Looking for clues to building’s demise, students excavate gym toppled in 1906
Senior Tara Laidlaw brushes away dirt from metal window frames that came from the Stanford Museum. The class discovered that wreckage from other parts of campus was dumped in the gym’s pool after the quake.
From left, students Leon Peralto, Pete Carothers and Samantha Azure practice proper field techniques and document their findings as they slowly uncover the concrete foundation of the Men’s Gymnasium, which the 1906 earthquake all but destroyed before it officially opened. The students are in a course called Archaeological Field Methods, which is taught by University Archaeologist Laura Jones. The dig is on a 1-acre site at the corner of Lasuen Street and Museum Way.
Co-instructor Katrinka Reinhart, left, and senior Tara Laidlaw, a course assistant, work with University Archaeologist Laura Jones and freshman Austen Wianecki to unearth remnants of the Men’s Gymnasium at Museum Way and Lasuen Street. The building was not yet completed when it collapsed in the 1906 earthquake.
BY HAYLEY RUTGER
The Men's Gymnasium at Stanford had a long way to fall when the 1906 earthquake hit. The three-story, Greek-columned building would have been the largest gym in the United States at the time, but the massive quake leveled it before it was completed.
Today, pieces of it remain buried next to Frost Amphitheater, near the heart of campus. University Archaeologist Laura Jones and her students study the twisted metal, shattered glass, concrete column supports and other remnants to learn the story of the gym and the quake that felled it. Every week, her class digs up and dusts off more of the wreckage, looking for clues to the behemoth building's inner features—and its Achilles' heel.
The building had vast spaces for squash, handball, boxing, wrestling, fencing and even a bowling alley. The top floor was supposed to boast a ballroom and banquet hall. Insufficiently sturdy steel reinforcements and concrete were probably the primary reasons for the building's downfall. But that's what the course being taught by Jones, Archaeological Field Methods, has been trying to get to the bottom of this quarter.
As part of initial site studies the university is required to undergo before the construction of a new concert hall next to Frost—but also for the benefit of her brood of aspiring and amateur archaeologists—Jones and her class have spent the quarter gradually unearthing the concrete footing of the approximately 130,000-square-foot gym buried in a 1-acre lot at the corner of Lasuen Street and Museum Way.
"I would need to do the excavation whether as a class or not," said Jones, who has taught the course more than a dozen times over her 24 years as the campus archaeologist. "But it is an opportunity for students."
She and six undergraduates and six community volunteers meet once a week on the site, previously a parking lot for construction crews. Because of its convenient location, every professor, architect, engineer and historian Jones has invited for a visit has come. In that sense, the site's proximity benefits students and allows the course to be more multidisciplinary in nature.
Visitors are welcome when class is in session, Fridays from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. But the fence around the lot is locked at all other times for safety reasons. Jones anticipates the dig will go on for about two years and estimates that construction to prepare the ground for the concert hall's construction will begin in late 2009.
The class is focused on retrieving remnants of the building, not necessarily searching for personal possessions. Because the building was never occupied, Jones said it's very unlikely that culturally significant items will be found. But her students have already discovered artifacts of architectural and engineering value, and she is sure they will find more.
And in addition to practicing proper field techniques, the students also are learning to look for clues about the building's structural weaknesses and testing hunches based on their research.
"The steel framing that we see in some of the photos was not anchored to the concrete," as it would be today, Jones said. "It's a very early experiment in concrete and steel, and they didn't get it right."
Much of the current activity is centered on the gym's "swimming tank." The floor plan depicted the pool as a white-rimmed rectangle surrounded by small white circles, which represent columns. Sophomore Christopher Lowman said the granite bases of the columns, which still remain, help him and his classmates orient themselves on the site.
The bases, and the larger concrete slab footings beneath, may ultimately help them understand why the building collapsed as well. Most likely, Jones said, the flaw was in the concrete's steel reinforcements. Although the column bases and concrete footings were probably wide enough to support the building's massive weight, Jones suspects disconnected steel reinforcement throughout and weak concrete—in the face of a massive earthquake—may ultimately have led to the gym's demise.
She said samples of the concrete will eventually be sent to a lab, where machines will squeeze them until they crumble, to see if the material met 1906 standards, and how they compare to standards today.
The apparent absence of some of the more luxurious materials amid all the metal, glass and rubble raises another interesting research question for the class. "We haven't seen a lot of this beautiful, gleaming white marble that was described," said senior Tara Laidlaw, who also works as an assistant to Jones. "We found lots of brick. It's a little bizarre."
Laidlaw said some of the rich decor could be at the bottom of the pool, which was tiled in marble and occupied an area 30 feet by 50 feet. The students have spent the quarter methodically scraping layer after layer of dirt and debris from the 12-foot-deep pit, which they discovered was used as a place to dump the remains of other buildings after the earthquake.
This became entirely clear when they uncovered windows from the old Stanford Museum, which was partially destroyed in 1906. "Because of the windows being here, we're no longer sure what things we're finding are actually from the gym and what things are from any other buildings that came down in that earthquake," Lowman said. "A lot of people were surprised to learn that there even used to be a gym here before."
Jones urges the students to speculate about why the gym collapsed, what they might find and reassures them that it's OK to be wrong. She herself speculates that the museum windows may be just the tip, and that the dig will yield other unexpected items. "There are a lot of lessons for the students to learn," Jones said, "about how you make your assumptions, and how you test your hypotheses, how you interpret archaeological data."
Some parts of the gym still stood after the quake, but the university decided to deconstruct it completely in 1910, instead of paying the hefty price to restore it. Photos taken after the quake show crews hauling building materials by the wagonload to rubble dumps in the nearby foothills. Laidlaw speculates some of the more precious materials may have been salvaged or re-used.
The students attend weekly lab sessions to discuss their latest thoughts and findings, as well to clean and catalog whatever they have dug up. Lowman said he would like to see some of the items exhibited in the university's Archeology Center, Building 500. Jones said some artifacts—her class recently found a chemistry beaker—may wind up on display at the Alumni Center.
Jones said her class has assembled an almost complete set of drawings for the gym, which was designed by former university architect Charles Hodges. They have floor plans of all three floors and drawings of activity areas outdoors. But as for how it looked inside, all they have are visions of creamy white marble, polished wood floors and a cavernous rotunda awash in sunlight.
"We have yet to find any pictures of the interior of the building before the quake," Jones said. "If they're out there, we want to see them."
Hayley Rutger is an intern at the Stanford News Service.
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