Save the trees nestled around Kenan Stadium

TO THE EDITOR:

On Friday, May 7, while delivering Sunday’s commencement programs to the Kenan Football Center, I had the opportunity to gaze out from the 5th floor addition onto the splendid view of the east end of Kenan Stadium with those magnificent green curtains of trees framing the Field House and the vista beyond the Rams Head Center.

To many fans and alumni, those stately hardwoods and tall pines shading the east end of the stadium are the classic hallmark of the football experience in Chapel Hill as much as the Bell Tower looming at the west end.

Sadly, before this letter is printed, the green curtain of oak and pine may have already been ripped down as so many other noble campus trees before in the name of progress. The animated videos on www.newkenan.com tout the advantages of the new “Blue Zone” and the excitement of “getting as close to the game without a helmet” for the enhanced fan experience.

On the way out from my delivery, I noticed in one of the last remaining memorabilia cases to have survived into the Davis era the following newspaper quote from the Greensboro Daily News, 1927 Dedication Day editorial for Kenan Stadium: “College Football’s Most Beautiful Setting,” which I quote before it, too, is removed from memory in the rush to greatness:

“Those who have designed and built this structure have had a high sense of the fitness of things. Its location is more than merely suitable: it is well nigh perfect.

“It would be so anywhere, but it is peculiarly so in Chapel Hill, fitting as it does in the essential spirit of the University Community. For the stadium rests, not in the midst of the streets and buildings and people and things, but in the heart of the hills and trees.

“It is completely surrounded by nature herself; and man-made though it is, it fits into, and becomes a part of, the surroundings. It belongs to the hills, and the woodland, and curiously enough they seem to belong to it.”

F. Marion Redd ’67
UNC Printing Services