Third in a series of stories detailing housing options available to Boston University students for the 2004-05 academic year.
Myles Standish Hall and the Myles Annex are a 10- or 15-minute walk from class in the College of Arts and Sciences, but residents say the location – near the Kenmore T station, Newbury Street, nightclubs and the occasional Red Sox victory riots – more than makes up for the distance from campus.
“I like that you kind of get away from everything,” said Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences sophomore Andrea O’Hora. “You go to school and then you can leave.”
Myles’ eight residential floors include an engineering floor and house 666 students, mainly upperclassmen. The rooms are arranged in different combinations of double and single rooms within a suite, as well as singles with a private bathroom. Suitemates share a bathroom, and those in singles often have to walk through a double to reach the bathroom.
Suites house anywhere from three to six students, and students wanting to pull friends into a suite during community room selection have to pull in enough people to fill the suite.
Myles Area Director Daryl Healea said students should explore the suite options because each suite is shaped differently. He said students new to Myles often do not understand that there are no common rooms in suites.
“They have visions of separate rooms, beautiful living spaces and stuff like that to share,” he said. “That’s obviously not the case.”
Another part of Myles’ character is its history, Healea said. Myles was built in 1926 as the Myles Standish Hotel, which hosted famous guests like Babe Ruth. The residence was acquired by Boston University in 1949 and was BU’s first large dorm.
Students can see pieces of Myles’ history in elements such as lobby murals and an old U.S. Postal Service mailbox still in place by the elevators. Healea said Myles will continue to celebrate its history with its first black-tie ball in December.
Connected to Myles on the second floor is the Myles Annex. The Annex offers single, double and triple rooms with a community bathroom on each of its three floors. The Annex houses only 93 students and is one of campus’s “best kept secrets” for dorm living, according to Healea. The common bathrooms and lounge areas make the Annex more social than Myles, residents said.
College of Engineering junior Jeff Zuccaro and CAS junior Patrick Layden said they prefer the Annex over Myles because they did not want to share a suite with random roommates. But they said one problem with the Annex is moving in because there are no elevators.
“If you’re on the third floor, you have to pretty much leave your stuff at the bottom and walk all of your possessions up individually,” Layden said.
Both Myles Standish and the Annex share a dining hall, laundry room, fitness room, computer lab, a TV and study lounge, music room and game room with pool and ping-pong. Though residents said the facilities are convenient to have in the building, they need improvement. The fitness room is in a small basement space that does not offer enough machines or up-to-date weights, students said.
“They have one treadmill, one elliptical machine, and the weight station is rusty,” College of Arts and Sciences freshman Juan Pablo Benitez said. “It’s pretty deficient.”
Other building deficiencies like broken elevators, power outages, heating problems and thin walls are a reality of Myles living, residents said.
Benitez said he has had several problems with his heater and shower. He said he wears layered clothing when it is cold because his heater is unreliable and he has given up on fixing the shower.
“Our shower we reported twice,” he said. “They came and fixed it once, but then it broke again so we were like, screw it.”
Regular maintenance is done to keep Myles functioning, Healea said, and the building does not have more problems than other residences on campus.
Despite maintenance problems, Benitez said Myles has a “reserved” atmosphere in which residents can get their work done.
O’Hora said though she has enjoyed living in Myles as an underclassman, she is moving off campus next year because of Myles’ security.
“I only live two hours from here and so if I want to have friends down, they can’t just pop in – I have to know in advance,” she said.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
