BECK HALL OWNERS ARE TRYING TO GIVE AWAY STRUCTURE

Beck Hall, at the corner of Quincy Street and Massachusetts Avenue, has been offered as a gift to anyone who will take it and assume taxes and mortgages to the amount of $154,000. An advertisement to this effect has been published by G. P. Davis '14, head of the Beck Hall Trust.

Last June, the hall and the land adjoining it on the east were put up at auction and sold to James Thurman, for $161,000. According to Davis, however. Thurman never paid the amount in full and instead has exercised his right of giving the hall back to the trustees.

Although still occupied by students, the hall has been anything but a paying proposition during the past three years, and only because of the sentiment connected with it has the building remained so long in the hands of Harvard men.

In 1923 the building was purchased by C. C. Stillman '98, who intended to present the hall to the University in the Spring of 1927, but his death in December 1926 brought a halt to negotiations.

In 1928 plans were made to build an apartment on the site which was intended to he developed as a kind of alumni hotel. After much discussion and objection on the part of the University, however, the project fell through.

Beck Hall is one of Harvard's oldest dormitories and numbers among its former residents such well-known men as Theodore Roosevelt '08, Pierpont Morgan '89, John Jacob Astor, and Larz Anderson '88.