Oh my goodness, I had a wild archival day today. I started out trying very hard to find something which I did not find (although I still hold out hope). Multiple twists later I found myself up to my elbows in a collection I’d never really studied before, the Bud Morehead manuscript collection. An architecture professor and later registrar, Morehead came to Rice in 1940 and stayed until his retirement in 1979. Among his papers are hundreds of prints, negatives and slides of the Rice campus including a group that had been given to him by William Ward Watkin. Some of these were included in his short book, A Walking Tour of Rice University, but many others were not and there are a substantial number of photos I’ve never seen before.
These two jumped out immediately. There are actually a pretty fair number of pictures of the construction of the new stadium in the Woodson but they tend to mostly look the same. Nearly all of them were routine construction progress shots, usually taken from the same angle each week and almost all in black and white. I’ve never before come across anything as dramatic as these:
It took me a moment to get my bearings with this next one. The key was realizing that that’s the old stadium in the background:
Where was this taken from?
Bonus: I spent some time at another university last week. My favorite part of the visit was the service entrance of the faculty club.
I bet that was taken from a crane roughly above the press box. The press box is really high, but not that high.
I agree with Walter … especially since it looks like the second deck (and thus the press box) has not yet been constructed. (The compass direction of the photo appears to be roughly southeast.)
Looking toward the tunnel, which nails the location.
Nothing like fresh herbs. We grow our own too.
I can’t help but see a parallel between Rice expanding its football stadium seating capacity in 1950 and Texas A & M expanding theirs to over 100,000 in 2014. With all of the proposed NCAA changes being considered, TAMU may find out, as Rice did, that the future is not necessarily a linear extension of the present.
Boy, ain’t that the truth. It’s hard enough to figure out what already happened.
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Don’t overlook the fact that the city fathers in Houston were very involved with the concept of Rice Stadium (originally to be called Houston Stadium.) It was in large part a matter of civic pride – Houston’s answer to the “House that Doak Built” in Dallas.
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