Highlights
The red-brick dorms, which opened in the fall of 1960, were never distinguished architecturally. But they became centers of campus life.
A wise person once said two ingredients are necessary for a successful college career. The first is a freshman dorm with a long corridor, which lets you make many friends. The second is a chance to get to know one faculty member well.
So as San Jose State University demolishes all but one of its remaining 1960 red-brick dormitories — known as “the bricks’’ — the reaction has been bittersweet among alumni and other observers. The dorms have outlived their expected lifetime — but what a lifetime it has been.
“The years in the dorms were magical,’’ said San Ramon Mayor Bill Clarkson, who lived in a red-brick SJSU dorm in the 1970s. “We were having fun, but we were learning how to work with others. The dorms gave us an intense environment that let us make friends.’’
Before the memories, the news: SJSU is now taking down Royce and Hoover halls, leaving only one (Washburn) of the original six red-brick dorms on the south side of campus. The old halls are making way for a $130 million recreational and aquatic center. (Three of the “bricks” were taken down several years ago for a new housing tower.)
The 800-plus students who had been living in Royce and Hoover have been moved to Campus Village 2, a 10-story behemoth that has just been completed. Like the old dorms, however, Campus Village 2 will have long corridors rather than apartment-like living.
Though no one is trumpeting the fact, one hope is that the kind of ugly racial harassment that occurred against a black freshman three years ago in an apartment-style suite will be much harder to hide in the long corridors.
In the meantime, Hoover and Royce — which were named after Lou Henry Hoover, who was the wife of President Herbert Hoover, and Ruth Royce, the first librarian of San Jose State Normal School — look like the remnants of buildings in Aleppo, with student rooms open to air.
The six red-brick dorms, which opened in the fall of 1960 to house 1,200 students, were never distinguished architecturally — three stories tall, long runway corridors, shared bathrooms. But in the absence of other student housing, they became lively centers of campus life.
“The students in the dorms worked the hardest and played the hardest,’’ said Dennis King, a former SJSU student body president who now directs the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “They had a clear sense of community. They were kind of the backbone of campus activities.’’
King was the key force behind the creation of the “People Book,’’ an informal yearbook that chronicled student life on campus for five years in the 1970s. One section of an old “People Book’’ shows a young Ken Yeager, now a Santa Clara County supervisor.
And the stories? Well, there was the story of Hobart the Dog (a lab and Norwegian hound mix), who was adopted by Bill Clarkson after the canine started hanging around the dorms. “I essentially dog-napped him,’’ said Clarkson, who somehow talked housing director Cordell Koland into letting him keep the pooch.
Then there was the famous story of the photos of streakers. As streaking became popular in 1973 and 1974, one female resident adviser at Hoover Hall organized several friends to streak across a pedestrian overcrossing over Highway 17 in Campbell.
What she didn’t know was that a couple of male students found out about the plan and snapped pictures of the women as they raced naked across the overpass.
In the dining commons later, when the young woman saw a picture of her escapade — mixed with shots of male fraternity streakers — she let loose a blood-curdling scream that makes Clarkson laugh even now. The bricks rang with those kind of memories.
