HANOVER — While Dartmouth College has put on hold its plan to build new undergraduate residence halls north of campus on Lyme Road, recent history suggests that if college officials see the project as a viable option, they will try to address community concerns, then press on regardless.
That was how the college built its 70,000-square-foot indoor athletic practice facility off South Park Street, prevailing in court over the town Planning Board’s rejection of the project.
The relationship between Dartmouth and Hanover hasn’t always been quite so adversarial. The town gave the college a key piece of the Garipay Field land that Dartmouth is considering for residence halls as part of a deal that paved the way for the renovation of Hanover High School and the construction of a new Richmond Middle School nearly 20 years ago.
How the practice facility came about and how that small piece of Garipay Field changed hands tell a story about how Hanover and Dartmouth used to work together and sheds a little light on how they’ve worked together since. With Dartmouth embarking on another round of construction, in a new neighborhood, town officials said they think the relationship with Dartmouth could use some mending. That’s not a new argument, and it’s not clear that college officials see things in those terms.
On the indoor practice facility, the town and the college never did see eye to eye.
The Hanover Planning Board’s 2016 denial of what Dartmouth calls “the largest permanent indoor practice facility in the Ivy League” was a rare rejection of a college project. Residents living near the project site said its size wasn’t in keeping with the surrounding neighborhood. Nancy Carter, the Selectboard’s representative to the Planning Board, was among the majority.
“I was one of the really vocal folks who said, ‘Let’s not do that,’ ” Carter said.
At the time, town officials said the college’s relationship with the town had frayed, as too many people in Dartmouth leadership were new to Hanover or lived outside town.
The state Supreme Court reversed the Planning Board’s decision in 2018.
The court’s 4-0 decision made clear that there’s no room in land-use law for sentiment.
“Our review of the record of the board’s deliberative session supports Dartmouth’s contention that the board unreasonably relied upon personal feelings and ad hoc decision-making in denying the college’s application,” the decision says.
Like the practice facility, which was dedicated last October, new Dartmouth projects are likely to be next to neighborhoods that haven’t had big college buildings in them.
“We’re going to have to build in places we haven’t had to before,” Josh Keniston, Dartmouth’s vice president of campus services said in an interview.
Dartmouth always seems to be in construction mode, but its new master plan widens the scope of those projects.
Where college officials once had a vision of a central campus and a few outstations, such as the organic farm and Oak Hill to the north and the medical center and the Sachem Village graduate student housing to the south, the “strategic campus framework” the college released last summer suggests Dartmouth now paints on a wider canvas.
“The 30-year vision supports Dartmouth as a corridor of connected campus nodes set within the majestic natural environment from river to mountains,” reads the text on a sprawling map that shows downtown Hanover tucked into a small corner, hemmed in by college properties.
The previous page shows Dartmouth’s current population of students, faculty and staff growing from 10,780 to an estimated 16,300 by 2050, and the plan calls for accommodating a lot of that growth in Hanover.
Keniston has become the public face of the college’s construction plans. Outreach to residents and community engagement are going to be a fundamental part of the college’s approach to its projects, including at Garipay Field, he said.
“The development will certainly change the nature of it. We don’t want to gloss over that,” he said in an interview before the college announced it would delay construction, which had been planned for this year.
The question, he added, is “how do we make a development up here that works for the community?”
For example, the field has been used by the Ford Sayre Ski Club’s programs for years. There has long been a need for public restrooms there, he said.
The development would bring change, he said, “but we’re going to do it in a way that still embraces the community and that still enriches people’s lives,” Keniston said.
The story of how Dartmouth came to own the whole of Garipay Field, so named because it used to be part of the Garipay farm, recalls an era when the town and college were handshake partners. It also echoes the current concerns about Dartmouth’s growth consuming the town.
While the college owned the bulk of the field, the town of Hanover owned a chunk of it right in the middle.
“We affectionately called it ‘the doughnut hole,’ ” said Carter, who was then a member of the Hanover and Dresden school boards. The town’s 5.42-acre parcel contained a couple of baseball/softball fields and a parking lot.
At the turn of the century the Dresden School District, which oversees secondary schools for Hanover and Norwich, was trying to replace the aging and deteriorated Richmond Middle School and Hanover High School, then both located on Lebanon Street.
In May 2001, the Dresden board, which had been negotiating with Dartmouth for nine months, announced nine options, one of which would have moved both schools to Garipay Field, on Reservoir Road, and shipped the district’s Lebanon Street property to the college for $26.5 million, an offer far above the assessed value.
As attractive as that idea seemed, it divided the Dresden board, and the public, as most Hanover residents wanted to see at least the high school stay on Lebanon Street and were wary of the college developing such a big downtown parcel.
“That would have been a huge chunk of land,” said Carter, who supported keeping the schools downtown. “From my perspective, it would have divided neighborhoods right in town.”
Brian Walsh, then the longtime chairman of the Hanover Selectboard, realized there was no way forward for the school district, Julia Griffin, Hanover’s longtime town manager, said in an interview.
“He came up with this very complicated series of swaps,” Griffin said. “He was watching how hard it was for the School Board to get traction on any one option.”
Walsh, who died in 2018 at age 74, was a Dartmouth and Thayer School of Engineering graduate, an entrepreneur and an artist, and a skilled politician. He used one of the drawing pens he always had with him to sketch his Dresden idea out for Griffin on a napkin over a meal at Lou’s Restaurant & Bakery, where Lou Bressette had presided over both the diner and town business in the decades before Walsh joined the board. He talked to the Selectboard and they gave him leave to go-ahead.
“He and I had numerous one-on-one meetings with each School Board member,” just to hear their thoughts and gauge their interest, Griffin said.
Both Carter and Walsh were members of the River Valley Club, then a new fitness club at Centerra Marketplace.
“The first time I heard of (the land swap), he stopped me in the parking lot and said, ‘We need to talk,’ ” Carter said.
Once Walsh and Griffin had talked to Dresden board members, they set up a meeting with James Wright, then the college’s president.
Wright, now an emeritus professor, was the last Dartmouth president to come from the college’s faculty. A Hanover resident since 1969, he taught history and became dean of the faculty before taking over from James O. Freedman in 1998.
The new schools were very much in Dartmouth’s interest. Recruiting professors to come to Hanover meant not just telling them about the schools’ record of achievement, but showing them around, Carter said.
“The buildings were pretty shabby,” she said. It was important to the college to be able to say high school students would get “a St. Paul’s-equivalent education,” without having to pay tuition, Carter said.
(St. Paul’s, an Episcopal boarding school in Concord, is charging $62,000 for tuition, room and board this year.)
In the deal announced to the public in July 2002, Dartmouth gave Dresden 23 acres on Lyme Road on which to build a new middle school and $9.7 million toward construction, which made the project more palatable for Norwich residents, who faced a bigger tax impact. Hanover gave Dresden $2 million, and the college got the Garipay Field land as well as a quarter-acre parcel on South Street and the use of 10 acres on the former town landfill.
Walsh outlined another part of the deal that was less tangible: “Dartmouth legitimately expects that they will get some major recognition for a donation to the two towns” in the Dresden district, he told the Valley News after the deal was announced.
At the time, the deal was viewed as beneficial for all concerned. In the short term, construction of the new schools could go ahead, Dartmouth could use the Garipay playing fields for intramural programs and the town’s former dump as staging for construction projects.
When the Dresden deal happened, Dartmouth had no plans for developing Garipay Field, but making the parcel whole certainly made it easier to consider building there.
And if the original deal between Dartmouth and Dresden had gone through, not only would Dartmouth have developed the Lebanon Street land, Dresden would have built a middle and high school complex on Garipay Field.
“Of course, it could have also meant tons more cars through that neighborhood,” Carter said.
From a distance of two decades, the final deal looks quite different. For starters, it likely wouldn’t be possible now.
“I don’t think we could do that today,” Griffin said. “Just the way Dartmouth is managed and governed, it’s a different era.”
Dartmouth has grown substantially since then, aided by major donations and endowment gains. The college has long had to balance its identities as a local institution and a global one, but the influx of money has tilted that balance in the favor of its global profile.
Hanover has changed, too, and in similar ways. After a property reassessment in 2002, the town crested $1 billion in property value. Since the concept of real property was introduced to that patch of soil in 1761, it took 240 years to add up to that sum. But it took less than 20 years for Hanover property to double in value, to $2 billion, after another reappraisal completed last year.
Along with that infusion of financial power came an interpersonal change. For a time, Dartmouth and Hanover officials met regularly to talk about planning, Griffin said. That practice ended in 2009, when Jim Yong Kim replaced Wright as president, and hasn’t resumed, Griffin said.
She has regular contact with college officials, “but when it comes to really comprehensive, long-term planning where the college meets the town, we used to have much more regular and direct conversations with key college officials, and we don’t have that any more,” Griffin said.
In addition, Dartmouth has had considerable turnover in its leadership positions, so institutional memory has suffered, Griffin said.
Dartmouth’s current board of trustees includes no Upper Valley residents beyond President Phil Hanlon. The impression Carter has heard from Hanover residents is that the trustees “jet in” for meetings “without learning that much about the community.”
Keniston said he sees the relationship in a more optimistic light, noting that he and Griffin have spoken regularly about coronavirus pandemic issues, and that a group of town and college officials took a tour of Denmark to research sustainability goals.
Still, there’s a difference in approach.
“We don’t want a deal to be made in a back room,” Keniston said. “There has to be this open dialogue. That doesn’t mean we’re always going to agree.”
Ultimately, what happens with Dartmouth projects will hinge on whether both the college and the town see benefits. The residence hall plan was delayed only after a faculty vote last month, regardless of neighborhood concerns.
When the college’s projects offend neighborhood sensibilities, “Our most effective response is going to be through the regulatory process,” Carter said.
The college is committed to working with neighbors, but there are limits.
“Just because we don’t cancel the project doesn’t mean we haven’t listened to the feedback,” Keniston said.
The potential for conflict will depend on how Hanover sees itself. Is it still the sleepy town of 20 or 30 years ago, where multimillion-dollar construction plans get sketched out on napkins, or has Hanover outgrown such expedients?
“This community really has morphed into a small city,” Griffin said. Adopting the city council, or even town council form of government, is worth considering, she said.
Hanover also is starting its own “sustainability master plan” development next month, Carter said.
How the town’s vision fits with the college’s will bear watching. Those plans often work in sync: Hanover’s current master plan, last updated in 2003, includes a new village center on Lyme Road.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
