For Quad residents, it’s time to say goodbye. Freshmen across campus will be mourning the tiny, old, sometimes smelly dorm rooms that have been their home for the last nine months. For the residents of every dorm except one, now is the time to say see you later. The residents may never see the exact walls where they hung their John Belushi College poster or splattered the walls with Spaghettios by accident, but they will at least be able to reminisce about their time walking the halls of their dorm when they pass it on campus. For Quad residents, now is the time to say goodbye.
Everyone in Quad will have their own way of saying goodbye to these yellowing, crumbling walls. Some will continue to kick holes in the walls without fearing damage fines. Some will tell people they knew Quad was done for all along, though the RAs kept telling us no. Some will post the pictures they’ve accumulated throughout their time here, the ones of cockroaches and creepy locked doors, of them smiling on musty carpeting and laughing with friends under low ceilings.
HAWQ, the executive board of Quad decided to throw an end of the year bash called Quadchella. The celebration included face painting, sand volleyball, popcorn and snow cones, T-shirt tie-dying and a photo booth. The mood was decidedly less somber than saying goodbye for the summer will be for Quad’s residents.
Meeting my Quad roommate at Quadchella threw me back to our first night together. Without a single idea of what to do for fun and too restless to just settle down for the night, I suggested we go ghost hunting throughout the old building. We roamed Quad’s ancient halls, finding the locked doors, broken windows, trippy, pink-tiled tunnel to Rienow with the boarded doors to the old dining hall and knocked on every door along the way to ask the other residents if they knew about the restricted tower. Even as we roamed hallways with flickering lights and coated ourselves in cobwebs, we never once thought that we were unlucky to be there. Quad was just an adventure.
Now, we see the secrets we thought we owned being exposed on Quad tours. We see yellow tape around our building for its impending demolition. We see the girls who live on our hall peeling the room number signs off of their doors because no one will need them when we leave. I pry our own number off of our door with a butter knife, and I don’t feel unlucky for being in America’s second worst dorm, or lucky to be leaving.
For Quad residents, this is not see you later. This is goodbye. The building in which we became adults, met lifelong friends and laughed and cried until our stomachs hurt will be demolished by the time we return in the fall. It’s time to say goodbye to Quad.