The Bowne Memorial Gateway renovation in progress.

One of several dozen figures on the gate.

Makeover might be too strong a word for it, but Drew’s old gateway looks like it spent the summer at a spa. Scaffolding came down early this fall to reveal a clean, crisp-looking gate, its Collegiate Style grandeur restored.

John Lindner, the owner of Union Stone Cleaning and Restoration, the company Drew hired for the restoration, tells me that environmental damage to the 1921 gate stretched back decades. “It had water infiltration from the 1950s as far as I can tell looking through photo archives,” he says.

The company washed the gate five times, redid the pointing and reproduced some of the cast-concrete columns and figures, such as the Virgin Mary, that had been worn down over the years from the stress of water freezing and thawing, corrosive minerals and exhaust from traffic on Rte. 124.

What I found most intriguing was that the gate, now a campus icon, wasn’t always so revered. When it was proposed to replace the gate from the original Gibbons estate, it was met with vehement resistance from both students and town residents. In his book The University in the Forest, John Cunningham C’38 describes the intensity of the response: “Replacement of the gatehouses provoked far more indignation than another sign of a new day: elimination of Hebrew as a required course of study.”—Renée Olson, Editor, Drew Magazine