Plans to Establish Alumni Center Progress; Clubhouse May Be Used

Overwhelming approval continues to dominate initial Alumni reaction to a recent proposal for the establishment of an Alumni Center, Bulletin president-publisher Joseph R. Hamlen '04, disclosed last night.

Terming the present arrangement "inadequate," Hamlen said that the University's acquisition of an undergraduate clubhouse adjacent to the Indoor Athletic Building at 54 Dunster Street was "just what we have been waiting for for the past 25 years."

The Alumni Bulletin, whose departments are now under the same roof for the first time in 49 years, will continue to occupy part of the first floor of the Dunster Street building. But with the passing of the local housing shortage, University officials who are now living in the second and third floors will vacate.

Centralization Seen

This would pave the way for the centralization under one roof of the varied activities of the Alumni Association, the Associated Harvard Clubs, the Harvard Fund Council, the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Reunion Committee and the Commencement Marshal.

Although the Alumni Bulletin, which has organized the drive for a permanent Center, is now consolidated, other Alumni offices are scattered about the local scene. Perched in the attic of Widener is the Alumni Directory, while the Harvard Fund occupies rooms in Wadsworth House.

Primary function of the Center, Hamlen stated, would be as a sort of "transient meeting place where any of Harvard's 82,000 Alumni visiting Cambridge could hang their coat, rest their weary bones, or thaw out after a football game."

If plans crystallized, the Alumni Center would occupy the first and third floors of the Dunster Street edifice. On the street floor would be a panelled lounge, 48 feet by 22, flanked at each end by fireplaces and furnished with divans, bookshelves and tables.