University Housing
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
Winding, narrow lanes lead up the hillside to the limestone university buildings. In the fall, students walk along broken sidewalks through shimmering light let through by 100-year-old tree branches, past the old two-story houses overgrown with thick foilage.
This being the first full week of August, the streets will be alive again soon and these houses 50 feet or so off the walking paths will become the havens students imagine them to be, near campus but worlds apart all the same. The proprietors of these dwellings have long since been saved from the pressures of pop quizes, lab experiments gone awry and research papers.
Once, these houses were occupied by professors, scientists amd researchers affiliated with the university’s various departments, but in recent years have far exceeded the budgets of the professionals in those positions. Only the wealthy, most esteemed alumni live there now, and, as witnessed by the empty driveways, most still work thoughout the day in order to live so close to their alma mater.
There on the hill in Lawrence, one house’s front balconies opens up on the football stadium’s south end zone. On Saturday mornings, the owners can sit outside their front door and soak in the noises of the band marching down the hill – a tradition before the game – and listen to the crowd’s rumble as it comes over the cement grand stands and across the parking lot on the thin fall air. Touchdowns and field goals on the south end are in plain view of their barbecue grill and in more vivid perspective than on television.
During the summer, the stadium is merely a hollow nextdoor neighbor with a seemingly endless slab of cement and infinite yellow-lined parking spaces (nothing as lovely as the houses to the east, which are of a similar era and design.)
Most of these houses are missed by the college-aged kids who are often locked in discussion on the walks to and from class or who keep their eyes on the uneven sidewalks to avert discussion at all. I know because driving the streets yesterday with my wife, she pointed out a couple houses that avoided her noticce when she was a student here 10 years ago. In my opinion, they are as majestic as the University of Kansas’ most historic halls and athletic structures. They give the campus its real character, its hominess and its ties to a past when the town was comprised mostly of students, educators and a whole community of learning. The emphasis now is on obtaining a degree and leaving, abandoning the town for greater things than this small Kansas town. No one notices or thinks to stay in this Eden of charming houses outside the rush and pressure of education’s pursuit.
