West Union to open for sports camp participants

The amenities of the renovated West Union will soon be available to some.

Bill McCraw, project manager for the West Union, wrote in an email that Monday is the opening date for the Great Hall and Cambridge Inn in West Union, which has been closed since July 2013. The eateries in these venues will be serving food for students attending sports camps during the summer months, said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs.

“They won’t be featuring menus for students that they will in Fall, but we will be cooking in them,” Moneta said.

Announced last September, the West Union vendors will be Three Seasoning Catering, Sushinara, Saladelia, Au Bon Pain, Campus Coffee of Durham, Enzo’s Pizza, Sitar Indian Palace, Geer Street Garden and The Boot.

However, Moneta noted that open venues in West Union will only be serving simple menus for camp residents. The restaurants will begin featuring their specialized menus once students return to campus in the Fall. 

Duke students on campus for summer session classes will not be able to eat at West Union, he explained. 

“This is the summer in which we’re transitioning,” Moneta said.

 He said the University’s goal is for the entire West Union to be fully operational by the start of the Fall semester. 

The last venue to open in West Union will be ABP, which is moving from the Bryan Center. Moneta explained that ABP could potentially open later than the other venues—but that it would not be significantly delayed by more than a week.

ABP’s current location in the Bryan Center will become a study space, and Moneta said this transformation should be completed by the Fall as well. 

McCraw noted that the project did not face any major problems, even though preserving many of West Union’s original structures built in the 1920s proved to be a challenging task. Before work began, an intensive structural analysis had to be performed.

Although much of the original work has been preserved, there are many new openings and wider openings in the walls, McCraw explained.

“All the floors in the tower were removed to create public spaces with high ceilings,” he wrote. “It was a huge undertaking.”

In addition, the Great Hall and Cambridge Inn now feature balconies supported by cables suspended from the existing rafters, he noted.

To perform all the construction work, McCraw wrote that the entire building had to be shored up to withstand the demolition of the interior core as well as the building of the new glass structures.

Moneta agreed that combining the old architecture with the new features was the largest design challenge.

“It’s a very big, very complex building that involves restoration of old and renovation of new, and it doesn’t get more complicated than that,” he said.

Despite the anticipated popularity of West Union’s new eateries, Moneta noted that he expects the Bryan Center to still be used frequently. He explained that the stores and offices in the Bryan Center will continue to make it a popular destination.

The renovations of West Union—along with the creation of the new student wellness center and the transformation of Penn Pavilion into an event space—were purposely designed to create unity in the main area of campus, Moneta added.

“We’re treating everything as an integrated collection of buildings that make up a downtown environment for students,” he said.

Neelesh Moorthy and Claire Ballentine contributed reporting.