This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM is checking out a photo of Georgetown Medical School when it was a lonely building. The photo is from June 30, 1931 and looks south across Reservoir Rd. to the building, with the rest of the campus in the background.
While Georgetown University created a medical school in 1851, the building seen here–the Medical-Dental Building–was opened literally days before this photo was taken. The present day hospital would follow 17 years later.
This photo also shows what the grounds of the former Hillandale estate looked like before it was turned into an unfortunately gated community in the 1970s.
An elderly GU alumnus writes: thanks for these wonderful photos — the best aerial shots of “Old Georgetown” I have ever seen. So much detail, so many buildings identified that I had only heard about by word of mouth; for instance, note the little settlement of houses located roughly on the current site of GU’s gym, dorms, and the John Thompson Center. According to tradition they were an extended family/ies of rag pickers and junk dealers, who had lived there for many years, and who had to be compensated bu GU when the gym was built in about 1950, because they had acquired squatters’ rights. The wooded area to the north (below) the old buildings of the main campus was a series of rustic woodland paths and by-ways known to the students as “The Walks.” The trees were all cut, the stream beds buried, the hills and ravines graded and leveled, and buildings now stand on the site.
Remember when you claimed that GU was moving the medical school to Virginia? And then when you were told it wasn’t true, you refused to correct your post?
And what’s unfortunate about a gated community? Given the crime wave and pandemic, gates seem like a necessity. I believe Dumbarton Oaks has gates, and you don’t seem to consider that “unfortunate.”
That sounds like Asuka! It’s been a long time, how you been!