Because I lived on campus my freshman year, and because everything I needed was mostly in the immediate area, I didn’t do a lot of driving during the week. A lot of that also had to do with the fact that it would take me until the following weekend to find a parking space. But when I could I liked driving around to familiarize myself with other areas of campus and the surrounding community.
And the community did surround the campus, creeping up on you like arthritis, nearsightedness, or that toothless pan-handler at the corner of Central and Olive. Gleaned from historical photographs, I learned the university’s original tract of land was atop a hill north of downtown; between the campus and downtown were houses. Naturally, as the fledgling campus grew it bought nearby land and razed those houses and constructed new academic buildings or dormitories or parking lots, or, in rare cases, green areas.
Fast forward a few decades and it looked as if the college and the city butted heads along the southeastern-most edge because the houses remained standing. Apparently the owners didn’t necessarily want their houses torn down, particularly when their homes still had a lot going for them –structurally sound, kept the cold out, and so on. Because these homeowners had rejected the college’s advances it forced the campus to build elsewhere in other directions for a few years. Then a curious thing happened. The people in the houses along Union Street moved or died and their houses were up for sale.
“Hooray,” said the university, “we can finally buy that property and do something with it!”
“But,” said the comptroller, “you’ve blown a fortnight of funds in mere days and are almost in the red, aren’t you? Without funds you can’t very well do both.”
“Oh, dear,” said the university, “I hadn’t thought of that – we have the money to buy the houses but not enough to do anything with them except let them be.”
“Ah, that was easy,” said the comptroller, and for an encore he approved the purchase and installation of a half dozen telephones booths across campus only to be later smothered to death while participating in the “stuff as many people as you can into a telephone booth” fad of the time.
So the houses didn’t go anywhere and were instead passed-off as university-owned except that they looked totally out of place and unlike any other structure belonging to the university. Nomadic departments such as University Housing, Graduate Studies, Art, and others were uprooted from their modular buildings and squeezed into one of these houses with the instruction to “make it [their] own” but then that idea lasted only for a year or so.
Enter Religious Emphasis week, a five-night (later three-night) examination and discussion of the spiritual life of students, observed from the early-50s through 1972. A religious council organized the event and welcomed leaders from various denominations to speak to smaller groups each night. Space was needed for the events and all eyes again focused on Union Street. Within a few years the houses turned into denominational student centers for the Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Catholics (the Presbyterians hadn’t colonized yet and the one house given over to Nontrinitarianists was never used). Inside the houses were totally remodeled, oftentimes with the addition of small chapels or sanctuaries for Sunday services; the exteriors didn’t change much except that the Catholics transformed their two-story bungalow into a squatty, dwarfish cathedral through the magic of plywood and acrylic paint.
The Religious Emphasis week coordinators thought the houses becoming student centers was a good fit, seeing how Union Street was the neighborhood that evangelist “Handsel” Monday visited during one of his small-town revivals in the late Nineteenth Century. A woman who grew up in one of the houses and later attended the university told the story of seeing Monday speaking to a small crowd that had gathered under the boughs of the willow tree across the street (“...he sounded scary,” she recalled).
But I digress...
The houses still stood during my time on campus but most of the church groups had moved on. The Methodists apparently knew a good thing when they found it and appropriated for their own use the backyard of the long-vacant Episcopalian Student Center, whose members now met at the church across town. The Catholics had moved off-campus, too, leaving behind a bizarre-looking building and their long-suffering neighbors, the Baptists.
Those houses that were unoccupied were mothballed and used for storage, though it’s anyone’s guess as to what remained within their walls.
