The picture I was going to use was one from the batch that loyal reader Karl Benson ’63 gave to the Woodson last December. But as I looked closer at some of the other images I was startled to find the answer to a tiny question that has nagged me for quite a while and that felt especially acute after the last post about commencement—when precisely did the parking lot in front of Lovett become a lawn?
If you go back and look that last post you can see that the area seems to be a well established lawn by the time of Pitzer’s inauguration in 1962 and it was still a parking lot in the spring of 1959. That’s not a huge gap, I guess, but I’ve always hoped to get closer than that.
So this is the image I found today, precisely dated, showing a newly planted lawn and reconfigured parking just before Thanksgiving, 1959. If you zoom in you can see guys still working near the building:
I am happy.
Bonus: This is what I started with. The combination of the caption and the look on her face made me smile.
Extra Bonus: O-Week shenanigans, sent in by a loyal reader. I’m not sure how they got it up there.
