Departments
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Week of 20 March 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 24 |
Feature
Article
GSU celebrates 35th with a birthday bash March 26
by Brian Fitzgerald
You're invited to a birthday party, complete with cake and ice cream, for a building. But not just any building. The George Sherman Union, literally and figuratively the student center of the Charles River Campus, is about to turn 35, and a huge bash is planned in the GSU's Metcalf Ballroom on March 26, from 2 to 4 p.m.
The Boston University Pep Band will be there, along with a multitude of people from the BU community -- including President Jon Westling, who will cut the massive cake. Actually, this dessert, prepared by the GSU baking staff, will consist of 21 different sheet cakes put together.
"We will have enough cake and ice cream to feed 2,000 people," says Ken Gasse, assistant catering director of GSU's dining services.
Also attending the festivities will be 75-year-old Rhett, BU's Boston terrier mascot, who was just entering middle age when the GSU was built. And what would a party be without balloons? Balloon sculpturist James Dalton, a BU police officer, will be handing out his animal creations. Commemorative T-shirts will be given to the party's first 500 guests.
From March 23 to March 26 the Metcalf Ballroom, constructed in 1984, much of it on the site of a little-used courtyard, will feature a photo retrospective of the building from the GSU's archives. During that week the Union Court -- a cafeteria long noted for its institutional-style drabness until it was remodeled in the summer of 1993 -- will entice diners with such food specials as 35-cent sodas, chips, and French fries. The dining hall and ballroom won't be the only areas in the building to go retro: the basement games room will feature preinflation pool table rates of 60 cents an hour instead of the usual price of $5.50.
"During the previous week there will be a birthday card in The Link for people to sign," says Mary Ellen Osburn, operations coordinator for the GSU administration. At present the building "looks nothing like it did in 1963," she adds. "Everything has been renovated in the past eight years."
Where were you in '63? Many readers weren't even born yet. But the 67 BU employees who have been here at least 35 years (they will be treated to a free lunch on March 25 in the faculty-staff dining room) remember when the GSU replaced the Commons, war surplus structures that served as BU's student center from 1947 to 1961. Before the construction of the GSU, Senior Breakfast on Commencement weekend was held outside, on Marsh Plaza.
When the GSU, named after Boston industrialist, philanthropist, and BU benefactor George Sherman, opened its doors in the spring of 1963, the building fulfilled one of then-president Harold Case's first plans for Boston University. The concrete-and-glass GSU, designed by architect José Luis Sert, was modeled after student union buildings at midwestern universities that were the social core of the campuses.
"A development brochure from the early 1960s described what was to be built as 'the unifying force on campus,' " says GSU Administration Director Annemarie Kougias. "And that's what the GSU did. As BU was developing from a commuter school to a residential university, it provided the Charles River Campus with a nucleus."