HANOVER — In his indispensable guide to the architecture of Dartmouth College, Scott Meacham wrote one of the book’s longest entries about the Hopkins Center for the Arts.

Dartmouth students, faculty and leaders recognized the need for some kind of student center in the late 1920s, Meacham wrote. The college’s own arts productions, including an annual Interfraternity Play Contest, had outgrown Webster Hall — then an awkward opera house, now the home of Rauner Library — and Robinson Hall’s Little Theatre.

Eminent architect Jens Larson twice drew up plans for a massive arts center in the style of existing campus buildings, but both plans were put off, first by World War II and then by the Korean War.

By 1955, the project’s two main movers got to work: Nelson Rockefeller, a 1930 Dartmouth graduate and future governor of New York, and architect Wallace Harrison, Rockefeller’s cousin by marriage and a leading modernist.

Dartmouth unveiled plans last month for an $88 million renovation and expansion of the Hopkins Center that has been years in the making.

The original construction, which opened in 1962, was momentous for the college, Hanover and the Upper Valley.

It cost $7.5 million to build the Hopkins Center. That’s around $71.4 million in today’s dollars.

Harrison’s plan for a comprehensive arts center shuttered the south end of College Street and remade the block between the green and Lebanon Street. As Meacham describes it, the Hopkins Center became a crossroads that brought together the college, the community, the arts and the wider public.

“Functionally,” Meacham wrote in The Campus Guide: Dartmouth College, “the Hop is often compared to a customs checkpoint: if the college is one country and the town another, then the Hop is the border crossing, and it does manage to form a transition that architect William Rawn called ‘one of the most seamless connections between city and campus’ of any college.”

That description fits with how Nora Jacobson first experienced the Hopkins Center. She was 8 when her family moved to France, before the Hop was built, and 15 when they moved back to Norwich in 1968. The Hop’s openness made it a magnet for Hanover High School students.

“It was like a second home to us,” Jacobson said.

The Top of the Hop, the big lounge with tall windows looking out on the green, was like an oversized living room, and the snack bar served up “these great, thick shakes,” she said.

Coming back from Paris, Jacobson watched films from the French New Wave in Spaulding Auditorium, “sitting in this huge expanse of darkness.”

The Hopkins Center differed in so many ways from Dartmouth’s other buildings and how they were used that it’s hard to account for or describe.

“If you want to know what I think of it, look around you,” Harrison, who would go on to design the Metropolitan Opera in New York, told the audience, at the opening ceremony on Nov. 8, 1962.

“A building is either a clean building or a mess, and this one will never have any marks on it,” he added.

Rockefeller called the Hop “a sign of an awakening of America to the importance of the arts.”

It also heralded a change in how audiences encountered the arts.

Prior to the Hop, Upper Valley residents would have experienced performing arts in their local town or grange halls or at the opera houses in Lebanon, Claremont and White River Junction. And the performers would have been their families and neighbors.

“We were all pretty much dependent on the community,” Helen Taylor Davidson said.

Her parents met during the Depression when her mother came to Meriden to work with the village’s Howard Hart Players and her father, an English teacher and theater director at Windsor High School, picked up his future wife at the train station in Windsor.

Davidson took voice lessons in Hanover in the late ‘60s and there were regular noontime concerts at the Hop.

Community-oriented performances, particularly theater, continued after the Hop opened, Davidson said. She performed in a musical in Hanover’s Congregational Church on College Street, but she also sang in a performance of the first act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Hopkins Center.

The Hop still mixes college and community performances with touring productions from global artists. Some of those visitors got their start at the Hop, most notably the dance ensemble Pilobolus, founded at Dartmouth in the early 1970s.

Part of the rationale for the proposed expansion is to provide more space for students to develop their own work before heading out into the wider world. Presumably, they’ll come back to the campus crossroads that gave them room to run.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

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