Take a look around you. Things will never be the same again. Change comes quickly here at Boston University. One day you’re smacking your lips around IHOP pancakes at 4 a.m. in Kenmore Square, and next thing you know you’ve got late-night cravings and nowhere to go.
One day you’re pining away for Student Village housing, and the next you find your room overlooks a steaming hole in the ground.
One day, Terrier football. The next, women’s professional soccer.
While it seems that many things never really change at BU (for the life of me I’ll never know why someone doesn’t take down that algae-festering, mucus-sheathed awning on Warren Towers), it’s pretty refreshing to think just how alive this campus is. In many ways, the BU campus resembles its students maturing with each year, growing as it ages.
So that’s why it’s a nightmare just to get to class right now.
Today’s BU campus is pimpled with more craters than the surface of the moon. It’s the kind of eyesore even BU students find offensive, and it promises to remain that way for some time. Even the tour guides are speechless.
The transformation began this summer. At the time, I was living in an Allston sublet just beyond the edge of campus. On the corner of Harvard and Brighton avenues, the hazy, ambivalent days would waste away until 10 p.m., when the nightlife peaked out for a brief fluorescent romp before slipping away again.
Meanwhile, just a small trip down the B-line, the crunching and cracking of cranes, drills and ‘dozers were endlessly breaking Commonwealth Avenue apart, bit by bit. By the time summer ended, the work was only just beginning, but the change to the campus was irreversible.
No longer is Boston University the campus between the billboards. Stretching westward from the Citgo sign in Kenmore, BU lost the keeper of its western border this summer when construction crews deep-sixed Ellis the Rim Man. The massive ad, a relic of the once-famous auto parts store that vacated Comm. Ave. earlier this year, came down with a whimper, barely noticed in the dead weeks of summer. But the Rim Man, rusty and worn over the years, was an icon on the BU campus, and its demise marks the passing of an era around these parts.
It doesn’t seem right, somehow. It was just always there.
Or moving inward along Comm. Ave., the land that bears the fruit of Boston University’s future: the Armory. At first, they just clawed away at its left wall. Then a bite was taken into the middle tower. Then, the wrecking ball was let loose, and day by day the structure caved further inward until there was nothing left but debris and dirt.
It took all summer before the Armory was finally gone. For about a month, the ear-splitting pounding of the industrial drill was painful even inside the McDonald’s next door and the BU Playwright’s Theatre. This migraine brought to you by the John Hancock corporation.
Continuing eastward, trucks settled onto the sidewalk in front of the College of General Studies and College of Fine Arts, nudging foot traffic onto Comm. Ave. alongside an expanse of jagged concrete and yellow tape. The crews set up camp and seemed never to budge. Come to think of it, they still haven’t left. Nor have the crews working endlessly on the BU East and Central T stops, a project some are now calling the Little Dig.
Inside the GSU, summer students stepped carefully around the wreckage that was Ben ‘ Jerry’s, while East Coasters furrowed their brows and wondered just what the hell a Jamba Juice was. Smaller construction projects occupied the School of Education basement and the gallery soon coming to the GSU’s second floor, plus the new offices atop the School of Management.
And, under its shroud, that God-forsaken Commonwealth Hotel came that much closer to finishing off the Kenmore Square revitalization project.
As a senior, I could complain that I’ll never experience the benefits of today’s work. But that would be myopic. Boston University is always evolving. While I may not be around long enough to try out the new sports complex (heck, I might not even get to get off at BU Central), other students suffered for the facilities I enjoy right now. And anyway, if BU gets the go-ahead to pursue the projects on its Master Plan, tomorrow’s students will have no less to complain about. That new law building won’t be built overnight.
When it comes down to it, there’s a certain energy to this campus. For students like me who stuck around this summer, you simply couldn’t escape it. The campus was kinetic, and you knew that change was on the way.
Except for the Warren Towers awning. That’ll be here forever.