Dartmo.

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.

Thanks to DADA for including the book in the inaugural exhibition. Thanks for citations by Bryant Tolles, in Architecture & Academe: College Buildings in New England before 1860 (UPNE, 2011), and the Rauner Library Blog, in a post on Dartmouth Hall.

Thanks also to T. Barton Thurber for the citation to the Rich thesis in European art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (UPNE, 2008).

Contrary to what was reported here in March, it looks as if Dartmouth is going to demolish the 1921 Parker Apartments at 2 North Park Street:

The July 6 minutes of the Zoning Board of Adjustment (pdf) state that the board granted an exemption “to allow for the demolition of an existing apartment building and construction of a new building to be used as a student residence.” Curiously, the minutes list no applicant; it was presumably Dartmouth.

The building appears to be serviceable, and one wonders why the college did not decide to renovate it. The faculty apartment next door is older and smaller, but its renovation worked out well:

• New Balance has put Dartmouth’s current midcentury coat of arms on the tongue of a pair of shoes in its Ivy League Collection (via the Big Green Alert Blog; there’s an article in The Dartmouth).
• Rauner’s blog has notable items on Cane Rush, Foley House, “the Glutton’s Spoon,” and the practice of “horning.”
• The Valley News has an article on the renovation of the 1890 Wilder Church. The church had a lot of Dartmouth associations early on and is another benefaction of Charles T. Wilder, donor of Dartmouth’s physics lab.
• Plan N.H. is the state’s “smart growth” group, and it gave a 2009 Merit Award to the South Block project.
• There is a photo of the Zantop Memorial Garden in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream (story in The Dartmouth, dedication program). It looks like the garden finally resolves the former awkwardness of the slope in front of Richardson Hall: never a proper stone-walled terrace, but too extreme to plant with grass and try to ignore.
• The last remnant of Campion’s various long-lived stores on Main Street closed last fall (The Dartmouth, Valley News).
  
• The Dartmouth reports that the [flower-] painted panels in the ceiling of Thayer’s main dining room contained asbestos and are being removed.

[Update 01.22.2011: Links to shoe and horning articles added.]

Rauner Library has provided a remarkable photo of the Butterfield Museum embraced in a death-hug by Baker Library. This is a view of the south and east facades of the east wing of Baker, looking to the northwest. The problem of Butterfield appears to have had a significant influence on the design of Baker.

See also the photos of the bells and the steel frame of the tower under construction.

With historic Clement Hall demolished (film and photos), the Visual Arts Center construction has been put out for bid.

Phi Delt reconstruction continues, The Dartmouth reports.

Engleberth Construction provides photos of the Tuck Living-Learning Center (Achtmeyer, Raether, and Pineau-Valencienne Halls).

It is not new, but Forever New: A 10-Year Report provides a comprehensive photo of the interior-block facades of Kemeny-Haldeman not available elsewhere.

Thanks to Alex Hanson for the mention in “In Hanover, Architects Note A 19th-Century Sensibility,” Valley News (22 November 2008).

The Lamb & Rich monograph page has become a separate blog. Posts related to that project will no longer appear here.

While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the nineteenth century permits represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.

It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.

Google Books also has volumes 5-6 (1870), 7-8 (1871), and 9-10 (1872).

A new list of about 675 Lamb & Rich projects should be available here in the next few weeks.

[Update 12.07.2009: It is more like 600 projects, and it is available at Lamb & Rich.]

[Update 02.14.2010: Reference to volumes 5-10 added.]

[Update 04.12.2010: Another good way to search the Record & Guide is to put this into Google:
site:www.columbia.edu "firm name".]

Posts have become even less frequent here because of a research trip to Manhattan and New Jersey…

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Reid Buckley (of those Buckleys) tries to describe* Lamb & Rich’s clock tower in Sharon, Connecticut:

[T]he clock is referred to always as a structure in “Gothic” style, with its granite blocks quarried nearby in Sharon, its red stones imported from Potsdam, New York. But it is properly called “Richardsonian Romanesque,” I am informed by Liz Shapiro of the Sharon Historical Society, after a New York architect by the name of Charles Alonzo Rich, who is described as “renowned,” would he had not.

Reid would that Rich had not done what? The anti-Victorian sentiment seems to have been tripped up by sloppy editing.

One doubts that the tower is referred to “always” as being in the Gothic style, especially among the Buckleys, who are familiar with the Gothic architecture of Yale. It also seems obvious that “Richardsonian Romanesque” must be named for someone named Richardson — in this case, Henry Hobson Richardson, not a particularly obscure architect.

*Reid Buckley, An American Family: The Buckleys (Threshold Editions, 2008), 225-226 n3.

About 600 individual projects by Lamb & Wheeler/Rich have been identified for the book. Progress is occurring in the Manhattan projects, while the Colgate University/family projects remain mysterious. Illustrations are beginning to come in, and a tentative publication date of early 2012 has been established.

Theta Delta Chi finished its Marc Fragge Wing and was scheduled to dedicate the addition on May 1.

Roc Caivano Architects of Bar Harbor, Maine, is designing the Beta Theta Pi stair addition (Planning Board approval July 1, 2008 (pdf)).

Dartmouth is adding significantly to Parkside (17 East Wheelock) to make it into a sorority house. Construction photos are now available, along with drawings by Haynes & Garthwaite.

One of the main sources of information on the early days of the Romantic suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey is William Ingraham Russell’s gossipy book The Romance and Tragedy of a Widely Known Business Man of New York. It appears to have been self-published in at least three editions through 1913 as Russell added postscripts. No one yet seems to have tried to figure out the pseudonyms he used for his neighbors in the early 1880s:

• “Frank Slater” is Franklin H. Tinker
• “Charlie Wood” is Charles Towner Root
• “George Lawton” is George M.S. Horton
• “Charlie Fiske” is Charles Alonzo Rich
• “Walter E. Stowe” is William Ingraham Russell
• “Knollwood” is Short Hills
• Ingraham’s trade paper is American Metal Market
• “A. * * S. * * * & Co.” is Arthur Strauss & Co.
• “Mr. Mallison” might be Mr. Allison, since it appears that way once
• “A gentleman of wealth” is Stewart Hartshorn

House names (“Redstone,” “Sunnyside”) are unchanged, as are place names and addresses outside of Short Hills. “Edward ‘Ned’ Banford,” “William Curtice,” “George Todd,” “Albert Caine,” and “Mr. Viedler” will require more work. The Banfords rented 39 Knollwood Road and the Todds rented 1 Park Place around 1893, so it should be possible to identify them.

As mentioned in the Dartmouth Parents & Grandparents Fund newsletter (Winter 2009), the book project underway at the moment is a monograph on Lamb & Rich. This is the same project mentioned back in 2004 and will take a few more years to complete.

The New Hampshire Hall addition and renovation project is finished and the dorm will be open for Spring Term, The Dartmouth reports.

The plans for the Parkside renovation and addition have been released. It looks like the rear wall is being bumped out under a new gable (see rear facade) and a row of dormers is being added to the front and sides. The chimneys will be lost, which is unfortunate. Here is the building a few years ago:

A couple of articles (one in pdf) explain how Barnard College used one of the Getty Foundation’s grants to create a plan for the preservation of Charles Rich’s historic campus. It turns out that Getty has shut down its campus heritage grant program, as the Chronicle‘s campus blog laments; there was even a story in the Wall Street Journal on the program shutting down after funding plans at 86 institutions.

The physical campus section of President Wright’s ten-year report mentions all the work done at Dartmouth over the last decade.

Dartmouth is going ahead with Haynes & Garthwaite‘s extensive renovation of Howard Major‘s Parkside Apartment for a sorority, but not the historic James Brown House, The Dartmouth reports (an earlier report said otherwise).

Engineer Richard D. Kimball and his firm helped design Dartmouth’s Heating Plant and original network of steam pipes in the mid-1890s. It turns out that RDK Engineers is still around and claims that its project at Dartmouth was the first underground steam distribution system in the country.

The 2001 Arts Center Infrastructure Analysis (pdf) by Rogers Marvel with Ove Arup suggests that the heat plant eventually move to Dewey Field, north of the Medical School.  That would allow the Hood Museum or other arts functions to take over the old plant building.

The OPDC put up new photos of the New Hampshire Hall renovation in mid-September. An article in The Dartmouth states that comments about the thoroughness of the gutting of Hitchcock prompted ORL to preserve wood interior trim in this project.