I got several emails and comments about the new sidewalks in the engineering quad, both pro and con. For my part, I have mixed feelings.

That pea gravel came, I believe, out of an effort to maintain as much as possible of the look of the original walkways, which were just plain gravel. You can see in this great shot (I’m guessing circa late 1940s) that both the walks and the road that came in off Gate 3 are gravel:

I think the gravel looks good and much more natural but I can see why it might not be the most practical thing for a campus. Thus the pea gravel, captured here as it was first being installed sometime in the 1950s:

By the way, I originally wrote about that image here but I misdated it, thinking the paving was done in the late 1940s. Pictures I later found from the 1951 student elections proved me wrong on that:

The pea gravel is both good and bad. It really is slippery when wet but even worse for someone like me, who has had to push and pull various carts, dollies, and wagons around campus, it’s hard to move things over. It’s loud and clattering and sometimes catches small wheels, which once sent me flying over the top of a library book cart right in the middle of the quad. I definitely won’t miss that part.

But the pea gravel looks better than the stark grey pavement (why not something with a bit of brown?), which I think is harsh and out of place on such a green and leafy campus:

Any way, I don’t have a vote on the grey pavement but I do have Yeats’s Lake Isle of Inisfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Bonus: It looks like Cannady Hall is pretty close to done.