Flashes of Panic

I noticed the other week that access to the main quad at The College was closed off, so on Wednesday evening I persuaded A. to walk over to the campus with me and take a look.

The campus has been under heavy construction since shortly after I moved back up here. They call it the “residential master plan,” with a few goals including housing all first-year students on the Quad (which is the picture-perfect New England private school scene, except for the sixties-ugly library) and opening up more housing for roughly the same number of students; fewer one-room doubles and two-room triples, I suppose. Last year they gutted and retrofitted Williston Hall, which was once where I took Logic; this year they redid (again) North and South Colleges, the two oldest buildings on campus. (I lived in South my first and third years.) They also demolished Milliken dorm and built two new dorms at the southeast corner of the campus, which I believe were called Y Dorm and Z Dorm in Room Draw, but are now King and Wieland.

(When I was an undergrad, “A Dorm” and “B Dorm” made the transition to Jenkins and Taplin; I can remember which was A and which was B, but not which one got which name. Also, “New Dorm” became “Cohan,” but that stuck a bit better.)

With those projects completed (I think North and South are open now, they’ve done the landscaping,) the really monumental change started this month, once the Alumni were gone. They’ve demolished James and Stearns, the two blocks on the quad which, between them, housed more than half of each incoming class, mostly in two-room triples.

I don’t think anyone will cry over those dorms. The word I was tempted to use was “kennels.” They were close, tiny, and densely packed. An article in the alumni magazine referred to them as “rat-holes” and the atmosphere was somewhat Darwinian. The ceilings were low, the rooms were small (one was crammed with a bunk-bed and a single plus three dressers, the other with three desks and maybe a closet) and the room groups were picked by sadists in the Housing office. Thing was, if you lived there (I didn’t—I was in South) you really got to know your classmates. You formed up with room-groups you sometimes held on to until graduation, or you discovered a lot of things (and people) you’d want to avoid in your next three years.

People looked on those dorms like boot camp: a profoundly unpleasant experience that strongly affected their lives.

Now they’re gone, and for the next year the replacements will be under construction. (The incoming first-years in fall ‘05 will be the first to live there.) I snapped a few shots, and I’ve included one in the “extended” entry. It looks, from the sign, like the replacements will look a lot like James and Stearns; maybe they’ll even keep the names. But they look like they’ll be nicer. Those of us who came before can lord it over the young ‘uns. “Why, back in our day, James and Stearns were nasty, brutish, and short!”