Rodin approves plan for Locust Walk's future

Graduate students and minority groups were given space on the Walk. University President Judith Rodin announced plans yesterday to reinvigorate Locust Walk starting next fall, providing new spaces for academic, social and cultural programming in the heart of campus. The plans call for about a dozen campus organizations to get new homes and will spawn the creation of a cultural and performing arts center, a research hub for undergraduates, a graduate student center and common space for student religious groups. The proposal also includes a recommendation for a sorority house to be relocated to Locust Walk sometime in the near future. "This is a very student-centered outcome," Rodin said. "It has achieved my strong aspirations for animating Locust Walk, day and night and on weekends." But the plans do more than just concretely define the University's plans for developing Locust Walk as the academic and social heart of campus. They also resolve, in part, long-standing concerns regarding the allocation of a limited amount of space to a growing number of student groups. The plans also bring to an end months of debate as to what should be done with the former Phi Gamma Delta and Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity houses and the recently purchased Christian Association building. "Having a number of spaces come available all at once, we suddenly realized we had the chance to change the dynamic of part of Locust Walk," Provost Robert Barchi said. The release of the plan culminates most of the work for the Locust Walk Advisory Committee -- a 12-person task force of students, faculty and staff chaired by Barchi -- that Rodin charged in February with determining how to best fill a number of recently vacated properties along the Walk. After narrowing a long list down to about 12 campus groups that needed centrally located space, the committee assigned locations based on shared interests and specific needs so that groups could take advantage of common resources and proximity. The committee submitted its final recommendations earlier this week to Rodin, who accepted all of the proposals in the plan. "It's a crazy-good mix of allocations," said UA Chairman Michael Silver, who sat on the committee. "It pleases so many disparate constituencies." Most of the spaces are expected to be ready in the fall. Renovations will begin over the summer to turn the CA building -- located at the corner of 36th Street and Locust Walk -- into a center for academic and cultural groups and a performing arts hub. The first floor will house La Casa Latina, the Pan-Asian American Community House and UMOJA, an umbrella organization for several African-American student groups. There are also plans to eventually house a performing arts hub in the building's ground floor, currently occupied by the Gold Standard restaurant. In addition to the space on the first floor, the organizations will share five new large conference rooms throughout the building, which will be assigned based on need. Representatives from all three of the minority student groups had independently lobbied the administration for space to establish their own cultural resource centers. But the decision to place such diverse groups under one roof has most of the leaders pleased with the outcome. "Being able to be with these different groups will facilitate interchange of ideas and dialogue," said College junior John Lin, who was part of a group of students that lobbied Rodin last fall for an Asian-American resource center. "This will not only serve Asian Americans, but the entire Penn community." Besides allocating space to UMOJA, the plan finally grants a permanent home for La Casa Latina, which is essentially swapping buildings with the Christian Association. Although La Casa Latina opened this September in the Westminster House at 3700 Chestnut Street, it was slated to be displaced by the CA at the end of the year. Penn granted the CA the space in the Westminster House in November for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Rodin promised La Casa Latina officials that they would receive equal or better space. "Most of the student leaders are happy," said Electrical Engineering Professor and La Casa Latina co-founder Jorge Santiago-Aviles, who also served on the Locust Walk committee. "They see that we might have traded a little bit of space for more accessibility and presence on campus." The available space on the ground floor will house additional rehearsal rooms and a new black-box theater. It will also hold offices for many campus performing arts groups, which will have access to a small auditorium on the second floor of the facility. More performing arts space will free up when the leases for the Gold Standard and the Palladium expire in 2002. Barchi indicated yesterday that Penn would reclaim much of the space the two restaurants currently use, though he said the committee wanted to keep some sort of food services operation in the building. "Now that the material arts are going into the Faculty Club, the thought of the performing arts going next door was very attractive," Rodin said. The second floor of the former CA building will also house a newly created Center for Academic Research and Fellowships. The center will advise students of undergraduate research opportunities, help with grant-writing and provide information and support for students interested in applying for post-graduate fellowships. Opening up a hub for undergraduate research has long been one of Barchi's goals as provost. The plans for Locust Walk also call for converting the first two floors of the Veranda -- the student center formed when Phi Sig vacated the house in the spring of 1998 -- into a graduate student center. Penn had previously been one of only two Ivy League schools without such a center for its 10,000 graduate students. The new building will provide meeting rooms for between 20 and 30 graduate academic groups, giving space for students to plan and host small colloquia and faculty seminars. But it will also be a center for graduate student social life. During the day, the building will have lounge space for graduate students to talk and do homework, and at night, it will be host to parties and other social activities. "It's a place for graduate students to hang out with each other, get to know one another," said Graduate and Professional Student Assembly Chairwoman Kendra Nicholson, another committee member. "That's the problem that we noted -- that there are 12 graduate schools and very rarely do we have the chance to interact." The ground floor of the facility, however, will provide shared space for student religious groups that do not have space, such as Muslims, and who congregate for daily prayer services. The Office of the Chaplain will coordinate the sessions. Finally, the plan officially confirmed what administrators had said before, that space in the former FIJI house at 3619 Locust Walk will be used for the Humanities Forum and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Rodin also said that down the road, she would seriously consider the recommendations calling for a sorority to move into the house currently occupied by the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life. There has not been a sorority on the Walk since Delta Delta Delta moved out of the Phi Kappa Sigma house in 1998. Rodin said she expects the VPUL's office to move into College Hall at some point in the future, though she would not provide any timetable.

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