Hotchkiss, the Place

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HOTCHKISS, THE PLACE

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COPYRIGHT © 2011 THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL LAKEVILLE, CONNECTICUT

SCOVILLE GATE

THE BULLS FRONT COVER: AERIAL VIEW OF THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL CAMPUS, 2000, LOOKING NORTH BACK COVER: "THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL," PRINT BY LITTIG & COMPANY, NEW YORK, UNDATED

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As places around us change‌ we all undergo changes inside.

This means that whatever we experience in a place is both a serious environmental issue

Hotchkiss, the Place An Appreciation of The Hotchkiss School Campus

and a deeply personal one‌

Barbara M. Walker Tony Hiss The Ex perience of Place

Spring 2011

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FOREWORD There are a few places that I know that have unusual power. There is a spirit that dwells in them, a genie, a daemon. It is thrilling to be in such settings, and a sustaining delight to live in them.

Some of these places are completely natural, with no hint of human intrusion. Others combine the natural and the built, landscape with architecture. It is this combination that is a glory of Hotchkiss.

Our builders must always have known that they were designing for local deities, of water, air, and earth. This hill and its attendant vistas are a location of energy and of loveliness. It is uplifting indeed to dwell in these buildings, to contemplate their elegance, and to tread out lightly from them into these landscapes.

Since the first edition of this booklet, new buildings have been added to the Hotchkiss campus: The Esther Eastman Music Center, and Edelman and Flinn Halls. In addition, the renovation of Monahan has been completed.

The sponsor of this booklet, Lloyd Zuckerberg ’80, loves Hotchkiss, its grounds, buildings, and place. It was he who argued to preserve Monahan when it might have been demolished. This love needs sharing. This booklet does so.

Malcolm H. McKenzie Head of School

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COY, EARLY MORNING

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword

2

Introduction

4

Prologue

5

The Form-Givers: Campus Architects

7

Main and its Satellites

11

Residence Halls and Faculty Houses

19

Athletic Facilities

29

The Landscape

35

Acknowledgments

40

Bibliography

40

Credits

40

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INTRODUCTION Highlights of my boyhood included Sunday trips to the bakery that my father turned into tours of our neighborhood to examine the craftsmanship of beautiful local houses.

When The Hotchkiss School became my neighborhood, I explored it in the same way.

The beauty of the campus at different times of day and various seasons of the year made a deep impression. As my intellectual horizons widened, so did my perceptions of setting, spaces, scale, and style. What I did not fully appreciate then was how rare that environment was. For almost a century, Hotchkiss was the beneficiary of a fortuitous combination of affluence, classically trained architects, and fine craftsmanship. But in recent times its refinement and human scale have been threatened. Indeed, as cars and commerce devour the landscape and exhibitionism replaces architecture, havens like the Hotchkiss campus are becoming endangered species.

To its mission of educating for citizenship, The Hotchkiss School has recently added “education for stewardship of the environment.” I applaud that thrust and assume the environment to include the structures we build as well as the land, waterways, and wilderness we manage. As for stewardship, I see it as a process of informed decision-making about every change we make in our surroundings. It is a process that begins with awareness. Encouraging awareness is the purpose of this guide, a brief chronology of Hotchkiss School facilities. The planning and design decisions described here may be credited to the architects, but it

is, of course, the client who decides. This booklet is my contribution to a syllabus in stewardship for students, all of whom will one day be clients, as community members or private patrons. It is my gift to a school that widened my eyes and a tribute to a father who taught me to notice. My hope is that the Hotchkiss community, as client, will appreciate the overriding importance of architectural continuity and context in choosing where and what to build as it seeks to accommodate the needs of this century.

Lloyd P. Zuckerberg ’80

A NOTE TO THE REVISED EDITION The half-dozen years since this booklet was published have brought many changes to Hotchkiss, among them two handsome new dormitories, the renovation of Monahan, and an archive with its own space and staff. I like to think that the first Hotchkiss, The Place played some part in advancing these changes. Whether or not that is the case, I feel I owe my alma mater a new edition that reflects an expanded campus and a surer grasp of its own history. I also must once again express my thanks to Barbara Walker, one of the few writers I’ve met who lives up to Hotchkiss standards and tells the story of campus architecture with exceptional grace and style.

The original booklet presented campus features in a strictly chronological order. This edition, also pocket-size, opens with an overview of campus planners and follows with Main and its satellites – an aid, we hope, to exploration on foot. What remain unchanged are the motives I articulated in the introduction above. If anything, they are stronger with each passing year.

— L. Z.

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VIEW TO THE NORTHWEST FROM THE FIFTH GREEN

The Hotchkiss School has no finer physical asset than its setting.

In a 1946 tribute, John Hersey ’32, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote, “It is not necessary for a graduate to get sentimental about the Connecticut countryside in which the school stands…to recollect how much he learned, —5—

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in the way of contemplation and affection for natural things, from sum- young men for college (read: Yale). She insisted that deserving local mer afternoons on the lake, from walks in the school woods…from ski- boys might attend tuition-free. For the first century, at least, Yale would ing and skating, and from daily sky-change and turning of the seasons. be a strong presence at her school.

The 65-acre tract Maria gave for the school—on Town Hill, at the The school is set on a wonderful hill.” “Town Hill” it was called in crossing of two country colonial times, although the roads—had open fields, sevtown of Salisbury centered on eral houses, the town burial the falls at the eastern outlet of ground, and fine viewpoints.

Lake Wononscopomuc. Here, The spot was well known for a burgeoning iron industry its beauty; it moved Huber G. earned the designation Buehler, the second headmas“Arsenal of the Revolution.” ter, to declare to a 1916 meetIn 1846 that center became ing on higher education, “The Lake Ville [sic]. best thing about The Maria Bissell grew up in Hotchkiss School is its locathese parts, taught school here, tion among the mountains of and married Benjamin Salisbury.”

Berkeley Hotchkiss, from a Purchases and gifts over family of Watertown ordnance the years have brought the dealers. A reluctant hostess, school’s holdings to 827 acres. she declined to join her husThe burial ground is now part band when he went abroad to EARLY POSTCARD VIEW OF LAKE WONONSCOPOMUC of a broad campus with green seek new markets. He died in lawns and playing fields, and Paris in 1885, leaving behind a new amour and an old will. At 58, Maria Hotchkiss became a wealthy the “mountains of Salisbury” are now officially part of the Berkshire widow; in time, she became a benefactor. She first offered to pay for Taconic Landscape, one of 200 “Last Great Places” chosen by The paving town roads and was rebuffed, but she succeeded in establishing Nature Conservancy as a focus for its conservation efforts. For a centhe Hotchkiss Library in Sharon. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, tury-plus-old school, this setting is an unusual and precious heritage. then persuaded Mrs. Hotchkiss to finance a school that would prepare

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THE FORM-GIVERS: CAMPUS ARCHITECTS Many architects have helped create the place that is The Hotchkiss School, but not all could be called “campus architects.” This designation is reserved for a succession of men whose commissions went beyond their initial buildings and involved visions of the campus as a whole.

Bruce Price was the first such campus architect, later joined by land-planner Ernest Bowditch, father of William and Richard, classes of 1912 and 1919. Price was known for buildings in New York City and for the Château Frontenac in Quebec. Price and Bowditch are best remembered for a house in Tuxedo Park, NY, said to be the model for the young Frank Lloyd Wright’s first house. Yale scholar Vincent Scully, Jr., would later refer to Price as “that elegant gentleman and erratic genius.”

Price planned a tight community of low structures linked to a central three-story main building by one-story corridors. Students could eat, sleep, and study without ever emerging into the New England climate. A reviewer at the time wrote, “The design [is] reduced by the necessity of keeping down the outlay to a very simple domestic programme. The PORTRAIT OF THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL, 1898-99

FIRST-STORY PLAN, FROM THE SCHOOLʼS FIRST ANNUAL PUBLICATION, 1892-93

great colleges which have been rearranging their buildings lately would have been wise had they considered the convenience of pupils and teachers as thoroughly as have the managers of this school.”

Main opened in 1892. A new building, Bissell Hall (page 19), rose at the eastern edge of the campus just two years later. The designers,

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CASS GILBERTʼS GENERAL PLAN, DATED 1915 AND 1925

Boston architects Loring & Phipps, used yellow brick to blend with Main Building and a covered walkway to tie this dormitory to the complex. Bruce Price died in 1903, and two years later Erick Rossiter, a partner in the New York City firm of Rossiter and Wright, became campus architect. Why Rossiter was chosen is lost to history, but there is a strong suggestion in the friendship that flourished between the architect and Headmaster Huber G. Buehler and his wife. With $180,000 – a substantial sum in those days – raised by Buehler, Rossiter undertook a complete renovation of the Main campus. The bird’s-eye rendering (back cover) captures the result. Of this villagelike complex, only Harris House (page 11) survives.

In 1906 the trustees engaged Ernest Bowditch for much-needed expertise in water and sewer systems. By that time he had added land-

scaping to his civil engineering credentials and estates like The Breakers to his client list, and Hotchkiss got a foresighted landscaper in the bargain. His landscape plan and plantings outlived him by decades; he died in 1918.

Even before Rossiter retired, the trustees had begun talks with another architectural eminence with Yale credits, Cass Gilbert, whose Woolworth Building in New York would remain the world’s tallest building for 16 years. They had launched a capital campaign with the goals of a larger endowment and accommodations for 288 students, and they wanted a new campus-wide plan. Gilbert delivered in style.

He unrolled a grand design that supplanted existing structures with a formal layout of amply spaced buildings facing each other across malls and quadrangles and backing on a loop road. By 1929, Gilbert had

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completed only the Memorial quadrangle and Alumni (now Tinker), Hall, but he set the course for the future by extending the campus to the south, by giving open spaces and relationships equal importance with the buildings, and by making the Georgian style (page 20) synonymous with Hotchkiss. One can still see a trace of his grand plan in the diagonal row of trees, lining a formal avenue, that now shade the bronze bulls (page 39).

Under Headmaster George Van Santvoord ’08, Gilbert was replaced as campus architect in 1929 by a firm no less prestigious: Delano & Aldrich, at that time designing colleges at Yale and structures that are now part of New York’s Upper East Side Historic District.

Retained at the outset to design the chapel, the firm put the commission in the hands of Henry Stuart Waterbury. Waterbury flourished at Hotchkiss; he was, in effect, campus architect until his death almost a quarter century later. When another capital campaign was launched at the end of World War II, he realized all its goals – new dining room and kitchen, gymnasium addition and library – excepting a new Main.

Waterbury also offered a formal campus plan with a central green, which over time yielded to the existing central entrance road. Several architects since have proposed to unify the campus by replacing the “bisecting” road with a circulation loop, but the Gilbert/Delano & Aldrich enclave has remained inviolate, with all later buildings rising at the periphery.

In 1956, Ebbets Frid & Prentice became the next campus architects, with T. Merrill Prentice, Class of 1918, in charge. Like those before him, he proposed a new main building, classical in design, but to no avail. Prentice is identified with renovations of the headmaster’s house, a faculty wing for Tinker dormitory, and completion of Van Santvoord Hall. Ironically, the only building this classicist designed

STUDENTS IN MAIN CORRIDOR, C.1933

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MAIN BUILDING DETAIL FROM THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL MASTER PLAN, 2001

was a modern one, the A. Whitney Griswold Science Building, now unrecognizable in its neo-Georgian envelope.

The long hold of classicism on the Hotchkiss campus yielded in

1964 to a succession of modernists, all of whom left their marks on the landscape but did little to reconfigure the map of the campus. In 1964 Paul Rudolph opened up the northwest quadrant with Dana, a dormitory in his signature style. In 1965, the elusive prize of designing a new Main went to Hugh Stubbins, who managed to create a new home for familiar functions on the same site without interrupting the school calendar.

Stubbins was succeeded

by Evans Woollen ’45, the second Hotchkiss graduate to become campus architect, who held the post for 15 years. Besides adding a dormitory, Watson Hall, to the north of Main, Woollen deftly improved the appearance and functionality of many buildings. He was the last to wear the “campus architect”

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mantle; Hotchkiss henceforth would have a succession of project-specific architects.

At the end of the 20th century the trustees, facing a burst of development, recognized the need for an independent look at the entire plant. They engaged Butler Rogers Baskett (“BRB”), architects with extensive school experience “to reassess the needs of Hotchkiss…take stock of existing resources, and to determine what needs to be done to move ahead.” At the time, expansion was less important than improvements to existing buildings; dining facilities for the entire community; more efficient kitchen operations; expanded daycare facilities; more space for Admissions; and greater attention to outdoor circulation, gatherings, and parking.

The Hotchkiss School Master Plan, developed with community participation by BRB and landscape architects Towers/Golde, was published in May of 2001. The plan spelled out building alterations and site enhancements to meet these needs and concluded with a timetable and cost estimates for implementation. Most important, the document established a mechanism for keeping the plan current – a “working party” of faculty and staff representatives that meets periodically with BRB staff to review objectives and accomplishments. Two amendments adopted to-date – one in May 2002, the other dated September 1, 2006 – are evidence of a plan that is well-grounded, alive, and responsive to the Hotchkiss community.

EARLY POSTCARD OF THE HEADMASTER'S HOUSE; BELOW, THE STUDY IN 1913

MAIN AND ITS SATELLITES HARRIS HOUSE (c.1894, 1906, c.1912, 1984, 1995, 2008, 2009) Harris House qualifies in two ways to open a survey of Hotchkiss buildings. As site of the Admissions Office, it is a welcome center, the first campus threshold crossed by many students. It is also living his— 11 —

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tory. Built about 1894 as a foursquare cottage anchoring the western end of Main, it is all that remains of the very first school. For over a century it was the headmaster’s house, first expanded by New York architects Rossiter & Wright in the era of headmaster Huber G. Buehler (1904-1924) and his wife, Roberta, a consummate hostess.

Before-and-after clues can be found in contrasting interior moldings and exterior window patterns. The heart of the house is a large oakpaneled room where Buehler convened faculty meetings. The small curved stair mid-room entered much later, in 1984. In the era (1926–55) of Headmaster George Van Santvoord, “The Duke,” art students used the basement as their first studio. Eventually the growing school needed more office space, and its headmaster, more privacy.

When a new house was built for the headmaster in 1994, his former HARRIS HOUSE AFTER THE 2009 RENOVATIONS

home was remodeled for the offices of admissions and development by Day and Ertman Architects of Waltham, MA. Renamed for John Houghton Harris ’35 as a memorial gift from his brothers, the building acquired an elevator, air conditioning, desks, and file cabinets. The exodus of the Office of Alumni and Development in 2008 prompted further renovation, a gift from Forrest E. Mars, Jr.’49, but Harris House still feels like a home, warm and welcoming. The play of daylight on a foyer and stairwell rich with joinery details makes this a campus beauty spot.

MAIN B UILDING (1892, 1966-68, 1984, 1995) With the exception of Harris House, nothing remains of the original Main but its concept.

It is a rare example of a building whose function has remained rooted, while its form has undergone wholesale change.

From the start Main has been the academic, administrative, and social center of the campus, “the village.” Bruce Price’s campus was a suite of buildings linked by a one-story corridor longer than a football field, a “Main Street.” The central element was a three-story prism of yellow brick, with a dormered attic, a deep front porch, and classical details. This housed masters’ rooms, offices, and a reading room on the first floor and, on the upper floors, dormitory rooms for 58 boys and four masters. To the west, Main Street led to a foyer, where students gathered to await morning chapel and the day’s mail delivery, then to a one-story classroom building. The eastern arm extended to the chapel, dining room, and gymnasium. Early additions were the headmaster’s house, to the west, and to the east, Estill Cottage, home to the school’s first associate headmasters. This Main Building embodied principles that would come to characterize Hotchkiss. Daily life would be community life, with primary activities concentrated under one roof. Teachers would live among their pupils. Secular architectural

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NEW MAIN HALL PROPOSED BY DELANO AND ALDRICH, C.1946

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW, C.1970, OF MAIN HALL DESIGNED BY HUGH STUBBINS

styles would prevail. Main would always enjoy pride of place, on a knoll overlooking the lake. Within a dozen years of the school’s opening, an infirmary, barn, field house, and pool were added to the complex, challenging the limits of the Main envelope. In his 1915 plan, revived in 1925, Cass Gilbert was bold enough to propose a new Main with a tower. While he succeeded in introducing the Georgian style and realizing three other elements of his plan (Memorial and Tinker halls and the infirmary), old Main outlasted him. Main also outlasted a proposal made after World War II by Delano & Aldrich. Through partner Henry Waterbury, this firm created a lasting impression on the campus, but not a new Main. Ebbets Frid & Prentice, campus architects from 1956 to 1962, envisioned a new Main of white brick linked to the chapel and library by red brick wings. Their concept survives in a ren-

dering hanging in the Plant Operations office. Paul Rudolph proposed a modern Main in 1964. He lost the commission, but not without making a convincing argument for contemporary architecture. The approach of the 75th anniversary galvanized the trustees of The Hotchkiss School to replace Main Building. They chose another modernist, Hugh Stubbins, known for unique solutions to particular problems. His work for Mt. Holyoke College, begun at the same time, resulted in 10 buildings there. Stubbins devised a three-level, Y-shaped structure that would embrace the old Main and permit it to function during construction. His building hugs the sloping site and exploits views to the lake, and it maintains the tradition of a Main Street linking satellite functions. At a time when new corporate campuses were being criticized for their long chilly corridors, Stubbins set classrooms

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MAIN ENTRANCE AS ALTERED BY EVANS WOOLLEN, 1983, AND BY SHOPE RENO WHARTON, 1995, WITH SITTING WALL ADDED 2005

at an angle to the long halls, bringing movement to the interior and drama to facades of glass and hand-made brick. A much-needed theater, Walker Auditorium, was located in the two-level stem of the Y, accessible both from Main and from public entrances to the east and west. Students returning to Hotchkiss in the fall of 1967 found old Main gone and only the east wing of new Main ready to receive them.

By the time their school year was completed, however, their new school was as well. The setting soon gave rise to new folkways. The new traffic circle became the “senior grass”; the new entrance plaza, with low sidewalls extending around the circle, became a commemorative site and popular outdoor gathering spot. Less popular was the newly exposed facade: a modest main entry in the shadow of two fortress-like stair towers with “ski slope” roofs. Architect Evans Woollen addressed the problem in 1983 by shifting the towers’ light sources from rooftop peaks to white-framed windows that brought relief to the sheer brick walls. Woollen also added, on the south face of the west wing, small offices that have since been enlarged. The Stubbins/Woollen Main served for a decade, until the design pendulum swung again, bringing a return to the Georgian style on a grand scale.

In 1995, architects Shope Reno Wharton gave Main a monumental entrance portico, formal vestibule, and broad corridor. This renovation also produced the Tremaine Art Gallery, off the Frantz Family entrance; the Dance Studio and Black Box Theater, two levels down; the Audrey Meyer Mars English wing; a reconfigured administrative wing; and the Frantz Student Center (gift of W. Theodore Frantz ’76), a welcome “living room” just off the main corridor. A challenge for the architecturally curious is to figure out just where the Y structure and the new entry – two dissimilar elements – meet and merge.

One casualty of the new entrance and its colonnades was the

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THE CHAPEL INTERIOR

iconic Date Wall that embraced the circular driveway and memorialized donor classes. Gone but scarcely forgotten for a decade, it was recreated in 2005 as the Sitting Wall, with engraved stones from the original foundation for 33 classes. Members of the Class of 2005 and their parents provided the impetus and funds.

THE CHAPEL (1931) replaces a chapel incorporated in the original Main. It began with the offer of a sizable sum from publisher Paul Block, Esq., to honor his sons, Paul ’29 and William ’32. By the time it was completed, the steward and direction of campus growth had changed again. Cass Gilbert had planned a chapel at the opposite extreme from Main, near the present Scoville Gate, but his delay in delivering drawings cost him the commission. The trustees turned to Delano & Aldrich, a firm well known for its city/country mansions and college clients, among them the Yale Divinity School. Henry Waterbury was the partner in charge. In taking on the chapel project, he assumed a role at Hotchkiss that lasted a quarter century. He is the only architect serving the school to have earned a permanent tribute (see rear chapel wall).

Waterbury made the chapel a western spur of Main. His design recalls colonial Virginia and the English churches of James Gibbs and Christopher Wren. The interior is like a New England meetinghouse, with a three-bay nave that is unusually long, columns that are unusually slender, and a vaulted ceiling that is unusually high. The effect is exalting. The craftsmanship displayed in the chapel speaks of a time – the Great Depression – when any construction job could command the very best skills available. Later memorial gifts include a Bruce Rogers Bible and its custom-designed lectern.

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THE EDSEL FORD MEMORIAL LIBRARY (1952, 1981, 2009) was a gift from Mrs. Edsel Ford and her sons Henry ’36, Benson ’38, and William Clay ’43. Waterbury conceived this as another Main spur, a complement to the chapel he had designed, with roughly the same footprint, the same height, the same red brick and white trim. He lived to see the building completed in 1952. Only one of its three levels was actually library space: a room one flight above ground, 45 feet by 72 feet, with five large windows on the side walls, each lighting an alcove made by bookcases. A large south window brought light to 10 large tables in the central space. The level below the library had six classrooms. The level above held an art studio, the first space designed for the purpose since art classes began in 1928 in the headmaster’s basement.

FORD LIBRARY AS SEEN FROM THE MAIN CIRCLE DINING HALL INTERIOR, C. 1973

THE DINING HALL (1894, 1948, 1974), the next major change to old Main, followed a post-WWII capital campaign later acknowledged in the oak paneling as “the generosity of 1800 alumni, parents, and friends of The Hotchkiss School.” Succeeding the original dining hall, this one by Waterbury expanded the seating capacity slightly and the sense of space greatly, with an elevated central section and clerestory.

Round tables replaced the original refectory tables in 1981, after service by student waiters had ended and the hall and kitchen had been adapted for cafeteria service. The Lieutenant Colonel James Lindsay Luke Foyer, named for a Class of 1922 graduate, was originally the entry point from both the outdoors and the corridor to Main. The names of annual Alumni Award honorees dating from 1931 are incised on the panel walls and hence, in many students’ memories. The School Archives uses this history-filled space to exhibit its collection.

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FORD LIBRARY BEFORE ITS EXPANSION IN 1981

Seen from the south, today’s library appears unchanged from Waterbury’s day. In fact it is six times larger in capacity, with open shelves for 100,000 volumes and seating for 250. In a skillful renovation and addition completed in 1981, architect Evans Woollen created five levels within the original three (after classrooms and art studio were relocated) and expanded two of the levels to the north. The circulation desk now stands in the former passage to Luke Foyer. A lunette with double-hung sash on the west face is Woollen’s signature.

The intricacy of the plan and the adaptation of the art studio deserve note – as does the kinetic sculpture suspended on the third floor by Cornwall (CT) architect and artist Tim Prentice, whose father, T. Merrill Prentice, succeeded Waterbury as campus architect.

An EEU (Energy and Environmental Update) project opened up the Edsel Ford Memorial Library in summer 2009 and put it back

together with new windows and advanced climate control systems, lighting, wiring, and IT network service. The project was a gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Clay Ford ’43, P’75, P’79, GP’10.

THE A. WHITNEY GRISWOLD S CIENCE B UILDING (1963, 1999) belongs in the Main family as classroom space, freestanding though it is. The first building devoted to a single academic subject, it was part of an emphasis on secondary science education that followed Russia’s launch of Sputnik I in 1957. It was also the first modern building at Hotchkiss, the sole original contribution of architect T. Merrill Prentice, a committed classicist. While Prentice maintained traditional finishes outside and inside – red brick, white trim, natural wood framing – he used modern modular planning to provide research laboratories with an array of mechanical services like oxygen and vacuum lines. The building was given by Bob Flint ’23 and Frederick Godley ’38 and named for a Hotchkiss trustee and president of Yale University, who died just weeks before the May 1963 dedication.

As enrollment in science classes grew, so did the need for more classrooms and for laboratories specific to chemistry, physics, and GRISWOLD SCIENCE BUILDING IN 1965, BEFORE EXPANSION

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biological sciences. Bruce Arneill ’53 and his colleagues at SLAM, architects with considerable laboratory experience, were asked to plan an expansion that would not require a shutdown through construction.

Their solution, completed in 1999, was to envelop the old building in a new one and then fuse the two. The fossil wall in the lobby was conceived by the faculty as a way to engage visitors directly in the wonder that is basic to science and in what they called science’s “intimate combination of beauty and function.”

THE ESTHER EASTMAN MUSIC CENTER (2004) pushed the envelope of Main Building in more ways than one. In 2001, Centerbrook, the much-honored Connecticut architectural firm, was chosen to realize a program developed by the Hotchkiss community for a new performance space, practice rooms, green rooms, meeting space,

offices, and recording studio. The firm’s design – four levels that extend from Walker Auditorium like the scroll of a violin turned on its side – uses glass walls to create a conservatory in both senses of the word. In the Katherine M. Elfers Hall, a memorial gift by William Elfers ’37 and William R. Elfers ’67, performers and audiences delight in concerts that include views of the pastoral landscape. The Esther Eastman Music Center, which has sensuous interior spaces and finishes, is named for the grandmother of principal donor Barbara Walsh Hostetter ’77. In December 2007 it was the first Hotchkiss THE ESTHER EASTMAN MUSIC building to receive LEED (Leadership in CENTER; MONAHAN DETAIL Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the United States Green Building Council.

MONAHAN B UILDING (1938, 1954, 2007), the former gymnasium, has become Main’s farthest satellite, with a combination of academic and administrative functions. One of six buildings designed by campus architect Henry F. Waterbury (page 9), the gymnasium honored the school’s longtime athletic director, Otto F. Monahan, and served as an athletic facility from 1938 to 2002. In their book about Delano & Aldrich, Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker describe Monahan’s Georgian facade as “punctuated with a monumental recessed entrance niche and textured with brick dentils, spandrel panels, and limestone medallions depicting athletes,” adding, “the simplicity of the design was powerful and elegant.”

A trustees’ vote in 2002 to demolish Monahan stirred alumni

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passions and prompted a second look at roles for the building.

Seeing Monahan as the answer to office expansion needs, Trustee Forrest E. Mars, Jr. ’49 and Board President John L. Thornton ’72 intervened to give the structure new life. Butler Rogers Baskett Architects was named to coordinate a renovation. Today the Center for Global Understanding and Independent Thinking, with interiors by Peter Pennoyer Architects, occupies an upper floor, while the main level houses the school’s Office of Alumni and Development. These offices boast Tiffany windows made for the first chapel and newly restored after years in storage. The lowest level is a reception space for alumni and school social functions.

HAND-COLORED ROTOGRAPH OF BISSELL HALL, 1910

RESIDENCE HALLS AND FACULTY HOUSES BISSELL HALL (1894, 1933, 1973), after playing many roles, now faces the end of its useful life. Designed by Bruce Price soon after the school was founded, it opened an era of expansion by providing 50 new beds and faculty cottages in a satellite location linked to Main. Its name honors its donor and the school’s founder, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss. Its tawny yellow brick is that of the original Main, produced in Perth Amboy, NJ, and no doubt transported by Hudson River barge and by rail across Dutchess County (NY).

By the 1930s, after four new dormitories had pushed the campus southward, Bissell became the logical choice for much-needed staff housing. When cafeteria service was introduced in the dining hall, that need declined. Facing an expanded coeducational enrollment, the trustees decided to re-commission Bissell as a dormitory. In 1973 the still-proud structure was completely gutted and refitted by architect Evans Woollen with rooms for 59 students and three new faculty apartments. In recent years, senior, lower-mid, and prep girls have called it home.

MEMORIAL HALL (1923 Gilbert, 1963 Prentice). Thirty years passed before Bissell was joined by a new residence hall. World War I had taken its toll not only on campus expansion plans but also on alumni who left to fight the “last great war.” When fundraising resumed, it was for a dormitory that would memorialize those who did not return. A bronze tablet in the corridor lists their names. The 20th century’s first addition to the campus, Memorial Hall was a turning point, embodying the Cass Gilbert plan that placed dormitories on a formal green and gave them a new look. While Gilbert preferred the Gothic style for college commissions and for his skyscrapers, his Hotchkiss buildings were exemplars of Georgian style, recalling the earliest dormitories at Harvard and Yale.

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GEORGIAN, OR AMERICAN CLASSICAL, S TYLE …it is our idea that unity of style adds beauty and charm to a group of buildings…[The] style of the simple old brick buildings of the Early Colonial or Georgian period was adopted…in the belief that the maintenance of simple standards of living in an environment of good taste and beauty would be an important factor in training and development of the boys.

Cass Gilbert, quoted in the Boston Evening Transcript, January 16, 1924

Memorial Hall, housing 57 boys and four masters, set the pattern for dormitories to follow: a ground-floor reception room; upper floors (in this case, three) of mostly single rooms on double-loaded corridors; bachelor masters’ quarters in the center, with bathrooms across the hall. When married faculty succeeded single teachers, functions were shifted, and rooms at the south end were converted to family apartments. Memorial became a girls’ dormitory in 2007.

MEMORIAL HALL, 1933, AS SHOWN IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS “AMERICAN MEMORY" COLLECTION

This style evoked by Gilbert is the Neo-Classical branch of the Georgian Revival. While principally inspired by Georgian Colonial architecture, these buildings also look to the England of George I and his successors. The basic forms and volumes tend to be rectilinear, and such elements as paired chimneys, regular window patterns, side-gabled roofs and central entrance reinforce the Georgian’s characteristic symmetry. Attenuated proportions and decorative classical details, derived from ancient Rome and Greece, concentrated at the cornice, rooftop balustrades and entrance portico, add a note of refinement. Facades of typically native red brick or wood are further enhanced by pilasters and quoins and string or belt courses that reflect a shift in floor level.

A most important characteristic is human scale, a quality of architecture that dignifies its inhabitants.

Peter Pennoyer Peter Pennoyer Architects

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TINKER HALL, 2002, STILL CLOSELY RESEMBLES ITS TWIN

TINKER HALL (1928, 1963, 1980), originally designed by Gilbert as Alumni Hall, was later renamed when Marie S. Tinker wished to memorialize her late husband, Edward R. Tinker. In making a substantial gift to Hotchkiss, which the Tinkers knew only as visitors, she was advised by former trustee William McKnight Jr. ’30, who is honored by a plaque above the door in the common room. Alumni Hall was built to mirror Memorial Hall on the east and affirm the formal symmetry of the campus. It had 56 single rooms, 10 doubles, and, for many

years, 10 basement rooms for “exceptionally trustworthy” boys. The south wing for faculty families, designed a full 35 years later by architect T. Merrill Prentice, demonstrates his respect for the Georgian idiom of the original. Except for their gambrel roofs of slate and copper – providing more capacious attics and better exterior sight lines – Memorial and Tinker are true to Gilbert's original design. Winter wisdom eventually led to the closing of drafty center entrances next to common rooms, but the porticoes remain as important decorative elements.

WIELER HALL (1928, 1989, 1993), sited to define a quadrangle with Memorial, opened in 1928 as the school infirmary. From the school’s founding, epidemics were a feature of community life, and the original infirmary, Huntress, was limited. The new infirmary was the second major building designed by Cass Gilbert. Dr. Harry Wieler, the first resident physician (who remained 30 years), helped Gilbert to design the interiors.

The resulting three-story-plus-attic building offered isolation rooms for students with contagious diseases and sunrooms at both ends for recovering patients. With the advent of “miracle drugs” such as penicillin and the Salk vaccine, the nature of health threats and health care changed completely. By 1974, Wieler – named in honor of Dr. Wieler in 1955 – took on a new role. While the basement continued to serve as a clinic, the ground floor was converted to faculty apartments, and the upper two floors to 28 rooms for the first entering class of

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ENTRANCE TO THE HEALTH CENTER IN WIELER HALL

WEST END OF WIELER HALL AS IT ONCE APPEARED

Hotchkiss girls. Fifteen years later, Architectural Resources Cambridge (ARC) expanded student quarters by removing faculty apartments to a new white clapboard annex to the east. Devoid of decoration, the annex is rich in its window patterns and in the interplay of volumes and roof planes. Today’s health center occupies a double pavilion added to Wieler in 1993. It was designed by Day & Ertman, architects also of Harris House renovations. It is notable for a commons useable for health education and for its well-appointed examining rooms. A cherished cartoon series by Robert Osborn, the school’s first art master and later a prominent cartoonist, hangs in the stairwell.

EDWARD COY HALL (1931, 1973), named for the first headmaster of The Hotchkiss School, was Henry Waterbury's next project after completing the chapel. With this dormitory he established the shape of

the campus and affirmed the “Hotchkiss Georgian” style. Coy opened with three stories of rooms for 73 boys and a wing with faculty apartments. It was last renovated in the ’70s. The school’s business office is in the basement.

HUBER G. B UEHLER HALL (1936, 1960s, 1973), honoring the school’s second headmaster, now houses 75 girls. It was designed by Henry Waterbury to mirror Coy Hall across the main entry road, with an L-shaped plan that extends faculty apartment wings forward. Both halls now have as many double rooms as singles, some earlier singles having been converted to provide shared rooms for day students. The plainness of their exteriors – pediments instead of porticos at the portals; no recessed ground-level window bays – belies interiors that are rich with dark paneling and built-in wardrobes in student rooms.

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Alterations by Evans Woollen in the 1970s to improve fire safety, upgrade bathrooms and services, and replace windows have done nothing to diminish the dignity of these elegant guardians of the main approach.

COY HALL NOT LONG AFTER CONSTRUCTION

BUEHLER HALL

VAN S ANTVOORD HALL (1956) honors George “The Duke” Van Santvoord, legendary headmaster of Hotchkiss from 1926 to 1955, who returned for the dedication. This dormitory west of Tinker was sited as a counterpoint to Wieler to the east. Plans were first drawn by S. Norton Miner ’30, but it fell to T. Merrill Prentice to realize the building. Two-story Van Santvoord is more Spartan in its Georgian style than its predecessors but more generous in its spaces. Faculty apartments are in wings that create a forecourt for the main entrance and provide homelike front entries. Progressing through the court and main portal, one can look through the bay window of an ample commons to a distant horizon. The dormitory has single rooms for 32 students.

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VAN SANTVOORD FORECOURT

DANA HALL IN 1964, BEFORE ALTERATIONS

DANA HALL (1964 Rudolph, 1983) is named for donors William D. Dana ’17 and Arthur D. Dana, Jr. ’21. Dedication day for Dana and Griswold was a path-breaker for Hotchkiss. Dana, with 60 rooms for boys, replaced the last remaining student housing in the old Main Building. The architect, Paul Rudolph, was well known as chair of the School of Architecture at Yale and as a brutalist, eschewing finish coats and trims to reveal brick and concrete structures (and often mechanical systems) in their “natural” state. Rudolph chose a sloping site that would give the campus a new face to the north without blocking views from the south. For a three-level building with single rooms and penthouse commons, he used familiar red brick in unfamiliar ways, creating an exterior with articulated columns and interiors with undulating corridor walls. Instead of exposed ducts he chose “invisi-

ble” electric radiant heat. Today, with double-hung windows having replaced rusted casements and the view obscured by a covered rooftop emergency exit, it takes some effort to appreciate the building’s many challenges to convention and its imaginative use of concrete and brick.

WATSON HALL (1979), the first dormitory to be designed specifically for girls, is striking in its modest scale, Shaker-like simplicity, and not-quite-formal symmetry. Echoing its neighbor Bissell in composition, Watson has two-story red brick “houses” joined by a common room, that step down to white clapboard faculty cottages. With 28 single rooms, it is the most homelike of any campus residence. It was given by Trustee Emerita Nancy Watson Symington and her sons, Stuart and David Watson,’76 and ’78, in honor of her husband and their father, Arthur Kittredge Watson ’38, board president from 1967

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FLINN HALL, EDELMAN HALL (2007). On the site of disused tennis courts along Route 41, the trustees envisioned new residence halls that would sustain the “Hotchkiss Georgian style” begun by Cass Gilbert and Delano & Aldrich. Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the architecture school at Yale and a leading advocate of “contextualism,” was a natural choice to design them. According to the architect, “Our threeGARLAND HALL, NORTH ELEVATION

WATSON HALL

to 1970. Watson and the now-superceded Goss Gymnasium are the two all-new buildings at Hotchkiss by Evans Woollen, whose 15 years as campus architect were otherwise devoted to a series of sensitive alterations. He not only transformed Bissell, Ford Library, and Stubbins’ Main, as noted, but also did much to update Buehler, Tinker, and Wieler halls and more than a half-dozen faculty houses, including the former Belcher mansion, garage, and tack house.

GARLAND HALL (1992) completes the group of dormitories west of the burial ground. Howard C. “Smoky” Bissell ’55, board president from 1993 to 1996, led the fund drive for this memorial to his late classmate, William Garland ’55. Henry S. “Dusty” Reeder ’57, of ARC Architects, designed a four-level building that exploits the hilly site and mixes Georgian elements – string courses, relief patterns in brick, paired end chimneys – with contemporary features such as square plate-glass windows. Forty-five upper-class girls live here on wide corridors in ample single rooms with built-in wardrobes, bureaus, and desks. There are four spacious duplex apartments for faculty.

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LEFT, FLINN HALL, FACING THE QUAD; RIGHT, EDELMAN HALL, AS VIEWED FROM ROUTE 41; PHOTOS © PETER AARON/ESTO

story buildings keep to the prevailing scale of the campus by creating a central building framed with gambrel-roofed side wings…The materials reflect those of Hotchkiss’ best existing buildings: fine brick details complement double-hung shuttered windows and inviting classical entry porticos.” The halls are named for donors Lawrence Flinn, Jr. ’53 and Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07. Both buildings have 32 beds, four faculty apartments, and ground-floor lounges and terraces.

Recipients of the school’s first LEED gold rating by the U.S. Green Building Council, both feature radiant heat, individual room temperature controls, and an outdoor electric vehicle recharging station. In 2010 they won the top prize for design and construction in the ninth annual Palladio Awards program of Traditional Building magazine.

FACULTY HOUSES From its start, The Hotchkiss School has made student-and-faculty community life a prime value, creating and acquiring housing for teachers in support of that value. Currently Hotchkiss provides 56 apartments (41 of them in dormitories) and 27 single-family houses for faculty. The houses are no less important to Hotchkiss, the place, than their occupants are to Hotchkiss, the community. Without neighbors of domestic scale, institutional buildings like dormitories cannot cohere into a community; they remain institutions. The houses included here are a few of the oldest, listed in order of their acquisition. All houses built by Hotchkiss in recent years – the headmaster’s house, those on Centennial Field and on Lake Road – pay homage, in one way or another, to these forebears.

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MEEKER COTTAGE

LARSEN HOUSE

MEEKER COTTAGE, at the south end of Bissell Hall, is one of two incorporated by Loring & Phipps in the design of the dormitory. Unlike old Main and Estill Cottage, these houses have foursquare forms with hipped roofs in step with the rhythms of Bissell Hall. Nearby LARSEN HOUSE was built in 1904 and renovated in 1995 with a gift by Chris Larsen ’55 and Jonathan Larsen ’57. The style and the chimney of Perth Amboy brick tie this house to Bissell Hall.

CLEAVELAND COTTAGE, at the northwest corner of Routes 112 and 41, survives from the 18th century, although alterations have left little of the original structure. Bought by the school in 1898, it became the “Pest House” after students caught in a 1905 scarlet fever epidemic were isolated there. Fire damage in 1991 revealed its original post-and-beam construction.

THE KIPHUTH-S TEWART HOUSE, which began life in 1898, first as Comstock Cottage and then Estill Cottage, originally formed an eastern counterpart to the headmaster’s (now Harris) house on the west. When the site was needed in 1947 for an expanded dining hall, the house was moved downhill and became East Cottage.

Eventually that plot was selected for the A.Whitney Griswold Science Building. In 1962, the house was moved to its present location and renovated. It was later renamed by the Class of 1955 for Delaney Kiphuth, former director of athletics, and classmate Michael Stewart ’53.

HOUSE # 2 2 (north of Larsen House). With its off-center front gable, bay windows, and ample porches, this Victorian has more in common with Queen Anne and shingle-style peers than with its Georgian neighbors on campus. It is a welcome variant.

HOUSE # 3 9 (not shown) and HOUSE # 4 0 . Built in 1917 to — 27 —

CLEAVELAND COTTAGE

KIPHUTH-STEWART HOUSE

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HOUSE #40

LANDON HOUSE

anticipate a quadrangle with Memorial and Wieler Halls, these are gems of Georgian design, with their paired double-end chimneys, dormer windows, small-pane windows, facade relief work, and entrance porticos with lanterns. Architect Cass Gilbert wrote, “I want these small residential buildings to seem to be low and domestic…partly to accent the greater importance of the larger buildings.”

HOUSE # 3 2 (not shown) at the northeast corner of Routes 112 and 41, built for Otto Monahan, is almost identical to these.

LANDON HOUSE, on Lime Rock Road, bears the name of its late-18th-century owner, whose offspring intermarried with Bissells and now rest in the Town Hill Cemetery. Acquired by the school in 1941, it is an outstanding example of colonial Connecticut architecture, with its post-and-beam structure, intimate scale, distinctive window spacing, and elegant colonnade. The dining room had no electricity until the 1970s; faculty tenants before then preferred to dine by candlelight. Landon House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

THE B ELCHER ESTATE, also on Lime Rock Road, was a generous gift to Hotchkiss by Benjamin Moore Belcher and his wife, Nancy, who had made the tack house into their home. In 1987 the colonial-style main house was converted to two faculty apartments; later, the garages became two more dwellings.

THE CLASS OF 1 9 4 9 HOUSE was one of the four original “cottages” of the Interlaken Inn. The name honors the class that funded the 1983 purchase and conversion of this ample late Victorian home on Interlaken Road. An old summerhouse on the property became the site of THE CYNTHIA WHITE CHILDREN'S CENTER, opened in 1990. The Center is named for the wife of former Headmaster Arthur White; she had campaigned for a facility to serve the preschool-age youngsters of Hotchkiss faculty and staff.

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HOUSE #22

THE CLASS OF 1949 HOUSE

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ATHLETICS AT HOTCHKISS “The Hotchkiss School boy believes it is his duty,” declared the very first student yearbook, “to be first a gentleman, then a scholar, and then an athlete, if possible…To secure the fullest benefits from exercise and yet to avoid the dangers and evils of overindulgence in matters purely physical, is the policy of The Hotchkiss School toward athletics.” On opening day in 1892 the athletic possibilities at Hotchkiss were limited to scrimmages on the lawn and exercise in a gymnasium half the size of a modern basketball court. Soon these were augmented by a straight cinder track in front of the school and the beginnings of a golf course in the rear.

The scrimmages quickly became contests between two school teams, the Olympians and the Pythians, building to an indoor track meet that was the focus of Mid-Winter Weekend. Interscholastic competition, an idea that had begun with an Andover-Exeter football match in 1878, soon entered the scene; by 1895 there were matches with other schools in football, baseball, and track. In 1896, the new physical education director, Otto Monahan, took up the cause of participation in sports – read, competitive sports – as integral to student life. During his 42 years of service under four headmasters, Monahan coached interscholastic varsity teams in football, baseball, and track. Through friendship with his counterpart there, he also turned the Hill School, in Pottstown, PA, into an archrival. The football, baseball, and track contests with Hill were enormously popular, rallying virtually the entire student body. The rivalry continued up to the United States’ entry into World War II, when travel was sharply curtailed. A boom in sports followed that war, after conscription had revealed the sorry physical condition of America’s young men. “Fitness” entered the national vocabulary as a goal for athletes and non-athletes alike. The new

BASEBALL AT BAKER FIELD, 1933

medium of television awakened the nation to the excitement of both participation and spectatorship. All residential schools felt the effects of this boom, as they felt the impact in 1972 of Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that leveled the playing field, as it were, for male and female students. The first girls who entered Hotchkiss in 1974 expected – and found – that they would have the same physical education opportunities as those given to their male classmates. The

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BAKER, 2009: INCORPORATING SPROLE FIELD AND HEMINGWAY TRACK, AND FULTON FIELD HOUSE

Hotchkiss School was fortunate in having the resources to respond to a rapidly changing athletic scene. Open land, the most important resource, was available, and playing fields could be developed without sacrificing buildings or trees. Loyal alumni helped to fund necessary construction. A brief chronology of today’s sports facilities follows.

BAKER FIELD (1905), at the southwestern edge of the campus, honors George F. Baker, 1896. It was the school’s first athletic field, where both football and baseball were played on turf encircled by a quarter-mile cinder track. John Pillsbury Snyder, Class of 1909, and members of the Class of 1908 gave money for a field house, designed

by Rossiter & Wright in 1908. In 1967 this was replaced with the

WILLIAM S HIRLEY FULTON FIELD HOUSE, designed by Lewis, Prentice & Chan, architects, with a trim exterior of vertical wood siding and an interior lighted from clerestory windows.

Other gifts have kept Baker up to date. One was the flagpole given in 1967 by Gene Tunney, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, in honor of James T. Bryan, Class of 1911; another was the S COREBOARD, given by Dr. and Mrs. Patrick Ruwe P’07, ’09, ’13. An ALL- WEATHER TRACK SURFACE was given in 1984 by Stuart Watson ’76 and named for his grandfather, Stuart C. Hemingway, Class of 1901; the PERMANENT VIEWING STANDS , also built in 1984, memorialize Delaney Kiphuth, the Hotchkiss athletics director who coached undefeated football teams in 1950 and 1951. The LIGHTS honor the 34-year coaching career of George R. “Rick” Del Prete. In 2009, a SYNTHETIC TURF FIELD was given by the family of Frank A. Sprole ’38, while a gift by Stuart and David Watson, ’76 and ’78, and their mother, Nancy Watson Symington, financed restoration of the surrounding HEMINGWAY TRACK. TAYLOR FIELD took shape in 1913, when the school purchased land for three new baseball diamonds at the crossing of routes 112 and 41. It was Frederic Taylor, Class of 1913, who suggested this use for a gift from his mother, Emma Flower Taylor. That same year, B RYAN POOL – six ft. by 24 ft. with a depth to eight ft. – was annexed to the old gym. It served Hotchkiss sons more than 40 years before being replaced by HIXON POOL (page 34).

THE HOTCHKISS GOLF COURSE (1911, 1925, 2002) honors Scott L. Probasco, Class of 1911, whose return to a 1923 reunion prompted him to help finance a redesign of the early school links. He enlisted Seth Raynor, the rising star of American golf course design, then working at Yale. Raynor created nine holes with roller-coaster fairways,

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HOTCHKISS GOLF COURSE

wildly contoured greens – 3,043 yards with a par of 35 – and “famous holes” like the ninth, modeled on the Road Hole at St. Andrews. He also captured the interest of English teacher Charles Banks ’02, who left the faculty to become Raynor’s partner and successor in golfcourse design. In 2002, consultant George Bahto was retained to restore features of the Raynor design that over the BOAT HOUSE years had been altered by road and building construction; plans for additional historic restoration are being considered.

THE HOTCHKISS B OAT HOUSE (1915, 1959, 1998) on Lake Wononscopomuc was given by Dr. and Mrs. C. R. Holmes, parents of Carl, Christian, and Julius Holmes, classes of 1912, ’17, and ’21, at a time when canoeing was a popular diversion.

Designers Rossiter and Wright equipped it with roller delivery and electricity. A 1959 renovation was made possible by a gift from the Class of 1939 in memory of classmates killed in World War II. In 1998, with a gift from Sharon and James Benenson Jr., parents of James Benenson III ’97, the school shored up the foundations with steel beams, replaced the worn siding with a new weatherproof skin, and remodeled the interior to suit the needs of both the sailing team and the caterers who serve boathouse meetings and parties.

MONAHAN B UILDING (1937, 1949, 1954, 2007) deserves mention here as the former MONAHAN GYMNASIUM, built to establish the center for campus athletics (and the Hotchkiss Georgian style) east of Route 41. Still bearing

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the name of the first athletic director, this building went through several renovations – a major addition in 1954 with a new swimming pool, basketball court, and reception area; an updated basketball court in 1996 – before it was gutted and brought back to life as the school’s Office of Alumni and Development and Center for Global Understanding and Independent Thinking (see page 18).

MONAHAN GYMNASIUM HOYT F IELD (1940), a baseball diamond given in memory of James Humphrey Hoyt ’35, pushed Hotchkiss’s eastern frontier still farther. Baker, Hoyt, Taylor, and Monahan were the principal athletics sites; when World War II interrupted interscholastic competition, their names were given to school teams that were formed to compete intramurally. The postwar development campaign that produced a new dining hall and new library also expanded athletic resources. “LITTLE B AKER” FIELD (1950, 2001) was built south of Baker to spare that field’s turf the ravages of football practice and to serve as hammer and javelin sites. In this century, the field has been raised, widened, and irrigated.

B IERWIRTH RINK (1957), an outdoor ice rink built east of Monahan and honoring Board President Jack Bierwirth, Class of 1913, was a major advance over three ponds in the woods then in use. It

served almost four decades before being retired in 1998. Two PADDLE TENNIS COURTS (1963) given by Joseph F. Cullman III ’31 were enjoyed for many years; two additional courts given later by Mr. Cullman and located on the far side of the Mars Athletic Center, are still in use by students, faculty, and staff for much of the school year.

THOMAS S CHMIDT HOCKEY RINK (1970) was another advancement for ice sports. It was given by Benno Schmidt Sr. in memory of his late son, a member of the Class of ’66. The structure, designed by Hugh Stubbins, an architect of Main Building, was later incorporated into the Mars Athletic Center and given a new facade.

WILLIAM AND MARTHA FORD INDOOR TENNIS COURTS (1974) opened north of Schmidt Rink. According to the Winter 1975 Alumni Magazine, “The [courts] began getting their first unseasonal use...as students could be seen trotting across the snowy second green, barelegged under their heavy winter coats and carrying tennis shoes and racquets.” The climate-controlled shed was designed by New Haven architect Herbert Newman to accommodate three courts and a spectator area.

GOS S GYMNAS IUM (19752002), named in honor of trustee George A. Goss, Jr. ’38, was an addition to Monahan that provided space not only for soccer, track, baseball, and volleyball but also for commencements, convocations, and other large gatherings. Planned for a limited lifespan, it served the school for over a quarter century before being supplanted by the Mars

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Athletic Center.

THE CLASS OF ’4 9 FIELDS (1975), just north of Hoyt Field, were dedicated during the 25th reunion of the Class of 1949. The class chose to mark its anniversary and the advent of coeducation by funding four new playing fields for girls. A bronze plaque set in a rock on the site marks the occasion. A gift in 2008 by John ’74 and Francie Downing P’03,’06,’09 transformed two of the grass fields into the DOWNING FIELD, with synthetic turf to make field hockey and girls’ lacrosse safer and competition-worthy.

J OSEPH F. C ULLMAN III S QUASH C OURTS (1984-2002).

Disturbed by the fact that squash was not being offered at his school, DOWNING FIELD; FORREST E. MARS, JR. ATHLETIC CENTER AT COMPLETION

Mr. Cullman ’31 gave the original courts that were added to Monahan, putting Hotchkiss irrevocably in the game. Later these were replaced by eight international courts with spectator space in the Mars Athletic Center.

CENTENNIAL FIELD (1992), a former apple orchard, was part of the estate given to The Hotchkiss School by the Belcher family. Boys’ varsity soccer and lacrosse games are played on this eastern expansion of Taylor Field.

THE MALKIN CLIMBING WALLS (1994), outside Dana Hall, were a gift from Jonathan Malkin ’80, to promote interest in his favorite athletic pursuit.

FORREST E. MARS , JR. ATHLETIC CENTER (2002). As the 20th century closed, Hotchkiss trustees took stock of a legacy of scattered, aging, and inadequate athletic facilities and resolved to rationalize and enhance it. They chose architects Ellerbe Becket, designers of many

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LEFT, MALKIN CLIMBING WALLS RIGHT, FAIRFIELD FARMS

national league, college, and university sports facilities in the U.S. and abroad, who conceived a 222,000square-foot facility that is a feat of space planning and structural, mechanical, and site engineering, not to mention logistics and operations phasing. Known as the MAC, it has four levels, the equal of three-and-a-third football fields. It embraces the WILLIAM C. FOWLE GYMNASIUM and the THOMAS S CHMIDT RINK and adds to them the ANDREW K. DWYER ’0 1 AND MARTIN DWYER III ’6 5 RINK; a new field house surrounded by a raised jogging track; the HIXON FAMILY 1 0 -LANE S WIMMING POOL; the CULLMAN S QUASH COURTS ; the EDWARD R. DAVIS WRESTLING ROOM; the RUSTY CHANDLER JR.

FITNESS CENTER; training and equipment rooms; new locker and team rooms, and offices. The architects even managed to give a Georgian flavor to the exterior of a building that is thoroughly modern in both scale and function.

FAIRFIELD FARMS (see The Landscape, ff) warrants inclusion here as the site of a co-curricular option introduced in 2009. Called FFEAT, for Fairfield Farms Ecosystems and Adventure Team, it offers students an extraordinary opportunity for hands-on farm work and nature exploration.

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THE LANDSCAPE Our survey of Hotchkiss, the Place, returns, finally, to the school setting, the “wonderful hill” described by John Hersey. Profound change has come to this landscape, not only in what we see but also in how we view it.

At the time Maria Hotchkiss made her gift of 65 acres, the hill was covered with gullied fields crisscrossed with stone walls, some of them defining a colonial-era cemetery.

The school’s trustees recognized that a new school at this site would require landscaping as well as architecture. Their first choice for the task was Elizabeth Bullard, the first woman member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Her tenure was short (“not quite big enough timber,” one trustee wrote). She was promptly replaced by Ernest Bowditch (page 7), who had engineering credentials as well.

Bowditch served for 12 years, but his influence lasted well beyond his death in 1918. He began by creating a nursery for “seven thousand trees and shrubs and a thousand white pine seedlings” and by building a greenhouse that included a home for groundskeeper John Cardozo. In the decades that followed, architects came and went, while Cardozo carried out his master’s plan and cared for the plant-

ings. The oldest trees on campus, including more than a dozen rare American elms, are his legacy.

1923 brought the first major expansion of the setting. The school acquired the original 130 acres of what’s now known as Beeslick Brook Woods, extending its holdings from Route 112 and the Sharon Road to what is currently the Town Transfer Station. The wooded tract was seen largely as a recreational resource; at one time it had two ski jumps and more than a dozen cabins for student retreats.

MAIN BUILDING DETAIL FROM THE TOWERS GOLDE LANDSCAPE PLAN, THE HOTCHKISS MASTER PLAN, 2001

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Through the second half of the 20th century, as Hotchkiss added both buildings and acreage, landscape design on the campus was largely project-specific. Until the landscape architects Towers/Golde entered the scene as consultants on the 2001 Master Plan, there was no presiding landscape designer, only a growing staff of groundskeepers.

At the same time there was a growing awareness of the land as an educational resource, a legacy, and an exhaustible treasure.

The 2001 Master Plan not only recommended improvements in the formal landscape (views, stately qualities, traffic corridors, social space, parking space), it also signaled new approaches to the school’s physical setting. A Landscape Committee of students, faculty, staff,

and trustees, became, significantly, the Committee on Conservation and Environment (popularly CC&E), with three offshoots: an Arboretum Committee, inspired by Tom Brokaw ’64 and aided by Henry Flint ’65 and Lyn Mattoon, a former faculty member and wife of former Head of School Skip Mattoon; a Beeslick Brook Woods Stewardship Committee, charged with implementing a 2005 study made by a unit of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; and the Fairfield Farms Committee. This last group provides oversight of the former Blum Farm, a 260-acre cattle-breeding expanse acquired

by Hotchkiss in 2004; in 2010, the main house, outbuildings, and an additional 17 acres were acquired. The open fields and woodland of

36-37 BEESLICK BROOK WOODS AND WATERFALLS THE AMERICAN ELM TOWN HILL CEMETERY GOODBODY TERRACE 38-39 HEADMASTERʼS GARDEN C. 1920 AND IN 2010 ROHRBACH GARDEN HOGLUND GARDEN VIETNAM MEMORIAL

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this property provide vegetables and fruit for the Hotchkiss dining hall as well as co-curricular options for students in farming and trailwork.

(See page 36).

The 1996 mission statement of the Hotchkiss School cited “commitment to environmental stewardship” as a desired outcome for its students. An earnest of that mission was the appointment, in late 2009, of a professional environmentalist as Assistant Head of School and Director of Environmental Initiatives. As the 21st century advances, Hotchkiss students are learning to see their campus not only as a place of architectural distinction, but also as part of an ecosphere that they must serve and protect while it is serving them.

FEATURES OF THE HOTCHKISS CAMPUS S COVILLE GATE (1937, 2002) honors Robert Scoville, a trustee from 1905 to 1935, whose portrait hangs in Main Building. With these arches welcoming foot and motor traffic, architect Henry Waterbury defined the campus edge on newly realigned Route 112 and gave the north-south access road dominance over the early east-west road skirting Main Building. The brickwork volutes recall the south chapel wall; the acorns symbolize growth. The present gate, built in 2002 with bricks custom-molded to 1930s dimensions, is an exact replica of the timeworn original. See photo on inside front cover.

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THE AMERICAN ELM outside Ford Library is a rare survivor of a fungus that invaded the Northeast in the 1940s and vastly reduced the nation’s stock of this favorite shade tree. Heritage elms (30-inch diameter or larger) on the Hotchkiss campus are outnumbered only by those at Yale and its environs; in addition, new disease-resistant elms have been planted in front of Main.

TOWN HILL C EMETERY preceded everything around it. The headstones date from colonial times to the 21st century. Maria Bissell Hotchkiss is buried here, along with many people from Revolutionary times.

ROHRBACH GARDEN, outside Main’s art studios, was given by Mrs. A.W. Olsen Jr., and her brother, John Rohrbach ’42, in memory of their parents.

GOODBODY TERRACE, with its curved-stone seating wall, echoes the footprint of Katherine M. Elfers Hall and serves as its outdoor foyer. The terrace is a memorial to Garrett Goodbody ’63; the landscaping was donated by his widow, Ann. HEADMASTER’ S GARDEN, behind Harris House, was originally a formal picture-postcard retreat. Today the informal garden defines an outdoor gathering space.

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HOGLUND GARDEN is a memorial to Susan Hoglund ’80, given by her parents Bill and Beverly Hoglund. The bronze figure by sculptor J. Holland is titled Here Comes the Sun. THE B ULLS , bronzes by Peter Woytuk, arrived in 1995 as an exhibition of the artist’s work and were acquired by the school two years later. See photo on inside front cover.

B EESLICK B ROOK WOODS , also known as the Hotchkiss Woods, is a 200-acre forest that borders the campus to the south and is used for recreation, inspiration, and occasional outdoor classes, particularly English, art, and environmental studies. It is traversed by several sce-

nic trails, including Beaver Pond Trail, maintained by students in Outdoor Leadership and related co-curricular groups. As a living laboratory, it’s also a key resource for the Hotchkiss Summer Portals program, which emphasizes environmental studies.

THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL started in about 1970 as a cairn improvised by students from construction-site boulders near Ford Tennis Courts. A student-faculty project to formalize the tribute resulted in a bronze plaque, later replaced by a granite rock incised with the names of six “students who gave their lives in the Vietnam War.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INTERNET SITES

The principal sources for this project in 2002-03 were current and former Hotchkiss faculty, staff, and consultants, many with long memories: Rusty Chandler, George DelPrete, Walter DeMelle, Brad Faus, Robert Hawkins, Roberta Jenckes, Robert Mattoon Jr., Robert Royce, John Tuke, Robert Valentine, and Evans Woollen. Rosina Rand was an important guide, and Nighat Saleemi, Laura Smith, and Norma Redmond mined an archive-in-progress. Help in various forms came from Jennifer Almquist, Candice Barker, Jessica Craig, Carolyn Grimaldi, Jennifer Tolpa, Martha Virden, and Rob Witherwax at Hotchkiss; Lou Burgess, Katherine Chilcoat, Laura Riva, and Peter Landon Woodcock at the Salisbury Association; and Frank Garretson P’02, Tim Prentice, Robert Meservey, and Bob Vuyosevich at farther reaches. Betty Gatewood, Heidi Hellmich, Anna Walker, Edward Walker, and designer Karen Pellaton were my home team.

Lloyd Zuckerberg’s proposal of a revised edition was an irresistible challenge that I could not have met without the strong support of Roberta Jenckes, the design talents of Julie Vecchitto, and the unparalleled diligence of Senior Archives Assistant Joan Baldwin. John Tuke and Rusty Chandler were among earlier informants who answered my calls. Robert Barker, Robin Chandler, Josh Hahn, Deborah Pastore, Peter Pennoyer, Jean Rose, Robert Royce, Divya Symmers, Nancy Vaughan, Anna Walker, and Tom Zetterstrom all enriched the new text. My thanks go to everyone who gave me an excuse to return to Hotchkiss.

Print and Internet sources for the revised Hotchkiss, the Place are the same as those for the 2003 edition, which can be consulted in the Edsel Ford Memorial Library at Hotchkiss. The sources for all information new to this edition are The Hotchkiss School Archives and persons named above.

PICTURE CREDITS This booklet was designed by Karen E. Pellaton and updated by Julie Vecchitto.

Pictured on pages 1, 2, and 4 are cupolas of the Chapel, Ford Library, and Monahan Gymnasium.

Image sources: Cover: The Hotchkiss School (hereafter THS).

7ab, 8, 11ab, 13ab, 14, 16a, 17ab, 19, 22a, 28cd, 31b, 38a THS Archives. 9 Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-4500 DLC. 10, 35b BRB and Towers/Golde. 20 Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-4496 DLC. 23b Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-4499 DLC. 26ab Peter Aaron/Esto. 29 Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-4502 DLC. Other photos for THS: Anne Day, Walter DeMelle, Marc Dittmer, Jonathan Doster, Colleen MacMillan, Emily Spalding ’05, Brian Wilcox, Fabio Witkowski. Back cover: Salisbury Association. All other photos by the author or from her postcard collection.

Barbara M. Walker Ossining, New York Winter 2011

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COPYRIGHT © 2011 THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL LAKEVILLE, CONNECTICUT

SCOVILLE GATE

THE BULLS FRONT COVER: AERIAL VIEW OF THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL CAMPUS, 2000, LOOKING NORTH BACK COVER: "THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL," PRINT BY LITTIG & COMPANY, NEW YORK, UNDATED

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HOTCHKISS, THE PLACE