A Stimulus to Town Development

CHAIRMAN, HANOVER TOWN PLANNING BOARD

IN the past two years, as exciting plans for the Hopkins Center were unfolding, the Hanover Town Planning Board has been making long-range plans to keep the Town and the College in step as we approach the 1969 bicentennial. This community of interests has been interwoven in our whole history.

Already it becomes apparent that the appearance of Hanover's downtown will be profoundly changed by the big building - or group of buildings - which will serve as the focus of Dartmouth's social and cultural life.

Alumni will remember the appearance of that central block in recent years: on the corner, the gaunt mass of Bissell Hall; along College and Lebanon streets, a line of rather dilapidated frame houses; in the middle a somewhat dowdy area used for parking since 1936; and toward the west, the disreputable backs of the Main Street stores.

With the building of the Center, a handsome group of buildings, surrounded by green lawns, with various terraces, walks, and retaining walls, will cover most of this area. College Street will be given up, in that block, and east of it will be a landscaped area extending from Wilson Museum to brick Brewster House. Ma Smalley's has long since gone, and the frame house next to it and the little Greek temple which has been known to successive generations as the Dragon, the Bema, the Naturalist's House, and the Audio-Visual Center will soon go. On the corner of Lebanon Street, famous or infamous old South Hall - erstwhile Kibling's Opera House - will go as soon as overloaded freshman classes will permit, to be replaced by a landscaped parking area.

Lebanon Street, already widened and smoothly paved, will probably become Hanover's newest shopping-street, with stores, office buildings and parking areas lining the south side of the street opposite the impressive entrance to the new audi- torium. This, of course, will take time, but negotiations are now under way for the purchase and redevelopment of TrumbullNelson's large shop and lumberyard and another nearby property. An increased spaciousness will mark new building developments more than a hundred feet from built-up Main Street because of a recently adopted amendment to the zoning ordinance. This requires, in effect, that all new buildings or enlargements must provide off-street parking facilities commensurate with their use.

Farther down Lebanon Street, beyond Rogers Garage, two houses have just been demolished to provide a large parking area for College employees, and a new access road to the power-plant and storehouse.

Crosby Street will be widened, regraded and surfaced - to provide a main access as one enters town on Lebanon Street, past the stadium to East Wheelock Street - and the Topliff Hall corner will be improved. Terminating the vista of this new approach, if present dreams are realized, will be a much-needed new classroom building.

To the west, the space between the Hopkins Center and the Main Street stores will be redeveloped as a parking area for some fifty cars, with an efficient truck access, from Lebanon Street, to serve the backs of the stores, the Inn kitchen, and the Center itself. It may take a long time for the present disreputable store-backs to be rebuilt as a clean and efficient foil to the Center, but already negotiations are under way for improving at least one segment of this sad vista, and we may confidently expect others will follow. With efficient truck deliveries to the backs of the stores, it will probably be possible to grass over Campion's and Putnam's "alleys" as pedestrian approaches to the Center.

The appearance of the Main Street stores will probably not be affected for some time, yet the Planning Board is hopeful that its policy of redeveloping Hanover's downtown as a shopping-center, intown, suited to the needs of the automotive age, may eventually result in a general upgrading of both profitable business enterprise and architectural appearance.

Main Street traffic has grown apace. If recommendations of the consultant planners are adopted, traffic flow will be speeded by eliminating delivery-truck roadblocks and by supplanting diagonal parking with parallel parking, to gain four moving lanes of traffic in the business section. This will be possible only if more offstreet parking is provided elsewhere.

The urgent need for big public parking areas, which will be greatly augmented by construction of the Hopkins Center, can be met by gradual redevelopment — in several stages - of the interiors of the two blocks west of Main Street to form a "shopping campus" slightly larger than the college campus. As a first step, the old tin Tavern Block, which has greeted every alumnus now living, has been razed.

A second step, involving parking space for 200 cars in the whole block interior south of Allen Street, has been announced and plans displayed. An enabling act has been passed by one house of the legislature (and by the time this is in print, probably by the Senate as well), which would facilitate such a development. The College has promised a substantial contribution to the community, and there is every reason to hope that a special meeting of the Precinct on May 16 will vote a bond issue, very largely self-liquidating through meter income, to accomplish these plans.

It is perhaps one of the uncomfortable aspects of living in the mid-twentieth century that we can be sure that communities will grow, old landmarks will be demolished, new buildings will be erected, the number of cars will increase, and traffic will become thicker. Hanover, like all other communities, has to face the worry, not that these things will happen, but that they might happen disastrously. With good planning and effective action assured by the kind of town that Hanover is — with the foresightedness shown by citizens, major institutions, business interests, and governmental agencies - Hanover promises to meet its problems as well as it has in a long past. It has a great tradition, but tradition is of value only when it is behind you, pushing forward.

Professor Hugh S. Morrison '26