Editor’s Blog
What’s New . . .
And What’s Not
If you haven’t been back lately, the biggest change will be the W&L campus. (That’s not counting the change in admissions standards, which would no doubt bring each of us a very thin envelope.) Partly for pedagogical reasons and partly because today’s competition for students demands it, lavish new facilities have been built. Yet the scale of the place hasn’t suffered too much, and they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to maintain the magical brick-and-column architectural grandeur.
A new library went up in the mid-’70s directly behind Washington Hall. It’s about to undergo a major upgrade. (It’s sobering to realize that buildings that didn’t even exist when we were students are now so old they need renovating.) The law school moved from Tucker Hall to Lewis Hall, situated on its own sub-campus north of the football field. The area between New Science and Howe has been filled in, creating a single, massive science complex. The C-School moved into old McCormick, now renamed for President Huntley. (Which is the least they could do for him, considering how much he did for W&L, such as rescuing it from financial ruin.) Reid Hall, renovated the year we arrived, has been renovated again. The Colonnade is now undergoing its own major restoration. DuPont Hall is headed for oblivion and all the arts have moved into a huge new cluster of buildings across Nelson Street, where the train station used to be.
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The new arts complex: |
No less dramatic are the changes to non-academic facilities. As you surely know, all the fraternities were yanked under the university’s wing and renovated to a level of Greek excellence of which even Dr. Leyburn would approve. (Ed Bishop, when he was a trustee, was one of the key forces behind this improvement.) Five new sorority houses, of equal stateliness, are located more or less beneath The World’s Longest Non-Suspension Concrete Footbridge. The Watson Pavilion, housing the Reeves Collection of Porcelain and the Herreshoff paintings, has risen between Tucker and Dr. Leyburn’s house. A new tennis center sits behind the Liberty Hall ruins, as does an enormous, Zollman’s-like tin shanty for parties (built to minimize the need for students to drive out into the country).
Biggest and most impressive of all, however, is the 80,000-square-foot, $30-million Elrod Commons, the all-in-one student activities center, dining hall, theater, bookstore and everything else. That’s 100 times the size of my co-op in Brooklyn and almost twice as big as Corbet Bryant’s new house outside Dallas. Huge as Elrod seems, looming behind Reid and old McCormick, much of its bulk is dug into the Woods Creek hillside. (It’s named for John W. Elrod, a W&L president in the late ’90s.)
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Elrod Commons, the university’s “living room” |
There are two campus newspapers: the familiar, 105-year-old Ring-tum Phi (now once a week) and the feisty, young Trident, which is completely independent (i.e., it doesn’t get any money from the student government as the Phi does). I hear that the Trident is now in boiling-hot water because it recently ran an article that grossly violated the boundaries of taste, supposedly libeling something like 65 people at once. Even the president is involved in sorting out the mess. Everything old is new again!
Southern Sem is no more. Its campus was bought by the Mormon Church, which in 2000 rechristened it Southern Virginia University and has ambitions to turn it into the Brigham Young of the east. It now has 700 students, on the way to a goal of 1,000. The S.V.U. campus is undergoing major expansion and renovation. (For perspective, 700 students is the size of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College – which itself has undergone a big transformation, by the way, becoming coeducational in 2007 and renaming itself Randolph College. And Hollins has become a university.) S.V.U.’s graduation is the same weekend as our reunion, which is half the reason motel rooms are scarce. 
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The 600-acre Virginia Horse Center |
The other half of the reason sits with the 600-acre, 1,200-stable, 19-ring Virginia Horse Center and coliseum, a short distance up the Goshen Road. It’s heavily subsidized by taxpayers, although its management would rather put a severed horse’s head on your pillow than admit it. On our reunion weekend the Horse Center will be in the midst of a U.S. Equestrian Federation Grand Prix jumping show with a $25,000 purse. Like Sem/S.V.U., the horse center has chosen not to cooperate with V.M.I. and W&L in scheduling motel-intensive events, which is why some of us from 1968 are up a creek.
Gone: McCrum’s. Campus Corner. Thomas Limited. College Town Shop. J.Ed Deaver. Doc’s Corner Grill is now the Blue Sky Bakery. The Liquid Lunch is now an upscale guesthouse – talk about the bizarro world! The site of Ray Miller’s Den of Antiquity is now occupied by The Palms, a sandwich shop / beer hall, sort of a spiritual descendant of the Paramount in that it attracts cadets and the occasional townie as well as students. An upscale chocolate shop, Cocoa Mill, is located where Pres Brown’s used to be; it has even been written up in the Wall Street Journal as a place to get a fail-safe Valentine’s Day gift. The Lyric is now condominiums.
Still there: East Lex. Alvin Dennis, complete with Al Carter standing in the doorway, ready to greet you and your AmEx card just the way he greeted you and your dad’s mailing address 44 years ago. The Southern Inn, which has had its ups and downs (mainly the latter), is on the upswing today with new owners, now that Lexington’s other “nice” restaurant, the Willson-Walker House, on the site of the old College Inn, has closed. And the indestructible Kenny Burger, which still offers secret sauce.
N.B.: The A.B.C. store has moved out to a strip mall on East Nelson Street (just beyond Col Alto, the big mansion past Lambda Chi). It’s now self-service, which means no more order slips and no more nervously glancing sideways as you pass your I.D. to the clerk.
— Bob Keefe