Circling the Square

Heeding neither praise nor abuse, Memorial Hall stands placidly between Cambridge and Kirkland Streets dedicated to the memory of Civil War dead and the proposition that the grotesque can be successfully combined with the sublime. Unfortunately time has weakened the proposition. Today Mem's begargoyled exterior may arouse occasional wistful memories in old alumni hearts, but it is often considered little more than an antiquated obstacle in the path to New Lecture Hall-bound students.

When a small group of alumni met in Chickering's Rooms, Tremont Street, Boston, on May 12, 1865, and expressed the need for a memorial to immortalize those sons of Harvard who had fallen in the Union cause, they started a controversy similar to that of the present period. Advocates of a marble column opposed supporters of a utilitarian memorial, and every group boosted its own cause. Memorial Hall was the $360,000 heterogeneous compromise theater, dining hall, and memorial transept. The transept was enlogized with the words, "There, amid the gorgeous emblazonry, shall be read their names, their academic year, their battles." And the marble tablets that cover the walls may still be read "amid the gorgeous emblazonry"--with a flashlight.

During the four decades around the turn of the century, undergraduate life centered about the 164-foot dining hall. The dining association, managed by its members, reported the average weekly board cost as $3.95 at a time when the menu offered such choices as "Roast Ribs of Beef," and "Braised Pork Tenderloin, Robert Sauce." "Creme d'Menthe Punch" and "Jelly Roll Pudding, Wine Sance" were two items on the same menu that prompted Carrie Nation, axe-wielding prohibitionist, to make her notorious invasion of the Memorial Hall dining room. During the noon meal on November 14, 1902, she appeared in the gallery where visitors came to "watch the animals eat"--and was immediately recognized with cheers and jeers from the floor below. She shouted, "Boys! Don't eat that infernal stuff, it's poison," and started down the stairs to sell her famous nickel-plated hatchets. The students quickly crowded around her, offering cigarettes and cigars which she struck to the floor with indignation. When the uproarious mob had swept her into Sanders Theatre, she attempted to speak, but shouts and singing drowned her out, and she finally abandoned Harvard to a life of sin.

Following a brief adventure as one of the Naval School "ships" during World War I, Mem's usefulness gradually declined after it was released from dining hall service in 1924. Since then the Great Hall hodgepodge of ornate tapestries, stained glass windows, portraits, and busts, has withdrawn into brooding silence broken only by an occasional dance or banquet. Students have come to look upon the hall as a den of horror, where they suffer either from the crush of registration or the torture of exams. Only rarely are the riotous days of the past recalled. Mem most recently shuddered from the sedate heights of its 170 foot tower down to the base of its firm foundation when Sally Rand lectured to a Freshman Smoker in 1941 on the subject "What the Average College Stage Door Johnny Is Looking for When He Stage Door Jennies a Burlesque House Stage Door."

All has been relatively quiet on the Mem Hall scene since then. Most recent renovation has been the transformation of its basement into ultra-modern psychology and psycho-acoustic laboratories. Walking through the medieval transept and then down into the futuristic halls of science beneath is as startling as being transported from the Dark Ages into the World of Tomorrow. At last the Renaissance seems to have overtaken Memorial Hall.