Princeton really astonished me when I first walked through the campus. The Collegiate Gothic architecture of its older buildings made it look like the quintessential American college campus. Most universities I'd visited had a few Gothic or Tudor or vaguely medieval buildings, dating from Victorian or early-modern times; but the Princeton grounds were packed with homages to Oxford or Cambridge:
Later in the day my Instamatic couldn't handle the diminished light, except that some shots did come to life with a warm twilight glow on the slide projection screen. Alas, they look merely dim when scanned, even after light and color adjustment. Here are a few of the just passable shots:
I was visiting Princeton to see one of my best friends from college, Jim Hicks, a fellow Clevelander, who was attending Princeton Theological Seminary. Jim, still a Facebook Friend, became a Presbyterian minister and years later presided over the marriage of Anne and me. Here he is, contemplating or calming a Princeton lion:
Princeton did have a few buildings in other styles, like this American Romanesque concert and meeting hall, dating from 1894 (I've just learned):
And I was excited to see the brand-new building by Minoru Yamasaki, whose World Trade Center was just starting construction in Lower Manhattan. (Thanks to Wikipedia I can tell you what I probably forgot immediately after seeing it: it's the School of Public and International Affairs. Until this summer it was the Woodrow Wilson School of..., but that President's racist record led to his name's removal.) I'm not sure what Jim is doing in the second photo: testing the column's strength, maybe.
Back at Colgate I took a few more pictures, shown below, two of the campus in mid spring and two of the nearby hills, a bit earlier in the season:
But you've now seen all the Colgate photos--no friends (though a few will show up in other places in later boxes) and hardly any documentation of everyday life. In the next boxes, however, you'll see a lot of pics of the family back in Cleveland, and then of my return to NYC.
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