Dartmo.

Bing’s current aerial view of the Upper Valley is much newer than Google’s — only a couple of months old — and has much better detail.

In various parts of this view, the Inn addition is beginning and the Softball Park is visible. Parker Apartments at 2 North Park are gone. The VAC is roofed and the LSC’s pathways are finished, looking like the runways of an airport.

There’s a forlorn little roundabout alongside the desolate grounds of Rivercrest. Rivercrest looks like a cemetery.

Alumna Emily Singer Yen has posted an impressive portfolio that includes a set of 2010 designs for what appears to be a large addition to the Ledyard Canoe Club.

This is not simply a student project: the designer “[c]ollaborated and interned with the selected architect to prepare schematic designs for preliminary State and Town permitting meetings[.]” Back in 2010 Ledyard was raising money for the addition, and in February of 2011 the “rebuild” was said to be going ahead.

The publicity around the Inn expansion constantly emphasizes the building’s “historic” nature. The label seems to come from the Inn’s inclusion in 2011 in the Historic Hotels of America, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

How does a hotel get into the program?

To be nominated and selected for membership into this prestigious program, a hotel must be at least 50 years old, listed in or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or recognized as having historic significance.

The nomination form states that “Properties must be a minimum age of 75 years” under the blank for “Year originally built.”

The main block of the Inn will not be 50 years old until 2016. The Inn is not listed on the National Register, and one doubts that any historian has determined the building to be eligible for listing. (If the dates on the main block and the subsidiary wing were swapped, that would be another story.) Nor does anyone, including the National Trust, appear to have recognized the Inn as having historic significance. The phrase “historic significance” refers to the fact that the building was “home to, or on the grounds of, a former home of famous persons or [a] significant location for an event in history.” This HHA definition is in line with one of the criteria for National Register eligibility.

What, then, did the Inn tell the National Trust in its application? Some clues might lie in the text of the HHA page provided for the Inn:

• General Ebenezer Brewster, whose home occupied the present site of the Inn, founded the Dartmouth Hotel in 1780 but later [it] burned to the ground and was replaced two years later on the same site by the Wheelock Hotel.

As corrected, this sentence is adequate as an anecdote, although it makes one wonder who would care about something occurring “two years later” than an unspecified date.

To be a bit more accurate, the page might say that the inn established by Brewster was usually called Brewster’s Tavern. Around 1813, Brewster’s son replaced the building with a completely different building called the Dartmouth Hotel. That building burned in 1887 and was replaced in 1889 with a completely different building called the Wheelock Hotel. That building was demolished in the 1960s and is no longer standing:

To continue:

• From 1901-1903, Dartmouth College carried out extensive renovations to the facility, which was then renamed the Hanover Inn.

This sentence could be worded better, but it is correct. What is not clear is why anyone would care about those renovations, since the renovated building no longer exists.

• An east wing was added in 1924, followed in 1939 by an exterior expansion.

And that east wing is the oldest part of the Inn. The 1939 information is interesting but irrelevant.

• In 1968 a west wing was added.

Another, more accurate way to put it would be to say that “in 1968, the historic 1889 Hanover Inn was completely demolished, leaving only the 1924 east wing.” The main block of the Inn today, the building standing on the corner, is not “a west wing” attached to something greater than itself: it is the Inn.

• 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.

These statements probably have some basis in fact. First, if the school was yet not co-ed, why were women living in a dormitory? Because they were Carnival visitors, in town for a few days each year. Second, if they were college-aged, why bother describing them (twice) as “single”? It cannot be meant to distinguish them from the veterans’ wives living in married students’ housing after WWII, since those women were not segregated by gender. Third, the statement about the chaperones is interesting, if true. But considering that Carnival dates at the Inn were not staying in a temporarily-cleared dormitory, and thus were paying for their rooms, the Inn must have found it cost-effective to station a few women in the halls to mind the furnishings.

• The Hanover Inn is the oldest continuous[ly-operated] business in the state of New Hampshire.

That might be true, if the various hotels dating back to Brewster are considered as a single business. One might prefer Tuttle Farm, which has been operating since 1632 and apparently has been owned by just one family.

Dartmouth recently announced that it has “initiated a renovation and expansion project for the Hopkins Center and will be selecting an architect in the coming year.” Because the Hop is so large, loved, and important, this is sure to be an interesting project.

On the occasion of the Hopkins Center’s 50th anniversary, the alumni magazine has published a photo essay on the Hop of today and collected reminiscences.

Reading Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker article mentioning the Pixar building and how Steve Jobs concentrated the restrooms in one place as a way of forcing interaction among employees reminds one of the Hinman Boxes and their placement in the Hopkins Center with the specific intention of exposing students to the arts.[¹]

The Black family’s gift for the Visual Arts Center includes the funding of an artwork by Ellsworth Kelly that will be attached to the east facade of Spaulding Auditorium this year (The Dartmouth). See this Street View for the likely site.

The publicity around the Hood expansion and the arts center refers to “Dartmouth’s new Arts District.” It seems that neither “Hopland” nor “SoWhee” has taken hold.

There is the challenge of adding to a notable building by a big-name architect, Wallace Harrison. The various firms doing careful insertions in and around the Harrison-planned Lincoln Center, including Tod Williams Billie Tsien, would be worth considering (Lincoln Center page, Times Topics).

Two recent master plans have proposed that the college graft a variety of additions onto the sides of the Hop:

• The 2001 Rogers Marvel arts center master plan (pdf, see also additional information from the firm and Chad Smith, Architect).
• The 2001 Brook McIlroy Downtown Hanover Vision plan, specifically the Spaulding Auditorium proposal.

It will be interesting to see where the new additions will go and how they will look. Will the Hop’s studio range really be demolished and replaced, as the Rogers Marvel plan proposes? Will the blank wall on Lebanon Street really get a row of shops, as the Brook McIlroy plan proposes? Will a northern addition expand the Hop proper toward the Green, alongside the original and iconic Moore Theatre? Stay tuned.

———————-

The Valley News reports that the project’s first phase will finish by June, “even as the price of the project has skyrocketed and town officials say the college may have underestimated the scope of the work.” Google’s Street View sort of shows where the addition is going. The Town’s Flickr stream has a mid-1960s photo that shows a clean Scout driving in the foreground and the original 1880s Inn being demolished in the background. The Inn’s 1923 wing, also visible, still stands.

Images of selective demolition are on line from contractor Dectam, including photos of some guest rooms without walls, only bathtubs; a team of workers going after the exterior concrete pavers; and the demolition of the lobby plaza area wall.

Dana Lowe, a subcontractor on the project, died on March 13th after a construction accident involving a crane and a scissor-lift (The Dartmouth).

The website for the current strategic planning process uses the 2019 Quartomillenium as an endpoint, with its motto “Imagine the Next 250.”

The Bicentennial year of 1969-1970 gives an example of what the Quartomillenium could be. There were three big events according to Charles Widmeyer in John Sloan Dickey: A Chronicle of His Presidency of Dartmouth College (1991), 250, 271. Those events were:

1. The Bicentennial Commencement in the summer of 1969.
2. Dartmouth Day (i.e. Charter Day), December 13, 1969. This was the focal point of the year, and it involved a fireworks display, a parade around the Green, and a proclamation by the Governor in front of the Hop (the Bicentennial plaque is in the Zahm Garden).
3. The Third Century Convocation in the Fall of 1970.

The notable commemorative objects produced for the Bicentennial included:

1. A USPS stamp designed by John Scotford, technically in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Dartmouth College Case, since USPS does not recognize individual schools or their anniversaries.
2. A new college flag with its stylized pine symbol designed by Scotford.
3. A medal designed by Rudolph Ruzicka and struck by the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia, requiring an act of Congress:

The Quartomillenium could include these events:

1. A commemoration of the Bicentennial of the Dartmouth College Case.
2. A visit by the 10th Earl of Dartmouth.
3. The receipt from the College of Arms of letters patent granting to Dartmouth an honorary coat of arms along these lines:

• 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.

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.

[02.25.2012 update: See also the articles by Susan J. Boutwell, "Dartmouth Among First Schools Showcased in Google Maps Feature," Dartmouth Now (January 11, 2012) and in The Graduate Forum (January 17, 2012).]

I. The Dartmouth Company

Curiously, there is a Boston-based real estate company called The Dartmouth Company. It makes good use of serifs and a dark green color on its website and seems to operate in New Hampshire. See also the more obvious reference to the college at the Dartmouth Education Foundation.

II. The Arms of Dartmouth’s Schools

The Dartmouth College website seems to be doing something new when it describes the institution as a collection of five apparently equal schools:

The harmonization and use of the schools’ shields is commendable.

But this arrangement seems to contradict the rule that Dartmouth is the college. The “Associated Schools” — Tuck, Thayer, Medical, and lately the graduate programs — are associated with the college but are not coequals beneath a central university administration. Because “Dartmouth” is the undergraduate college, there is no need to put the letters “CA&S” before one’s class year, for example.

Tom Owen writes in The Dartmouth today:

In the discussion following Kim’s address, Provost Carol Folt said there is a “complicated set of reasons” for the gap between Dartmouth’s national and international rankings. Two of the major contributing factors are Dartmouth’s lack of a “university” title and Dartmouth’s focus on undergraduates, both of which have hurt Dartmouth’s international reputation.

[...]

Although large-scale changes may be necessary in the next decade, alumni must see new developments as part of an institutional history of adaptation rather than as a threat to tradition, Kim said.

The school’s Quartomillennium celebration in 2019 would be a good time to launch something new.

[01.25.2012 update: Education Foundation link added.]

• 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.

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).

The catalog from the 2011 DADA Exhibition is now available (pdf) and provides some fascinating information about alumni in design.

For example, Domus, the Hanover firm that designed the new Sigma Phi Epsilon house, includes Marty Davis ’69, Bruce R. Williamson ’74, and Bill Keegan ’75.

Canaan architectural blacksmith Dimitri Gerakaris ’69 (art-metal.com) created the copper pediment atop the Rockefeller Center porte-cochere, the Rugby Clubhouse interior bas-relief, and the railing outside Baker’s 1902 Room.

The poster was designed by Emily Yen ’10 of Hanover and Anchorage.

Thanks to author Sue Reed and to DADA for permission to post the catalog.

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.)

A new group called DADA – Dartmouth Alumni in Design and Architecture has formed, and it’s holding an exhibition of work by alums from June 11 through June 19.

(Via Sue.)

Dartmouth’s Flickr stream has photos of the installation of furniture in Baker’s main hall.

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.

Graduate Studies at Dartmouth (or “the Graduate Studies programs,” collectively lowercase) haven’t given the impression that they form a single school or college. Over the past several years, however, they have unified under a logo comprising the Old Pine, likely derived from the Bicentennial Flag, inside an oval. The oval logo is reproduced in a prior post and is vestigially visible on the current Grad Studies site.

Now Graduate Studies have a new coat of arms with a kinship to those of the other schools:

Graduate Studies coat of arms, from Graduate Studies

This shield has a woodcutty form similar to that of the recent Thayer School arms. The year “1885″ (I think) in the base would be the year that Dartmouth granted its first Ph.D. degree; there is no singular institution here to claim a foundation date. (Some sources have Dartmouth giving a Ph.D. in 1877 to astronomer John Robie Eastman of the Chandler class of 1862.)

This iteration seems to place the numerals with a bit more success, from the DCHCDS site:

Graduate Studies coat of arms from DCHCDS application

The white pine is carried over from the earlier oval logo, and below it the lines of the New Hampshire hills create a depression rather than the rising hill (a peak of enlightenment to be ascended, etc.) found on Dartmouth’s seal. The lines also read as a pair of cradling hands.

It turns out this coat of arms is the product of a competition held last October. The competition brief required a representation of waves (have I misread those lines? The tree is growing out of the upper line) and referred contestants to the shields of Tuck, Thayer, and DMS — but not of Dartmouth itself. The brief also required entries to show the year 1960, which is when the current crop of grad programs began, and that must have been regarded as the “founding” year when the brief was published. There is a discussion in the comments about the advisability of dividing the year into two pairs of numbers, and some question about how and when during the competition the year 1885 was substituted for 1960.

All of the competition entries are available for viewing. Several alternate between the Grad Studies pine and the Bicentennial pine; several follow the Tuck School example fairly closely. One from SB Design deserves credit for depicting Wentworth Hall, the Grad Studies headquarters. Another sort of quarters the arms of the three Associated Schools, using the paths on the Green to divide the shield. The winning designer was Scott Gladd. (He has some alternative versions, including an intriguing one with Baker Library, in his portfolio.)

Now the logotypes of Dartmouth and its Associated Schools and related entities, as they are lined up at the bottom of the DCHCDS site, are one step closer to complete congruity. Only the hospital, the Institute for HP&CP, and the DCHCDS itself are without coats of arms.

Isn’t this interesting. Where the symbols of the appropriate programs are lined up for an online application form, both DIHPCP and DCHCDS (noted above as lacking logotypes) are represented by Dartmouth’s shield:

Row of logotypes from application.

[Update 04.25.2011: Minor wording changes and date correction.]

[Update 01.22.2011: Second image replaced with better version; note about row of four logotypes added; competition information added.]

Board chairman Stephen Mandel’s January 13th letter to the Dartmouth community mentions so many new spaces going into the renovated Inn that the building’s envelope surely must be expanding:

In addition, the “front door” to the College, the Hanover Inn, is planned to undergo a complete renovation beginning this summer. Every aspect of the inn will be touched and will result in a larger number of guest rooms, all updated, new and relocated restaurants, and modern conference facilities. The College remains the owner of the inn but we have hired a third party to manage the inn. The renovation will be funded with mortgage debt and the proceeds of the sale of the Minary Conference Center in Holderness, N.H.

The idea of having a standard conference center near Hanover has been mentioned in past master plans:

Finally, the College is exploring the feasibility of a regional conference center to further enable the dissemination of scholarship.

Lo-Yi Chan, et al., Dartmouth College Master Plan (2002), 10 (11.3mb pdf).

A conventional conference center could probably be a moneymaker, but it is hard to see how could fit on the corner of Wheelock and Main.