<p>My frosh dorm room at Vassar was in Main; I loved the large rooms and wide hallways and being in the middle of everything. Had a roomie issue so switched to a single…more of a closet, in Jewett.</p>
<p>Loved that main dorm though :)</p>
<p>The UMass story is definitely not true, as noted above. Thing is the library is 28 stories tall, which makes it one of the tallest college buildings anywhere of any kind, and it had a problem with the brick facade chipping. That was caused by a design change from stone to brick and the mortar not holding up and it happened back in the 70’s, just after it was built. They moved the most popular books - a quarter million out - and shut it down for repairs. That is how the legend started. The building has been completely renovated more than once since then.</p>
<p>I’m amazed by how these stories hang on. One of my favorites is the hideous name “rape stairs” for a particular staircase that leads up to Beacon Street behind a building at BU. The name dates to 2 assaults in the early 1970’s. Not exactly a current issue, but this name actually came up as a safety concern in conversation: well, they have this name so it must be dangerous. Uh, no. That area of Boston is likely safer than a small college town.</p>
<p>Eva Balogh. There’s a name I haven’t seen in a long time. I took Eastern European History from her. I liked her, but the textbook was the most boring, poorly written history book I had ever read.</p>
<p>Fact: at least as late as 1975, there were air raid shelters underneath some of the buildings at Yale (I came across a couple while steam-tunneling), stocked with supplies bearing dates from the late 1950’s, including syringes and hypodermic needles.</p>
<p>Myth (I think): the steam tunnels all narrowed considerably when they got near the secret society “tombs,” to prevent people from sneaking into the basements.</p>
<p>For a civil engineering class at my alma mater, the professor had the students survey a portion of campus, including a building on the side of a hill.</p>
<p>When the results came back, the students were marked down a grade because the location of building on the side of the hill was 7 inches off. It seems the students had the building sliding down the hill into the city below.</p>
<p>The students insisted their measurements were correct, so the professor went out and surveyed the building himself. He determined that building had in fact slid 8 inches down the hill. Since the students’ result was still wrong, he did not give them the higher grade.</p>
<p>Or so the story goes.</p>
<p>The building really was sliding down the hill, though. To fix it they dug a tunnel from the basement up the hill to the basement of another building that was resting on bedrock, and wasn’t going anywhere for a few centuries. They installed 4 twelve-inch-thick steel cables from one building to the other to prevent the downhill building from sliding any further down the hill.</p>
<p>Or so the story goes.</p>
<p>Re: #24</p>
<p>How did the professor know that the students got it wrong, as opposed to the building sliding another inch between the students’ measurement and the professor’s measurement?</p>
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<p>The supposedly true condition Mrs. Widener imposed was, in order to prevent having the library remodeled and renamed for some later donor, that if Harvard ever moved “brick or mortar” in the library then the ownership of the building and ground beneath it would revert to the city of Cambridge. So when the school sought to link Widener library with another library via a tunnel they had to knock out a large window to create an entrance to avoid disturbing any bricks. I believe the connecting tunnel was torn out a few years ago. So I don’t know what the tour guides say now.</p>
<p>Another Harvard tour guide myth is that, because the lower floors of the Massachusetts Hall dorm house the president’s and other administrative offices, the students living on the upper floors are handpicked as especially quiet and trouble-free. Thanks to my daughter living there I got meet a whole bunch of Mass Hall kids. And, as much as I’d like to think my daughter is so wonderful that she was somehow “handpicked,” I can attest that Mass Hall kids weren’t any quieter or less troublesome than any other college kids. </p>
<p>My daughter was in fact slightly offended by this goody-two-shoes myth and once when she overheard a tour guide repeating it she stopped to correct him and dispel the myth, which of course cut into the guide’s act and knocked him off his stride. She felt horrible about this, apologized, and vowed to never interrupt another guide. She realized it was probably better to let them continue with the myth.</p>
<p>
Indeed, this probably reinforces the myth.</p>
<p>Coureur, I was trying to remember that story about Widener library and the condition about no brick/mortar alterations–I heard it 20 years ago when I attended a seminar at Houghton Library, the building next door which was at that time connected to a window in Widener by an enclosed bridge (rather than a tunnel). From Google satellite view I see that the bridge has been removed, as you say.</p>
<p>^I think there might have been a tunnel as well. At least my recollection from shelving books a million years ago was that the people who did cataloging were in some adjacent basement, but I might be misremembering. Here’s a weird fact: Harvard had their own cataloging system which included two separate places to find books about fishing and angling. (And yes people did check them out.)</p>
<p>Widener is one of many college libraries where there is a tradition of consummating one’s love affair in the stacks prior to graduation. People really fulfill that tradition, as I’m told they do at other schools. Having five miles of stacks helps with privacy.</p>
<p>Medical journals in Swedish. That’s all I’m saying.</p>
<p>^ROFL, I missed that tradition, and I admit I don’t remember shelving any medical journals in Swedish!</p>