Category Archives: Larson, Jens

Dartmouth Hall renovation images

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This video of the Dartmouth Hall renovation, just discovered, has apparently been up for a couple of months now. It shows site plans, floor plans, interior renderings, and several other views. (It also refers to the auditorium as “Dartmouth 105” instead of “105 Dartmouth,” which seems to be the older, more common phrasing.)

A couple of interior views also appear in a recent Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article. (Another aside: the 1773 Gamble plans and elevation drawing depict a large stone building that was not built.)

Neither this oblique view of the northwest corner of the building nor this straight-ahead view from the Green (both provided on the project page) indicates a railing along the front of the podium. There are short east-west railings lining the stairs, and there are substantial railings to keep people from falling off the north or south end of the podium, but there is nothing along the podium’s long west facade other than a low coping fronted by some ground plantings. Is that realistic?

The big renovation of Dartmouth Hall is beginning

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The Trustees have given the go-ahead (Valley News, Dartmouth News) to start the big renovation of Dartmouth Hall (design page). Apparently the project was moved up by a year because the relocation of faculty offices from the building was unexpectedly spurred by the pandemic.

Dartmouth Hall, it will be remembered, was designed by college architect Charles Alonzo Rich ’75 and was built from 1904 to 1906. Successor college architect Jens Fredrick Larson designed the gut-remodeling of the building that took place in 1935 and 1936, in which the current concrete floors and steel stairs were installed and Room 105 was created. The small gables over the north and south entrances bear the years 1904 and 1935 in reference to these construction periods. The year 1784 in the central gable refers to the original Dartmouth Hall, which stood on the site.

The most notable change in this latest renovation will be the extension of the existing granite foundation as a podium or terrace in front of the building. The three sets of steps will be there, and a ramp will be integrated into the south end of the terrace. The composition seems fitting and will probably go unnoticed by most observers.

Other changes: The building’s center doors will be made operable and will continue to give on to the shallow lobby of Room 105. In the College Yard, an east-west path leading to the center entry will return, and a new diagonal path will make the slope accessible. The rear facade will have ramps and stairs for the north and south entrances protected by simple if not utilitarian shed roofs.

Symbols, including weathervanes and flags

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Baker Tower Weathervane. The Valley News has been reporting on the petition calling for the removal of the Baker Tower weathervane and the college’s plan to remove it (see also Dartmouth News). A crane crew removed the weathervane on June 25 (Dartmouth News).

The college plans to create a replacement; George Hathorn has suggestions. The June 25 Dartmouth News piece by Aimee Minbiole states that “Vice President for Communications Justin Anderson will assemble a working group to consider designs for a new weather vane and whether other changes in iconography across the institution are necessary.” If that iconography includes the college seal with its depiction of Native Americans, one solution would be to adopt an heraldic seal based on an heraldic coat of arms.

The cascading effects of the weathervane’s deprecation are interesting. The Guarini shield, less than a year old, contains the tiniest imaginable depiction of the weathervane, but it will apparently be changing. (It is even less visible than the Indian head cane that was removed from the pre-2012 DMS shield.) The Town of Hanover is also changing its official logo, which contains a line drawing of Baker Tower that also features a small version of the weathervane. Remarkably, the Valley News story, citing Town Manager Julia Griffin, states that some variants of the town logo already render the two human figures as trees: “Griffin said via email that many of the logos in town show three pine trees on the weather vane, rather than the more troublesome figures. For now, those logos won’t be changed, she said.”

The original 1928 copper exterior of the Baker Tower weathervane is already in storage. The exterior was recreated, according to the Valley News story of June 12, as part of the tower renovation project of 2016, less than four years ago. Compare that missed-opportunity-in-hindsight to the travails of U.Va., which updated its athletics logo in April and two months later finds itself tweaking the new design to get rid of the twisted hilts of the crossed sabers. What is the symbolic significance of a twisted hilt? It is not clear that it has any independent meaning at all, but the promotional verbiage that was put out with the spring update pitched the twisted hilts as a reference to the serpentine walls that line the back gardens of the university’s original buildings. Those walls’ connection to enslavement is the prompt for the latest change.

(One would think that the bigger problem is the association with the Confederate cavalry saber — the crossed, curved cavalry sabers are much more typically seen as an emblem on a mid-19th century slouch hat than in connection with a 17th-century cavalier — but the designer of the U.Va. logo in the mid-1990s says he did not intend it to refer to the Civil War.)

Flags. A lot is going on with flags these days. Mississippi has dropped its flag and will consider the Stennis Flag among the possible replacements. The 9/11 “Freedom Flag” (spotted in the wild here) is the subject of a bill, sponsored by Reps. Spanberger and King, proposing to make it the official flag of 9/11 remembrance (WTVR News). The flag is to be flown on federal buildings from September 11 through 30 each year. Finally, CNN has a piece on the Juneteenth Flag. Maybe looking at the Freedom Flag encourages one to view every flag as a map, but the zig-zag “burst” lines on the Juneteenth Flag can also be read as the plan of a 19th-century star fort. One might prefer a version of the date that omitted the comma, but the specificity of putting the date on the flag in words is appealing.

Other symbols, including plaques. There is an official climate emergency tartan (Scottish Register of Tartans). The FCC has a new seal (see Brand New, also FCC announcement pdf). The eagle has post-Homeland Security wings; the antenna feed line, which curved realistically in the old FCC seal, is made into a rigid line of division of the shield — ouch.

Finally, because this site is always on the lookout for a rogue plaqueing, a link to Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory post on the series of unofficial historical markers erected by activist historians on Monument Avenue in Richmond. Some of the markers apparently have been ripped up already (WTVR News). Three of the four city-owned statues of defeated rebels have been removed in recent days, and only Stuart remains. Here is a windshield snap taken yesterday; the statue is not expected to last another week. It does feel like Europe in 1989:

Stuart statue by Meacham 07.03.2020

The new Guarini shield

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The Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies has a new shield by OCD.

The prior shield (see the post at this site) was adopted in 2011 after a low-budget crowdsourcing project. It shows the mandatory river lines in the base as a pair of helping hands, a bit reminiscent of the United Way logo. Some versions of the shield included the year 1885, when the first graduate degree was awarded at the college.

The new shield displays the year 2016, the year the school was formally established, in the base. It is not clear whether the sans serif typeface is the required National 2, but the extra height it gives the numeral 6 suggests that these numerals were not hand-drawn.

Above the year are the waves of the river, and on the left side of the shield, emerging from the river — not yet swamped! — is the upper portion of the cupola of Baker Tower. This might be called the Day After Tomorrow shield. Stanley Orcutt’s Wheelock and an Indian under the Pine weathervane bumps up against the very thick border of the shield, and the rest of the shield is occupied by a representation of the constellation Cassiopeia, as the news item explains:

The designers worked with the School to create an image of Cassiopeia, one of the constellations that one could have seen when standing on the green at midnight and looking north at Baker on the night the Board of Trustees voted to establish the School, on July 1, 2016.

College floats three sites for the new heating plant

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First, the most important news: The college “will be decommissioning the current power plant, removing the stack and repurposing the building” (Planning Board Meeting Minutes 5 February 2019 pdf). That is reassuring. Naturally one would love to see the landmark 1958 stack retained as well and repurposed as a memorial column or a pedestal for public art, but we will take what we can get.

At a public meeting last month, the college revealed the three places that are in the running to become the site of the replacement heating plant (Valley News 22 May, Dartmouth News, The Dartmouth). The sites are:

1. The hill behind the Dewey parking lot, east of Rope Ferry Road and Occom Pond. This would not be the first power plant in the neighborhood, of course: the MHMH plant had a tall smokestack and stood in the parking lot behind 5 Rope Ferry Road (roughly behind the red BMW in this photo from Google Street View):

2. A site along Lyme Road by the Hanover Country Club’s maintenance facility garage at the south end of the golf course. This is the best we can do on Street View:

3. The third location is the former home of Trumbull-Nelson Construction Co., next to the Hanover Public Works Department, on Route 120.

The third option is the most distant and seems to be the only one that would not require trucks full of wood chips to drive through the center of town several times a day. That site would require a lengthy insulated underground pipeline to link up with the existing steam tunnel and pipe network, however. The pipeline can be no more than two miles long if it is to be efficient (Planning Board pdf). According to the map above, the route to the T-N site is about 1.6 miles, following roadways.

Because of its distance from campus and the possibility that it would keep some trucks out of town, the favorite site among the public seems to be the T-N site (Valley News 23 May).

The college presents the three dorm sites

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The college has been giving presentations (Valley News article) on the potential sites for a proposed 350-bed dorm. An initial list of four sites was reduced to three when College Park was dropped as a site for even this smaller version of the dorm. The three remaining sites are the former site of Gilman, the current site of Dragon on College Street, and the current site of the tennis courts and the Onion on Crosby Street at East Wheelock.

The suggestion on this site that scattering a few smaller additions around campus would be preferable to erecting a single 350-bed dormitory was based on the assumption that such a large building could not comfortably be shoehorned into a site as small as that on Crosby Street. Considering the fact that the entire McLaughlin cluster only contains 341 beds and has a footprint that is much too large to fit next to Alumni Gym, this assumption does not seem unreasonable.

The reason the college gives for the 350-bed number is the desire to use this swing space dorm to house an entire “house community” at a time. Fair enough — that is what Princeton did when it built Scully and Bloomberg Halls, initially planning the buildings to house a rotating cast of residents of other residential colleges as their own buildings were being renovated.

Adhering to the 350-bed goal will require all of the proposed buildings at Dartmouth to stand four and five stories high, and the Crosby Street site will require a building that stands five-and-a-half stories high.

At any rate, Sasaki (presumably) created a site plan and a massing study for each site and had Boston-area designer Dongik Lee draw up two perspective views of each potential building. These are nicely done and show the same style of building in each location. They are introduced with the caveat that they are not actual building proposals but are for illustration only.

Gilman and to a lesser extent College Street make sense as sites for some future building, but they do seem the lesser of the three sites for a new dormitory. College Street in particular begs to be left as forest or to become a site for an addition to Burke, part of a unified science complex 120 years in the making. (And constructing a building on College Street would bump off the Dragon Hall for at least the third time).

The Crosby Street proposal, called “the Question Mark” because of its shape, seems the most popular among audience members. It is nearer to dining areas and has a site that is not more suitable for some other use.

The site has indeed long been reserved for residential use — the 1998 master plan (pdf p. 19) states that “[a]t five stories, two residences on this site could accommodate 200 beds. Social and study spaces could be added to serve Topliff and New Hampshire [H]alls, too.” Interestingly, the 2001 plan and its 2002 update (pdf p. 12) would allow only 160 beds here.

Mills dorm site presentation slide 24 concept image Crosby site

Concept image of Crosby Street dorm from EVP Rick Mills presentation 16 August 2018

A dormitory on Crosby Street could make nice companion to Topliff, which was the giant dorm of its own era. One hopes, however, that the building could be given a footprint that is large enough — and that extends far enough to the south — to reduce its height somewhat. The driveway to Alumni Gym could be realigned to the south, and Davis Varsity House could be moved to face Lebanon Street as part of Larson Square, giving the new dorm more space in which to spread out. And this is completely unrealistic, at least until a Southern Bypass is built, but wouldn’t it be nice if Crosby Street could be partially or completely closed to traffic? That would be one way to make more space.

Sports Pav expanded; other news

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A village in the Park?

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  • The Moosilauke page has a section called “Building has begun.” Dartmouth News has a report with some recent photos showing the building taking shape. Trips this year will conclude at the McLane Family Lodge at the Skiway because the Ravine Lodge will not be ready.

  • Photos show the steel going up at the Hood Museum addition; see also the Hood’s updates on steel, progress, and the topping-out ceremony.

  • More than 20 years ago an architecture magazine published a small photo of Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill’s adaptation (cleverly invasive rehabilitation? creeping residential takeover?) of an old cement plant. The work has held a fascination ever since. Now Designboom has a comprehensive article. An amazing long-term project of simultaneously inhabiting a ruin and making a “ruin”; and don’t those trees on the roof remind one of J.M. Gandy’s fantasy illustrations of Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin?

  • A while back the absence of personality on the part of any of the new House Communities was noted. The apparently provisional names are still in use, but the communities do seem to be coming to life. West House (on the north side of Tuck Mall) has a blog with a bit of personality. For example: West House members are called Westians. The house has a Westletter and a team in the House volleyball league. West House has been using a logo that features an image of the great elm tree that stands between Fahey and Russell Sage. Incidentally, the deadline for House Community insignia design ideas was April 10. No word yet on results.

  • The Dartmouth says in an article that the college is thinking of developing “a kind of ‘village'” near the Bema in the College Park. One hopes that if it is built, it is sited at the north end or on the back side of the park instead of near the Bema.

    The College Park has been eyed as a building site for decades, most recently as a site for a pre-recession SLI “Commons House.” There were some terrible ideas for building there in the Fifties and Sixties; and RipWoodSmith, after all, is an encroachment on the College Park, and Richardson was probably seen that way when it was built more than a century ago.

  • U.Va. artisit-in-residence Mark Dion has created a “cabin of curiosities” down the hill from the Architecture School. Interesting.

  • Heraldry news: Along with renaming Calhoun College for Grace Hopper, Yale has given Hopper College a new coat of arms (Calhoun notice, Yale Daily News). Yale also built two new residential colleges recently, Murray and Franklin. Rather than create stone Gothic buildings, the firm of Robert A.M. Stern has designed a Tudorbethan complex of brick. The two colleges have had complimentary coats of arms for a year or more (pdf). Finally, at Harvard, the sustainability website replaces the crimson of the school’s historic shield with a pea-soup green.

  • The Big Green Alert Blog has a seating diagram showing Fenway Park as it will be configured for the Dartmouth v. Brown football game there on November 10.

  • The Medal of Honor Foundation is running elaborate eight-page print ads, such as those in Fortune Magazine, that attribute this quotation to Abraham Lincoln: “Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure.”

    Really? That sure does not sound like something Lincoln would say. Of course he used the phrase “can long endure” with reference to a nation in the Gettysburg Address, but that is all the more reason to doubt that this quote, similar and yet different, is also from him. And does it even make sense? Isn’t the maintenance of the military, or the food supply, or the economic might of the nation a bit more important to the nation’s survival than its treatment of its “heroes”? (And, objectively speaking, are they really heroes if they are not honored?)

    The Grand Army of the Republic, which should know a Lincoln quote when it sees it, printed an article in 1909 (actually it was the GAR Department of Iowa in its Journal of Proceedings of the Annual Encampment) that contained this passage:

    A man once said, “The nation which does not honor its heroes, itself should die. The nation which does not teach its children to honor its heroes, itself will die.”

    No Lincoln. Someone asked the “Queries and Answers” column in the New York Times Review of Books in 1959 for the source of this statement: “A nation which does not honor its heroes soon has no heroes to honor.” I am unable to find a response.

  • Here’s an idea: If Davis Varsity House needs to be moved out of the way (see this snippet of the latest master plan), why not move it to the intersection of Lebanon and Crosby Streets, a roundabout-worthy urban room that could be called Larson Square? Davis would occupy the parking lot next to the Black VAC, a spot that is very close to the current location of Davis, avoiding a lot of big trees; and it fits perfectly with an intersection that is already home to two other major institutional buildings by Jens Larson.

  • Stained glass, old and new.

    Chartres

    Signature panel, window in sixth bay, north side of nave, Chartres.

    South

    Window in south transept, Sainte-Mère-Église.

——

[Update 08.10.2017: Broken links to Hood photos removed, Lincoln quotation image added.]

A new direction for the old Heating Plant

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Introduction
The college announced recently that it won’t upgrade its Heating Plant from No. 6 fuel oil to natural gas but will instead skip directly to a more sustainable source of energy.1Charlotte Albright, “President Hanlon: Big Green Will Go (More) Green,” Dartmouth News (22 April 2017); Aimee Caruso, “Dartmouth Plans to Cut Oil Reliance,” Valley News (23 April 2017). That energy source is likely to be biomass.2Rob Wolfe, “New Dartmouth Task Force Will Help School Go Green,” Valley News (31 August 2016); Peter Charalambous, “College to finalize heating and energy proposals,” The Dartmouth (3 February 2017); Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future,” Valley News (27 April 2017). Because a biomass plant will require a lot of land on which to store piles of wood chips for combustion, the site of the current Heating Plant south of Wheelock Street will not do.3Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future.”

The new plant

The college is mum on where the new heating plant will be built, but Dewey Field must be at the top of the list of possibilities. Dewey Field is a large, open site on Route 10 (Lyme Road) that is currently used as a parking lot. Most of the field is located outside the 10-minute walking radius that is supposed to define the limits of the campus proper. The field also is close to the northern end of the tunnel network that currently carries steam lines to the various buildings. Some posts on this site have speculated about the idea of putting a new heating plant in Dewey Field: here, here, and especially here.

Dewey Field aerial at Google Maps.

(Unfortunately for the college, Dewey Field is also close to the mansions of Rope Ferry Road. Would it be possible to locate a biomass plant on the other side of Lyme Road, up by the Corey Ford Rugby Clubhouse? Or would the inefficiency created by the long distance be too great?)

Wherever the school sites the new plant, it should be encouraged to hire an outside architect with vision. The northern gateway to Hanover is not the place for a brown, metal-sided box. While the plant at Hotchkiss might not be right for Hanover, it stands next to a golf course. It was designed by Centerbrook with civil engineering by Milone & MacBroom, both firms that have worked at Dartmouth.

Since a heating plant is a simple industrial building, it can be covered in anything. Here is an amazing plant in the Netherlands that is clad in Delft tiles.

The old plant

Heating Plant, Meacham photo

The Heating Plant.

The old Heating Plant is one of the better examples of historic preservation at the college.

The ground level of the plant was built as a one-story Romanesque building in 1898 (Lamb & Rich, Architects). The second level was added by the college’s other important architectural firm, Larson & Wells, in 1923. In more recent history, each time the college has placed a new boiler in the building, it has dismantled a front facade bay and then built it back again — three times, in three different bays.

This website cannot stop talking about the importance of preserving the old exhaust stack, a fundamental Hanover landmark — it is an axial terminus for Lebanon Street — and an historic symbol of the traditional function of this neighborhood as Hanover’s energy district. Yale’s master plan devotes one map to showing “major vertical objects,”4Yale Master Plan pdf, 94. and this stack is one of the three most important vertical objects in Hanover. It makes no difference that the stack, built in 1958, is not “original” to the building, whatever that means for this evolving industrial structure. The stack is simply too important. It satisfies the 50-year threshold to be considered “historic” under the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards anyway. (And it goes without saying that Harry A. Wells’s wonderfully adaptable 1916 Store House on Crosby Street, seen in Google Street View, also must be retained.)

The stack as seen from Lebanon Street.

The old plant in the future

Old power plants are reused all the time: see “Adaptive Reuse for Power Plants by Studio Gang and Adjaye Associates“5Aaron Wiener, “Adaptive Reuse for Power Plants by Studio Gang and Adjaye Associates,” Architect Magazine (1 December 2013). and the Bruner/Cott renovation of Amherst’s 1925 power house. The only natural move would be for the college to expand the Hood Museum into the empty plant building.

The old stack should become a victory column. Or the school could install a staircase and top the column with a Classical decorative element, such as the golden flaming urn of Wren’s 1677 Monument to the Great Fire of London (Wikipedia) or William Whitfield’s 2003 Paternoster Square column, seen in Google Street View (that one was built as a ventilation shaft, Wikipedia notes). Or imagine commissioning a statue or an abstract sculpture as a new signpost for the arts at Dartmouth — and for the college as a whole.

 

References
↑1 Charlotte Albright, “President Hanlon: Big Green Will Go (More) Green,” Dartmouth News (22 April 2017); Aimee Caruso, “Dartmouth Plans to Cut Oil Reliance,” Valley News (23 April 2017).
↑2 Rob Wolfe, “New Dartmouth Task Force Will Help School Go Green,” Valley News (31 August 2016); Peter Charalambous, “College to finalize heating and energy proposals,” The Dartmouth (3 February 2017); Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future,” Valley News (27 April 2017).
↑3 Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future.”
↑4 Yale Master Plan pdf, 94.
↑5 Aaron Wiener, “Adaptive Reuse for Power Plants by Studio Gang and Adjaye Associates,” Architect Magazine (1 December 2013).

And if you want, they’ll bring it right up to your room

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By now you’ll have heard the news that Everything But Anchovies has closed (Valley News). The restaurant opened on Allen Street in 1979.

The October 2016 edition of the menu is still on line (pdf) and shows such familiar dishes as the Chicken Sandwich (on a Portuguese muffin, never my thing), the Pasta Alfredo, and the Tuscany Bread (did the delivery drivers really make the garlic bread while they were waiting to hop into an early-eighties Chevette with an armful of orders?). The Southwestern Burrito does not seem to be there any more; I went through a phase in 93X where I ordered one or two of those every week. Opening the white styrofoam clamshell would reveal a placid ocean of salsa, refried beans, and shredded lettuce. One had to fish around in the depths to pinpoint the location of the burrito.

The EBAs building is historic, designed by Larson & Wells and built by W.H. Trumbull in 1921.1”Building and Construction News Section,” The American Contractor 42:14 (2 April 1921), 67. It was originally a garage, as these photos from Frank Barrett’s books show:




The second story and the brick facing are obviously much later. The image above is from Google Street View.

————–

 

References
↑1 ”Building and Construction News Section,” The American Contractor 42:14 (2 April 1921), 67.

Moosilauke Ravine Lodge construction continues

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  • David Kotz has some nice photos of the construction of the new Ravine Lodge.

  • The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the great railroad artist Howard Fogg ’38.

  • Spotted this flag at a Richmond, Virginia, area high school:

    Photo of flag at Freeman High, Richmond VA by Meacham

    The star recalls the WWII Army Air Force insignia or the Chrysler Pentastar of the Eighties. Or it could be a battlefield map depicting a star fort surrounded by infantry units. The variety of bar widths is unusual. Flags of the World explains that it is “an official symbol of remembrance of September 11th” and that when it is hoisted vertically, the wide bars are meant to be seen as the Twin Towers.

    It turns out that the flag’s designer owns a restaurant very close to the school, and that he has also designed a monument to the flag (in the shape of the flag, hoisted vertically) for a traffic island nearby. “Given that it is the home of the Freedom Flag, Henrico County is the natural choice for the location of the Freedom Flag Monument and Virginia 9/11 Memorial.”

  • Dartmouth Now seems to have changed its name to Dartmouth News.

  • Other college buildings based on Independence Hall are found at Brooklyn College:


    and Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. (see the Google Earth 3D image).

  • Amherst has chosen as its mascot the Mammoth. The blurb explaining the Mammoth proposal notes that “The Beneski Museum of Natural History famously displays the skeleton of a Columbian mammoth, unearthed by Professor Frederick Brewster Loomis and brought to the College in 1925.” Museum specimens always provide good mascot options. Dartmouth’s museum displayed both a stuffed zebra and a set of curious elephant (i.e. mammoth) bones during the late eighteenth century.

  • The University of Virginia is celebrating its 200th anniversary and will feature bicentennial-logo zipper pulls on this year’s graduation gowns.

  • The city of Krakow has a new logo in the form of a city plan.

  • Last year the New York Times published interactive articles on mapping the shadows of New York and which existing Manhattan buildings could not be built today.

  • A Times obituary of March 13 noted the passing of the architectural historian and author of the Streetscapes column Christopher Gray. I was never able to meet him, but I was honored to have my site mentioned in his column on Lamb & Rich, and I enjoyed visiting the Office for Metropolitan History to do research in his compilations of 19th-century Times building permit notices (now they are in an online database provided by OMH, an amazing resource). The New Yorker ran an article about how Gray had left his skeleton to his school, St. Paul’s. What a character —

Planning the western part of campus

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In September the college released a framework plan for potential construction around the professional schools (news release, story in The D). The plan, by Beyer Blinder Belle, elaborates on that firm’s earlier master plan for the campus.

The plan shows several future buildings. One is the upcoming Thayer School/Computer Science building, on the site of the Thayer parking lot (new images released). Another is the Irving Institute building in front of the Murdough Center (some details released). The designer of the Irving Institute is KPMB Architects, a Canadian firm: the school’s press release notes that each of the firm’s three partners is a member or officer of the Order of Canada. The plan also shows the demolition of the final two River Cluster dormitories, although the school has not selected a site for the replacement beds yet.

It is good to hear that the planning involves the “consideration of the aesthetics of future buildings and improvements to signage.” The future buildings depicted in the plan image do seem to perpetuate the oddly suburban bias noted in the original BBB master plan, however.

Lisa Hogarty, at the time the Vice President of Campus Planning (The D), said that “This plan creates a route from the Green to the river and adds new community green space.” The new route to the River is shown in the illustration and includes a ped-bike bridge over the cemetery. The “new community green space” is presumably an improvement of the existing “Whittemore Green” behind Thayer School. Some work has been done here, but it still feels a bit like leftover space, the grassy area in the middle of the asphalt turnaround.

Some campus photos and notes

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Steam Tunnel access grate on the Green, Google Street View

Steam Tunnel access under Green, Meacham photo

Steam Tunnel access grate on the Green, underside

The first stage of the steam tunnel’s construction, south of this grate, was a test meant to determine whether such a project would be economical in a ledge environment.

image

North bank of HBs at former entrance to Hop, view to west

Until recently, students entered the Hop at the end of the room. The entrance was closed off and a replacement of the same configuration built just to the north.

Hop interior at Minary entrance, Meacham photo

The new Hop entrance, view to northwest onto Zahm/Memorial Garden

(Have the memorial plaques attached to the Inn there been moved to Memorial Field? That would make sense. This is not their first location anyway.)

Triangle House, Meacham photo

Triangle House entrance (west) facade

Even more than the society houses on the south side of Webster Avenue, Triangle House has a well-used student entrance on one side, shown here, and a formal street entrance on the other.

LSC bike pavilion, Meacham photo

LSC bike pavilion

This elaborate bicycle shelter for the Life Sciences Center joins a couple other pavilions in the area.

Gilman plaque, Meacham photo

Plaque moved from Gilman to LSC

LSC name lettering, Meacham photo

The town changed the street address of the building to get it to match.

Cemetery viaduct to be built

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The Valley News reports that Hanover residents voted on Tuesday for the zoning amendment that the college had requested as part of a project related to Thayer School expansion.

Residents also approved an amendment that would allow development near or in a cemetery in some circumstances. The official zoning amendment proposal form (pdf) supplies this detail:

Providing direct pedestrian access from the parking structure and Thayer campus to the College’s administrative offices, Mass Row, 53 Commons and downtown is desirable to the Town and College. In order to accommodate an elevated pedestrian walkway, construction of footings [in the Dartmouth Cemetery] is anticipated.

While the former parking deck idea is not a part of this zoning change, a parking structure certainly would be an important terminus for such a viaduct. The Planning Board minutes of 2 February 2016 (pdf), written back when the parking deck was a hot topic, say:

A pathway is also proposed from a proposed parking facility to the Green, to enhance connectivity of the west campus to the main campus, and to provide easy off-highway access from the proposed parking facility to the Green.

Aha. The viaduct that Larson proposed during the late 1920s, shown on his 1928 master plan, looks set to become a reality. (See also the Westway proposal here.)

Detail of Larson 1928 master plan

Detail of 1928 plan with viaduct lined in red

The map associated with the zoning amendment gives a general idea of the route of the new work, with the viaduct shown as a dashed orange line through the cemetery:

Planning Board map from April 2016 video

Map from “Hanover Planning Board Changes April 2016” video at 9:37 mark

The viaduct presumably will be an extension of Cemetery Lane, the road known until relatively recently as Sanborn Lane. (The map above also shows the realignment of the bottom of Engineering Drive at West Wheelock Street and the reconfiguration of the turnaround at the end of Tuck Mall.)




Keats and Yeats are on your side; Street View image from Google.

The cemetery gate, minus the unfortunately-located parking signage, would make a nice entrance to the viaduct. Here’s hoping the bridge is a work of the engineer’s art worthy of this historic place and its Classical monuments of carved stone. Wilson Architects, the firm that appears to be designing the Thayer building, designed a set of impressive campus pedestrian bridges at Vanderbilt University (a view of one, a view of another).

This will not be the first bridge in the cemetery: during the early 1880s, the cemetery association spanned the northern ravine with a timber bridge. It shows up on this 1890 map and a photo was reproduced in Dartmouth Now. It became unsafe and was removed by the 1920s.

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[Update 05.16.2016: Reference to Dartmouth Now added and historic bridge re-described as being of timber, not iron.]

[Update 05.12.2016: Note about dashed orange line added.]

The plaques are back at Memorial Field

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The rededication of the memorial plaques that had been returned or relocated to Memorial Field took place last weekend (Alumni Relations press release, Events notice).

The green wall on which the various plaques are mounted faces westward from behind the brick arches of the West Stands. A new circular logo-like relief sculpture by Dimitri Gerakaris ’69 bearing the motto “THE HILL WIND KNOWS THEIR NAME”1The phrase is a reference to a line in the “Alma Mater,” which is a version of the poem “Men of Dartmouth” (“The still North remembers them, / The hill-winds know their name, / And the granite of New Hampshire / Keeps the record of their fame.”). Richard Hovey, “Men of Dartmouth,” in H.J. Hapgood and Craven Laycock, eds., Echoes from Dartmouth (Hanover, N.H., 1895), 12. is an organizing feature; it was donated by the Sphinx Foundation.2The Foundation, of whose board Gerakaris has been a member, maintains the Sphinx Tomb. Its other purposes include being a “reservoir” of college history and preserving the educational ceremonies of the Sphinx (it conducts a “formal annual course on Dartmouth and Sphinx history and tradition” for members). Getting good Internet access through the poured-concrete walls of the tomb must be tough, and indeed one of the group’s accomplishments is the maintenance of “the building’s wireless and high speed conductivity to ensure the Sphinx Building provides the strongest support for undergraduate academic activities.” Those activities include using the library and study stations and engaging in “extensive peer driven learning experiences” (2013 Form 990 PDF). Gerakaris, of Canaan, is the sculptor of the rugby relief on the chimney breast in the Rugby Clubhouse.

The Big Green Alert Blog has a photo of each plaque. The post-1920s plaques were moved here from elsewhere. For pre-1920s plaques, visit Webster Hall, where an Alumni Association plaque lists the 73 Civil War dead and a Class of 1863 plaque lists the 56 class members who served in the Civil War. The two plaques were installed in 1914, about six years after Webster Hall was finished.

Dartmouth does not seem to have a war memorial for any earlier war, and Charles T. Wood’s The Hill Winds Know Their Name (pdf) does not list any. Dartmouth certainly could have a monument to past and future college students and officers who fought in the Revolution; students of Moor’s Charity School are actually more prominent in that war than are Dartmouth students, and at least one (Joseph Brant) took part in both the French & Indian War and the Revolutionary War.

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References
↑1 The phrase is a reference to a line in the “Alma Mater,” which is a version of the poem “Men of Dartmouth” (“The still North remembers them, / The hill-winds know their name, / And the granite of New Hampshire / Keeps the record of their fame.”). Richard Hovey, “Men of Dartmouth,” in H.J. Hapgood and Craven Laycock, eds., Echoes from Dartmouth (Hanover, N.H., 1895), 12.
↑2 The Foundation, of whose board Gerakaris has been a member, maintains the Sphinx Tomb. Its other purposes include being a “reservoir” of college history and preserving the educational ceremonies of the Sphinx (it conducts a “formal annual course on Dartmouth and Sphinx history and tradition” for members). Getting good Internet access through the poured-concrete walls of the tomb must be tough, and indeed one of the group’s accomplishments is the maintenance of “the building’s wireless and high speed conductivity to ensure the Sphinx Building provides the strongest support for undergraduate academic activities.” Those activities include using the library and study stations and engaging in “extensive peer driven learning experiences” (2013 Form 990 PDF).

Here’s to the Polka Dot; other topics

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  • The Valley News has an article with some superb photographs on the Polka Dot Restaurant by the tracks in White River Junction. The 1925 building seems to have hosted a diner from the beginning; owner Mary Shatney started working there in 1959 and had to close the place last year. It’s up for sale — let’s hope it remains a restaurant.

  • The Dartmouth Energy Program site is very impressive. In the history section, the excellent photo of the coal assistant seems to have been taken from the east end of the hall looking west. The narrow-gauge rails lead toward the coal hopper in the end of the building, now the site of the Hood Museum’s Bernstein Study-Storage Center. A couple of quibbles: first, “the good old days” actually began in 1770, not 1769; second, the timeline could mention the major addition of a second level to the building in 1922, apparently when the plant switched from coal to oil; and third, there’s something off about the wording of this sentence on the main page, however technically correct it might be: “While Dartmouth may be the smallest Ivy League university, we’re doing big things with energy efficiency.”

  • Excellent photo documentation of the construction of the West Stands continues at the Big Green Alert: April 24, April 23, April 22, April 19, April 18 (notable photos), April 8, April 7 (seating chart), March 23, and March 16.

  • The photo in the Valley News story on spring practice makes Memorial Field look as if it occupies an industrial wasteland. The runway at which Memorial Field’s concrete risers were stored for about six years, incidentally, was known as Miller Airport (Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields).

  • Victor Mair ’65 at Language Log takes on the word “schlump,” of “schlump season,” i.e. “mud season” (“breakup” in Alaska).

  • The Rauner Library Blog has interesting posts on the petition of Ledyard and others to be allowed to learn to dance and use the sword and a mysterious photo album called Along the Connecticut 1912.

  • The Watershed Studio website features several notable projects, including the Friends of Hanover Crew boathouse, the Organic Farm greenhouse, and a design for the replacement Ledyard Canoe Club.

  • Maybe the real test for the Residential Communities (a post here) will be the Commencement ceremony. Will the Communities be represented in the procession? The graduates will still have to march in alphabetical order, but will the House Professors carry the house emblems?

  • The West Wheelock Gateway District proposal is up for a vote and has been getting some press (Valley News, The Dartmouth). The VN story has this neat tidbit:

    Around the corner from Anderson, William Smalley owns a small white house sandwiched between rental buildings mostly filled with Dartmouth students.

    In an interview Monday at his home, where he has lived since 1938, Smalley said he welcomed the creation of the district and didn’t mind the parties the students occasionally threw.

    “Somebody said to me, ‘How can you stand them?'” he said of the students, but “I’ve never had a problem with them — never.”

  • The college’s Flickr account has a neat and unusual view of Dartmouth Row, Ascutney, Richardson, and the Wilder addition. See the photo of the graffiti inside the Bartlett Tower roof. The structure does not look particularly original (1895) but there are graffiti from 1910 and 1915, so perhaps it is.

  • The Hanover Master Plan (pdf) contains a number of interesting tidbits, including this one: “The Town’s boundary stones and monuments are also historic landmarks. Most have the first letters of the adjacent towns incised in them.”

  • “In devising the plan of the library building, you have contemplated its indefinite extension to meet the growth of the collections,” said Mellen Chamberlain at the dedication of Wilson Hall as the school library (Google Books).

  • “Areas of potential historic interest include theoriginal center of Town; the well field of the old Aqueduct Company south of the Greensboro Road; the Granite Quarry south of Greensboro Road; the Tilton Quarry east of Moose Mountain Road and one of the earliest slate quarries on the old Tisdale property” (Hanover Master Plan pdf).

  • Finding churches that have been put to interesting new uses is just too easy, so further examples will not be added to the post here that arguing that Rollins should be turned into a library. There is a pub in a former church in Nottingham, England, and a brewery and pub in a former church in Pittsburgh, where a Romanesque nave makes an impressive beer hall.

  • The Hanover Master Plan (pdf) also recommends National Register listing for various districts including the campus.

  • This has probably been posted here before, but Yale has construction photos and a slick video of the two new residential colleges it is building.

  • The Dartmouth has an article on near-future construction projects.

  • Not much is coming out about Thayer School’s master plan. “Because the college owns Tuck Drive, any attempt to better align it with West Street will have to wait until Dartmouth’s own building plans in the area are finalized, she said” (referring to Vicki Smith, Hanover’s senior planner) (Valley News).