Gil Harlow and the late Bill Huntley, longtime professors who championed the College's arboreal assets, might have been pleased recently to see chainsaws dropping the trees that they planted along North and South lanes.
It meant their plan had worked.
In the early 1970s, as Dutch elm disease had taken a heavy toll, it was Harlow and Huntley, with campus planner Jack Lytinski, who oversaw the replacement planting of about four dozen little leaf lindens around the center of campus.
Theirs was a far-sighted plan. By the mid-80s, with the last of the leafy-arched elms disappearing, the lindens were filling in to re-create what landscape architect Joseph Jacques Ramée had in mind in 1813 when he designed the nation's first planned campus.
By this year, the lindens had grown so large that they had begun to crowd each other and to obscure the views of North and South Colonnades. So in late November, members of the College's grounds staff took out just under half of the lindens, in most cases taking every other tree in order to preserve the spacing. Some of the trees were deemed unsafe, said Tom Heisinger, manager of grounds.
To at least one observer, the thinning had the pleasing effect of raising the visibility of the College's rich architecture of North and South Colleges. “The look now is reminiscent of early photos of the campus,” said Loren Rucinski, director of facilities.
The latest thinning project is also part of an ongoing effort to improve safety lighting on and around the campus, Rucinski added.
The final step of the project will be to grind down the stumps. Said Heisinger, “When the students come back in January, they won't know what we've done.”
Harlow, who out of modesty assigns to Huntley most of the credit for the replanting plan, said the thinning validates the work the professors promoted decades ago. Besides planting replacements for the vanishing elms, they also sought to promote the diversity of plantings, adding non-native species like a dawn redwood (north of Reamer Campus Center) and paperbark maples (east of Social Sciences).
Harlow, who taught civil engineering from 1940 through 1993, received the Founders Medal last fall for distinguished service to the College. He was the first recipient of the Alumni Council's Faculty Meritorious Service Award in 1958.
Huntley, a 1934 Union graduate, served the College for more than 50 years in a range of capacities including professor of psychology, dean and unofficial groundskeeper. He received the Alumni Gold Medal and the Faculty Meritorious Service Award. He died in 1996.
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