Dudley Community is an alternative to Harvard College's 12 Houses. The Dudley Community serves nonresident undergraduate students, visiting undergraduate students, and undergraduates living in the Dudley Co-op. In 2019, the Dudley Community was formed, reflecting the administrative split between the undergraduate and graduate programs that were under Dudley House since 1991. The student center for the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Science is based in Lehman Hall; the building houses a dining hall, library, game room, computer lab, coffee shop, lockers, and common rooms. Affiliated undergraduates have access to Dudley House advisers, programs, intramural athletics, and organized social events.
History
A decentralized commuter center was established in 1935 called Dudley Hall, named after the former Governor of Massachusetts Bay ColonyThomas Dudley. Coinciding with the founding of the Dudley Co-operative Society —Harvard's off-campus cooperative housing dormitory—it was renamed Dudley House and officially became part of the Harvard House system in 1958. It moved from Dunster Street to the Ambassador Hotel on Cambridge Street in 1963. Dudley House consolidated operations and moved to its current location at Lehman Hall in the southwest corner of Harvard Yard in 1967. In 1961, the Dudley House dining hall was the first at Harvard to gocoeducational, which was an experiment that paved the way for the University's eventual merger with Radcliffe College.
Lehman Hall
Lehman Hall is a Georgian-revival building by Charles Coolidge completed in 1925 as part of Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's program to "cloister" Harvard Yard. The building occupies the site on which the second, third, and fourth meetinghouses of The First Parish in Cambridge had been built. The site became Harvard property in 1833. Named for donor Arthur Lehman and his wife Adele, its exterior "is a modified example of the early New Englandcounting house." In keeping with its original function as the home of Harvard's Bursar's Office – for part of which time it was known as "The Counting House" – its "heroic parade of pilasters, a bit overblown admittedly, doubtless intended to mark the principal frontispiece, as Lehman is, of Yard to Harvard Square| Square". Its "main chamber reaches practically the entire height of the building, is finished in delicately modeled cream plaster... an extraordinarily light, cheerily simple room. A balcony reaches about part of its upper circumference." Bainbridge Bunting wrote that its "public function is announced by an architectural frontispiece of giant pilasters and arched windows repeated on both major elevations. The building's mass also is sufficient to announce its official role and to define the triangular open space on its east side, although the pilasters are out of scale with other buildings in the Yard." The plaza immediately in front of its Yard-facing elevation once had a sculpture by Henry Moore.
