Click here to view the embedded video.

The 1-minute, 9-second video begins with the dismantling of the old grandstand and concludes with the field’s dedication on Oct. 9 during the football team’s Parents & Family Weekend home opener vs. Williams.

The video’s still images were taken by a digital SLR camera mounted on a tripod in a second-story storage room in New Commons. Starting back on May 28, the camera took a picture every seven minutes, each of which was fed to an iMac close by.

To produce the video, Scott Tiner and Colin Kelley of the Digital Media Center selected a subset of the 23,000-plus pictures, eliminating idle stretches, such as weekends.

View images of the time-lapse setup at Garcelon Field by clicking the thumbnails below.

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See a WCSH-TV report about the Garcelon Field project.

The big news in the Garcelon Field renovation these days, of course, is the installation of the FieldTurf playing surface.

The intensely green synthetic grass was rolled out in big strips starting Aug. 11. It was a very hands-on process involving a big front-end loader and a squad of big guys. They used big clamps to wrangle the strips into place and a big pneumatic gun to stitch them together. Laying down the yard-line numbers finished off what can only be described as a big job.

What comes next is the spreading of a mix of processed rubber particles and sand over the carpet of synthetic grass. That could start as early as today, says Pam Wichroski, director of capital planning and construction at Bates. (Mike Gustin, our usual contact for Garcelon Field, was out of the office this week.)

Proprietary to the FieldTurf brand, this infill gives the synthetic turf a playing quality that the manufacturer describes as “forgiving.” Mostly sand at the bottom and mostly rubber particles on top, the sand-rubber mix is both stable and shock-absorbent in a way that protects athletes from impacts and torques that could otherwise cause injury.

Outside the fence, footings for the Musco field lights have been poured and backfilled. Sleeves for the flagpoles will be installed the week of Aug. 21 — and on that Tuesday, Wichroski added, the scoreboard and the two 30-second play clocks will be erected.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch live video from Garcelon Field.:

Read about Bates’s latest student residence and the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls. And here’s the plan for the Garcelon Field project.

A 19th-century house is Bates’ newest student residence, the green carpet is rolled out at Garcelon Field and Campus Construction Update is beaming as the steelwork continues at Hedge and Roger Williams halls:

This fall, 23 Bates students will find themselves studying, socializing and sleeping inside a lesson in local architectural history. Acquired by Bates in 2009, the large brick house at 10 Frye St. is the latest addition to the college’s stock of student residences. But it’s one of the older buildings in the fleet, dating to 1873. Read more about 10 Frye St.

The big news in the Garcelon Field renovation these days, of course, is the installation of the FieldTurf playing surface. Read more about the renovation of Garcelon Field.

As this was written, on Aug. 20, Hedge Hall was something to watch as a crane swung long steel beams across the blue sky toward the building. There’s plenty of new steel in Hedge already, but the creation of the building’s framework will become more of a spectator sport as it increasingly happens outside the building’s shell. Read more about the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Even forewarned, it was shocking to arrive at work on June 3 to find the Garcelon Field grandstand succumbing, after 71 years, to the force of machines.

Power shovels stood by, engines idling, while a man with a chainsaw went up and down slicing up the boards on which happy Bobcat fans used to park their fundaments. Underneath the stands, another worker picked up the pieces and pitched them into an Almighty Waste container. Rain poured down.

A grim scene, for sure — but let’s put it in terms of breakfast: You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the omelette we’re talking about is causing big excitement among fans of Bates athletics.

It will be served up in October: a fully renovated Garcelon Field complete with new lights, a modern FieldTurf playing surface and, yes, nice new bleachers seating 1,500.

Watch live video from Garcelon Field. Text continues below the video:

The day the grandstand demolition was started, general contractor R.A.D. Sports of Rockland, Mass., also began rototilling the Garcelon turf, drawing flocks of birds to snarfle down the exposed worms. The first of several steps in preparing the field for the FieldTurf, the rototilling made it easier to strip away the existing natural turf (which has been stockpiled at the college’s Strawberry Avenue storage facility and will be recycled).

Since then, workers have continued to strip away soil and underlying sand — getting it down to the subgrade, as Gustin explains. Next, says Gustin, the PVC pipes that have been draining the field since its last renovation, back in the 1980s, will be yanked out.

A different drain has got to go, too: a very old clay pipe, running beneath Garcelon’s own drainage lines, that carries stormwater from the baseball field into Lake Andrews, crossing Central Avenue and Garcelon Field in the process. It will be replaced with a new 15-inch pipe routed near the New Commons Building and around Garcelon.

With all these old pipes, says Gustin, “we don’t want to take the chance that some of them could collapse and cause a depression in our new field.”

Also being extracted are electrical conduits, including one that connected the press box with the field. This intercom setup used headsets that allowed assistant coaches in the press box to view the action from an elevated perspective and relay plays down to the head coaches on ground level. In the days before electricity, pigeons were used to carry this vital information, but now, of course, it’s all wireless.

Once all the hardware is out of the ground, the field will be layered up again: first with a foot of gravel, probably by the 18th; then a geotextile layer that helps stabilize the whole works; and next a 15-inch thickness of crushed stone with new drainage pipes embedded in it.

Finally the FieldTurf will be installed. Unlike older artificial playing surfaces, this isn’t a matter of rolling out a big carpet of stuff and calling it good. Installing FieldTurf, instead, starts with placing a matrix of artificial grass and then filling it to a certain depth with a sand and rubber-particle mixture that affords good playing qualities. Gustin predicts late July for this final layer.

Read about progress in the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

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Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at this E-mail, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

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Created in 1899 with the help of students who wielded shovels and axes to clear pastureland, historic Garcelon Field will get a major facelift this summer thanks to a similar cooperative venture, this time between the College and its donors.

Approved by the Bates Board of Trustees in May, the project will transform the natural grass football field into a FieldTurf facility by the start of the 2010–11 academic year. Lights and a new grandstand and press box will be in place by October.

• Watch live video from Garcelon Field.

A brief groundbreaking ceremony will take place at 4 p.m. on June 12 during Reunion Weekend near the south end zone of Garcelon Field, adjacent to New Commons.

In a campus announcement May 20, President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said that trustee approval depended on the project being both “fully donor-funded” and in sync with the College’s ongoing facilities planning effort, which will promises new residence halls in the Garcelon Field area in the coming years, among other long-range projects.

With $1.68 million already raised toward the $2.6 million cost of the project, trustees voted to begin construction while fundraisers work to close the remaining dollar gap.

“The Garcelon Field Project has afforded us a welcome opportunity to carry out an initiative entirely funded by donors,” Hansen wrote. (Typically, college construction projects are funded by a mix of resources that include gifts by alumni, parents and friends as one component.)

The Garcelon Field Project

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Bates field hockey will continue to use the AstroTurf surface at Campus Avenue Field, installed in 2000.

The specific FieldTurf surface at Garcelon will be Prestige Duraspine Monofilament. Like other current-generation synthetic surfaces, FieldTurf is considered better than AstroTurf because it features synthetic grass-like blades that are cushioned, or “in-filled,” with sand and rubber granules from recycled tires.

In the 2000s, schools and colleges increasingly turned to synthetic turf fields because they could be used much more often, and retain their playability better, than natural grass fields while demanding less maintenance and no mowing or fertilizing. (The New England Patriots famously replaced their grass football surface with FieldTurf between home dates in November 2006.)

Bates becomes the fifth member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference to install FieldTurf for football, joining Trinity (2002), Middlebury (2008), Colby (2008) and Hamilton (2009). All NESCAC schools have at least one artificial turf field for one or more of their varsity programs.

“In its current condition, the old football field does not meet the standards of excellence we hope to attain in all we do at Bates.”

Since the 1980s, the Garcelon Field area has evolved from an athletics quadrant into more of a campus crossroads.

Near the football field’s north end zone is the Residential Village (1992), while Pettengill Hall (1999) is just to the west. The New Commons Building (2008) sits a few yards from the south end zone, close enough that a net protects its windows from extra-point and field goal attempts. Nearby, two historic buildings of Garcelon’s vintage, Hedge Hall (1890) and Roger Williams Hall (1895), are being renovated and expanded for new academic use.

“In its current condition, the old football field does not meet the standards of excellence we hope to attain in all we do at Bates,” Hansen wrote, and “it does not complement the state-of-the-art academic and campus life buildings in the surrounding area…. In completing that quadrant of our campus, we will further reveal to our prospective students and their families Bates’ commitment to high-quality and well-integrated facilities.”

Lewiston Sun Journal writer Kalle Oakes echoed this theme when he wrote about the project after it gained approval from the planning board. “Stuck in somewhat of a time warp, even as it rests in one of the most visible locations on campus, Garcelon Field is in line for its own facelift,” he wrote.

Garcelon Field debuted in September 1899 after a spring and summer of hard work that involved Bates students who helped to turn the “rough uncouth pasture,” in the words of The Bates Student, into an athletics complex featuring a football field, baseball diamond, quarter-mile track and tennis courts.

Forgoing their “regular recitation work,” students helped clear the land and set cedar posts around the field. Their “resulting blisters and lameness,” the Student noted, was “partially compensated for by the good things to eat and drink, served them in the society rooms by the young ladies of their respective classes.”

Garcelon Field is considered to be among the 10 oldest college football fields in the U.S., and fields at NESCAC member colleges occupy six of the top 10 spots.