I was thinking I might just skip posting tonight because I’m so busy, but while I was putting slides together for a talk on the early history of athletics at Rice I noticed that a very early aerial photo of campus gives a remarkably similar view to one I wrote about last week. Both were taken looking over the athletics field and towards downtown. The quality is obviously very different–the later one was taken by a professional and the earlier by a mechanical engineering professor hanging out the side of a plane flown by an undergrad–but the angle is almost the same and if you zoom in on the 1917 shot you can see quite a bit:
Here’s the one I talked about last week:
What tremendous change in so few years. As I mentioned when I first posted this one, there are a lot of things worthy of comment here. I really am too swamped to write much more, though, so for now I’ll just note that you can clearly see the space where Mecom Fountain would someday be built and that in 1933 it was a garden.