Editor's note: This is the eighth and final piece in a multi-part series focusing on the future of residential life at Dartmouth.
The College plans to tear down Thayer dining hall and rebuild a new and expanded dining facility in its place, slated to open in 2010, as part of its construction initiatives.
"Its guts have pretty much reached their life expectancy," Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman said of the aging Thayer dining hall.
Renovating the current building would have cost an estimated $15 million and only included minor internal renovations like replacing wiring and changing the building to meet current construction codes, Redman said. Including air conditioning and significant structural or design changes in the renovations would have also added several million dollars to the total cost.
In the end, the College decided it would be cheaper to tear down Thayer dining hall and start again from scratch, although the interim will provide a challenge to the College.
"We still have to build something else temporarily for the potential two-year period of time it would take," Redman said. "The College felt that at the end of the day it didn't make sense to spend that kind of money just to remodel."
During the construction of the new dining hall, the College will have to find ways to cover the 700 seats it will temporarily lose. Redman said Dartmouth plans to add seating to the Courtyard Cafe at the Hopkins Center as well as Collis Cafe to cover some of this difference.
The College will also build a small temporary dining hall with about 250 seats on the northern part of campus on Main St., as well as another interim dining facility elsewhere, to cover the temporary loss of Thayer. Even so, students could still face lines and a seat shortage once construction starts.
The temporary dining hall has aroused some controversy among students and alumni because it could shift the center of campus away from the Green to the campus' northern end, Redman said.
Earlier plans would have permanently shifted the center of campus north to complement previous plans for a larger 500-bed McLaughlin cluster. After the College received a variety of complaints from Hanover residents and alumni about moving the campus' social center, it decided to reduce the size of the McLaughlin cluster and keep the main dining hall where it is.
Redman also cited cost as one of the main problems with creating a new dining facility. The College will have to extensively fundraise for the new building.
"Ideally the [interim] building would open in the fall of 2008, but that might be a little aggressive," Redman said.
The College has not yet hired architects for the plan. The timing for such decisions will depend on the pace of fundraising and the progress of other construction projects currently underway.
