For folks who’ve been bystanders to Webster University’s expansive expansion in Webster Groves, changes to the physical environment have come at an irregular, yet steady clip. Having landed at the World HQ in the mid-’80s and sticking around through last year, placing locations of the Mental Map of What Is and What Was at Webster was a fun game that I’d play. It helped pass the time, traipsing from my vehicle on Lot O to whatever building I may’ve been teaching in that day.
The landmarks on this map are many. The Music Annex is grass. The tennis courts and pool sat on the Quad. The Brown House departed for the Emerson Library. The Kirk House, long home to my adjunct mailbox, is a sand volleyball court. The long row of residential frame houses along Edgar Road, where my friend Peter introduced me to the music of The Police and Fisbhone, is a complex for student housing. The Loretto Hall dorm rooms, where I enjoyed many a first in human experiences, has been turned into office space. The Psychedelic Elevator’s but a fond memory.
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And, my god: walking into just about any building on campus, at any time of the night, for any purpose you’d care to imagine? These are the actions of someone living in another century, right? Right.
In recent years, telling stories about Ye Olde Webster became what felt like an exercise in shock. Students who might spend 80 percent of their college careers taking classes in one building were puzzled by stories of an actual trailer, sitting in the middle of campus, where students took outdoor education classes and listened to their instructors’ CSN&Y records. Students spooked by a short walk from the parking garage to class at night were disbelieving that there was once an unlit forest along Edgar Road, through which you’d shortcut to the Administration Building (itself long renamed Webster Hall). These same students, almost of all of them unborn when Webster’s basketball teams debuted in 1984, playing in the tiny Plymouth Gym.
If there’s a place on the Webster campus that neatly sums it all up for me, it’s the Visual Arts Studios. It’s a structure at 8350 Big Bend, on the western edge of campus. Built in 1964, it’s often dubbed the Hunt Building by outsiders, due to the presence of the Cecille R. Hunt gallery inside. The reason that the building is sprinkled with some particularly strong nostalgic pixie dust for me is three-fold.
One. When visiting the campus as a prospective student, I met with the dad of a friend in the Hunt. He was a business professor, and talked to me there between classes. So, dig that: he was teaching business in the Hunt. Today, the East Academic Building is the campus’ largest new construction, a nice, big, functional, utilitarian space neighboring Nerinx Hall; it’s home to Webster’s large business student community. Webster’s long-running rep as a campus for art nerds and weirdos? Oh, they’re still around, bless ’em, but the numbers have shifted dramatically.
Two. One summer in the late ‘80s, I was hired to paint the Hunt, hired along with two members of the band Corporate Humour. By day three, I was the only man left on the job, spending about two months painting solo in a hot, unattended building full of art studios and lockers and funky little corners. In between paint being applied to walls, I explored every inch of the place and consider that a strangely magical summer, potentially made more dreamy by the paint fumes.
Three. In recent years, my breaks increasingly took me to the Hunt for short blasts of “something else to see.” In these 15-minute mental health refreshers, I’d quickly stride out of the Sverdrup, walking through the Visual Arts Studios hallway galleries, pausing to take in the student work, always stopping at the community board, which typically contained some of the funnier, quippier commentary you’d find on campus. The graffiti in the men’s room? Quality stuff. The odds/ends lying about the corner? Lovely little bits of detritus. When my own students stopped me for a word between segments of the class, I always had one foot out the door, heading out onto the sidewalk of Big Bend, heading for those paint-splattered halls of the VAS.
Long may the students in this corner of campus stay weird. Long may they remain the living embodiments of Ye Olde Webster. Long may they be the unicorns.
