Word: tower
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Memorial Hall was dedicated in 1878 as a remembrance of Civil War veterans, it included a tower composed of much more than the current cube with gargoyles. This projection stretched 195 feet into the air, making up one-third of the height of the entire structure. The building, designed by Henry Van Brunt and William Robert Ware, dominated the Harvard skyline long before the Science Center, William James Hall and Holyoke Center bullied their way onto the scene...
Looking out the window of my fifth-floor Currier House room on a clear day, I can see the landmarks of the Cambridge and Boston skylines: the mighty Prudential Center, the slender Memorial Church spire, and the sleek Hancock Tower. In the middle of these spirited architectural statements, however, sits a stubby and overlooked square tower--the top of Memorial Hall as it now exists. Every time I notice that forgotten tower from far or near, its incompleteness pains...
...added a clock in 1897, according to Bainbridge Bunting's Harvard: An Architectural History, "Even the townspeople were beholden [to the building], for anyone who lived within a quarter mile could see the face of one of the clocks and hear the tolling of the quarter hour." The tower completed an edifice so monumental in its Gothic exuberance that it could only be crowned by overstatement...
Until, of course, the tower burned in 1956, leaving what we have now. It was being restored, and rumor has it that a worker with a blowtorch accidentally sparked the conflagration...
...more than 40 years, Harvard students, professors, administrators and staff have been forced to look upon a sorry shadow of what could be, leaving the tower only in their imaginations--and in their line drawings of the hall with tower, as Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles is apt to pencil off in a free moment...