These memories are contributed by Brown alumnae that I was able to get in touch with because they are still around campus. They cover several decades, and give a wider range of insights into the impressions that RI Hall made on Brown students.

Laurel Bestock '99, Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies: "I only ever went there to visit the Office of International Programs. I was desperate to go to Egypt, so I associate the building with my frustrations with that process. It was the locus of my nervousness about being accepted to the Cairo program I applied to. I remember it as being messy, with lots of papers and flyers on the walls. I don't think we ever really referred to the building by name; it was just where the OIP was."

Norine Duncan '71, Curator, Art Slide Library: "I don't remember ever going into the building as an undergrad, and I don't remember what the building was used for. I went there later for the Brown Learning Community because I was taking some non-credit classes with the program during the '80s or'90s. I never had any of the classes there, but it was where the administrative section of the program was located. In my mind there was nothing really memorable about the building. It seemed like cramped space."

Nick Winton '85, Co-founder of Anmahian Winton Architects who have the contract for the renovation of RI Hall: "I took Russian History at RI Hall. I have a memory of the classroom in the divided top floor in what was the "great room" when RI Hall was used as a "museum" of natural history. The space was very awkward and one of the skylights that originally brought light into the great room was mostly covered and leaky. It remained that way until our demolition of the space last Fall. I don't think I could have imagined then that those skylights and that great room would become such an important subject in the process of our redesign for the Joukowsky Institute. The skylights will be opened up and rebuilt to once again bring daylight into a new library with offices and a research lab mezzanine at its core. No more dead animals and taxidermy, but archeology."

After talking to Terry Tullis, I asked Nick if they had encountered the charred timbers and cinderblock walls during the gutting. Nick said that "Yes we did see some fire damaged wood and charred timbers, etc. It looked to us that the fire started in the basement and traveled up the wall cavity to the attic. I don't know the history of the fire, but the evidence suggests that it was not devastating and that because much of the affected wood was heavy timber it did not burn through and was distinguished early. There were low concrete block walls in the basement along the north and west side stone walls. We speculated that the basement floor of the original structure may have been lowered to gain more space and that this masonry was part of that."

Daniel Krinsley, MS ’49, taken from the Geology Alumni Newsletter 2007: I met Richard Ray (MS ’43) at the US Geological Survey over 40 years ago, but we hadn’t seen each other for quite a while. We enjoyed a reunion lunch in November ’07, reminiscing about our careers and eventually our days at Brown. My adventures at Rhode Island Hall (’47-’49) while mapping the surficial deposits of the northern half of the Providence Quadrangle for my Master’s thesis were detailed in the ’93 alumni newsletter. Ray remembered the winter of ’42-’43, when he pursued evening studies huddled in his overcoat on the balcony of Rhode Island Hall. To conserve fuel during the war, heat was maintained only during the daytime hours. In the evening, when the radiator steam came up only once every hour or so, he would rush down to Professor Richard Goldthwait’s office just below the staircase to thaw out and warm up. He also remembered accompanying Professors Quinn and Goldthwait, in the dark evening, along with a photographer and reporter from the Providence Sunday Journal (July 19, 1942), to Copper Mine Hill in Cumberland, where they searched for the tungsten mineral, scheelite, using ultraviolet lamps. As reported in the Providence Journal, it was an evening more notable for the voracious mosquitoes than for any finding of tungsten minerals. These were the good old days?!

What do people remember?

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