Y is Coming Back Like a Ton of Bricks

Posted on Aug. 10, 2006

There was a time when the Campus Y and its front courtyard were the best place on campus to meet friends, exchange ideas and try out unpolished folk songs.

Before South Campus dormitories shifted the center of campus in that direction, Lenoir Hall and Wilson Library were about as far south as anyone needed to go. Built in the late 1960s along with the Student Union, the Undergraduate Library and the bookstore, the Pit pulled campus social life away from Y Court. Now, the Campus Y is trying to pull some of it back.

As part of a $5.5 million project to rebuild the interior of the century-old building, the Y is creating a sidewalk cafe facing Memorial Hall and Polk Place. Y leaders are hoping the cafe and new landscaping will remake Y Court as the campus crossroads it once was.

“This was the Pit of its day,” said Y Director Virginia Carson ’71. “People met their spouses at Y Court.”

Unlike the Pit, the Y Court never had a brick. It went from dirt to the asphalt that has wrapped around it and the University’s administration building for many years. That is about to change. As part of the restoration of the Y, its court and the south and east sides of South Building will be bricked, same as their surroundings.

The University has contributed $1.5 million toward the Y’s restoration. The rest is coming from private donors, many of them Y alumni, including hundreds who are paying $100 apiece for memorial bricks to help pave the cafe and courtyard. Two of those bricks belong to songwriter Jim Wann ’70, who used to test his early tunes with audiences at the Y coffeehouse. “Jim Wann was here singing,” one of his bricks will read.

“I was just starting to write songs, and, of course, that was a great place for me to try out something that I’d just written the night before and see how people respond to it – or not, as the case may be,” Wann said.

With the coffeehouse on the first floor, the campus printing press on the second and the student bookstore in the basement, the Campus Y was much more than just an out-of-place stucco building in a sea of brick. There were guys with guitars covering Dylan, student-activists marching for civil rights and cafeteria workers striking for higher wages.

“It was very much a place where you could count on meeting interesting people,” Wann said.

If things go as planned, it will be that once more.

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