New Million Dollar Public Administration Building Nears Completion

1942 TO USE FACILITIES OF MODERN HEMENWAY GYM

Replacing the old Hemenway gymnasium, razed in February to make room for the construction of the Littauer Center, a new Hemenway gymnasium has been built, located on Massachusetts Avenue, scarcely a stone's throw from its former site.

Conting between $200,000 and $300,000, the new gym features 12 regulation six squash courts designed to provide more readily accessible exercise for graduate students and especially for Freshmen.

The building also contains facilities for basketball, badminton, and volley ball. It will be ready for use about the first of October.

Displaying remarkable mushroom growth to residents of Cambridge since its founder laid the cornerstone four months ago, the white granite Littauer Center of Public Administration, first building in the University to feature granite and brick construction, has passed the two-thirds mark toward completion.

Prominently located at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Kirkland Street on the site of the old Hemenway Gymnasium, this impressive structure of Georgian design will house the Graduate School of Public Administration, located in Hunt Hall. The exterior of this edifice, composed of 200,000 cubic feet of Chelmsford granite backed up by 300,000 bricks, has already been constructed.

Intermittent spells of heat and torrential rains failed to shake the steady progress of the work, as 85 laborers toiled constantly to keep the work on schedule. At one time, heavy rains and sub-surface water necessitated working in water until the foundation, sinking 22 feet below the surface, was laid. Since that time, no serious obstacles have arisen to impede the work, and the Center will be finished on time, according to construction managers, on or about December 20.

"I anticipate that this will become a school to train leaders and, though them, the people at large how to translate democratic ideal of administration into living realities," declared Lucius N. Littauer '78 of New York City, founder at the "Silver Trowel" exercise last May.

Littauer described the laying of the stone as an "important mile-stone here at Harvard and in public life. "The completion of this building should point to the day when public office, in the hands of broadly educated and highly expert public administrators, will really become a public trust." The founder stressed the improvement of "public administration through making the government service popular as a life's vocation.

Offers New Method

Deau of the Graduate School of Public Administration is John H. Williams, Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy. Dean Williams describes Harvard's contribution to this field as the offering of a new method rather than the answering of a new need. He foresees the Littauer Center growing into a real center for men in the public service whether federal, state, or local, and for men in the social sciences, whatever their particular specialty, who are engaged upon research in broad public problems.

Costing nearly a million dollars, the building is strictly classical in style, rectangular in shape, with Ionian pilasters, on the fads. The foundations extend 22 feet below the surface in order to accommodate two floors of book-stacks.

Among the many features of this modern building is a library of 200,000 volumes with reading rooms, administration offices and stacks. It also contains an auditorium with a seating capacity of 200, seminar rooms for small conferences; and offices for professors, consultants, and secretaries. On the top floor is a lounging room which may be used as a lunchroom as well for informal meetings.

The School will open for its first regular session this fall, following over a year of exploratory sessions in which the faculty and invited government officials collaborated in shaping a new type of curriculum for study and research on basic governmental problems. Until the start of the second term this years, the School will continue to be housed in Hunt Hall in the Yard.