By the end of the summer, the stone walls of West Union will be obscured from view by white construction fences until July 2015. From top to bottom, inside and out, the central building will be demolished and replaced by a tall glass atrium, more inviting than the segmented Gothic enclosure that has been a staple of West Campus since its construction in the 1920s.
Within the new glass facade—inspired by the library’s Von der Heyden Pavillion—West Union will feature a more open floor plan, with spaces for student organizations to meet and to engage with each one another. Pods, similar to the ones in Perkins Library, for candid and organic interactions between students, faculty and staff surround the many new dining options, which will be able to serve 12,000 meals a day and will highlight locally sourced and healthy options.
The dated feel of the current student spaces is amplified beneath the floorboards. In the basement—the area responsible for the food storage and preparation—the compartmentalized feel was not intended to support the production of nearly 6,000 meals a day. A mere two weeks before the renovations are set to begin, I toured the bottom-most levels of West Union, retracing the tour given to the Board of Trustees before they voted to renovate the building.
Led by Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta, I began with the freezers. Six intertwining rooms beneath the Great Hall—so cold that staff are provided heavy coats on inventory days—are home to all of the produce, meat and perishables provided for the eateries of West Union. In the middle of June, after almost all of the dining has been discontinued in preparation for the demolition, the freezers only contained enough to feed 500 children on campus for summer programs. Yet dining employee Brent Hopkins carefully maneuvered the cart in which he was gathering food for the lunch service through the tightly packed aisle of the first room of the freezer. He said it is even more of a challenge to efficiently maneuver through the snug areas when the freezers are full.
Shipments come in at least three times a week, where they are distributed to their proper place in the freezers. When it is time to use the products, they are brought to the front room so workers have easy access to them. Employees accompany large carts full of food into a service elevator where they are brought up to be cooked and distributed to students. Moneta said as much food is prepared upstairs as possible, but some stages—like chopping and parboiling—take place in the basement kitchens. These kitchen facilities will be almost completely replaced in the new West Union.
Adjacent to the freezers is a large open area used as a pantry. Large boxes of small potatoes sit open and ready for preparation. There used to be a butcher shop in this area. When West Union opened, Duke dining used to break down their own cuts of meat, but that ended many years ago. Now they bring in pre-cut, frozen meats, ready for preparation.
The bakery is gone too, long ago replaced by the kitchen for Alpine Bagels, though the machine that Alpine uses to perfect their bagels is still functioning. The machine takes kneaded dough and shapes it before running it through a circular pole, so it comes out the other end with a hole in the center, the classic bagel shape.
“The secret to a perfect bagel, is boiling the bagel first,” Moneta said. A large, metallic tub is used to boil the bagels before they are baked in a commercial oven.
Much of the area underneath West Union has been emptied in preparation for the demolition, and only some of the industrial appliances are finding a new home in the Events Pavilion, which will house student dining facilities during the renovations. Others, Moneta said, will either be donated or discarded. Many of them haven’t been replaced since the 1970s.
To travel to the sub-basement, we had to leave the building and move to a separate entrance. While there was a way to get there internally, it would have taken us to a dark, mechanical side of the lowest level. Because construction crews at the time lacked the technology to break through the layer of rock that West Union was built on, the sub-basement is not a uniform height. Some areas, like the section I toured, have tall ceilings, while others are reduced to the size of a crawl space. The disjointed nature of the lowest level will be rectified in the renovations, as crews will excavate as much as 20 feet deeper to have a more even space.
Nestled down a staircase beneath the Greek Devil on the Bryan Center Plaza and beside a little-known laundry facility open to the residents of West Campus lies an entrance to the subbasement. With no swipe for card access, one must know the code to the door in order to enter. Inside serves, among other things, as a storage unit for the belongings of miscellaneous student groups. Stacked almost to the unfinished ceiling of one corner are boxes of The Chanticleer, Duke’s student yearbook, dating back to the 1990s.
In the center of the room is evidence of a campaign to reduce waste caused by plastic water bottles. A water bottle, crafted from plastic and wire, four or five feet tall, stands with a sign on the front that reads “Take back the tap.” Inside are more than 100 plastic water bottles. I asked Moneta if these would be recycled when the demolition began; he assured me that they would.
On the far left wall are tiny plaques urging students to wash silk at their own risk, the last remaining signage of a dry cleaning service that is long out of business. Their private room, to the side of the level has a still-working sink and the plumbing hookups for washing machines that once were housed there. Among other things, this damp, dark storage area is home to many cockroaches, all of which will be displaced when their home is demolished.
Although there are many aspects of West Union that will be destroyed once the construction begins, the plans include restoring some former Duke student favorites to the building. With its entrance off of the loading dock that leads into the freezers of the basement, the Hideaway, a pub that was once lively with student interactions closed in the early 2000’s. The space is now used as temporary offices. After the renovations to the building are complete, Moneta said a new pub will open in its place.
Planning for the construction began in 2008, and is set to conclude in Fall 2015. The renovation is being funded by the Charlotte-based Duke Endowment. In Spring 2011, the Endowment pledged $80 million to renovate Baldwin Auditorium, Page Auditorium and the West Union Building. Grimshaw Architects, lead my Mark Husser, is overseeing the construction of the new West Union.
Incoming freshmen will never see the basement of West Union, but most of class of 2013 probably hadn’t either. The space was unique to the original 1920s style design of the building, but Moneta noted that, after the renovation, West Union will be a fresh, modern space where students want to be.
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