Residential plans overcome history

The University has slowly responded to changing student residential needs. When the University converts all its residences into college houses next fall, it will be the biggest change in decades to a system that has evolved very slowly over Penn's history. Since the University was founded 257 years ago, the residential system usually failed to meet changing needs until decades of complaints and proposals built up, The Daily Pennsylvanian found in an examination of records in the University Archives. In light of such history, the newly proposed dorm plan seems even more significant to the fabric of the institution. While the first University dorm was built in 1752, only 12 years after Penn's founding, the 16-room house on the original campus at Fourth and Arch streets remained the school's only residence until construction of the Quadrangle 142 years later. In 1872, the University moved to its West Philadelphia location and continued to function without a single residential building until 1896, when the Quad opened. Four years later, the University built the "Bennett House Residence for Women Students" on the present site of Bennett Hall. The Quad remained the only male dorm on campus, and the housing system would remain segregated by sex until the 1970s. As Penn's population grew in the early decades of this century, new housing proved inadequate and the administration proved slow to act. Many students began to live in fraternity houses, which numbered well above 40 during the first half of the 20th century. Other students secured off-campus housing in boarding houses and apartment buildings nearby. Only men were allowed to pursue these option until the 1960s, though. Women were still confined to one of the few all-women's dorms on campus until then. The end of World War II sparked the biggest housing crunch the University had seen in its 200 years up to that point. Returning veterans tried to finish their college educations at once, and there wasn't enough space for all of them. Many were married and needed to accommodate families, and others simply demanded better housing than the University had been accustomed to providing. The situation set off a flurry of memos and drafts within administrative offices, but little else. Officials beseeched local landlords to rent to students, and tried to convince alumni in the Philadelphia area to donate apartments or find student tenants. After the immediate postwar crisis passed, the housing shortage continued, as the "Baby Boom" generation reached college age and sent the University's enrollment way up. Exacerbating the crisis, black students found that some local landlords refused to rent to them. At the same time, women students began demanding the right to live off campus, and to allow male visitors in their dorm rooms -- which was still prohibited by official policy. Attempting to ease the crunch, the University obtained several local apartment buildings for women's residence halls, which numbered 12 by the 1960s. These included King's Court, which was purchased as a nursing dorm in the 1950s, and Hill and English Houses, completed in 1960. In 1963, the University allowed senior women -- with parental permission only -- to move into off-campus apartments in officially approved buildings. And in 1964, Women's Student Government -- led by future University President Judith Rodin, then known as Judith Seitz -- convinced administrators that senior women were responsible enough to have male visitors in their rooms -- at least before midnight. Spurred by overcrowding pressures and by ripples in the society at large, the housing system was changing rapidly by 1969. Men were allowed in more than half of the women's dorms until 3 a.m., sophomore women were allowed to live off-campus and some Penn students were living in co-ed apartments in Center City -- a fact reported with great interest by the Philadelphia press. But an even greater change to the face of housing was still to take place in a far corner of campus. In 1969, with University housing capacity at a record low of 42 percent of undergraduates and 9 percent of graduate students, Student Government President Al Conroy complained that the Penn was "losing students because of the housing shortage." Student government representatives threw their support behind a plan to build a series of skyscrapers at 38th through 40th streets on both sides of Locust Walk, and graduate towers on 36th Street. The three high rises opened as the first co-ed dorms at Penn in 1970 and 1971, and the rest of the residential system ended its gender segregation soon afterward. Superblock's construction caused the demolition of 10 fraternity and five sorority houses and several blocks worth of homes in the Hamilton Village neighborhood. At the same time that the large, impersonal high rises opened, the University decided to follow faculty suggestions and open smaller program houses called college houses. Van Pelt College House opened in 1971, and five more houses, including, DuBois, Stouffer and Modern Language college houses, opened over the next five years. College houses were such a popular idea in the '70s that plans were drawn up to convert the Quad into six college houses. But the program, which lacked financial and administrative commitment, also met a fair amount of student resistance. "There goes the Quad experience," moaned an unnamed student in a 1976 DP article. In the end, only Ware College House in the Quad was ever carried past the planning stage, though faculty and some students continued to propose an overall conversion of University housing to a college house system. Over the next two decades at least four separate reports were commissioned to examine the housing system. All recommended a college house system, but only the most recent one by Art History Professor David Brownlee -- his second report to suggest the system -- prompted any action. So after toying with the idea for nearly three decades, the University will move to college houses next fall, setting the latest mark in the history of Penn's dorm life.

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