What do Labor Day, Halloween and move in day all have in common? They’re all prospective completion dates for DePauw construction projects.
“I like to use milestones that people can remember,” said Dick Vance, Assistant Vice President of Facilities Management.
By this Labor Day weekend, the makeshift wall separating the Union Building Lobby from the new Hubbard Center space will come down. On Halloween of 2016 a party is being planned to introduce Hoover Dining Hall and move in day fall of 2017 will see the Stewart Plaza completed.
These are days that university President, Brian Casey, awaits anxiously.
“I’m a profoundly impatient person when it comes to buildings,” he said.
For Hoover Hall especially, the journey to completion has taken a long and windy road. Vance first hoped to have it ready for student use by fall of 2016, but unforeseen difficulties forced him to rethink that date, and push completion back to Winter Term of that same school year. However, with hard work over the summer the date has been moved up by two months, with completion planned for Halloween.
“It’s a fairly intricate building, so I don’t know that we’ll gain much more time, but we will meet October 31,” he promised.
Originally, the project was slowed down by cold weather and complicated design.
“You’d be ready for a concrete pour and to start placing steel, and then you’d get a snow,” said Vance.
Though the cost of project has exceeded expectations, it is being funded entirely by donors, with the lead gift coming from the Hoovers themselves.
Vance says that brick will start appearing on the outside of the building within days as construction amps up in these next 14 months.
Meanwhile, just a few steps away in the Union building, a construction wall hides the rapidly progressing Hubbard Center from view.
“There’s currently a wall behind a wall,” Vance said.
But while the wall currently visible is blocking the view, the wall being built will do just the opposite.
“It’s full of glass, and there are glass doors so it will be very transparent and very obvious that this is the Hubbard Center. The transparency is really important,” said Vance.
In tangent with the Hubbard Center construction, a small update was made to the McDermond Center, which will now be connected to the Hubbard Center.
“New floors and walls—no more of that old green carpet,” Vance said.
A staircase has also been added to that side of the building, which will connect the first and second floors to the Hub. Upstairs, the Daeske Boardroom has retained its integrity, and interview rooms are outfitted with new furniture and ready to go for use by visiting interviewers and students who require special services during finals time.
Once Hoover is completed, the changes to the Union Building will start to feel more drastic.
“I think of the projects as being interrelated,” Casey said.
With Hoover as the main dining hall, the dining servery and parking dock will be torn down, creating a space that will be as wide as Ubben quad, according to Vance. This space, which will be known as Stewart Plaza, will allow a direct view of East College from Bowman Park.
“There really was no link between Bowman Park and East College—physically or visibly,” Vance said.
Casey is especially excited about this phase of the building projects.
“I just know that the whole campus is going to feel like it has a center and a crossroads and everyone is going to run into everybody. I just know it’s going to chemically change the institution,” he said.
With the Hoover Hall and the Plaza in place, the Hub itself will change from a dining hall to a multipurpose student lounge. With couches, soft seating and maybe even a “portable stage” according to Vance.
“A student space in the student union—imagine that,” he added of the plans for the Hub.
Aside from the big projects in the central part of campus, smaller projects have been completed over the summer or are in the works. A change to the roads surrounding Peeler will create more parking, while the new partnership with Hendrick’s Regional Health has necessitated updates to the health clinic in Hogate Hall.
“Now there are two clinics instead of one,” Vance said, citing the need for privacy in the form of separate entrances now that both students and faculty and staff will be using the clinic.
However, this is merely a holdover measure until an entirely new clinic can be built, probably on the North side of campus as a way to bridge the divide between DePauw’s campus and downtown Greencastle.
Though the completion of these projects is something Vance looks forward to with unmitigated excitement—“This doesn’t feel like work to me,” he said—for Casey it is more bittersweet.
“The fact that I won’t actually be here the day they cut the ribbon and welcome people into Hoover Hall, that will be a hard day for me on a very, very personal level,” Casey said.
Though he won’t be president by the time the construction is completed, the efforts he has made towards beginning the projects will make the temptation to return to look the newly renovated campus over might prove too much to resist.
“What I might do, sometime in the near future, is to slip on campus and put a baseball cap on and look at the projects,” he said, “Then I’ll get in my car and drive off.”