Architecture critic Donald Maurice Kreis has a thorough review in Dartmouth Medicine of the most recent expansion of the DHMC, a massive 2002-2006 project. The article also includes several short videos.

Frances Cha has examined the remarkable Wheelock memorial window in Bartlett Hall in The Dartmouth:

The window depicts John the Baptist and quotes him: “Vox Clamantis In Deserto Viam Domini.” In doing so, the window recalls Wheelock’s invocation of that message in his suggestion that the college motto be “Vox Clamantis in Deserto.” (Meacham photo)

A curious Internet rumor is spreading, but it does not seem to have left the borders of Hanover:

Someone read the name “Harry Bates Thayer, [Dartmouth class of]
1879″ to mean “Harry Bates, Thayer [School of Engineering Class of]
1879.” The real Harry Bates Thayer was a long-time AT&T executive, prominent leader among Dartmouth’s Trustees, and the namesake of Thayer Dining Hall. No one named “Harry Bates,” on the other hand, graduated from any branch of Dartmouth before at least 1910. The only person in Thayer’s graduating class of 1879 was Ray Gile.

What’s oddest is that “Harry Bates” got put in the shoes of Herman Hollerith, the famous punch-card man. The excellent Computing at Dartmouth timeline attributes to “Harry Bates” the 1887 design of a punch-card compiling apparatus, the incorporation of the Tabulating Machine Company, and the 1911 sale of the company, which later became IBM.

But it was Hollerith who registered “Art of Compiling Statistics,” U.S. Patent No. 395.781 (1889, filed 1887); who formed the Tabulating Machine Company (see IBM Archives Exhibit); and who sold the company in 1911.

Also picking up on “Harry Bates” are the DTSS Timeline; Here in Hanover magazine (Winter 1998) [pdf]; and the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science (Spring 2001) [pdf].

[Update 08.09.2006: Timeline was fixed last week.]

McKenzie Hall, perhaps Dartmouth’s most obscure building, was built as a dairy east of the Heating Plant around 1931. It now houses the headquarters of the Department of Facilities, Operations & Management.

New plans for Tuck’s Living-Learning Center, to be built on the site of Hinman Hall, are available. For the first time, the basement-level plan confirms that this building, like all of the others in the Tuck School, will be accessible by tunnel.

The temporary lack of shutters on Dartmouth Hall’s front facade gives the building an even more rudimentary, eighteenth-century appearance.

All three of Baker’s main doors, originally heavy 1928 metal revolving doors enclosed in apparently bronze-lined cabins, have been replaced with swinging doors of wood stained a light color and lacking either formal panelling or paint. (Earlier, it seemed that the western door, at least, would remain, since it is at the top of a stair and inaccessible by wheelchair.) Salvors sold off the original doors, and one at least is rumored to have been bought by someone who appreciates its history.

The parliamentary Faculty Room in Parkhurst Hall was largely demolished decades ago and a mezzanine inserted in its place, but a few of the roof beams remain in an unfinished attic.

An earlier view of the room. Some of the benches, with their numbered seating spaces, can be found in the corridors of Parkhurst Hall.

Peter Christian’s (in the New York Times; in New London) was a Hanover tavern that occupied a basement at 35 South Main Street lined with dark wood, including beams salvaged from the oldest house in Hanover, the 1770 Storrs’ Tavern (D.K.E.). During the mid-1990s, Old Pete’s replaced it, then another tavern, then The Wrap. The Wrap has become a burrito place called Boloco, for “Boston Local Company.” (One customer was overheard describing a burrito to her deprived child as “like a wrap, but warm.”) When the wrap or the burrito place moved in, all of the old, dark interior was ripped out and presumably sold off. A Boloco clerk said that someone stole the bar one night.

The possibly-1860s granite post mentioned earlier as surviving the Kemeny Hall construction has been pulled, but the fact that it remains at the construction site encourages the speculation that it will be replaced when the building is finished: