History
Officially opened in September 1959, Quincy House symbolizes the new Harvard. As a part of the Edward Harkness bequest, it was the first House to be built after construction of the original seven river Houses. Three buildings currently house Quincy House students: Old Quincy, New Quincy, and 20 DeWolfe Street.
The older of the sections of Quincy House, Old Quincy or Increase Mather Hall, originally named for early Harvard president Increase Mather, was part of Harvard's Leverett House until 1960. Constructed in 1929-30 during Abbott Lawrence Lowell's university presidency, it is a neo-Georgian building with finely detailed suites, high ceilings, carved moldings and fireplaces. Until the construction of New Quincy necessitated their removal, the now open east side was enclosed by a one-story range of squash courts. Beginning in the summer of 2012 Old Quincy is being renovated as the pilot project in a college-wide House renewal program.
Designed by the Boston firm of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson, and Abbott, New Quincy is a modern eight-story high-rise with views of its more traditional neighbors. It consists of a two-story commons wing along Mt. Auburn Street, a nine-story main residence unit with split level suites having splendid views, and the raised, glass-walled House Library, nicknamed "the Qube", the placement of which adds a second interior court to the series of courtyards and gardens that are a distinctive part of the House.
The 20 DeWolfe Street residence hall is a brick structure with a double mansard roof of lead-coated copper. The 10 and 20 DeWolfe Street residences are shared with Leverett House and Kirkland House.
In the fall of 2012, construction on Old Quincy begin as part of a University-wide housing project.
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“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)