Boston babymoon, Post 2: Harvard University

On Friday, October 5th - our second full day in Boston - we took a tour of the prestigious 375-year-old Ivy League university, Harvard. Some of its more famous alumni include presidents and prime ministers of the USA and various other countries (including Canada), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matt Damon, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg!

In the early afternoon we headed to the Harvard Square T station and spent a while wandering around the nearby streets before our tour. (I should also mention that, despite it being fall, the weather was warm and sunny during our first two days in Boston. After that it turned cold and rainy for the rest of the trip!) We ate a burger lunch and discovered the World's Only Curious George Store, which was a lot of fun to explore... and of course we bought a Curious George onesie for our own upcoming little monkey!

At 2pm we went to the Information Centre to join our tour. It was free and student-led - our guide was one of only five Kiwis (i.e. New Zealanders) studying at Harvard! For the next hour or more, our guide led our group of 20-30 tourists around the grounds of Harvard, showing us various buildings and telling us lots of interesting anecdotes about their history. He also described different aspects of student life to us, and it was really interesting to hear how Harvard differs from the university experience we are familiar with.

Harvard Yard

Harvard Yard

Oldest dormitory building on campus

Science building

Memorial Church

Memorial Church

The only building we went inside was Memorial Hall. It looks like a church, as it was designed and built by church builders, but it is in fact an entirely secular building established as a memorial to former students of Harvard who were casualties of war (initially the Civil War, but now all wars since then). Memorial Hall also includes the freshman dining hall, and is where Harvard graduation ceremonies used to be held (until they became so big that they are now held outdoors).

Below is a photo of our tour guide standing beside the statue of John Harvard. It is one of the most photographed statues in the USA. However, the statue contains three errors: (1) the year of Harvard's founding is out by 2 years; (2) the statue credits John Harvard with being the university's founder, when in fact he was a benefactor who gave the university a few hundred books; and (3) the statue is not even of John Harvard, as by the time they decided to make the statue, he was long-dead and no one knew what he had looked like!

John Harvard statue

The building we found the most interesting was the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. Harry Elkins Widener was a wealthy 1907 graduate of Harvard, and he was a prolific book collector. He had a goal to acquire originals of seven of the most valuable books in the world. He had just completed a voyage to Europe, where he'd obtained the final book for his collection (something by Francis Bacon?), when he and his parents boarded the Titanic. Harry and his father (and the book) went down with the ship, but his mother and her maid survived in the lifeboats.

Harry's mother then donated $3.5 million to Harvard to build a library in his memory. Harvard tore down their existing library and built the Widener Library in its place. Two of the conditions of the donation were that there must always be a vase of fresh flowers in the library's entrance, and that no brick or stone could ever be removed from the building... or the ownership of the library would revert to the City of Cambridge (i.e. the city where Harvard is located).

To this day, Harvard studiously upholds these conditions. When the library needed to be extended - but no walls could be removed to do so - the library was instead extended down six storeys below ground level, and then underground most of the way across the open yard between the library and Memorial Church. I'm not sure if this was during the 1997-2004 renovation or not, but Wikipedia says that that renovation cost $97 million!

Unfortunately, after the tour ended and we thought we'd go and explore this fascinating labyrinth, we discovered that a Harvard ID is required to get into the library. No doubt that's to stop the library being filled with nosy tourists wanting to do exactly that!

The Widener Library - it extends underground most of the
way across to where this photo was taken from!

Resting on the library's front steps

And that was our tour of Harvard. Fascinating and highly recommended!