Down in the basement of South Dining Hall (SDH), from the men’s room to the entrance to our beloved newsroom, the walls are marked with arrows and the letters “DEMO” in permanent marker for demolition. It’s a pity, not only because the image that’s been published of a renovated SDH seems to perpetuate a soulless modern architecture that infects campus with white walls.
South Dining Hall will still be a beautiful building with its façade. But it’s losing The Observer’s offices, which administration has decided will be continuing its journey at Hesburgh Library.
“When any industry is new, they build cathedrals to it,” is something Lorne Michaels once said about 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
That’s what it felt like as an wide-eyed (delusional) freshman coming down into the now-“old” Observer offices in the basement of South Dining Hall. Upon further thought, it may not be true that the “industry” of student journalism was new. The Observer itself had existed for 30 years elsewhere on campus. But to those of us who walked into that office perpetually entranced by its walls, it was a sort of cathedral.
People who have seen the office might object to my dramatics. On its face, it was a grimy, old cellar, and many jokes were made about potential disease in the ceilings and furniture. But to those of us who developed a relationship with this space that may have come that the expense of our grades, we fell into some trance.
The walls were papered with old issues and awards, and jokes from years of production nights. There were notes from Pulitzer Prize winning alums and letters from Fr. Hesburgh, and it was always priceless to see how happy a freshman got when they added something to our increasingly flammable walls. Walking into the office felt aesthetically like entering the past (at least the 1990s). Many of the things in the office were lost to time, and it was impossible to tell whether something in the drawers had been there for three years or three decades (or older, like a bottle brought over from the LaFun office). Sometimes, an afternoon conversation would by interrupted by a phone call coming through the fax machine. At three in the morning, working a production or back shift, it certainly felt time above ground did not matter.
Functionality was also questionable. At least in the last four years, there were way too many computers on the desks, and somehow none of them would work at the same time. That was navigable, with the bounties of functional cable TV, boundless Diet Coke, the eclectic collection of chairs and the conversations you got to have in the office with a constellation of people who played some part.
As a (personality hire) Observer friend once pointed out in a post-board meeting storytelling session, she had dropped first and last names constantly, and not once did it ever come back to haunt her in her real lives above ground. At The Observer, everyone had other social circles, different people in their Instagram posts. We were factually work friends, living out a separate sphere of our college lives. And this one belonged to us, with a place we could show off to friends, to family.
Legends of Observer past tell that “before there were cameras,” enterprising student journalists (who graduated a long time ago) would take breaks from work for karaoke up in the Oak Room (singing Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow”) or hold conference calls with administrators in the emptied-out dining halls. Some are rumored to have even observed the kitchens and pantries. Perhaps, worst of all, there was an old challenge in which alpha male Observer journalists would pee in every urinal along the wall in the bathroom, in one go.
But that’s history.
Long live The Observer. Rest in peace, our office.
