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captainsblogI had a dream the other night about being back in my freshman college dorm. Or possibly it was one of the five other identical cookie-cutter cinderblock castles plopped along with it behind the Gothic towers of Cornell's west campus following WWII. They were poorly designed, had few amenities, and everybody hated them, being occupied only by the freshmen forced to live there. Though all but mine were named for some generou$ donor (and even mine got a moniker on it sometime long after I left), they were universally referred to as "U-Halls," which they pretty much resembled except the ones on wheels had better acoustics.
It was enough of a revived memory for me to check some Cornell sites and see what had become of them. I remember reading, years ago, that the administration wanted to make that part of the campus residences more multi-aged and not the freshman pit (literally- the area between the six structures was known as the "Dust Bowl") that it had always been. Yet how would they do that, I wondered, when the dorms themselves sucked so much?
Yesterday, I got my answer: they tore them down. New, improved and doubtlessly full-of-new-naming rights "Houses" are rising in their place.
While there's no love lost for the buildings themselves, I made friendships in those halls which still endure, and got pointed in directions in which I still continue. It amazes me that this bunch can send me 8 million emails about sports functions, band functions, regional alumni functions, class year functions, probably function functions if I'd been a math major, but nothing about "oh, by the way, we listened to your complaints about ugly campus architecture and got rid of six of the biggest offenders." (Apparently, Rand Hall, another of the oldest of the ugly buildings on campus and ironically home to the College of Architecture, has also been on the death watch in recent years.)
Just as ironic was about the only photographic reference I could find to the legacy of the demolished U-Halls themselves: this picture, from the campus administration's weekly newspaper, which we on the independent daily referred to as either Pravda or the Cornell Comical:
Professor Isaac Kramnick displays newspaper clippings from when the University Hall dorms were built. The U-Halls were demolished to make way for the new West Campus House System.
Providing the irony is that Kramnick was one of my first-semester professors, of the infamously difficult Government 161 course, which he was still teaching there as of two springs ago, the reading list for which was (and still is) basically the entirety of Dead White Men writings from the previous 2100 years. Plato's Republic. Machiavelli's Prince. Locke and Hobbes. Rousseau and Mill. Ending with Marx (Karl, not Harpo). Every one of which I actually read, in its entirety, yellow highlighter burrowing through to the mattresses of the bunk beds in the basement study lounge at 2 in the morning, in the U-Hall whose destruction he apparently presided over 30-odd years later.
Their fate, over a mere half a century of university history? Nasty, brutish and short.
----
Closer to home than even that was news which Eleanor got secondhand yesterday and was confirmed in person for me today: Mike and Penny, two of our dearest friends from church, are leaving the area. Mike flies for one of the airlines which occasionally sees fit to land a plane here, and they are shutting down at least their locally based pilot services as of the end of the year. They, along with their just-turned-two-year-old girl and her barely two-month-old baby sister, will be relocating to Milwaukee, his new base of operations, soon after the first of the year. Penny and the girls will join Mike as soon as their house is sold, which they're required to handle on their time and at their risk. Much as a 10% unemployment rate sucks, the cost of continued employment is sometimes even qualitatively higher than that. They have no family there that I know of (Mike grew up here, Penny in Minnesota), and I'm guessing it's just a matter of corporate convenience that will probably affect a carrier's bottom line by, oh, 0.000000 something percent.
It may be good to be the King, but being a pawn? Not so much.
----
One hour to Dexter. I'm guessing it may not be good to be Arthur Mitchell in about two.
It was enough of a revived memory for me to check some Cornell sites and see what had become of them. I remember reading, years ago, that the administration wanted to make that part of the campus residences more multi-aged and not the freshman pit (literally- the area between the six structures was known as the "Dust Bowl") that it had always been. Yet how would they do that, I wondered, when the dorms themselves sucked so much?
Yesterday, I got my answer: they tore them down. New, improved and doubtlessly full-of-new-naming rights "Houses" are rising in their place.
While there's no love lost for the buildings themselves, I made friendships in those halls which still endure, and got pointed in directions in which I still continue. It amazes me that this bunch can send me 8 million emails about sports functions, band functions, regional alumni functions, class year functions, probably function functions if I'd been a math major, but nothing about "oh, by the way, we listened to your complaints about ugly campus architecture and got rid of six of the biggest offenders." (Apparently, Rand Hall, another of the oldest of the ugly buildings on campus and ironically home to the College of Architecture, has also been on the death watch in recent years.)
Just as ironic was about the only photographic reference I could find to the legacy of the demolished U-Halls themselves: this picture, from the campus administration's weekly newspaper, which we on the independent daily referred to as either Pravda or the Cornell Comical:
Professor Isaac Kramnick displays newspaper clippings from when the University Hall dorms were built. The U-Halls were demolished to make way for the new West Campus House System.
Providing the irony is that Kramnick was one of my first-semester professors, of the infamously difficult Government 161 course, which he was still teaching there as of two springs ago, the reading list for which was (and still is) basically the entirety of Dead White Men writings from the previous 2100 years. Plato's Republic. Machiavelli's Prince. Locke and Hobbes. Rousseau and Mill. Ending with Marx (Karl, not Harpo). Every one of which I actually read, in its entirety, yellow highlighter burrowing through to the mattresses of the bunk beds in the basement study lounge at 2 in the morning, in the U-Hall whose destruction he apparently presided over 30-odd years later.
Their fate, over a mere half a century of university history? Nasty, brutish and short.
----
Closer to home than even that was news which Eleanor got secondhand yesterday and was confirmed in person for me today: Mike and Penny, two of our dearest friends from church, are leaving the area. Mike flies for one of the airlines which occasionally sees fit to land a plane here, and they are shutting down at least their locally based pilot services as of the end of the year. They, along with their just-turned-two-year-old girl and her barely two-month-old baby sister, will be relocating to Milwaukee, his new base of operations, soon after the first of the year. Penny and the girls will join Mike as soon as their house is sold, which they're required to handle on their time and at their risk. Much as a 10% unemployment rate sucks, the cost of continued employment is sometimes even qualitatively higher than that. They have no family there that I know of (Mike grew up here, Penny in Minnesota), and I'm guessing it's just a matter of corporate convenience that will probably affect a carrier's bottom line by, oh, 0.000000 something percent.
It may be good to be the King, but being a pawn? Not so much.
----
One hour to Dexter. I'm guessing it may not be good to be Arthur Mitchell in about two.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-07 01:52 am (UTC)They've been saying since I was a freshman that Rand Hall was coming down. I'll believe it when the Dragon looms over the demolition site & not before.
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Date: 2009-12-08 11:29 am (UTC)