Campus History: I Promise This Is Interesting
January 2021
While I wrote this in early quarantine, in a way, this has been a work in progress since before I came to Berkeley. I want it to grow some more before I graduate, so please let me know what I’ve left out (:
If you’re anything like me, the first thing you did when you got into Berkeley was check out the campus seismic report. It pretty much confirmed what we already knew, which is that Evans is a death trap and Edwards Track Stadium is as fragile as it is ugly. I wouldn’t be putting any money on Davis or Campus Parking Garage either, unless you find yourself playing a game of virtual Jenga with campus buildings and need a hint as to which ones are going to crumble first.
I’m what you might call a Wikipedia historian. I’ve got a pretty good breadth of knowledge when it comes to Berkeley history, but I’ll fall apart if you ask me to go any deeper than this, so please don’t. Most of my info is from the historic structure reports that I like reading on the toilet. I find that that sort of information keeps me engaged for just the right amount of time. Some of it is also from berkeleyheritage.com, The Daily Cal, and the occasional old Berkeley blog. It’s information that’s out there for everybody if you too find yourself tired of the reddit-email-naptime spiral.
I’m sure I could learn a lot more about deep UC history if I decided to use the campus resources that I pay dearly for, but I’m only here for the fast facts. With that, I present to you:
Everything I have learned about the Berkeley campus (except the basic stuff)
Classical Core—this will be the slowest part, but you need it for context
One thing you should know about the campus is that the Hearst family built it out of spite. They had a rivalry with the Stanfords, and around the turn of the century noticed that Leland Stanford JUNIOR University was noticeably not bad looking. To retaliate they decided to funnel their money into the little University of California, which was mostly a miscellaneous collection of buildings.
Phoebe Hearst staged an international design contest for the new campus plan, which some French guy won (for the curious, here are some of the other design entries). He didn’t actually want to visit the sinful land of California, so he was eventually dropped from the contract and instead John Galen Howard ended up designing most of what we think of as Berkeley’s “classical core”. You can pretty easily identify these buildings: they’re the Beaux-Arts, neoclassical-style buildings that look good on brochures (as opposed to the corrugated steel portables behind Barrows).
Besides the buildings I’ll be referencing below, he also had a hand in designing the University Mansion, Bancroft Library, The Greek Theatre, Wellman, Hilgard, Giannini, and some of the other elegant but often overlooked buildings that you’ll find scattered on the northern part of campus.
Campanile
Most people know a thing or two about the Campanile, but I don’t think enough people appreciate the fact that we have a family of peregrine falcons that lives at the top. The chicks currently look like roasted cornish game hen covered in dryer lint; I highly advise checking them out on the Cal Falcons webcam, which is what I watch now instead of Youtube. One of the former chicks lives on Alcatraz. Cal alums end up in all sorts of places.
You can take lessons to play on the carillon--most of the songs that you hear are performed by students--and according to Emma our carillon program is one of the most active in the world. Berkeley also has a pretty impressive collection of antique instruments, like lutes and harpsichords, that music majors sometimes play. The bell that you hear each day tolling the hours is the “Great Bear Bell”, and is engraved with Ursa Major. We started off with 12 bells, but now we have 61, which is 13 more than Stanford (their bells were secondhand, previously rejected from the Washington National Cathedral).
Another thing we did that Stanford didn’t was fill our tower with fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits.
Next to the Campanile is the Esplanade, which is full of pollarded London Plane trees. I think they’re hideous but I can appreciate the history--Aristotle was said to have taught his students under the same types of trees, and Berkeley the city was originally conceived as an “Athens of the West”. Personally, I don’t hang out on the Esplanade because occasionally I’ve seen the tree limbs, which at this point are blunted and kind of tragic looking, break off, and they weigh more than enough to split my skull.
Sather Gate
Though I never really notice them, the bas-relief panels at the base of the gate that depict nude muses were originally taken to be quite salacious. Berkeley’s always been Berkeley, but I guess that it hasn’t always been the Berkeley of the Annual Naked Run. Anyways, the muses are supposed to represent Berkeley’s focus on law, letters, medicine, mining, agriculture, architecture, art, and electricity. The gate also marks where Telegraph Avenue once ended, until the University got greedy.
Hearst Mining
This was an actual mining school back in its day, because George Hearst made his original fortune in mining and decided that he wanted to pay it forward. As you can guess, the mining school has remained extremely relevant. Today it’s just an engineering building. But unlike a lot of the classical revival buildings on campus, the interior of this one is just as stunning as the exterior, and it’s managed to stay that way even though we don’t have millionaires financing us anymore (we’ll see how long that lasts).
There’s an actual mine shaft to the right of the building, which was dug by students as a class project in the early 20th century. It was closed in 1938 after an earthquake collapsed part of it, but it’s still sometimes used to monitor the Hayward Fault. It’s all boarded up now and pretty unassuming, but you can still look through the grate and see somewhat far inside. It’s eerie, looking into the fault that will someday probably destroy my home.
Durant Hall
This building hands down has the best bathroom on campus, but I’m not going to tell you how to get there, because I don’t trust you.
This used to be the law school and imo it's one of the prettiest little buildings on campus. I’m not sure what it's actually used for (besides graduate research and collaboration on the bottom floor), but there used to be a big lovely reading room on the upper level. It’s mostly administrative spaces up there now, which is a shame. Sometimes I’ll just stand in the hall and it feels sort of wrong, but I see no reason why I can’t be up there too. It’s much prettier inside than most academic buildings are.
Also, I’m not going to make a separate entry for it, but California Hall was the OG Wheeler, in that it had a big auditorium and a lot of humanities departments were housed in it.
Bacon Hall
Look it up; you’ll be sad it doesn’t still exist. This was the original library building, and it stood for several decades at the primary campus library (the main libraries that we think of today weren’t actually a part of Howard’s plan for the campus). It was razed in 1961 to make room for Birge, which is a travesty.
Wheeler Oak & Meg’s Opinion on Campus Pruning Jobs
The Wheeler Oak was a beloved campus tree. When it died they gave it a plaque and planted a new one and none of the students today know or care. I wish people still had that kind of respect for trees. Some of the campus “pruning” jobs that I see make me want to cry. Tree limbs are like arms--they can recover from scratches, but they don’t just grow back after you hack them off.
The only interesting fact that I have about Wheeler Hall is that when they renovated it they found some old WWI-era trash that's now housed in the Bancroft library. Some things they found: old newspapers, a loyalty oath directive from the UC President’s office, essays, a Hershey’s chocolate wrapper, and general war propaganda.
The doors on the fourth floor are still in their original oak. My English professors’ offices are on that level!
Also notable: a few years ago the power went out in Wheeler Auditorium during “Wealth and Poverty”, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s class and one of the most popular electives across the entire school. Rather than dismissing the class, he stood on the steps and hundreds of his students (I’ve taken this class--it maxes out at 800 people) quietly sat on the ground and listened to him finish the lecture. I love this school.
Le Conte
I know woefully little about Berkeley’s scientific achievements, but that doesn’t stop me from taking great pride in them. One thing that I can personally verify though is that Le Conte has one of the worst beautiful-exterior-to-ugly-interior rankings. Inside, it’s mostly scuffed-up walls and cracked linoleum, as well as the most depressing of all of Berkeley’s 26 campus libraries.
Le Conte is the site of the first cyclotron. Nearby in Gilman Room 307--a national historic landmark--plutonium was first identified. More importantly, Le Conte houses the physics department, but for some reason it’s also where they put my English 45A and dreaded Cal in the Capital lectures.
Somewhere on campus, decades ago, we had a “low-temperature laboratory” which sounds pretty cool to me. Other old labs that I think that ought to be remembered: the Radiation Laboratory, the Old Radiation Laboratory, the Virus Laboratory Greenhouse, and the Poultry Husbandry Laboratory. Unofficially, there was also a swimming pool laboratory called HYDRAULICS MODEL BASIN, which came into existence when some professors commandeered one of the gym pools and converted it into a lab.
As long as I’m being grossly vague about this part of campus, in the courtyard of Hildebrand sits the cupola from the old chemistry building, which predates the Hearst plan. It’s sat there for decades like a weird carousel, confusing generations of students. There isn’t a plaque describing it or anything. I love me a good Berkeley plaque, and this was the first time I felt Berkeley really let me down.
Classical Core Auxiliary
The Cabins: Faculty Club & Senior Hall
I think Senior Hall was the very first student union, before Stephens and MLK, but it was only for senior men. Today, it’s where the Order of the Golden Bear, Berkeley’s most elite society and the most perfunctory of all elite societies, meets. I don’t know too much about this building but sometimes when I’m wandering campus at night I’ll look inside and it’s kind of spooky.
Julia Morgan built a twin to Senior Hall specifically for female seniors. They were going to demolish it when they were building the new Haas campus, but instead they ended up cutting it into four pieces and moving them all the way up the hill to the Botanical Gardens, where it’s now used as a reception hall.
Nearby, the Faculty Club is supposed to have a ghost.
North Gate Hall
All the articles that I read about this building talk about how it’s nicknamed “the Ark”, but I can’t help but wonder if that’s just another one of those dead Berkeley traditions that lives on only in guided tours. Like how you’re supposed to enter Doe backward so that the carved bust of Athena won’t steal your knowledge. I think that tradition mostly serves to entertain tour guides. Anyways, it’s probably called “The Ark” because it’s hollow, and its courtyard is covered in brown shingle. It’s a Howard Design, and you can actually see a lot of resemblance between it and one of his most important buildings, which also has a fantastic courtyard: Cloyne Court Hotel.
I used to love studying in the Ark. It’s full of blossoms and vines and there is almost always space to study, which is rare for Berkeley. Until one day I went and everything was covered in yellow orchid aphids. Aphids aren’t afraid of anything, and they don’t respond to shoo-ing. When I try to brush them off, they only smear. You can tell what days I’ve been studying there because it will look like a highlighter exploded all over my course reader.
Hearst Women’s Gymnasium
The Hearst Women’s Gymnasium was presented by William Randolph Hearst in honor of his mother, who was a woman. It was a rare collaboration between Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck, and you can tell--it resembles the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, with its columns and stone urns and intricate courtyards. It took the place of the original Hearst Hall, which burnt down in 1922. Hearst houses the North Pool, easily my favorite pool on campus. It’s made of marble and surrounded by Greek statues. Since it’s open-air, in the early mornings before the sun hits the water you can watch the steam rise and keep time by the Campanile.
When I was a freshman I got an email that the pool was temporarily closed because “a portion of a column fell into the West Pool.” This didn’t come as a surprise, since the gym is pretty badly maintained and spending millions of dollars on it is not a priority for my public university. It’s a shame though, because there are almost no gyms left like it. It really does feel like you’ve stepped right into a decaying version of the 20s, but maybe I’m partial to that kind of thinking since it’s also where I took my swing dancing class. Ian was supposed to take that with me, but he forgot to enroll so I had to take it alone.
The gym is also notable for housing the remains of 12k American Indians. Some are thousands of years old. It’s the second-largest collection of remains besides what’s “owned” by the Smithsonian, and I have to wonder if Berkeley can really justify holding onto them.
Collegiate Gothic: Moses and Stephens
John Galen Howard also designed these buildings under the Hearst Plan, but as they were auxiliary buildings, he designed them in a different style. Stephens was the student union from around the 20s to the late 50s, and Moses hall was originally called Eshleman. Eshleman has always played a partner role to the student union, which is why the name was later transferred to the building on Bancroft near the new student union, but I don’t think that old Eshleman had a boba shop at the bottom of it.
Two of my favorite spots on campus are around here: the Philosophy Library and the patio in the back of Stephens overlooking Strawberry Creek. Whenever I’m forced to film myself for class I’ll do it here. Something about these two spaces feels very distinctly East Coast.
The Multiversity
I read somewhere that we have Chancellor Clark Kerr to thank for the wave of brutalist buildings that ruined the campus aesthetic starting in the mid-60s. He called the newly eclectic campus style the “multiversity”, but I don’t think that really convinced anybody that buildings like Davis or Cory or Tolman had a place next to buildings like Doe, which is considered to be an almost perfect neoclassical specimen. Still, because of the GI Bill he had to do something to accommodate the huge swell in enrollment.
I actually don’t hate brutalism. I think it’s kind of a noble style, even if it isn’t pretty. I feel a mixture of pride and regret when I think of how this era of construction changed the campus’s architectural trajectory, but I don’t think Berkeley would be Berkeley if it were just Beaux-Arts. We’ve always been a collection of traditions and it’s taught me a lot about sorting the gems out of the crud. And I think that this departure from classical tradition is what enabled a lot of the amazing and more recent buildings, like Stanley and Chou Hall and the East Asian Library. But I digress.
Zellerbach Hall
Home of Cal Performances. I actually think it’s a really lovely and strange building. It was built in 1968 and was state-of-the-art, and time has treated it well. Even today, because of how uniquely analog and well-built it is, Zellerbach can stage shows that can no longer be performed anywhere else. Alvin Ailey makes its annual residence here, and Yo-Yo Ma visits each year as well. If you’re a student you get 50% off of all shows, and if you’re me you get 100% and plus-ones, so hit me up. I once sat through a three-hour production of An Enemy of the People that was entirely in German, so I’m pretty much down to see anything.
Wurster
During orientation week it’s common to hear freshmen telling their parents “ironically, that’s the architecture school.” There’s no getting around the fact that it’s kind of an ugly building, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t architecturally interesting (though this seems to be a common refrain when critics defend brutalism).
The guy who was in charge of building it, Wurster, chose three faculty with opposing mindsets to design it. He was too humble to want his name attached to it, but too fickle to actually come up with a name, and so it was just called Wurster. I think he died hating that. He said after its completion that “I wanted it to look like a ruin that no regent would like… It’s absolutely unfinished, uncouth, and brilliantly strong.” And he was right, nobody liked it.
We’re a big deal when it comes to architecture because we were the first school to combine architecture, landscape design, and planning into one school: the College of Environmental Design. Architecture is the hardest major at Berkeley. You have to have an understanding of design, chemistry, physics, and engineering, but, @CS majors, you don’t hear them complaining on Reddit every time they have to turn in an assignment.
Wurster chose to build it with concrete because Yale had also recently done their architecture building in concrete. [Berkeley and Yale actually go way back--a lot of the original faculty were graduates of Yale, and the blue in our color scheme was to recognize this.] The building itself is inside out-y, though not as aggressively as the Lloyd’s building in London. The exposed ductwork, rather than being an aesthetic choice, was to allow the halls to be less cramped. You could say they decided to put all the ugly on the outside instead. Inside there’s a light-filled courtyard (it recalls the courtyard in Northgate Hall, which was the OG architecture building if you recall) and a lovely library. Emma is trying to figure out how the library acquired a facsimile of the Smiling Angel sculpture, so if anybody has any leads let her know.
VLSB
I try not to go into it. This building style is called “Neo-Babylonian” and it’s not a part of the classical core. It also has a t-rex skeleton in it named Osborn.
Misc
South Hall
We all know this is the oldest building on campus and about the little bear carving up on the banister (I always thought it more resembled a homunculus). You may or may not have put together that there also used to be a North Hall, which was razed in 1931 to make room for Doe. Back when this building was built, I think in 1877, you could fit all of Berkeley into two buildings: one for physical sciences, and the other for everything else. Eventually we outsourced our agricultural school to Davis (we had to have one of those, being a land grant college as we were/are) and our inferior students to UCLA, and that’s how all the lesser UC’s came to be.
Sproul
Here’s an anecdote that I liked from Ted Pack’s essay about his time in the co-ops, though I definitely take it with a grain of salt: “Opposition to the war was at the root of most of the student riots. At one point, late in 1969 or early in 1970, there had been at least one riot and one student strike called in each of the previous seven quarters. The standard student "riot" start [sic] with 3,000 students standing around Sproul Plaza at noon to see if anything would happen. 300 policemen would show up just in case something did happen. 50 to 150 hard-core types would throw rocks at the police, who would respond with tear gas, every one would run (some stopping to pitch a rock through a big window) and the next morning the newspapers would report 5,000 students had rioted.”
Sproul also has a famous invisible memorial to free speech on it. Within the bounds specified on the sculpture, anything and everything is legal. People seem to only want to litter in it.
Anthony Hall aka “The Pelican Building”
This building has my favorite backstory. It was commissioned by Earle Anthony, who, when he was a student in the early 1900s, had started a publication called The Pelican. Rube Goldberg was one of the notable alums of the magazine! The Pelican was basically the Hieronymous Squelch of its day, though more widely circulated. “Pelican” was turn-of-the-century slang for a frumpy woman, and not very pc.
Anthony went on to be one of the most important business people in Los Angeles. He brought neon lights to LA and also had something to do with cars. He was a big enough deal that he convinced the Regents to let his pet publication get its own building, even as they were building a student union with offices for campus publications (now Moses and Stephens Halls). Originally he wanted the building to be in the middle of the Eucalyptus Grove or Faculty Glade, but they talked him down from that. He was definitely a personality: I recommend page 46 of this report to get a feel for the writing he put out into the world. He reminds me of me.
Architecturally this is also my favorite building on campus. It’s a Maybeck (you can see the resemblance to the First Church of Christ on Bancroft) and a combination of the New Craftsman style endemic to the Bay Area, with modern touches, like the spiral columns in the front. Because he was afraid his legacy would be overwritten, he covered the building in pelican motifs and there’s an enormous bronze pelican that sits in the front. For years, stealing the narrow part of the beak was a popular prank. You can see where it’s been welded back on several occasions.
The Pelican lost steam by the 70s and was gradually crowded out of the building. Now it’s just used by the Graduate Assembly. I haven’t been able to get in, but I do sometimes study on the patio in the back, which is covered in ivy and stone pelicans.
Campus Tunnels
Sometimes, drawn by the cloying scent of asbestos and lead, I will stand on top of them and just inhale the vapor. The steam is from the heating plant near Haas pavilion and I think it was originally used to heat the campus. I’m not sure what function it performs now. Allegedly students used to use the steam tunnels to get around campus, and in the 60s faculty used them to escape from rioting students (they connect to a lot of major buildings on campus, like Wheeler and the admin buildings). They were open through the 70s until the Unabomber came along and ruined everything. I don’t think he was actually ever in the tunnels, but after him it didn’t seem like such a great thing to have an underground network letting into pretty much any building, and now they’re tough to get into. There are a few people who have blogged about their experiences down there, but it doesn’t sound especially interesting, and the dangers definitely outweigh anything you could discover. The best way to experience the steam tunnels I learned from a houseless person, which is to spread yourself out on top of the grates and block the way of people headed from Dwinelle to VLSB.
That bridge To Nowhere
If you walk from Wheeler towards Strawberry Creek, there’s a little bridge that connects the pavilion to one of the campus power centers. It ends at a barbed-wire gate. There isn’t anything to see there, but you can hang out over the creek and watch it pass under Sather Bridge. Of all the sewers on campus, that one has always been my favorite. There’s also a good view of that tiny wooded amphitheater where you sometimes see people meditating.
I was chased by a skunk onto this bridge once.
Alumni House
I read the historic structure report and it’s just as boring as we thought it was.
Weird Buildings at the Top of Campus
These houses, along Piedmont, used to be residential. They were leftover from an old neighborhood before the land was plotted for UCB. A few of them used to house graduated students. Now they’re historic landmarks and the university can’t get rid of them, so some of them have been converted into departments. They’re honestly kind of spooky. You can climb onto the porches--some of them go up three stories--and look through the windows, and a lot of the rooms look like they haven’t been touched for a decade or so. I swear I saw a floppy disk sitting on a desk in there. It’s hard for me to tell how much of this is just me projecting/disuse due to Covid-19, and how much is actually just facts. I wish I could learn more about them.
What Was Formerly Kroeber Hall
Houses the Hearst Anthropological Museum. The most famous and sad story relating to this museum is of Ishi, who worked there for decades as a custodian and educator. His name meant “man” in the language of his people, the Yahi, of which he was the last. He never told his true name to anyone after he came to Berkeley. You can go to the museum and see the countless arrowheads that he carved while he lived there, helping professors document his culture. That’s one way to put it at least--most of the articles that I read about him have a fairly rosy spin, but it’s hard not to wonder if to most of the professors he worked with, he was more a living specimen than a person. Living among the people who took his land from him, especially all alone, was the last thing he ever wanted to do.
I think that Ishi Court is named for him.
Goldman School of Public Policy
This one used to be a frat. You can tell because 1) it’s off-campus, 2) it’s done in Tudor style and 3) the interior makes no sense. Robert Reich once held open the door for me here!
It used to be the home of Beta Theta Pi, which is notable only for being rivals with the Cloyne Court cooperative. From what I can tell it seems like the rivalry came about because, in terms of demographics, the two houses are antithetical. One account I’ve read puts it this way: “Fraternity men, in the late 1960s, were assumed to be rich, well-dressed, thick necked, thin skinned, racist morons who took easy classes and didn’t care about anything beyond Friday’s keg party. Most of the frat men didn’t fit the stereotype, although the men in the Beta Theta Pi house, directly across the street from Cloyne, did.”
Shenanigans ensued. Once Cloyne put a firehose through one of Beta’s windows and flooded the entire building. In retaliation, the Betas killed all of the Cloyne chickens. Cloyne later tried to get the Berkeley Student Cooperative to just buy the house, but the University beat them to it and turned the building into the Goldman School of Public Policy in 1969. The Betas disappeared, so I guess we won.
Here’s my favorite story I’ve found about the Cloyne-Beta rivalry, from one of the accounts of co-op history:
“One night in summer of ‘56 or ‘57 a few people took this can of grease and spread it on the Betas’ driveway. They then had only one driveway, very steep, which was next to Cloyne. And the grease slowly oozed down onto the sidewalk… This is pledge week. This guy, totally naked, walks along the sidewalk, holding his hands over his vital place, and he suddenly sees this huge flood of grease on the sidewalk. And he looks at it, and he looks around, there’s nobody visible and he goes back about ten feet and he runs and leaps and misses. And he falls naked into this pool of grease. And he rolls around and gets up and staggers off down the street. The street is quiet again.
The next morning the Betas spent three hours burning off the grease.”
Botanical Gardens
These used to be on campus. That’s pretty much all there is in terms of accessible history about the Gardens. We also have a few Amorphophallus titana, which is Latin for “giant misshapen penis”. They have names like “Maladora” and “Trudy”. The last bloom was in November 2017, my first semester. Some people say the class of ‘21 is special because we began our freshman year with a solar eclipse, but honestly I’d be just as thrilled to call us “the class of the corpse flower” and tell all my grandchildren about the magnificent stink that kicked off my college days.
Most of what I love about the Botanical Gardens I can’t express in a quick catalog like this. Last spring (2019 at the time of writing this) I went up almost every week--sometimes walking all the way there from my apartment on Blake and Dana--so I know it well. It might be what I miss most about campus right now.
Strawberry Canyon used to be the home to a pack of captive hyenas. They are no longer there, but the turkeys give me plenty to think about in terms of fauna.
Big C
Your college class used to mean a whole lot more at the start of the 20th century. Frats almost have nothing on the way that sophomores used to haze the incoming class. Somebody decided that the perfect way to put an end to this would be to construct a giant “C” in the hills. In order to pour it, freshmen and sophomores formed a human chain in order to schlep up all the concrete during a downpour (so the story goes, it doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny), and then it was painted yellow. We tell people coming to campus that the night before each Big Game, the C is guarded against Stanford students who might paint it green, but I’m not sure I buy this. I think people just try less these days, and most of our pranks have gone digital, like that site “stanfordrejects.com” that redirects to the Berkeley webpage.
When I read this story I thought about how many weird campus traditions have been lost. For instance, for almost the last century, every semester the carillon has played “The Hanging of Danny Deever” before going silent for Dead Week. I’ve been here for six semesters and I had no idea. There used to be a giant end-of-year bonfire where people cremated their textbooks. Oski was once an actual bear cub. When you became a senior you’d wear your “senior sombrero”, and you got respect for it. Where did these things go? All we have now is UCBMFET and the Cal Band.
California Memorial Stadium
This was… an investment. I think we finally got rid of the debt Berkeley accrued during the 2010 renovation right before covid happened. Since this building is situated on top of a fault, its architecture allows for the fact that it literally stretches a few inches each year. Prior to Memorial Stadium, there was West Field (located where VLSB is now), California Field (where Hearst Gym is—you can still see part of it in the lawn next to the building) and in 1923 then the original stadium was completed on its current site.
Residence Halls
Until 1929 there was no campus housing at all. In 1874 the regents built a grand total of eight cottages, which didn’t go that far. One was incorporated into the Faculty Club as a kitchen. The rest, near the Eucalyptus Grove (which wouldn’t be planted for another eight years), were razed, and I regret that.
Bowles
Bowles, the romanesque castle on the east part of campus, really deserves more than I’m going to be able to write about it here. It’s a residential college in the style of Oxford and Cambridge, and I’ve only been in once, but it’s another one of the rare Berkeley buildings that doesn’t disappoint as soon as you step inside. Like the co-ops, it has its own wack culture and has almost been shut down on numerous occasions for “being an incubator of student disorder.” They’ve been doing the same luau barbecue at the end of each semester since the 70s. Out of jealousy, I have a hard time getting deep into the history of places that I don’t live, which is why I regrettably will leave this article as it is and make up for it when I someday write about the co-ops.
The Other Ones
I-House has its own documentary that I haven’t watched. It was a gift from Rockefeller and built in the 30s. The idea behind it was pretty radical because it had men and women and Americans and international students all mixing together. It was actually part of a larger “international house movement” encouraging foreign and domestic students to live together, and Berkeley was selected because it had the largest number of international students on the West Coast. The site, on frat row, was deliberately chosen to stick it to all the Greek societies that excluded people of color. The author of one of my favorite memoirs, Firoozeh Dumas, lived there. I would live there too if it weren’t so expensive.
Stern was built next, but my mind, like my body, would rather not linger on that particular building. The Units didn’t come along until the 60s.
Clark Kerr Campus was acquired in the 60s. It used to be a school for the “Deaf, Dumb and the Blind”, and each of the buildings had some sort of academic function, e.g. Building 13, of which Aashna Avachat was a notable resident, was a junior high school.
As if this isn’t long enough, there will be more to come!