It’s a well established fact that I have a soft spot for decorative ironwork. (See here.) The only thing that stops me from walking around our neighborhood taking pictures of it is that my husband (wisely) won’t let me.

When I first looked at this photo, which I found in one of the scrapbooks, I was astonished to realize that the woman on the right is Alice Dean (’16), Rice’s first librarian. We have very few pictures of her and as far as I know this is the only one taken around the time she was still a student. I believe this dates from 1918, when the young man, Paul King, would have been a freshman. The woman on the left is Elizabeth Rowe Kennon (’18).

The second look at a photograph is often more interesting–or at least contains more possibilities–than the first. In this one, there’s a really nice view of the beautiful ironwork beneath the windows of Lovett Hall. A few weeks ago I was walking over there from the library and I noticed some guys up on ladders doing something to it. It turns out that years of rain caused dark streaks to form beneath the iron and they were cleaning them off. They did a pretty good job, but I guess it’s not really possible to get rid of all of it:

And here’s a picture of the ironwork from the inside of the building. I took it earlier in the summer when I was poking around in the Founder’s Room. Spiffy, no?