Sweeping a Century's Dust

Just as giving a 100-year-old lady a face lift is not an easy operation, the restoration of Memorial Hall is no simple renovation job.

Since Mem Hall has never been cleaned before, the project will be quite extensive. The stonework on the roof and walls needs repair, the stained glass windows need cleaning, and missing parts have to be replaced.

To make matters more complicated, the building is a registered historical landmark, so the restoration work must preserve--and not alter--the surface of the structure, designed to commemorate Harvard students who died in the Civil War.

Mounds of scaffolding have encased the building since the project began last spring, causing human traffic jams whenever classes change. The exterior will not be completed until November and cleaning the stained glass windows will take four and a half years, according to Project Manager Peter J. Riley.

However, the extensive restoration work will not interfere much with the use of Sanders Theatre or Memorial Hall. "Only a small amount of our work is noisy," Riley said. "We worked all during final exams [last spring] without a single complaint."

Such a project was not undertaken lightly. About four years have elapsed since the grand renovation project was first conceived, said Riley, who is overseeing the work for Harvard Real Estate.

In an effort to restore the building as accurately as possible, researchers studied the original paint colors and stoneworking methods that were used in Mem Hall's construction. When workers replace the worn stone and brick, they attempt to replicate the original colors of the stone and even of the mortar in between the bricks. They also use stone cutting processes similar to the original techniques.

The repair crew even tracked down some of the original Nova Scotia sandstone and found a recently demolished Boston building which was built with the relatively rare materials, said Daniel M. Aylward, Vice-President of Cardarelli Construction, the Allston-based company which is the general contractor for the project.

Cleaning the facade is no easy task for the crew. First, they must wash the building's exterior with chemical detergents and high-pressure hot water, Aylward said. Then the stone portions of the facade are treated with chemicals to harden them and re-painted in the original colors, workers said.

The bricks are also getting a beauty treatment. Workers use a cutting and pointing process to cut out existing defective stone joints and replace them with new mortar, said Walter H. Packard, president of Chapman Waterproofing, which is in charge of the masonry work. Then workers use koppers bitumastic tank solution, a pitch compound, to repaint the bricks and restore their original appearance.

"It's a very tedious sort of work," Riley said. He said some unexpected complications have added slightly to the expected time for stonework completion. "It requires patience and good skill level," Riley said.

The restoration's most dramatic change will be the replacement of Mem Hall's missing gargoyles. Each of the building's four towers was originally inhabited by one of these creatures, but only two of them remain. One of the missing gargoyles currently resides in the Fogg Art Museum and the other has never been found, Riley said.

Rather than deplete the Fogg's collection, the restoration project commissioned two new gargoyles for the Mem Hall skyline, and they will be installed some time this fall.

Although the exterior work is nearing completion, the window cleaning process has a long way to go.

Each of the more than 100 windows must be removed individually, cleaned and replaced. The lead tracery between the windows also needs repair.

"When we got there the windows were black and the frames were tan; they should be a murky reddish brown and a gooey brown," Riley said.

Dirt has obscured many features of the stained glass windows, and during the cleaning process new colors and details are coming to light.

"We had no idea it was a yellow and green window," one worker said, as he brought a newly cleaned pane of glass back to its resting place as part of the huge window in the north trancept of the building.