Dartmo.

Dartmouth’s and Memorial Field’s first night game under the new lights will begin at 6pm tonight against Penn.

The sports publicity office’s extraordinary promotional efforts, as chronicled by the Big Green Alert Blog, include a banner across Main Street, an advertising poster, and a drinks coaster distributed to local establishments.

In December of 2008, Dartmouth put on hold its planned rebuilding of Memorial Field (Dartmouth News). The project would have demolished and replaced the existing steel-framed concrete grandstand, leaving the arcaded brick facade on Crosby Street. It seems that the replacement supports, made of concrete, were actually cast and have been resting in a field in Vermont, awaiting an improvement in the college budget.

Here’s hoping the project will be restarted soon.

The Big Green Alert Blog has been providing extensive coverage of the installation of lights at Memorial Field (June 11, June 25 morning and afternoon, August 3) in advance of the first night game on October 1. The game will be against Penn and will begin at the extravagantly late hour of 6 pm. It will be Dartmouth’s first-ever night game at any field.

[Update 08.22.2011: Replaced line reading "The project recently was restarted" (thanks Big Green Alert Blog).]

A graphical article based on research by Barbara Krieger in the July/August Alumni Magazine nicely covers a larger exhibit in the History Room in Baker. It is good to see the site for the amphitheater named as Murdough rather than the Bema, which is the site that that drawing is usually said to describe.

One or two quibbles: the 1931 courtyard Inn on page 53 was meant not not the Robinson Hall area but for the Spaulding Auditorium site, as is shown on the exhibit’s Dartmouth House Plot Plan. The gateway shown in the Larson drawing would have faced east, and Lebanon Street is depicted on the left of the drawing. (The main block of the current Inn was completed in 1967 rather than 1887.)

The focus on the Dartmouth Hall cupola is a bit of a wild goose chase. The plans depicted are by William Gamble and show a masonry building that was never built. Dartmouth Hall was built from some other plans, long since lost, that almost certainly showed a cupola. Those plans might or might not have been by Gamble and probably were not by Peter Harrison. (The cupola that Tucker admired was probably a somewhat different midcentury replacement for the original.)

Here is an image that did not make it into the article, a pre-Leverone proposal for a field house by Eggers & Higgins:

Wow. That is a view to the southeast from above the gym. South Park Street runs behind the field house, and the field in the upper right corner is the site of the later Leverone Field House.

The article quotes Eisenhower on “what a college ought to look like.” Conan O’Brien recently paraphrased this commentary while adding something of his own:

It’s absolutely beautiful here, though. It is the quintessential college cam-… American college campus. It does look like a movie set.

(Video, at 1:27.)

For the first time in nearly 120 years of football on the site, night games will be possible (The Dartmouth, Valley News, WMUR Manchester). Dartmouth Sports has a rendering.

Dartmouth announced the delay, which is the result of budget pressure. Small-scale upgrades will occur instead. The project page has more updates.

Dartmouth has planned to replace the concrete stands that make up most of Memorial Field’s main western stand for some time. The recognizable brick arcading and memorial arch will remain. The OPDC recently put a plan (pdf) and front and rear elevation drawings (pdf) on the project’s web page.

The Fleck & Lewis design preserves the street facade of the Larson building, including the tall brick attic story added above the entry in the 1950s (?) to screen the press box. Low brick cheek walls that appear to be new will flank this attic story to screen the wider replacement press box, but they are imperceptible and improve the transition from the tower to the parapet.

The field facade includes a straightforward-seeming set of replacement concrete seat risers and a new, squatter-seeming press box. The press box appears more dignified than its predecessor: its roof seems lower, and its bottom level appears to rest on a lower seating level than the old box’s did. It is certainly broader. New stair towers flanking the box introduce brick into this historically concrete facade. Like the old box, the new one will be faced in green-painted panels.

The project also appears among landscape architects Saucier & Flynn’s works in progress, and the historic field was the subject of a recent “Ask Dartmouth” query.

Now that the economic collapse has depressed Dartmouth’s endowment (story in The Dartmouth), the school has put the Memorial Field project on hold for two to six weeks to determine whether to go forward, Provost Barry Scherr and Executive V.P. Adam Keller announced on the 13th. The other projects on hold are the Visual Arts Center and the Truex Cullins renovation of Buchanan Hall (story in The Dartmouth).

The updates page for the stands renovation (updated November 3) is still announcing the start of construction as November 17.

The diamond at Red Rolfe is being completely rebuilt, and, with a grandstand, dugouts, and a press box, will become part of Biondi Park. Press Release; Project page. Clark Companies and Gale Associates are the field consultants, and Lavallee Brensinger, designer of the gym renovation, is designing the grandstand. The project page has a perspective rendering available.

[Update 07.12.2008: The plans page also includes a nice site plan (pdf), and Big Green Alert Blog has a post with an aerial perspective rendering and a view of the entrance gate.]

The demolition and replacement of all but the brick arcade screen of Memorial Field’s main or West Stand will be designed by Fleck & Lewis Architects. The completed building will seat 4,736 people, a number almost certainly smaller than its original capacity.

Jens Larson’s main or western stand at Memorial Field is a concrete grandstand screened by a brick facade overlooking Lebanon Street. The Big Green Alert Blog reports that the previously-announced Memorial Field project (construction to begin October 2008, occupancy September 2009, according to the schedule pdf) is more than just a renovation of the structure: the school will demolish the entire concrete stand and replace it with a new one, leaving the brick facade in place.

This project will make the stand more accessible, more comfortable, and less capacious. The likely drop in seating capacity, continuing the trend of the Floren-motivated shrinking of the East Stand, might be desirable. The green-paneled press box, which seems to be from the 1950s and is the latest in a series of expanding press boxes, also will be replaced. The replacement could be a harmonious brick design that responds to Floren, and if Centerbrook has a hand in the project, this result seems especially likely.

Memorial Field’s original West Stand as viewed from the head of the field, by Davis Field House. The distinction between the concrete stand and the applied brick facade or screen is evident. The replacement press box will probably be much wider.

The stand’s center bay contains the only “interior” and the only portion past the street front that is worth saving. This vaulted passage is the site of the memorial element of Memorial Field.

The concrete stand itself is utilitarian and not in the best condition.

ORW Landscape Architects & Planners of Norwich provide, among their transportation design examples, information about a project for Hanover: a set of street standards that fits with the Brook McIlroy plan.

The site includes drawings of a reworked south entrance into town (note the commercial building in the parking lot of Grand Union/CVS, as Brook McIlroy suggested); an eastern welcome by Memorial Field focused on a proposed corner tower and building on the very important site where the FO&M buildings are now; and two proposed street sections, one for Lebanon street with Brook McIlroy’s wide sidewalks for cafe seating.

The firm has also done a riverfront park design study, a trail plan, and a suburban development proposal in Lebanon, a proposal for corridor enchancements in Norwich, and a proposal for new buildings in downtown White River.

The OPDC has exterior photos of Floren, and the Big Green Alert Blog has the first photos of the completed interior. The smart classroom mentioned in the blog and on the project page is presumably for team training sessions, not Dartmouth academic classes.

The OPDC has posted photos of the progress on the new Varsity House (one of the photos shows Memorial Field in the context of the campus), the Montgomery House renovation (check the pondside facade), and the Soccer Field (with the turf in place and grandstand going in).

Most notable are the photos of the landscaping between Berry and Maynard Street, or Berry Row. See the substantial walkway that organizes the whole project, for example.

A large photo of Floren appeared on the cover of the Sports Weekly, and Big Green Alert Blog noted that many of the major spaces within the building have been named.

Some more shots of the progress on Floren, mostly interiors, are available from the Big Green Athletics.

Dartmouth Life has an update on new athletic facilities and notes the upcoming renovation of Red Rolfe Field. Artificial turf will replace the grass, the dugouts will be rehabilitated, and a new scoreboard will replace the old.

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.

The possibility of building a temporary bubble (an Air-Supported Structure) over one of the Chase Fields for football practice was discussed during the winter (The Dartmouth) and covered conclusively by the very active Big Green Alert Blog (earlier and later stories). Bubbles turn out to be beautiful (as at the Stadium) but quite expensive.

A large amount of interest in the history of American football is accompanying the fiftieth anniversary of the Ivy League. The Big Green Alert Blog has linked (more) to trailers for two new films about Ivy football: The League and For Love and Honor, which is based on Mark F. Bernstein’s Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.

Both films appear to give some credit to the myth that football began in 1869 when Princeton played Rutgers. (The trailer for the first film mentions that game; the book upon which the second is based also mentions the game.) As has been noted here before, although the teams called their game “foot ball,” the fact that the British still call soccer by that name should be a tipoff: the teams were actually playing soccer, which was and is also known as Association Football. Rutgers acknowledges that the game was FA football and not rugby football in its website about the game.

Although the teams that played in the 1869 soccer match might be called the first American football teams, since they later switched rules to play rugby against other schools, the match itself was not half as significant as the 1874 Harvard-McGill rugby match or the 1875 Harvard-Yale rugby match, either of which is more properly known as the birth of intercollegiate football.