Sometimes the small changes have the biggest impact. From my perspective the most important change to the Rice campus in the last twenty years has been the addition of a back door to Fondren Library. Here’s another big one–finally, a sidewalk running along the intramural fields out to the stadium lot where I park:
Yes, I realize that there’s a sidewalk on the other side of the road but I’d rather walk near the open spaces. Now I’ll be able to do it without getting my shoes dirty.
And speaking of those open spaces here are a couple pictures of those fields circa 1969. These only exist as tiny images on contact sheets so I can’t make them any clearer but it’s not hard to get the gist. It was empty out there. Very, very empty. It looks like they didn’t even bother to cut the grass regularly:
This next one was taken from the corner across from where the Shepherd School is now. Note the little saplings:
And this was the same spot yesterday:
I’m thankful for those trees every day on the long walk in to the library.
Bonus: This is routine maintenance, straightening out the ones that have gotten cattywampus and resetting the wires that keep things generally upright. They look much neater.
They were quite tilty at noon, today.
You shot this later?
Yes, but some of them are still pretty tilty even now. There are a couple that I don’t see how they’ll ever get them back up straight.
“… quite tilty at noon”
You just watch your phraseology, young man.
(With apologies to Meredith Wilson.)
Melissa,
Please don’t encourage him.
Papa, please! It’s ‘Capulets’ like you who make blood in the marketplace! Ye Gods!
We’ve surely got trouble.
There’s an Italian Cypress in Iran that is thought to be 4000 years old. Maybe we should find out their secret.
I bet they don’t water the grass.
Those empty fields did get a workout. When Rice hosted schools such as UT, A & M, and LSU in the early 70s, the football stadium would be sold out and the empty fields completely filled with cars all the way to the RMC.
When did the small prairie experiment start in the north part of that field? I know it was there in the late 70s or early 80s.
On the sidewalk, Bill Tomlinson, formerly of FP&E, did a project in the mid 1990s to fill in missing trees. He made sure that we had a double row of live oaks down that stretch of road, even though he did not have the budget to out in the sidewalk.
He added a fair number of trees in places where we now take them for granted.