UNIVERSITY COMPLETES DEAL FOR NAVAL RADIO DRILL HALL

It was announced last night that the University has completed the purchase from the Navy Department of the large drill hall formerly used by the Naval Radio School while it was in session at Cambridge during the war. Negotiations for this purchase have been under way for some time.

The drill hall will at once be turned over to the newly established Harvard Engineering School for use as a laboratory for mechanical engineering. It is a large building, 280 feet long and 100 feet wide, with a power house immediately adjacent to it, and when fitted out will offer unusually ample facilities for laboratory work in mechanical engineering. It will also enable the electrical laboratories located in Pierce Hall to more than double their present capacity, and will increase as well the laboratory facilities in sanitary engineering and metallurgy.

The building stands on the so-called Palfrey Estate, on Oxford street, Cambridge, just north of Conant Hall. It is expected that the equipment will be fully installed before the beginning, next September, of the first full academic year of the Engineering School; which was opened last autumn as a result of the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court that the funds of the Gordon McKay bequest could not be used jointly by Harvard and the Institute of Technology.