Oddly enough, there was an old picture of the academic quad in the folder I found the other day that was full of shots of biomedical engineering in the late 1960s. It’s very pretty and it illustrates nicely why they had to move commencement to the front of the Administration Building as enrollment grew:
But how old is it? I’m not sure–there’s a kind of timelessness to his area that makes it hard to accurately date. The first clue that jumps out are the bulletin boards on the outside of the building but I don’t know when those went away. It turns out that the state of the cypress trees is probably the best way to at least narrow the time frame down.
The first thing I did was count them. I might be the only person on earth who knows that their number has changed over time–sometimes there are seven on a side, other times eight. This looks like seven to me, although it can be kind of tricky to get it right because they sometimes split near the top. If you zoom in on this next image, which was taken in 1933, you can see that there are eight to a side:
This next one was taken on December 31, 1940. (It’s pretty spectacular, by the way. Check out that stadium view!) Zoom in and you see seven to a side, with the south row showing the same cypress, yew, cypress, cypress, yew, unidentifiable scraggly little thing, cypress lineup as in the first photo:
But we’re also confronted with the problem of where the top photo was taken from, which seems to me to have been an elevated position. Could this have been taken during or after Fondren construction? Maybe so:
1952 is too late–look at how bad the hedges between Willy and Lovett look in this image, nothing like the lush growth in the top picture:
Now I’m going to go have a glass of wine. I seriously thought this would be an easy post!
Bonus: Eight to a side these days.
