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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy October 5, 2005: When
Campus Club was young One hundred and five years earlier, PAW – with a pinch of fanfare and a dash of cheek – announced the club’s formation. “Another upperclass club has been established at Princeton,” PAW reported on Oct. 13, 1900, “of the elective, perpetuating variety, with a club house of its own and a club pin and a club hat-band. It is called the Campus Club, probably because it is situated farther from the campus than any of the seven similar organizations.” Indeed, the original Campus Club was located on Olden Street, a neat bicycle ride from Nassau Hall in any day and age. The club was founded by a group of sophomores from an underclass eating club called Yama – the Commons dining hall had not yet been created – who were unhappy at being denied a place at one of the seven existing upperclass clubs (Ivy, Cottage, Tiger Inn, Colonial, Cap and Gown, Elm, and Cannon). At the time, those seven clubs had space for about half of the sophomore class of 300, leaving nearly 150 students without a place at any table. The family of Gardiner Watkins ’03 loaned the money for Campus’s lease at the Olden Street location, which became known as the “Incubator” for the number of clubs that began there. According to the online club history, the Watkins family also provided money for the china, silverware, table linens and cooking utensils. We can guess that the family also may have helped out with the new club’s rented pool table, pictured in the 1902 Bric a Brac. By the end of its first year Campus had nearly 30 members and plans for a new home. Professor Andrew West, who was busy creating Princeton’s graduate school, had decided to sell his Colonial Revival house on the southeast corner of Washington Road and Prospect Avenue. According to an online architectural history, West’s 1880s clapboard house boasted Ionic columns, a small pediment with a fanlight, and a widow’s walk. By issuing Princeton Campus Club bonds, sold to the families of Campus Club members, including M. Taylor Pyne 1877, the founders were able to purchase the West house in 1901 and to occupy it in the fall of that same year. But a scant eight years later, with a growing and ambitious membership, club members were finagling the money for a new, dedicated clubhouse. According to the architectural history, an original plan showed a large brick building in the same Collegiate Gothic style of Cap and Gown as well as Campus’s neighbors across Washington Road, 1879 Hall and Palmer Physical Laboratory. Faced with financial reality, however, the club asked architect Raleigh Gildersleeve, who had also designed Cap and Gown and Elm clubs, to come up with a more economical plan. While Gildersleeve kept to the Collegiate Gothic style of the original plan, he was able to reuse the foundations of the West house, saving a significant amount of money, and to forgo the intricate detailing found on the facade of Cap and Gown. (The former West house, incidentally, was moved to the intersection of Nassau Street and Princeton Avenue, where it still stands today.) The building would prove more than adequate throughout the years, though a serious fire in 1951 destroyed the third floor. Repairing the damage required restoration of the entire building and included, in 1953, an addition to the east side of the club. In its early days, Campus Club failed to make F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17’s cut in This Side of Paradise; there’s no memorable description of Campus’s membership alongside the “breathlessly aristocratic” Ivy and “broad-shouldered and athletic” Tiger Inn. But former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean ’57 was a member, and in Geoffrey Wolff ’60’s 1990 novel, The Final Club, Campus makes a decent showing. (To the Class of 1960’s Nathaniel Clay and his roommates, “Campus sent a delegation of high-spirited boys, two of whom had been cheerleaders at their Pennsylvania public high schools. One reference led to another, and visitors and visited found themselves laughing, and the two Campus Clubbers each did a sis-boom-bah, with appropriate gymnastics.”) Though the Campus Club passes away, memories, a classic turn-of-the-century building, and no doubt a fair number of club pins and hat bands, will endure. Sources: http://campusclub.princeton.edu/alumni/history.html http://etc.princeton.edu/Campus/text_Campus.html http://www.princetonhistory.org/movedhouse/moved.pdf
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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