Attention Former Ashdown Residents—Photos Needed!
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slice.mit.edu
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Few MIT landmarks evoke more history—and could tell more stories—than Ashdown House.The first graduate dormitory at MIT, Ashdown’s lineage includes 1930s-era beginnings as the former Riverbank Court Hotel; a three-year occupancy of Navy apprentice seamen during World War II; the arrival of co-ed housing in the 1960s; and a student-led, Godzilla-themed attempt to stop the building’s conversion to undergraduate housing in the 1990s (The building eventually became the undergrad Maseeh Hall in 2011).
Located in Bldg. W1 for nearly 70 years (it was known as Graduate House until 1964), Ashdown House moved to Bldg. NW35 in 2008. In total, more than eight decades of graduate students have called Ashdown their MIT home. And current resident Aarthy Adityan is working to combine the memories.
Ashdown’s acting photographer and history officer, Adityan came across troves of Ashdown-related photos while digging through the dorm’s digital archives earlier this year. The photos—which included recent shots and a few from the 1930s—inspired Adityan to honor the house's history.
“My goal is to combine all of these photos and create a photomosaic,” she says. “An image of both old and new Ashdown.”
Adityan estimates that she has more than 3,000 photos but believes she’ll need about 2,000 more to create the mosaic.
“We’re looking for anything related to Ashdown,” she says. “It could be people, event posters, or old programs.”
The current Ashdown collection includes some rare shots of the old Riverbank hotel, a ’40s-era costume party, and a visit from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr in the 1950s. But on the whole, the photos skew more recent and older images are needed.
“It’s much easier to find new photos,” she says. “We’d love to have much older photos, especially anything from the old building or in black and white.”
A previous email sent to alumni yielded nearly 100 photos but Slice knows more photos out there. Are you a former grad student—or apprentice seaman—who once called Ashdown home? If so, send your Ashdown-related pics to ashdown-photo (at) mit.edu.
