There are a lot of aerial shots in the Campus Photographer collection that are new to me. These shots, although they were often taken for some specific purpose, are jammed full of other interesting bits of information that would otherwise escape capture. Here are a couple from about 1970 that I especially like. They seem to have been taken to record progress on the construction of Sewall Hall, which is somewhat interesting on its own, but the really good stuff is accidental.
The first thing I noticed were the hedges behind the Physics Building and then immediately the parking lot back there. I had never seen that before. I suppose at some point after the Bonner Lab was built they tore down the building that was there and replaced it with parking spaces. I obviously don’t know when they disappeared. Even more interesting to me is the parking situation over by Cohen House–many fewer spaces than we have now and an intriguing if tiny porte cochere.
You can get a much clearer look at it here. I’ll see if I can find any ground level pictures of what that looked like.
Bonus: These images came off a contact sheet. Here’s the last shot on the roll, notable for what appears to be an aerial photograph on the wall behind the guy’s shoulder.
