Going Back, Part Two: Day Hall

See Part One here for the story of how I swept carpets, washed dishes and met the girl of my dreams, all before turning 18.

Those of us work study students who had been working for the Empire State Games had been on the Syracuse University campus for three weeks in Dellplain Hall, and then it was time to move to our regular dorm assignments. Before the official opening day, I had to move my milk cartons full of stuff (and my mini-fridge), with whatever means I had, up to the highest point on the Syracuse campus, Day Hall on Mount Olympus. I didn’t have a lot yet, except for that fridge, but I carried what I had on my back, making several trips up the Mount. (My parents were coming out with the rest of my stuff, including my bicycle, but they weren’t going to be there when we had to move.)

The only practical way to get between the main campus and the Mount was, and is, a long set of wooden stairs. (There was a long, steep, circuitous driveway that would take you to a far corner of campus – even with a bicycle, the stairs made more sense). They were covered, or partly – there was a roof, but the side walls were only about three-quarters high, leaving a nice open space between roof and wall for wind and snow to come in. A few years after we graduated, the walls were replaced with full-coverage (though still with space between the slats). We’re 80% sure the railings are the same as they were when we used them 46 years ago. The stairs themselves have been replaced, but are still wood, and the little spots of pavement on some of the landings appear to be the same, right down to one of the little sinkholes.

We went up and down them several times a day way back when. I never thought so, but boy did I have working knees back then, and I could fly down those stairs when I had to. How my legs used to know the irregular patterns of those stairs, broken up by occasional asphalt landings. I could fly up them, too. On this visit, we walked. We’re both in pretty good shape, but still: we’re 63, not 18. (I once wanted to believe that slowing down with age was a matter of will and practice – that if I just kept running stairs, I’d stay in condition to keep running stairs. I now understand it’s not a matter of will, it’s a matter of cartilage.)

There was a second set of stairs, less steep, less numerous, less covered, that led down to a less useful access point near the Women’s Building, an athletic facility. Those stairs are now completely gone, just some ramshackle chain link fencing and strewn gravel left to suggest they were ever there. They were less useful, but also less arduous, and sometimes we would use them just for a change of pace.

There are two residence halls and a dining hall up on the Mount, as it was invariably called. At the time, Flint Hall was purely the freshman experience. Day Hall was a mix of freshmen, sophomores and even some upperclassmen who were okay with the dorm life. We were both in what was then called “extended housing,” the common way of addressing limited housing space and expected attrition. Select freshmen (in this case, yours truly) were stuffed into uncomfortable living situations until enough other freshmen dropped out and went back home that we could be put into normal spaces. Purely by chance, this girl I had met in an elevator was living in the room next to mine; we both had roommates in spaces that were intended to be singles. It was, shall we say, tight. But it was fine. I met my roommate, Danny, and as he put it, he got not one roommate, but two, because it wasn’t long before Eileen – whose name I summarily shortened to Lee, with her assent, because it was so much easier for my tongue to say – and I were what was referred to as “an item.”

Within a few weeks, Danny and I were in a regular-sized room, 235 Day Hall, where we would spend three semesters. Lee would linger a bit longer in extended housing before getting moved upstairs as well, where she was gifted with a mostly absentee roommate.

235 was where it all happened, the base for all our adventures and the basis for our friendship. It was where we decorated the ceiling with a gauze bedspread (as one did in the ’70s) and regularly burned incense, getting our room designated by neighbors as “the opium den.” We played The Beatles a lot, and loud. We drank horrible, horrible cheap alcohol on the regular – rum and coke nights, Annie Greensprings wine (good heavens). We both arrived home late most nights and got out early, as sleep was for the weak. We had to leave the Mount, and descend those stairs, every day, usually several times a day. It was Syracuse, so it was usually cold, usually windy, usually wet – our feet were never dry.

The stories I could tell about Day Hall might never end. Endless games of pinball, particularly Gottlieb’s epic oldtimer Team One, in the first floor lounge. Watching SNL on a communal TV and being genuinely confused about who the Blues Brothers were. Having my bicycle stolen early in the first semester. Learning you could get ice cream with every meal at what we called Graham Nash Dining Hall (it was just Graham). Having a beer store between our dorm and the next one. Leaving notes for each other on the newfangled dry erase boards we all mounted on our doors, and relying on the hall phone for our communications, at least for the first semester. And while I can barely remember the communal bathroom that we apparently used for a year and a half, I do remember that every time Danny went there, he came back with a story about someone he had run into along the way.

At the end of freshman year, the choices were to enter the lottery for housing – which could have landed us anywhere on campus, possibly in better housing, possibly not – or to “squat,” giving us rights to stay right where we were. We had liked Day Hall, had made some good friends there and, stairs or not, it was convenient to the architecture studios where Danny spent most of his life. So we decided to squat, and came back to the same room in the fall of 1979.

But of course, it was not the same. Lee got moved across campus to Booth Hall, which had just converted to co-ed, so that meant much more trekking about. We didn’t really connect with any of the new floormates – while I can remember the names of several who shared our floor freshman year, I can’t remember a single human being who was there our sophomore year. Just the way it goes. So at the end of that fall semester, we put in for a move to what was then called “Village” housing – smaller dorms, often in run-down old frame buildings, all now long since demolished by SU. Of course, we weren’t informed that we had been reassigned until we came back from Christmas break and found all our belongings had been pulled out of our room and stuffed into the Day Hall library, and we were then expected to figure out some way to get those things, which included a loft bed, down the hill to the other side of campus. Thus began our semester at Seneca.

Our return visit to the Mount this year was really interesting because so very little has changed. Flint Hall looks exactly like it always did. Graham has had its entryway revamped and relocated, but otherwise looks the same. Day Hall long ago had an addition grafted onto its front end, so the entrance is completely different looking, but otherwise – the long driveway, the parking areas, the landscaping (or lack thereof), all the same. The little steep dirt path down to Oakwood Cemetery, where we loved to have a wander in the autumn air, is still there. The view has changed a bit, with the new structure of the Dome taking up considerably more of the viewshed.

But beyond that, it felt very much the same. I could picture the cold nights walking back home from a late night at The Daily Orange, the joy of finding a note that said “I’m still up” or something like that on her message board. I could remember the clatter of feet up and down those steps – I was always the impatient one, or the one with less time to get where I was going, and I ran faster in those days. I could feel the intensity of what it had been like to be so full of energy, so full of promise – it seemed like the whole world was opening up to me there.

In later years, I would come to have a much more jaded view of both myself and my college experience. But those first three semesters spent living up there, which bound me forever to two incredible friends – that feeling of fulfillment and love just came rushing back to me as I stood there again.

On to Seneca, The Embassy, and things falling apart next time.