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The PMD 70 Tree and Other Memorials at HBS
The groves of academe are fields rich with possibilities for memorial naming, from entire campuses and buildings to individual benches. HBS has honored individuals and groups of people by putting their names not only to buildings but also to streets, rooms in buildings, courtyards, 115 professorial chairs, and more than 400 fellowships.
When the campus was built in 1925-26, George F. Baker, who funded the buildings’ construction, was given the honor of naming them and chose names of U.S. Treasury secretaries (Chase, Gallatin, Glass, Hamilton, McCulloch, Mellon, Morris, and Sherman). Baker also named the administration building after his friend, J.P. Morgan, and, at Dean Donham’s insistence, gave his own name to the library. In the late 1960s, four additional buildings were named after Treasury secretaries (Dillon, Fowler, Humphrey, and Anderson). Other campus buildings have been named or renamed after HBS deans (George P. Baker, John McArthur, and Stanley Teele), prominent alumni (William Connell, MBA 1963; Robert Greenhill, MBA 1962; Rodney Hawes, MBA 1969; John Loeb, MBA 1954; Gipp Ludcke, MBA 1925; Arthur Rock, MBA 1951; Jack Shad, MBA 1949; Dick Spangler, MBA 1956; William Wilder, MBA 1950; and Hansjörg Wyss, MBA 1965), HBS overseers (Charles Cotting and Leonard McCollum), and a variety of friends, and relatives of friends, of HBS (Nelson Aldrich, John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s father-in-law; William Burden; Alexander and Arthur Cumnock; and Sebastian Kresge). For much more information about HBS buildings’ names, see here.
The Meredith and Williams rooms in Spangler honor his wife and his favorite HBS professor, Charlie Williams (MBA 1939). The Baker Library | Bloomberg Center is a double-barreled honoring of George F. Baker and the funder of its renovation and expansion, Michael Bloomberg (MBA 1965), and the library’s named rooms (the Stamps Reading Room, the Aldrich Room, and the former Cole Room) honor E. Roe Stamps IV (MBA 1974), Nelson Aldrich again, and a professor and librarian of Baker, Arthur Cole. The courtyard between Morgan and Baker is called Peterson Park and was named in 1976 in memory of Carol Peterson, Dean Fouraker’s administrative assistant, who was murdered in her Cambridge apartment. And the semicircular courtyard behind Aldrich (between Baker and Hawes) is named after the Class of 1971. Gordon Road running in back of Shad to Spangler honors Albert Gordon (MBA 1925), and Batten Way at the south entrance to the campus honors Frank Batten (MBA 1952). See here for an alphabetical list of physical things at HBS given memorial names.
I recently learned of another kind of named memorial on campus, an addition to the literal groves of academe: a tree planted near Burden by the PMD 70 class at their graduation. The class may have been inspired by the Partners Association, which had planted a tree in front of Soldiers Field Park apartments. PMD 70 donated the money for the tree but left the choice of its kind and placement to the Department of Operations. The tree is part of a series of landscape improvements, starting nearly from scratch, that were originally carried out by the Olmsted Brothers firm, run by sons of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. It was said at the time that the HBS campus had “no natural beauty in topography or tree growth.” Much progress has been made since then! More than 2,000 trees have been planted on the campus since 1971, but given construction and other factors, about 880 trees are now standing, including 450 shade trees (of 28 different species), 80 evergreen trees (of 9 kinds), and 350 flowering trees (24 kinds). John Moody of the Operations Department tells me that they’ll happily accept more additions, named or unnamed, to the greening of the HBS campus.
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