Dartmo.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

I. Aerial films

Dartmouth Now has posted a video of a campus flyover taken from a helicopter. While most aerial photos look from south to north, this video skirts the northern and eastern edges of the campus. Things look different from this new perspective:

See also the helmet cam video of a parachutist landing at Memorial Field to start the Columbia game on October 22 (via the Big Green Alert blog).

II. Street View: Paths and Passages

Google has added the results of a sortie by one of its human-powered tricycles to its visual representation of Dartmouth’s campus. At least one trike visited about a year ago. Here is the view from the center of the Green.

The tricyclist took a curious detour to the rear of the NAD House and traversed the bridge to McCulloch Hall. He managed to ride under the Bildner Hall portico, onto the running track at Memorial Field, through the Hood Museum gateways, and along Mass Row.

Who knew that this little village lane meandered around the back side of College Park?

The rider’s reflection appears in the windows of the Berry Sports Center and the MacLean ESC. When he stands up to pedal up the hill north of the McLaughlin Cluster, you can see his helmet, and the camera has a brush with some tree branches along Maynard Street.

• The Real Estate Office’s new office building at 4 Currier, designed by Truex Cullins, was awarded a LEED Silver rating.
• College Photographer Joseph Mehling ’69 is retiring (The Dartmouth). Among hundreds of college-related projects, Mehling provided the photos for the Campus Guide.
• The Rauner Library Blog notes that the Freshman Book – the Shmenu – was last printed on paper in 2009.
• CRREL, the Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory north of campus, was giving tours recently (Valley News).
• Old fire insurance maps of American cities and towns produced by the Sanborn Map Company are invaluable to historians. A post at Bibliodyssey features the elaborate designs displayed on the title pages of Sanborn maps.
• According to hikers interviewed for an article in The Dartmouth, all of Hanover’s mile markers for the Appalachian Trail are inaccurate. Experience with the Milepost on a couple of drives up the Alcan suggests that the inaccuracies result from the practice of rerouting the trail.
• The watering trough that once occupied the southwest corner of the Green is featured in a post at the Review.
• The ongoing basketball office renovations in the Berry Sports Center are planned to include a “display of Dartmouth basketball history and tradition” (Valley News).
• The Dartmouth had an article back in May about how Rauner librarians hope that the players of new metadata games will help them attach information to untagged photos.
• Randall T. Mudge & Associates Architect has exterior and interior photos
  of the Dragon Senior Society hall. The interior paneling, taken from Dragon’s 1931 hall behind Baker, really does look like a Larson & Wells product.
• The site What Was There brings rephotography into the digital era by superimposing historic photos on Google Street View images.
• Yale’s new residential colleges site has a nice site map (pdf) showing existing colleges and site of the two new colleges designed by architecture school dean Robert A.M. Stern. The Grove Street Cemetery really is in the way…
• An article explains the move from the old hospital north of Maynard Street to the new DHMC complex in Lebanon 10 years ago.

The Friends of Hanover Crew project outline includes a site plan and textual overview with photos (pdf). The old dairy barn will be renovated for boat storage, placing this project in a long tradition of transforming agricultural buildings for boating purposes.

In a preemptive move, the Town Arborist cut down the Parkhurst Elm on August 19
(Dartbeat blog post, Valley News blurb, Alumni Relations note).

The old tree (photo, info from College Arborist article in Parents News) was notable not only for its magnificence and prominence but for its siting, since its roots and trunk encroached on North Main Street:

The Rauner Blog has a post on the practice of saving pieces from an old tree.

New Hampshire was comparatively fortunate, although the Upper Valley Plaza, the shopping center with Shaw’s and Kohl’s at the corner of 89 and Route 12A in West Lebanon, was flooded, as the Valley News reports. Repairs there will cost nearly $8 million.

Vermont is still suffering. The Valley News has a photo gallery and After the Storm coverage. The railroad bridge over the White River was rendered unusable. Residents built a temporary exit from Interstate 89 in Royalton.

See also the Rauner blog report on the Hurricane of 1938, which toppled many elms on campus, and the student efforts to help clean up after the Flood of 1927.

Various back-office functions including the Real Estate Office and the newly-renamed Campus Planning & Facilities division have been moving into the college-owned office building at 4 Currier Place. It’s an unusual building, with art studios still occupying the ground level.

Dartmouth Now and print newsletters are publishing a rendering of the future Inn that shows a new porte-cochere, a modest expansion onto the Terrace, and, almost out of sight at the left, an expansion onto part of the Zahm Garden.

The rendering is by Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc., although it is not clear that the project will be undertaken by that firm.

The expansion could be very subtle and intriguing. It will put hotel rooms above the Gap on Main Street, in the existing upper level of the Lang Building. It will convert the Hopkins Center’s Strauss Gallery, at the northwest corner of the Hop, where the corridor makes a right-angle turn, into an entrance to the Inn (March 3, 2011 Building Code Advisory Committee minutes (pdf)).

[Update 07.17.2011: The Dartmouth reported Friday that the Inn has decided to close during construction, from December 2011 through April 12, 2012.]

Back in May, the Lebanon High School Times began reporting on a giant new building planned for Heater Road. The building and its parking lot will fill much of the northwest corner of Heater and Route 120:

This is is not particularly near to the hospital; in fact, that’s Fort Harry’s/Fort Lou’s/The Fort in the lower right. The third building up Heater Road, the one with smoke coming from the chimney, will be demolished to create an access road. A second access road will head west from the site, reaching all the way to Old Etna Road.

Chris Fleischer wrote in the Valley News:

On Heater Road in Lebanon, 11 acres of land has been cleared to make way for a $38 million medical office building that will be home to about 200 Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center physicians, nurses and staff.

While enjoying a fairly low profile in the press, this project is not exactly new. A Lebanon wetland permit for the project is dated July 2008 (pdf). Fleischer’s article notes that the building was first proposed by a different group in 2006.

The Valley News has set up a site dedicated to Hanover’s 250th anniversary this July 4th. The site announces that Jay Barrett is giving several talks, gives a schedule of town events, and links to the town’s Flickr account where historical photos are kept.

The upcoming $12 million project at the Hanover Inn has a number of intriguing aspects. The first detailed story about it appeared in the Valley News last week, and the news has been picked up by the Boston Globe and WCAX. The Dartmouth Real Estate Office is running the project but appears to have dropped its “projects” webpage.

This is the kind of project that planners have been thinking about for decades. According to Alex Hanson’s story in the Valley News, builders will erect 12,000 square feet of additions between the Inn and the Hopkins Center and over a portion of the existing terrace facing Wheelock Street.

The terrace will shrink; the existing parking garage under the terrace will expand by ten spaces, presumably beneath the Zahm Garden/Drake Room portion of the expansion; the Inn’s existing restaurants will be pulled from the bowels of the building to storefronts on both Main and Wheelock Streets, an excellent idea; and the existing upper-level conference rooms will be divided into guest rooms.

This part of the project, explained in last week’s Valley News story, is particularly interesting:

The renovation would create guest rooms where now there are offices and meeting space in the Lang Building — the brick building next to the inn on Main Street that houses The Gap. The inn and Lang are already linked by passageways, but the new project requires the building to be brought up to code. Building code doesn’t allow openings between buildings on separate lots, and the financing of the two buildings makes it impossible to combine the lots, college officials wrote in filings with the town.

Dartmouth has obtained a minor lot line adjustment that annexes 22,400 square feet to the Hanover Inn’s lot, finally reflecting the building’s actual size. This will allow for future expansion (Planning Board meeting 4 January 2011 (pdf)).

From a newsletter of more than four years ago:

The Hanover Inn is in the early planning stages of building renovations to include the guest rooms, 1st floor conference rooms, and main floor kitchen, dining and lobby areas. Carl Pratt, the Inn’s General Manager, together with the Planning Design & Construction (PD&C) Office, initiated master planning with the architectural firm Truex Cullins & Partners in Burlington, VT to identify structural deficiencies and to develop design ideas. The Inn is working with PD&C and the Real Estate Office to understand zoning implications for any recommended changes to the current building footprint.

“Changes at the Hanover Inn,” Dartmouth College Finance and Administration News 1:1 (16 January 2007), 3 (pdf).

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s campus architecture blog, Buildings & Grounds, last month linked to a story on the Inn’s new management.

The 69-room hotel at Six South Street has opened next to the newish parking garage (Valley News, The Dartmouth).