Photo of the Day: Carrie Tower, Brown University

In late October 10 years ago, I visited Brown University while vacationing in Providence, R.I. I was impressed with the architecture of the Ivy League campus, but, with so much happening in my world and my life the last decade, I had little reason to think back on it.

Until late yesterday, that is, when I saw the first awful news of yesterday’s campus shooting that left two students dead and nine others injured.

Among the photos I took 10 years ago was this one of the 95-foot-tall campanile clocktower on the Quiet Green adjacent to the Van Wickle Gates, Hope College and University Hall.

Carrie Tower was named for Carrie Mathilde Brown, granddaughter of Brown University namesake Nicholas Brown Jr., whose death in 1892 after 16 years of marriage devastated her husband, Count Paul Bajnotti of Turin, Italy. The widower left this tangible reminder of his wife in the city where they first met.

Preeminently, then, Carrie Tower stands for the enduring power of love—a force so strong, according to the monument's inscription, that "Love is Strong as Death." The truth of that statement will be tested in the days ahead, not just at Brown but in gun-maddened America. 

Photo of the Day: Brown University, Providence, RI, Fall 2015

I took this picture on the campus of Brown University five years ago, while I was on vacation in Providence, RI. Obviously, the absence of masks is a giveaway that this was taken before the pandemic.

I feel sorry for the successors to these students and their counterparts around the country today who are living in fear and not enjoying the experience of college the way that those who graduated before this year did. I can only hope that today’s will help the world find its way to a better, brighter place than the one we are in now.

Photo of the Day: Dill Center for the Performing Arts, Brown University, Providence RI

This time of year, high school seniors will be deciding where they will be going to college. In fact, for Ivy League schools, that big decision was already last month—or, for those who might have chosen the early decision option, closer to the start of the year. 

In any case, Brown University is probably going to be on a number of students’ wish lists. That’s been the case since the 1980s especially, when it began getting high ratings in the Fiske Guide to Colleges. 

Back in the day, I graduated from one of its rivals in the Ivy League—Columbia—and I’ve had no reason to regret it. But I have been curious about what Brown looks like, and in October 2015, while visiting Providence, RI, I had the opportunity to visit the school. It was as lovely as I heard about.

One of the campus buildings that caught my eye was the one I photograph and included here, the Catherine Bryan Dill Center for the Performing Arts—partly because I’m interested in the theater, partly because it’s a striking piece of architecture. As Lyman Hall, it was the university’s first gymnasium. But in the 1970s, then again in 2008, it was renovated, as part of the school’s ongoing improvement of its performing arts facilities.

Photo of the Day: John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

No, I haven’t visited Brown University this summer. I took the image accompanying this post last October, when I took a short vacation in Providence, R.I. I snapped a host of photos during that time—so many that it would have taken me weeks to exhaust them all, and would have left regular readers of this blog exhausted, too.

But I decided to look into them again the other day. One image that immediately caught my eye was this one, of the John Carter Brown Library. Constructed in 1904 on the campus Main Green, it represents the Beaux Arts manner, notable for its classical revivalism. While most of the exterior suggests ancient Greek and Roman architectural elements, it hints at the library’s Americana preoccupation with cornices that feature sculpted headdresses of Brazilian Indians in an exotic hybrid variation on classical Greek ornament.

The library’s collection consisted of 50,000 rare books, printed before approximately 1825, along with manuscripts, reference books and secondary sources. Its exhibits make rich use of their heavy focus on the literature of European exploration and travel in the Western Hemisphere.

The day I visited, for instance, the library’s Reading Room featured “Pamphlet Wars,” an exhibit using the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act as a springboard to examining not just the American Revolution, but also the transatlantic tumult that followed: the French and Haitian revolutions, and the wars for Spanish American independence.  

These revolutions originated as wars of ideas waged in the new media of their time: not just pamphlets, but also political cartoons and maps. The Brown Library’s exhibit made me wonder how future historians would see the wars of ideas in our time.

Photo of the Day: ‘Circle Dance’ Sculpture, Brown University

Late last October, on a vacation to Providence, Rhode Island, I was touring Brown University at mid-day when my eyes were stopped by this stainless steel sculpture on The Walk near Waterman Street.  

Circle Dance, by Tom Friedman, was installed in 2012. Inspired by Henri Matisse’s La Danse, it’s evidently become something of a local institution in its own right, attracting many photographers, professional or, like me, amateur, who are caught up in the swirl of its 11 joyful figures linking hands and dancing to music we wish we could hear, too.