It’s been surprisingly busy for me lately. Various offices and departments are taking advantage of the July lull to clean things out or clean things up. Here’s how it goes: someone makes the decision to change some of the carpeting in Lovett Hall, which sets off a chain reaction of people moving to get out of the way, which causes other offices to rearrange things and it all ends (from my perspective, of course) with a box of assorted oddities sitting on my desk.
That’s how I got this aerial photo, which I’d not seen before:
Interesting, no? That’s from pretty high, right straight down on top of campus. There’s a lot to pick at here–I’m especially interested in that small semi-circle right where the new Wellness Center is today. I’ve noticed in other pictures that there’s often smoke drifting up from that spot and I wonder if it was some sort of . . . . well, dump, I guess.
It is, of course, undated. I’m fairly confident, though, that it must be early in 1957. You can see that the construction of the two new lab buildings has started and that the Geology Building is much farther along than Biology. They both opened in 1958. Here’s a picture taken by Professor Joseph Davies sometime in 1957:
There’s no sign yet in the aerial shot of groundbreaking on the RMC, which took place a bit later, and the cedar elms along the drive that today separates Rayzor and Sewall halls are in full leaf so it can’t be winter. Jones and Brown look to be nearly complete but not yet landscaped–move-in was in March, 1957. What else am I missing?
Bonus: Speaking of the RMC, here’s a picture I took from the top of the tower the last time I was up there.
