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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy October
23 , 2002: By Jane Chapman Martin ’89 With the coming of fall — even without the usual accompanying nip in the air, missing in this oddly warm New Jersey October — my thoughts have turned to warm evenings by the fireplace. I was fortunate enough to share a Princeton fireplace for two years running back in the days before the Public Safety Office came to its senses sometime in the 1990s and blocked them off. (The Office apparently labors under the misconception that graduate students are more mature and responsible than undergraduates: nearly all of the rooms in the Graduate College are still equipped with working fireplaces. "Fireplaces should be used with caution," warns the letter welcoming new graduate students, weakly.) In my sophomore year the fireplace came with the room in Walker Hall, a blessedly traditional room in wretchedly modern Wilson College. Walker Hall is an incognito dorm, slipped behind Patton (now Wright), just below Cuyler and Walker's contemporary, 1903 Hall. Walker was built during the great post-World War I building boom that also saw the construction of Lockhart, Henry, Foulke, 1901, Laughlin, and Pyne. Like many of those residences, Walker, which was completed in 1930, was designed by Charles Zeller Klauder. According to Princeton's Web site, it was originally intended to be called Joline Hall, but at the last minute was renamed Walker Hall in honor of James Theodore Walker '27, who died in an accident just three days after his graduation. (The Jolines would get their building, of course; in 1933 the building that we know as Joline and that today is part of Mathey College rose in the northwest corner of the Blair-Campbell quadrangle.) The Walker fireplace was used most frequently on Thursday nights, I recall, a cozy backdrop to our weekly dose of Cheers. The scene was tame, but suited to three girls who got their firewood from a grandmother in a baby-blue Cadillac (who refused to allow any of us to unload it from her trunk; that was men's work). The boys tended to play a little rougher, throwing anything that they thought might possibly burn into the fireplace and trying to set it aflame. Still, I don't remember anything approaching the debacle recorded by John McPhee '53 in his story A Room Full of Hovings, John McPhee '53's profile of former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving '67. During a particularly drawn-out and wild debauch, Hoving and his roommates threw everything they could lay hands on into their residential inferno: "They had, in fact burned up almost everything in the room except the player piano. Someone went out and came back with an axe. The piano played on while it was being hacked to pieces, and all the pieces were given in tandem to the flames," wrote McPhee. Small wonder Public Safety decided to stamp out the flames for
good — 25 years later.
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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