The Hibernation of Central Campus

If you are like me (admittedly, many aren't) and you don't set your college time zone 3 hours behind New York, I have a little experiment for you: Go to the HUB building during the late morning (about 10 AM) on a weekend. You will see something reminiscent of this:

(Yes, that is my own picture, not an architectural rendering)

The HUB building is what most would call the center of campus, known to be home of tangles of lines spanning from Panda Express to the Student Book Store. Yet the "Times Square of Penn State" lays nearly dormant, semi-about-to-open, yet semi-abandoned from all humanity.

The basis of this phenomenon stems from a broader perspective across the lands sandwiched between University Drive and Atherton Street. Have a look at the picture below:

In the foreground sits Simmons Hall, with its ivory crown molding, framed windows, and let's not forget the "renowned" K Floor. Yet, this masonry heaven seems to be endangered by its cousin: Hartranft Hall, a "brutalist" rectangular prism, constructed in the 1970s, a time when pretty much any building in a repository, to me at least, looks downright ugly.

What has been occurring since Penn State became a full-out university in 1953 is actually a mirror of the simultaneous construction of cookie-cutter rectangular prisms in Levittown, NY (a suburb of Manhattan). The historic happening-places of sometimes entertaining disputes, chases of thieves, and even that occasional fight after a big loss in a sporting event in the commons have been pulled outside of the old, main area into Suburbia, or in Penn State's terms, East, North and Pollock Halls. Meanwhile, the poles of masonry and residence began to switch and repel each other, with an exodus of millennials in place of students and arrays of chairs and desks.

Well, what is left? While students and millennials are still the same human beings, they play antithetical roles at Penn State. Students swarm through the caverns of old campus, pushing and shoving to reach their next chair less than fifteen minutes after using the last. They may eat in that "one eatery serving one million people" for lunch, but then flee old campus to go at least to the newer enclaves, if not completely out:

Just as they cross Shortlidge, Curtin, or across the swooping IST building into the newly-built residence quarters, the now-millenials walk the concrete array from basketball to volleyball to anyball to eating untimed dinners, not to mention that sporadic quarrel or flash mob that causes all to lean from their open squares more than 50 ft. off the grassland tiled by concrete.

What remains in the region where Old Main's Westminster chimes can still be heard are empty laboratories and classrooms, dormant to the point that I sneaked into the double-level Sackett basement without interruption. (To qualify, West Halls and part of South Halls are still in the old campus, but this represents only a tiny macaroni within the entire college pasta.) The fact is that the commercial park of Penn State, where the average tourist would more likely discover more "history," is lifeless during the off-hours of students, and the on-hours of millenials.

So for all you millenials out there, I have an experiment for you: Get a passport to exit the home-country that is your dorm room, and travel to your regular work-country of a study-place on a weekend. While you won't get any written work, your job is to listen to Old Main's bell. If you can brave the serenity of old campus on a weekend, you will not hear the traditional chimes, but rather a snippet of Penn State's fight song.

As is always said, traverse beyond where most travel at a given time, into the instantaneously dormant back-country. You are bound to discover something in this world you thought you knew all about, but in reality still have a breadth to tunnel through.