As the places of memory come tumbling down…

This was in 2016, a year I seem to barely remember

This was the end to the W. W. Holes Residence Hall on the campus of St. Cloud State university. I never lived there, but as I watched the building fall, I remember the friends up on the top floor, room #909, or the LAN gaming parties that took place on the 7th floor. What was that game again? Halflife?

I worked for Residential Life for two years, both as a “representative” and a member of the summer conference crew. I manned the front desk and I cleaned windows (and desks and floors) in just about every room in that entire building.

I can still tell you that Holes Hall was basically the twin of nearby Stearns Hall, the main difference being that the room numbers wended their way on the floors in opposite directions. At nine floors, both were tall buildings for the area, but Sherburne Hall, at 13 floors, was the tallest building in St. Cloud and in Stearns County. As I was giving tours, I used to laugh about that fact, having grown up in Chicago.

I never wanted to live in Holes Hall. Even then, in the waning days of the 90s, the rooms were small for college students’ taste. The building itself was a plain rectangle, built in the days of the space race where US college campuses seemed to want to prove we could build buildings just as ugly as their Soviet counterparts. The rooms in Holes and Stearns Halls were even more unimaginative; a door opened into the middle of one end of the room, and a built in wardrobe flanked either side of the door. A single, perfectly centered window was situated in the middle of the other end, two mirror-image desks completing the total oppressive symmetry of the small space. During the summers, single beds would fill a large portion of the wall space between the wardrobes and the desks, during the school year, beds were lifted and lofted in all sorts of ways – often over the desks and across the entire width of the room – to make these dorm rooms feel a little bit more comfortable.

To attract students to Holes Hall, two of the floors there – the 7th and 8th, I believe – were “honors” floors, for students in the honors program. Even as a “cheerleader” for living on campus, I felt like it was a little bit of a gimmick to do this, that it was a way to entice good students into quite mediocre living quarters, but it seemed to work.

I haven’t spent much time in St. Cloud since graduating. I know things change. My favorite building on campus, Colbert South, was demolished within a year or two of my graduation. It was a random house that occupied a space on the northeast corner of campus, pretty much ignored by all. However, that was different, as it was a random old house that just happened to be on campus – seeing Holes Hall’s end, even with it being seven years ago, is something else. There was nothing special about the building architecturally, and the city “skyline” may have been improved in taking it down. In my mind, though, it simply belongs to campus, and seeing it come down into a heap of rubble definitely conjures sadness, remembering how much time I spent there both for work and for fun.

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