Neil Brennan took pictures that other people don’t. In particular, he liked to take pictures looking tight along the side of whatever building he happened to be in or on. Sometimes this resulted in images that do not exist anywhere else. Here’s one of those, from West Hall looking east:
This next one is similar to the standard commencement photo they used to take every year from the top of the arcade that connects the Administration Building to Physics, but Brennan must have been squished right up next to the building on one of the balconies:
It might not seem like much but in my little world, where I see the same pictures over and over again, anything different is good.
Bonus:
On the roof of West Hall (Hanszen College today), does anyone have any idea what the two or three metallic like triangular projections are? Was that part of some repair project? Was that a permanent feature of the roof design? Those projections may be the reason he took the photo. The fellow standing on the fire escape looks more like a student than a construction worker.
That’s a good question. I’ll see if I can find anything.
I think that may be the roof over the points where the stairwells extended into the attic. As I recall they went up into the attic as a normal stairwell. The attic ran all the way across sections 2 & 3. There was also a door on the 4th floor of the tower between the two east most rooms giving you entrance to the attic. (The B&P was housed in the attic when I was there. It eventually moved to the basement underneath the first stairwell closest to the commons in the new section
I think they were shelters for roof repair materials. There are ladders running up to the roof from the fire escapes. Yes, that fire escape was probably permanent and that probably is a student on it. Wish I could see the convertible well enough to tell what it is. ’41 Ford is a reasonable guess. Ford is almost always a reasonable guess, prewar, given how many there were and how cheap they were.
The picture was taken in either 1941 or 1942, so that makes sense.
I believe that is the old front of Herrman Hospital in the second photo? If so, it is now sadly obscured by what I cannot call an improvement.
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