State of the Union

AAAH, remember lunches in the Union--those days when you sat, nibbling at your chickwich in a crowd of entry mates, staring up in awe at the antler chandeliers and wondering if Teddy Roosevelt really had anything to do with them? Well, cherish that memory if you're not a senior. Once first-year dining has moved over to Memorial Hall, you won't even have a Return-to-the-Union "Champagne Senior Brunch" to remind you.

But the building will remain even without the brunch and still harbor a few lingering memories. Right now, Harvard's plans to transform the Union into a humanities center including an in-depth investigation into which Union artifacts should end up where. "We've been working with the Harvard museums try to figure our what items are important to the building proper and which have to do with the freshman experience," says Elizabeth Buckley, the project manager of F.A.S. Physical Resources' remodeling of the historic building.

Breathe easy: the antler chandeliers aren't going anywhere. The bulbbedecked horns will flank an enormous staircase which will split the Great Hall (that's the main dining room to us) in two in order to provide more office space. "You'll have a remembrance and understanding of the past life [of the building]," says Buckley of the new design. Goody Clancy, the project architect, has planned the renovation so that "from the first floor, you'll be able to see what the hall once was." As for the chandeliers, "It's going to be a one-of-a-kind thing," Buckley says, "They've just become part of the architecture... I'd like to see what they say when we send those things in for cleaning and re-wiring."

A number of other Union standbys will also stay with the building. "There are a lot of plaques and things you don't really see" that reflect the time period of the Spanish American War, says Buckley, who plans to re-locate the plaques to remind us of the building's rich history. The ponderous busts of John Harvard (sculpted by Daniel Chester French) and George Washington (a gift from one of the original architects) will stay, too, along with the fireplaces whose mantels they grace. "They were designed for the space; they will definitely stay," reassures Buckley. A portrait of the Union's benefactor, Henry Higgenson, will keep the busts company, along with the statue of the draped man upon a turtle named "Kronos." Some of the tables originally designed for the Union have been ferreted away into storage for quite some time now, and will re-appear to be recycled.

Alas, not all our familiar symbols of Uniondom can stay, though according to Buckley all the artifacts will find a place somewhere at Harvard. The inconspicuous Spanish-American War canon that huddles beneath the center stairwell has yet to find a resting place. "We're trying to find happy home for it... canons just don't have the popularity they might have had in earlier times," says Buckley. The baseball collection from upstairs might endue across the river in an athletic facility, and some of the many portraits in the Union will accompany the Class of 1999 to Memorial Hall.

Deciding what objects end up where isn't always easy. Buckley and her colleagues use old photos of the Union to decide "what's truly traditional and sacred and what's not...different people have different concepts of what belongs." The ornate mirrors in the appropriately dubbed Mirror Room seem to have arrived in some mysterious manner; no one really understands how the huge plates of glass got into the room, but "the Fog wants nothing to do with them," according to Buckley. "They're really just over-romanticized Victorian frames that are starting to fall apart." Still, she might keep one in the Union just for old times' sake.

Then again, you never know. Older `old times' at the Union were quite different from our `old times,' and not always worth preservation. Once the Varsity Club, it was "intended as the poor-man's club," says Buckley. "All the rich kids had their own places to be." In trying to cultivate an aristocratic atmosphere the newborn Union of 1901 hosted a zoo of stuffed animal heads, some of whose dusty outlines you can still see on the walls if you look carefully. "I don't think I could have eaten a meal there with all those heads, especially not one with meat in it," Buckley comments. Eventually the busts fell out of fashion, reminding us that an appropriately-lost memory here and there might not be that bad.