A couple weekends ago I had to go to campus for a few minutes and I got Mr. Rice History Corner to drive me over there. As we were leaving through Gate 2, I blurted out “stop! back up quick!” Which he did, as he is a generally agreeable fellow. I jumped out, surprised, elated, and laughing, and took a bunch of pictures of this:
See it? It’s the definitive answer to this problem, noticed first at entrance 2 of the Main Gate in November, 2017:
What are these rectangles?
We had pretty well decided that there must have been poles in there to allow us to hang chains across the entrance but this seals it. I did have to poke around with my shoe to make sure there was concrete under the dirt at Gate 2 and indeed there is:
I leave by this gate with some frequency yet never noticed the poles before, I suppose because I was driving. It simply never occurred to me to go over there and look back in 2017. I do note with some irony that only two weeks before I noticed the rectangles behind the Main Gate I wrote a long post about Gate 2, but I was completely focused on its front side, trying to explain this picture:
Bonus: I love this tiny little cypress, looking like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree out in the quad. I’m rooting for it! (I’m not completely sure, by the way, that it’s the same kind as the others. It looks the same but different, if you know what I mean.)
I’m not sure that I see that this completely answers the question. You have a round post in concrete, in a square hole, with different concrete around that. That argues for two events, the one that created the square hole and the one that put the round post into the middle of the square hole. Steel posts would certainly have been available when the gate was built, so if they’d been there initially, you’d just see the round post in concrete, without the square hole.
Regarding Charlie Brown’s cypress, maybe the planters were following the old Chinese adage of “If one wants a LARGE tree, then plant a small tree”.
Maybe not chains
Different gate ?
Not original lights?