Breezeway goodbye

Part of a con­crete breeze­way con­nect­ing my build­ing and sev­eral oth­ers on cam­pus col­lapsed last week. No one was hurt. No one even reported see­ing it hap­pen, so quiet is cam­pus in the sum­mer­time. It was a sur­prise to me, though. I walked back into my build­ing at 2 p.m. after an appoint­ment — every­thing was fine. I walked out again at 4 p.m. and part of the con­crete roof just to the east was on the ground and some­one had posted a cute lit­tle sign that read “walk­way closed.” No shit.

News came late last week that the uni­ver­sity is going to tear the entire breeze­way down, end­ing its life after just shy of 60 years. Not a bad lifes­pan, I suppose.

I com­ment on the breeze­way because it makes me a lit­tle sad to see it go. It con­nects, at one end, Langford Hall, and the four-building Johnstone Complex. An entire row of four dorms and an admin­is­tra­tive build­ing con­nected by a block-long con­crete over­hang that has stood since the late 1950s.

I walked under that breeze­way daily when I lived in Langford as an under­grad­u­ate. It kept us out of the snow and rain on the way to the cafe­te­ria in Johnstone. As a res­i­dent adviser in the build­ing, I even saw jack­asses scale to the top of that breeze­way some­times in the night and run along it. They got writ­ten up, if we could catch them.

I won­der what the Johnstone and Langford res­i­dents will think when they come back in late August and the breeze­way is gone. Will they notice?

This is all pre­lude of course. I’ve seen the university’s 50-year plan. In half a cen­tury, nei­ther the Johnstone Complex nor Langford will exist, let alone a silly breeze­way. But still, it’s sad to see the demo­li­tion start so soon.

Related posts:

1. Steve Outing: Goodbye, for Now? But Looking Forward