Location Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: April 2007
One of the constants of my college years was construction. Lots and lots of construction. The university was reaping the benefits of alumni who had done exceedingly well (I believe they were the founders of Pampered Chef, if you’ve heard of that). Large sums of money was donated by the Christopher family to the university, and well, it was building time!
In my freshman year, the new library, the Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources (that last word would have been Technology until someone pointed out the acronym), had just finished completion that summer, and it was sparkling new. There was some construction going on for the doppler radar that was being built on campus (we had a rather good meteorology department). The old library was still around, but abandoned. They’d just torn down one set of the old apartment buildings the upperclassmen lived in, but the second one was still up (and showing quite plainly why it was slated for destruction).
Sophomore year, that apartment building was torn down and so was the old library. They also started work breaking ground both at the old library site for a new student union and at another spot on campus for a new building for the meteorology and geography departments. They also had a lot of problems with water mains bursting that winter, so they went through and replaced a lot of the underground pipes throughout the campus.
Junior year they continued work on the union, and finished the geography building (the Kalley-Christopher Building) during that summer. It was a bit odd taking classes in a building that hadn’t existed when I started at the school. There was also a new road build around the south side of the campus. They also started working on a much-needed parking garage by the main dormatories, which is what is in this photo. That was finished by the end of the school year.
Senior year, I was only there for the fall semester (I lived in Chicago for the spring semester), but they decided to completely remove part of the road through the middle of campus and shunt all that traffic onto the new road, changing the remnants into building access roads. They also had finished the exterior of the union, though they were working on the interior all that year.
After I left, the new student union opened, which changed a lot of the patterns of student life. They shifted all the cafeterias from a horde of them scattered through the campus to one big central one, for instance. There’s no new buildings listed on the current campus map, but I’m sure the interiors of a lot of places changed as things got shifted around.
I went to my college during its transition years. Only my yearmates had the exact same experiences for what buildings were where during their stay there. It was quite different from the way it had been even just the year before I came in, with the old falling down apartments and a library that my older friends told me was quite dark and damp and possibly haunted. And it’s completely different now, even if most of the buildings are the same. A lot of my patterns of life were based around the old student union, and with it no longer being the union, well, current students just won’t have the same experience I did.
Heck, there’s a new University President now. And they’ve even changed the school’s logo and the look of its mascot! That’s a really major change, you know.
It’s quite odd to think about, really, just how much that place has changed from when I first visited it on a campus tour back in the summer of 2003, less than a decade ago…
