Dartmo.

Although Dartmouth seems to take some pride in having a campus without any gates, it could still benefit from the exercise of defining a campus boundary and identifying the major entrances to the academic precinct. A sketch from several years ago:

This is all fairly obvious, but it does not seem to receive much attention in writing. The greatest coherence (and the greatest support for the idea of walkability) seems to be achieved by reducing the number of gates and pulling them inward.

The only site where two gates would stand close to each other is at the southwest corner of the Green. Pulling the gates toward the center would allow them to share a single gatepost on the Green itself, but that would detract significantly from the Green and would interfere with the tree on the corner. Here, the gates should spring from the Inn and C&G (south gate) and from Collis and C&G (west gate):

Again, this is not a proposal, and Dartmouth does not need any more* gates.

However, if this sort of project were built, and if it were differentiated from its direct ancestor, Charles McKim’s wonderful gates at Harvard, the builders couldn’t go wrong with a set massive rusticated granite piers supporting a timber truss. This would refer to the Connecticut river bridges, especially Rufus Graves’s arched truss of the late eighteenth century.

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* Tuck Drive was built with a brick gateway at each end. The lower example survives. More recently, Scully-Fahey Field was erected with a large freestanding gateway.

The Lone Pine Tavern, created in College Hall’s (ex-cafeteria?) basement as part of the 1994 Atkin Olshin Lawson-Bell renovation, has closed and will be replaced with something more cost-effective called One Wheelock, The Dartmouth reports. I remember buying the second beer served in the place, and although not the biggest fan of the name, I liked the change of atmosphere that it represented. It is hard to believe it has been fifteen years. One hopes that someone will document the room in a panoramic photo while the decor is still intact.

The Zahm Memorial Garden, which filled the sunken space in front of the Hinman Boxes alongside the Inn, has been redesigned as the War Memorial Garden by Saucier + Flynn. The WWII/Korea memorial, a granite plaque, has occupied the end wall of the Inn since it was moved from under the Hood’s upper bridge in the early 1990s. The school moved the Vietnam Memorial, a sculpture, from the Collis Center to the garden. The Class of 1945 also gave the garden a plaque.

Google’s recent acquisition of the garage where it began as a company in 1998 and the preservation of the garage where Hewlett and Packard began working in 1938 point out the importance of documenting Bradley and Gerry Halls and marking their sites after they are demolished, since they have some role in the history of computing. Demolition begins as soon as this month.

Bradley is not, however, the place where Kemeny and Kurtz and others created BASIC in 1964, as reported here in “A Plea for the Shower Towers.” A College news release states that BASIC was invented in College Hall, and that is indeed where the school put its GE-235 during February of 1964 after taking delivery of it. BASIC first ran that May and the school moved the machines to the existing Bradley Hall later.

This is historic preservation for the twenty-first century: a group has formed to recreate the first Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which started in 1964 in the basement of College Hall on a GE-235 computer (used for executing programs) and a GE DN-30 (for communicating with the remote teletype terminals).