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.

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 Class of 1953 Commons project, a renovation of Thayer Dining Hall (The Dartmouth, The Dartmouth), has finished.

Dartmouth Now has an article on the dedication with a flash (!?) slideshow of photos on Flickr. Bruner/Cott also has an image of the main dining room, and a first-floor plan appears on the DDS portion of the college website.

The building’s interior is hard to recognize. The photos show crisp white walls and sunlight replacing the cramped spaces and dim lighting of Thayer’s last renovation, which occurred in the 1980s. The main dining room, the site of Full Fare in the early 1990s and later Food Court, retains its original wooden roof trusses but abandons the painted flower ceiling panels. The south side dining room (Food Court of the early 1990s) is cool and sophisticated. The building now offers dining on the second floor, probably where the miniature convenience store called Topside once was, and perhaps where DDS offices once were.

Outside, the new stair is clad in granite. Irrespective of the changes in the menu, it looks like a nicer place to eat in.

Contrary to the implication on this site last month, the renovation and expansion of the Hanover Inn are indeed the work of Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc. The firm designed a stylish renovation of the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, N.H.

Interior design for the Inn is being handled by New York firm Bill Rooney Studio, Inc. Some snippets of the firm’s renderings show an interesting use of inscribed lines and geometric patterns.

The ongoing work has shifted some students’ Hinman Boxes, The Dartmouth reports.

Although the main block of the Inn is not even fifty years old, the Inn has been listed with the National Trust’s Historic Hotels of America. The Web information includes this novel tidbit:

Before Dartmouth College became co-ed, the fourth floor of the Hanover Inn was a single women’s dormitory. The Inn provided chaperones for the single female guests. The Hanover Inn is the oldest continuous business in the state of New Hampshire.

• 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 Alumni Magazine published two letters critical of a rendering of the proposed Inn addition. (It is not clear that the rendering represents a final design.)

One writer laments the lack of a railing for putting one’s feet upon, although the rendering shows clearly that the existing railing, located within the arcade that screens the recessed porch where the rocking chairs are, will be retained.

The same letter called the design “nontraditional,” and that might be accurate. The most prominent part of the addition will be a new porte-cochere, and the rendering seems to show it as a Modernist structure. But look at the Inn itself: it features an uncharacteristic mansard roof; a lack of shutters; the omission of traditional building details such as quoining, lintels, or sills; and the absence of columns or much reference to the Classical orders. The main block of the Inn was designed by Hilton architect William B. Tabler and completed in 1967.

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.

The Dartmouth reports on the project, and the Planner has some closer photos. The D also had an article in July. (The Planner’s Office now has not only a blog and website but also a domain name, dartmouthplanning.com.)

Although the dock project includes bank stabilization and plantings, it continues the trend of intensified development on the east bank of the river between the bridge and the canoe club. As recently as 1985, the docks were less noticeable, the bridge was smaller, lower, and much less prominent, and the assertive boathouse was nonexistent.

Instead of maintaining the fiction that this limited site is a part of nature, could it be developed heavily, with a broad granite pedestrian corniche? Let’s promenade on the Ledyard Malecón.

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.

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.

A gallery of photos of ongoing construction projects for athletics includes a plan and rendering of the new varsity basketball offices in the Berry Sports Center. The design appears to be by Moser Pilon Nielson Architects of Wethersfield, Conn.

This familiar glassed-in space on the north side of Gwathmey Siegel‘s 1987 building faces East Wheelock Street and previously housed the Kresge Fitness Center. It is depicted in a Gwathmey Siegel photo and appears at the bottom of the small plan of the building published by the firm (pdf).

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).]

An article in The Dartmouth today credits Bruner Cott with the design of the ongoing Class of 1953 Commons renovation of Thayer Dining Hall.

The identity of the designer of this project has been the object of some curiosity. Initially, Bruner Cott designed a new dining hall to be called the Class of 1953 Commons (pdf) as part of the McLaughlin Cluster. Once food service was available at the north end of campus, the school would have been free to demolish the historic Thayer Dining Hall and replace it with a new dining facility by Kieran Timberlake (see planning document pdf).

The downturn and other factors caused Dartmouth to drop both dining halls and to settle for renovating Thayer, renaming it ’53 Commons. The answer to the question of which firm would get the job has not been answered publicly until recently. (Bruner Cott’s site also lists this project and has a rendering of the main dining room.)

The article is illustrated with a photo depicting nearly the view shown above.

Local architect Ammi Burnham Young (1798-1871) began designing federal custom houses in 1837 and was appointed Supervising Architect of the Treasury in 1852. His office designed federal buildings all over the country, from San Francisco to Cleveland to Galveston to Maine. Dartmouth awarded him an honorary degree in 1841.

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:

Beta Theta Pi remedied the safety deficiencies uncovered in its Fuller Audit with a series of small porticos that make the building almost Propylaeic (above). Sigma Phi Epsilon decided to replace its house: