A Whole New World

After a year and a half of renovations and 72 years beyond its original debut, it finally happened last Tuesday: The Basement of Jonathan Edwards is once again open for business. Each of the residential colleges has been undergoing renovation, one a year over a 12 year cycle, and JE was being worked on my freshman year. The students moved in on time, this fall, but not everything was entirely ready just yet. Due to some complications arising from some of the buildings originally belonging to a different complex (Weir Hall may have at one point belonged to Skull & Bones, but I'm sure you never heard that from me…) the renovations of the basement facilities took a bit longer than expected, but now it’s ready in all of its glory.

I like to tell my friends from home that I literally live in a castle....

...much of Yale’s campus is characterized by beautiful gothic architecture, constructed around 1930 by the architect James Gamble Rogers who wanted to imitate the kind of collegiate feel he found at Oxford. But even though on the outside these buildings look old and stately, with all sorts of little touches to make it look as though they’ve survived hundreds of years of weather and crusades, on the inside they’re the epitome of modern comfort and sustainability.

One of my favorite spaces is our incredible new game room, with pool and foosball tables surrounding the plush couches and enormous flat screen TVs. It’s right next to the student Buttery, where you can buy any sort of late night snacks ranging from the deep-fried Manwhich to chicken ceasar wraps to sweet potato casserole for dirt cheap. The Café is right there, too, selling late night espressos and lattes for spare change right in our own basement. It’s a great place to have some group study time late at night or just socialize.

Alas, my narrow lens and shoddy camera skills fail to capture the scope and grandeur of the basement. The background of this picture extends to a much larger hangout area with couches and the Buttery, (a late night snack bar) which Hayley (far right) is managing this next semester. She's looking to expand the traditional fare, like chicken wings and legendarily delicious Manwhiches to include baked goods and weekly themed gourmet nights. Did I mention everything in the buttery is sold dirt cheap to students? Also, the game room extends way to the right of this frame, with more game tables, flat screens, and some art galleries thrown in just for good measure. Longest photo-caption ever FTW!

On last Tuesday, though, when the whole basement opened, more than 300 alumni, University officials, faculty, and students crowded into the Great Hall to see the rededication ceremonies. Then tours set off to showcase our new grandeur. In addition to the kinds of facilities that every college has, JE proudly hosts a dance studio, a printing press from the early 1900s, a dark room, a theatre, art galleries, a woodshop, and a state-of-the-art theatre. Before tours were even complete, I was inside our glorious new kitchen, preparing a batch of my Grandma Bo’s Pumpkin Pie to celebrate with all my JE friends. Then the subsequent 12 days in the JE Theatre have included a non-stop barrage of inaugural events, with improv comedy performances, Baroque opera performed by our Master, and theatre brought in from New York.

My buddy Kisho and his older brother Kensho, both in JE,

performed an incredible Violin/Viola duet at the opening!

I’ll be kitchen manager for this upcoming semester, and I’m way excited to take advantage of this opportunity. We have a brand new facility and I'll be directing what kinds of classy equipment and ingredients to fill it with. With funding through JE, I’m planning to host a bunch of study breaks that bring people together through the process of making food just as much as eating food, like in making bananas foster (with fire!), crème brulee (with fire!) and chocolate fountains (with… not fire.)

Even though a lot of people would expect academics to be the exclusive focus at a place with the kind of reputation Yale has, its good to know the university puts just as much effort and money into the ways we live and hang out. There’s probably a good reason that anyone you talk to will tell you that their own residential college is the best--although they’re clearly mistaken unless they live in JE. (Ask me about JE's slogan, "Sux et Veritas" sometime... it's too much of a story in its own right to do it justice as a tagline at the end of this post.)

A couple more pictures of the new space: a meeting room in the Taft Library overlooking the sculpture garden of the Yale Art Gallery, my dining hall, the kitchen servery, and another view of the library.