-bouldering.

III. Conclusion

The new piazza would be the first work of architecture of any kind in Hanover — whether a plaque, monument, room, or building — dedicated to an architect.

It would make a nice gateway for drivers entering the campus from the southeast. That might be its most important function.

The danger is that Piazza Nervi would be a windswept Modernist wasteland: there is a fine line between minimalism and barrenness. But something good is possible.

The rising cost of the Inn addition has been controversial lately, and The Dartmouth now has an article about it.

It seems strange to say that “[g]reat effort has been made to preserve the Inn’s exterior” when that exterior is undistinguished at best. Perhaps this is a reaction to negative comments from alumni, cited in a previous post.

The four buildings involved here may be seen in the plan provided by Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc.:

• The west wing of the Inn (Larson & Wells, 1923), built with a donation from Randolph McNutt, is historic but undistinguished. It will contain the prefunction room and restrooms as shown in the plan.

• The Lang Building (Larson, 1937) faces Main Street at the southwest corner of the site (the upper right of the plan). It is both historic and well done and is worth preserving. Its upper level will be given over to hotel rooms.

• The Hopkins Center (Harrison & Abramowitz, 1959-1962) is a notable building by a world-class architect and must be modified carefully.

• The main block of the Hanover Inn (William Benjamin Tabler, 1966-1967) is both unhistoric and undistinguished. While fairly effective at disguising the great bulk of the hotel, the Inn is only nominally Georgian in style.

The comment about preservation is especially interesting in light of the fact that one of the Cambridge Seven images proposes to add shutters to the windows of the main block:

(Another view by the firm shows the Inn without shutters added.)

Big Green Alert: The Blog has a couple of construction photos.

I. Background.

The hope is that if or when Dartmouth builds a new heat plant in Dewey Field, the prominent field north of the Life Sciences Center, it erects a building of high quality.

More important than the architecture, however, is the siting: the building should be located in such a way that it does not impede the construction of other buildings in the future. This is the second time this idea has been flogged here.

Dartmouth needs to decide upon the potential building sites for the whole area between the LSC and the 6th hole of the golf course. It should know ahead of time whether this will be a district of brown metal sheds, academic buildings, office spaces, or even general-market apartment buildings, and how these new buildings will be organized, even if the first one is not built until 2050.

Google Street Views of the overall parking lot (up from the bottom, down from the Medical School) show the tremendous amount of space available to future builders with incomplete ideas. The sort-of road that lines the western edge of the site will form a crucial axis, as is made apparent in the set of excellent views to the north from under the Kellogg bridge and to the south (uphill).

II. Proposal.

The idea of placing academic buildings or dormitories north of the LSC should be dismissed out of hand. This site is simply too far away from the center of campus. The fact that the LSC forms a great rampart walling off the outside world suggests that the college agrees: what lies beyond the pale is not a part of the campus.

But there will be buildings built here, and there are some functions that would be appropriate for the college to develop here.

Present zoning aside, this could be a great place for commercial rental buildings with integrated parking garages. The Development Office could be here. Look to Centerra; look to the space the college is renting in downtown Hanover at the moment. This site is no farther from the Green than is Ledyard Bridge, and walking distance is obviously of little importance to non-student functions. Retail and residential uses would be essential to add life to the district when it is finally built out, but they might be too much to hope for.

What about the golf course? Add a couple of holes to the north or east; build a new clubhouse at the north end of this commercial project, or in the Reservoir Road area as a companion to the Rugby Club.

[02.25.2012 update: first paragraph reworded slightly.]

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.

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.)

Mark di Suvero’s X-Delta has moved again, this time to a site in front of Berry Library. It will move back to its permanent site below the Hood after the Visual Arts Center is finished.

And Richard Nonas’s 1976 sculpture Telemark Shortline is back:

See also Google Street View.

• A nice reproduction of the famous photo of the burning of Dartmouth Hall is on line. This view to the southwest shows the rear of Dartmouth Hall, not the front. The photo seems to have been taken a moment after a large explosion — a smoke column is blasted horizontally from the northeast corner of the building at the second-floor level. Many of the students nearby are sprinting away, and some are turning to look back at the building.

• The Band is getting rid of its old style of uniform, a green wool blazer over a white turtleneck, white pants, and white tennis shoes. That combination seems to have lasted about 45 years.

• In August, the Planning Board talked in hypothetical terms of several potential development projects on Lyme Road, such as a tennis club north of the Chieftain (pdf), a golf course and country club around the junction of Lyme Road and Old Lyme Road (pdf), and others (pdf).

• The official traditions page is irritating not just because of the punctuation, the capitalization of “the HOP,” or the use of sentences like “It’s far different than [sic] you’re imagining.” Nor is it because of the claim that Homecoming was established in 1884, when Dartmouth Night didn’t even exist with or without a bonfire until 1895. No, it’s the statement that the school’s chartered mission is “… education of Indian youth … and also to educate English and others.” The Charter contains the true mission, which is “the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes … and also of English Youth and any others.”

• An early-1960s photo of the Hop excavation looking southwest from around Wilson Hall.

• Ask Dartmouth has put up some interesting posts lately, covering the Lone Pine, with a super photo of College Hill probably taken from the steeple of the College Church; the Hinman Mail Center (what it doesn’t say is that the student mailboxes are called Hinman Boxes, and until the mid-1990s the USPS tolerated the use of HB numbers in mailing addresses); the pendulum in Fairchild; and Sanborn Tea, still 10 cents a cup.

• Rauner Library’s blog has too many interesting posts to keep up with. See, for example, the post on the color Dartmouth Green.

• The Hanover Improvement Society has a smaller membership and larger ambition than one might expect.

• The New Hampshire Good Roads Association of 1904 is a remarkable survivor from the pre-auto era, when bicyclists were the interest group demanding that the highways be smooth.

• The bus stop study (pdf) recommends the removal of the curb cuts at Hanover Park (Google Street View). Bravo. That building would be so much more inviting if it did not pretend to have its own driveway.

• Dartmouth and the Mac: The Valley News article about Apple products in Hanover doesn’t focus on Dartmouth’s long-time maintenance of a Mac-centric campus. The college turned its Mac expectation into a requirement for all entering students in 1991. That seems fairly early until one reads about Drexel selecting Apple in 1983 and requiring Macs as soon as they appeared in 1984 (Drexel’s Steve Jobs memorial events).

• The unpaved paths on Whittemore Green should be applauded (Street View).

• The lively Congregational Church building in Wilder (Olcott), Vermont was designed in 1889 by Edward Goss. Following a renovation, it has become the Charles T. Wilder Center (U.K. Architects, Trumbull-Nelson, Lyme Properties). Charles Wilder was a mill owner who also gave buildings to Wellesley and Dartmouth.

• The Center for Cartoon Studies in WRJ is moving into a new headquarters (Valley News). The Center’s students occasionally create or display works at Dartmouth.

• National Geographic Traveler ranks the Dartmouth Winter Carnival sixth among world carnivals. That is pretty good, considering. The number one carnival is Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous. (My high school band was scheduled to play the Rondy parade but pulled out when cold weather was forecast. Why not just wear warm clothing? Because this was the one time in three years when we could wear our official uniforms. Why not just play out the windows of a bus? Because the last time the band had tried that, spectators had pelted the bus with snowballs all the way down Fourth Avenue: if they were going to stand around and watch a parade when it was 20 below, the least the band could do was actually march.)

• Women’s Hockey won at Fenway (!) recently (Valley News). Fenway’s paint color was described as “Dartmouth Green” in 1934, and that color seems to have been used when the Green Monster was first painted in 1947. The shade used on the Green Monster does seem to have been lightened since.

• Dartmouth Now has a piece on “cabinhopping.”

• New notice of old projects: Centerbrook’s Wilder Lab addition; Lavallee/Brensinger’s Red Rolfe Field and DHMC Patient Training & Safety Center remodeling, and Red Rolfe Field; and Truex Cullins’s Buchanan Hall alterations.

The website for the current strategic planning process uses the 2019 Quartomillenium as an endpoint, with its motto “Imagine the Next 250.”

The Bicentennial year of 1969-1970 gives an example of what the Quartomillenium could be. There were three big events according to Charles Widmeyer in John Sloan Dickey: A Chronicle of His Presidency of Dartmouth College (1991), 250, 271. Those events were:

1. The Bicentennial Commencement in the summer of 1969.
2. Dartmouth Day (i.e. Charter Day), December 13, 1969. This was the focal point of the year, and it involved a fireworks display, a parade around the Green, and a proclamation by the Governor in front of the Hop (the Bicentennial plaque is in the Zahm Garden).
3. The Third Century Convocation in the Fall of 1970.

The notable commemorative objects produced for the Bicentennial included:

1. A USPS stamp designed by John Scotford, technically in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Dartmouth College Case, since USPS does not recognize individual schools or their anniversaries.
2. A new college flag with its stylized pine symbol designed by Scotford.
3. A medal designed by Rudolph Ruzicka and struck by the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia, requiring an act of Congress:

The Quartomillenium could include these events:

1. A commemoration of the Bicentennial of the Dartmouth College Case.
2. A visit by the 10th Earl of Dartmouth.
3. The receipt from the College of Arms of letters patent granting to Dartmouth an honorary coat of arms along these lines:

Yale has been described as having more buildings with street addresses than any other school, proportionally at least. That might have been the case 15 years ago, but in the age of E911 address requirements, there should not be a campus building anywhere in the country without a street number.

This is interesting: Dartmouth’s Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center, which basically is part of the old Med School campus along College Street, had its street number changed from 76 College Street to 78 College Street (DAM Jan/Feb 2012, 14 (pdf)).

• Virginia Tech has an official building stone quarried near the campus since 1899.

• The University of North Carolina carries out an archeological investigation before laying a new drainage pipe.

• The most interesting new campus built during the next decade might be the one on Roosevelt Island in New York. The Chronicle reports and gives an update on the proposals; the Times reports on Stanford’s withdrawal and Cornell’s winning proposal. So far the renderings of the SOM proposal leave something to be desired.

• Roosevelt Island (Google Maps aerial) could be a fantastic place for a university, sited near the center of the city and yet isolated from the grid. (The Times has an article about an exhibit at MCNY on the Manhattan grid.) Incidentally, if Manhattan’s grid were extended northward, the corner of 163rd Avenue and West 4,543rd Street would occur at Maynard and College Streets in Hanover according to ExtendNY (via kottke.org).

• The iconic St. Gall plan for an ideal monastery has been mentioned here before, and a new website (St. Gall Monastery Plan) has a nice version of the plan and several aerial views of speculative reconstructions.

• The jumbled former site of an historic hospital, the Radcliffe Area in Oxford is being redeveloped for university functions with buildings by big-name architects. Plans for buildings by Rafel Viñoly and by others have been approved. Herzog & de Meuron are designing a building there too. This was the subject of a post here as well.

• Modernist architect Edward Durell Stone, designer of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., created some notable campus buildings. They share a certain look: the Atwood Center at Alaska Methodist University/Alaska Pacific University (Flickr photo) has a lot in common with the original buildings of the University of Albany, parts of which are being rehabilitated (Times Union (via The Chronicle)).

• Inside Higher Ed has a review of Bryant Tolles’s new book, Academic Architecture in New England. The book, based on Tolles’s 1970 dissertation, provides the best coverage available anywhere of Dartmouth’s original buildings.

• A new book about the work of alumni firm Rogers Marvel is available.

• Dartbeat has a map of warmcuts around campus. What is a warmcut? It’s a shortcut that won’t save you time but will let you stay indoors as much as possible.

• The college publicity office has an article on the 50th anniversary of the Hanover Conservancy, formerly the Hanover Conservation Council. The group manages the Mink Brook Nature Preserve and other areas.

• The Four Aces Diner in West Lebanon has reopened (Valley News).

• Eli Burak, whose work has been linked here, is the new official college photographer following the retirement of Joseph Mehling (The Dartmouth, Facebook video (via Dartmouth Now)).

• The story of the Chicken Farmer I Still Love You graffito, in the Valley News.

• Dartmouth’s investment in sustainability (The Dartmouth) is likely to create problems when it encounters the college’s interest in preserving the historic windows still found in many campus buildings.

• A solar-powered blue emergency phone (Dartmouth Planning).

• Historic photos of Main Street businesses. Note the Dartmouth Bank Building before the arches were added to the front and after the arches were added (but before the building was raised by one level). More of this building and others north of Lebanon Street appear in a slide show from the Hanover Bicentennial parade on July 4, 1961 (via the Planning blog). Also in the slide show is an interesting shot of the buildings that preceded the Nugget Arcade.

• Is the Watershed Studio’s listing of a Ledyard Canoe Club project a reference to a replacement building, a renovation, or something else?

• The Co-op Food Store at the roundabout on Lyme Road is the subject of some detailed information provided by ORW.

• In Norwich, Vermont’s ex-village of Lewiston (see the Rauner post) is a street that was recently named Ledyard Lane (Google Maps). The street leads to the depot, which is still standing, and one presumes it was previously called Depot Street. How strange to see John Ledyard’s name migrating via the bridge across the river to a site he had nothing to do with.

• An interesting granite monument is set in the ground at the northwest corner of Lebanon and Summer Streets (Google Street View). The “H” must stand for Hanover, but why here? Is it a former town line? Doubtful. Perhaps a former corner of a town-owned parcel.

• The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the development of the Synclavier and the origins of the Bregman Electronic Music Studio.

• The latest college map (pdf), released in August of 2010, is the first to show the LSC, ’53 Commons, the VAC, 4 Currier, and other novelties. The map also strangely misnames more than a dozen Greek houses in an apparent attempt to Romanize or transliterate the Greek characters of their names (via Jonathan). Visually, the map might be improved if the ground were shaded and the symbols indicating accessible entrances and restrooms were made less obtrusive. And one might hope that the mustard yellow of the buildings could be replaced with gray, brown, or green.

• Dartmouth has been digging up the small lab animals that were buried in mass graves at the Rennie Farm during the 1960s and 1970s (Valley News).

• Dartmouth Now writes about the last male descendant of Eleazar Wheelock.

I. A recent one-paragraph review.

One alum quoted in the Alumni Council’s annual report (pdf) stated:

The north campus is appalling. The buildings look like something from USC and it is barren of trees. Further, the buildings pointlessly drift off to the right, making it an unsatisfying prospect. Seriously, from Berry north they need to plant several thousand trees to soften and obscure this severe, inappropriate landscape.

There is something worth discussing here. The unusual wording itself creates a number of questions:

1. What does “north campus” mean? Is it the area around Kemeny, the stretch from Berry to Moore, or the stretch all the way up to Gilman? The word “severe” in reference to the landscape suggests that he* is referring to the Kemeny area, which has low granite walls. But who knows?

2. How quickly are trees supposed to grow? Berry Row was recently a construction site. One supposes the same trees are to a) provide general natural beauty (“The north campus is barren of trees”) and b) obscure a landscape.

3. The buildings drift “pointlessly” to the right: does this mean that the buildings fail to lead to a point, such as the still-unbuilt terminus of the Berry Row axis, or does it mean that the alignment of the row should follow an unbending north-south line no matter what goes on in the surrounding streets? It is obvious that the curve in the line of buildings traces of the historic curve in the town’s street grid, which in turn follows the bend in the river.

4. Is the USC comparison useful? The rather attractive buildings of USC. do not look similar to the buildings of Berry Row and do not seem to have been designed by Moore’s firm, unlike, say, certain buildings of UCLA, UCSB (Kresge College, 1971), UCSC, and Berkeley (Haas School of Business, 1995).

II. Another take.

Kemeny/Haldeman seems successful. The building’s street facade is admirably modest in scale; the twin porticos are delightful. The way the building works with Sherman to bracket Carson Hall is important and it seems well done. The towers on the inside of the block are not as notable as they could be and disappoint somewhat. The handling of the termination of the main tower’s north facade might be a mistake: it is not much of a tower if it does not even meet the ridge of the roof.

The eccentric footprint of the McLaughlin Cluster has the potential to be too quirky for its own good, but it works; the apparently arbitrary inflection is not bothersome.

A brochure-quality view of McLaughlin captured by Google Street View looks to the south toward the towers of Sudikoff and Baker. The use of granite and white-painted brick, reminiscent of Dartmouth Hall, is appealing.

Street View has a photo of the hefty sculptural light-pier at Bildner’s front entrance.

The absence of shutters on McLaughlin is a bit of a let-down, but shutters seem to be the litmus test for traditionalism in Dartmouth buildings these days: Fahey-McLane was meant to be shutterless but got them anyway, according to one account, because they were important to a donor.

—————–

* Really a “he”? He seems to be under 40 (the youthful use of “seriously”) but might view himself as having the tastes of someone over 60 (the use of the antiquated “prospect” instead of “view”).

Dartmouth has been debating the academic qualifications of its athletes lately (Jan. 6 editorial, response, another view). Athletes in the Ivy League are not paid to play but have at least the same access as other students to financial aid, which, as the Times points out, has lately made the league competitive with the scholarships of the big-time sports schools.

Meanwhile the big-time schools and the NCAA are under pressure to raise or eliminate the wage cap on their athletes. Joe Nocera’s proposal in the Times makes sense but might not go far enough, since it doesn’t excuse athlete-employees from the obligation to attend classes — a wasteful distraction that has long been something of a sham at some schools.

But Liberty University is leading the way: the school has sponsored a professional freestyle skier named Jay Panther (press release). Panther, who is pictured in the press release wearing a school shirt at the school’s football stadium, trains at the school’s ski area and represents the school in competitions — but he is not a student!

This goes well beyond the weirdness of the University of Phoenix having a stadium without a team to play in it, and it might represent an honest way out for big-time football. One wonders whether a place like Auburn or Miami might be better off if it eliminated its football program and then sponsored (like Liberty) or purchased (like Red Bull GmbH and the New York Red Bulls MLS team) a new minor-league football franchise that would wear its uniforms and represent it in competitions. The players would finally be paid what they are worth on the open market; the schools would no longer have to deal with a group of distracted and occasionally underqualified students; and the fans wouldn’t necessarily notice any difference.

Discussions and controversies continue to slow the plan of the friends of Hanover High rowing to turn a part of Fullington Farm into a boating headquarters (Valley News article, Planning Board minutes Sept. 6 (pdf), Valley News article 1, article 2, Friends article).

The Valley News noted on December 16 that the crew was allowed to move in but was denied permission to hold early-morning practices.

UK Architects of Hanover have designed a renovation of the ground floor of the Buskey Building, a 1978 commercial block at 7 Allen Street, just past EBAs. The building’s second level is connected to the rear of the bookstore by a bridge: this is where the bookstore had its music department during the early 1990s.

Google’s Street View images, taken in the past few years, show the space as Omer & Bob’s Sport Shop, empty at the time of the photo and with a leasing sign in the window.

The client for this project is new health clinic for college employees called Dartmouth Health Connect (Dartmouth Now, The Dartmouth, Valley News; see also Forbes).

A rendering of the new interior is available at Dartmouth Now.

During the nineteenth century, horse-drawn coaches delivered people to Hanover by dropping them at the southeast corner of Main and Wheelock. Bus companies continued to use the stop, including Vermont Transit (which apparently dropped its competent dark-green identity in 2008) and Dartmouth Coach.

The college and the town are now working on expanding the transit stop and moving it to a more spacious site to the east, in front of the Zahm Garden (The Dartmouth; see also this Valley News story).

The new bus stop will include a shelter for the first time: the shelter is likely to follow the basic design set out on page 19 of the Advance Transit bus stop design study by ORW (pdf). (ORW also created the new Ped/Bike Master Plan (pdf), which is particularly relevant to the college; see the College Planner’s post on the plan.)

The design of the little shelter in front of the Zahm Garden might involve a variety of considerations:

1. The history of the Inn Corner and the south end of the Green. Moving the bus stop eastward gives a bus space to pull up but also reflect the loss of the pedestrian’s freedom to use the street, a result of the growth of the auto (see Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” article “The Pedestrian Loses the Way,” New York Times (Nov. 13, 2011)).

2. The grassy island that once occupied the center of East Wheelock Street. Possibly a remnant of the Green from before the corner was cut off, the median was the site of a substantial masonry traffic marker for a time. The bus stop study proposal notes that “[a] small median is an optional element that can serve as a pedestrian refuge and act as a traffic calming feature.”

3. The Wheelock Street crossing. The study does not seem to show the crosswalk to be the raised feature that The Dartmouth mentions, but students would benefit if the crosswalk were elevated to the level of the sidewalk. This could be just the beginning — if the sidewalks were protected with bollards, the raised walk could be extended to cover the entire street between Main and College.

4. Architectural concerns. The new shelter could be made of glass in order to be overlooked, or it could be designed as a proud pavilion that establishes an axis with Baker Tower. It should not be so valuable that it could not be replaced in the future by the Hopkins Center wing that really belongs on this site.

5. The Hop’s somewhat unsuccessful landscaping. The isolated patch of grass north of the Zahm Garden does little more than pointlessly narrow the sidewalks that surround it.

Just a thought.

As Dartmo. enters its 17th year, the Dartmo.15 badge has been removed.

Over at Lamb & Rich, a post about putting off the proposed publication date for the book.

Thanks to Ameridane Press for the link to subway map. Thanks to Big Green Alert for the hat tip.

The Planning Board minutes of September 20 (pdf) mention that pedestrianizing Main Street, presumably between Lebanon and Wheelock, was considered several years ago and did not receive the support of the Chamber of Commerce.

The malls in Boulder and Charlottesville are fantastic places that appear to be successful, but each also seems to require a population that is much larger than Hanover’s. The extreme fluctuation of the college population would drain the life out of a Hanover mall far too often. The questionable closure of South College Street in the 1960s leaves no alternative route for the traffic that would be shunted away from the upper end of South Main Street: creating a pedestrian mall would be a radical and risky venture.

A better move might be to turn the diagonal parking on South Main Street into parallel parking, widen the sidewalks, raise the street surface, and define the edges of the street with bollards. Restaurants could claim spaces for outdoor seating, and the existing trees and benches would become less of an impediment to foot traffic. Northbound and eastbound traffic would be encouraged to use Lebanon Street and Park Street.