Campus Buildings Category
05.16.2012
It’s an age-old debate really, not limited to the culinary world. Some say tomato, accenting the long “a” sound. Others prefer the “tomotto” pronunciation of the word. And on NC State’s campus, a similar debate arose in the 1960s about Syme Residence Hall.
On this day in 1962, students learned that the correct pronunciation of the dormitory was actually “sim,” sounding like “dim.” In a survey by the university, more than half of the student body thought the pronunciation was “sime,” with a long “i.”
That thought is still around today, as the university’s facilities website lists the pronunciation as “sime.”
Syme Residence Hall in 1955. Photo courtesy of NCSU Libraries.
The residence hall was named for George Frederich Syme (prounounced “Sim,” like “him”), a civil engineering student who graduated in 1898 and garnered a reputation when he worked with C.L. Mann, an NC State professor of civil engineering, to survey the prospects of building a canal across Nicaragua after the turn of the century.
But as Hardy D. Berry writes in Place Names on the Campus of North Carolina State University, “It is said the heat, insects, and hostile surroundings discouraged their enthusiasm for the canal location.”
Syme, who was the first president of the Raleigh Engineers Club, came back to North Carolina as a highway and bridge specialist with his reputation, but apparently not his name, intact.
05.11.2012
Frank Thompson was everything athletics when he came to NC State in 1909 after a year at Davidson College. He captained the Wolfpack’s baseball team for two years before he was named its coach. He also captained the football team.
So it might seem odd that on this day in 1923, the basketball facility on campus was named Thompson Gymnasium in honor of him. But the honor saluted more than just Thompson’s athletic prowess.
The son of Judge John W. Thompson, Frank felt the patriotic call to serve his country. According to Hardy D. Berry’s Place Names on the Campus of North Carolina State University, Frank was too old to be drafted for service in World War I. But he enlisted anyway in the Fifth Division’s 15th machine gun battalion and soon became a first lieutenant serving in France.
Thompson was killed in action along the German lines when his division was attacked at Regnieville. “The news of his death reached his father in the Panama Canal Zone where he was serving as a judge by appointment of President Woodrow Wilson,” writes Berry.
Reynolds Coliseum opened in 1949, and Thompson Gym became Thompson Theatre in 1963 after renovations. In 2009, the building was renamed Frank Thompson Hall, which houses the Crafts Center and University Theatre, the home for the dramatic arts at NC State.
04.27.2012
Visitors to NC State’s acclaimed College of Engineering these days will find themselves in new buildings on Centennial Campus.
But over 60 years ago, engineering students and professors were still settling into new space on NC State’s main campus. On this day in 1951, the newly-opened Riddick Laboratory was dedicated. More than 200 NC State officials, professors, staff and students gathered for the dedication.
Riddick Laboratory, which now houses the Physics Department and offices and classrooms for the Department of Animal Science, was named for Wallace Carl Riddick. In addition to being NC State’s first football coach (hence Riddick Stadium), Riddick was the university’s first dean of engineering and its fourth president.
The completion of Riddick Laboratory in 1949, at a cost of $1.3 million, came at a great time for the engineering program. The program received new accreditation for several of its disciplines, meaning that only Harvard and MIT had more accredited engineering programs, according to Alice Elizabeth Reagan’s North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.
04.26.2012
NC State is at the center of a rock ‘n’ roll treasure hunt, as a music memorabilia buyer has set out to find a rare poster from a Rolling Stones concert at Reynolds Coliseum in 1965.
Andrew Hawley, of Vintage Rock Posters, has announced that he’s willing to pay $5,000 for the poster of the concert on NC State’s campus.
The poster was used in seven venues on that particular tour, including Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro, N.C., and they would just change the name for each city. Only 100 posters were printed for the Raleigh show. The poster’s unique qualities include a picture of the band with a title of one of their greatest hits, “Satisfaction,” in small print.
Hawley has this picture of the poster he's seeking from the Reynolds concert.
Why is the poster so valuable to Hawley and other collectors?
One reason is that the tour marked only the second U.S. tour for the Stones, who had first come to the states a year earlier in 1964. But there’s also a personal connection to the poster for Hawley, who has the posters for the Charlotte and Greensboro shows.
“My dad grew up in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.,” he says. “It’s been something I’ve always been looking for. I actually saw a picture of it a long time ago.”
Hawley, who is 46 and lives in Denver, Colo., spends his time tracking down posters of other rock ‘n’ roll greats like Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin and Buddy Holly. He appreciates the fact that the posters were randomly put up almost 50 years ago and are now resurfacing.
“I’ve been collecting posters since 1986,” he says. “A lot of this stuff was just hung up in laundromats and barber shops.”
Contact Hawley if you have any information on the poster.
04.04.2012
We profiled a day in the life of Thomas H. Stafford Jr., who is retiring from his post as vice chancellor for student affairs in June, in our Spring 2012 issue of NC State magazine. We asked him to reflect on the places on campus that have become the most important to him during his tenure at NC State. Here are his six favorite spots:
1. 
Stafford is a walking encyclopedia of NC State history, and the place on campus that is most meaningful to him is the Memorial Bell Tower. He regularly gives tours, where he recounts the history of the landmark, something he hopes to continue in his retirement.
2. Holladay Hall not only houses his office, but it was the first building on campus. Stafford appreciates that symbolism and lines every tour group on the building’s steps to recreate a famous picture of NC State’s first freshman class, taken in the same spot in 1889.
3. The sports junkie in Stafford cherishes Reynolds Coliseum. The storied arena was the home to so many great memories, but he also appreciates it as the home to NC State women’s basketball and Kay Yow’s legacy.
4. One of the places he is most accessible is on his strolls through the Brickyard, where he chats with students.
Thompson Gymnasium in the 1920s. Photo Courtesy of NCSU Libraries.
5. Colleagues celebrate the vice chancellor’s eclectic tastes. He says his love for the arts has grown because of the plays he’s seen in University Theatre in Frank Thompson Hall. And he points out that in its previous life, Thompson Gymnasium was where “big-time college basketball started in the Southeast.”
6. While Stafford has overseen student affairs since 1983, many forget that he was a student himself when he attended graduate school at NC State in the mid-1960s. He and his wife, Judy, lived in Owen Residence Hall, which allowed married couples to live there. He might get in trouble at home if this one didn’t make the list.
03.13.2012
Nancy and John Gregg.
Charlotte Wainwright, former director of what used to be called the Gallery of Art & Design at NC State, remembers the 2007 naming ceremony that celebrated the $750,000 endowment Nancy Gregg helped create. The endowment led to the gallery being renamed the John N. and Nancy C. Gregg Museum of Art & Design.
“She walked around to where her grandchildren were sitting and said, ‘This is your responsibility. It’s about what’s been collected. It’s about other people,’” Wainwright says.
Gregg died March 8 after battling Lou Gehrig’s disease for the last several years. She was 78.
Gregg was married to John Gregg ‘55, who served on the university’s Board of Trustees in 1989 and 1990. He was a driving force in raising money for the original gallery before it became the Gregg.
Nancy served as president of the Friends of the Gregg, a nonprofit organization supporting the museum, and on the board of Arts NC State. She also served as a docent at the N.C. Museum of Art. Wainwright says Nancy’s service and the charge she left her grandchildren symbolized her role as a keeper of the arts.
“I told her one time she was the mother of the Gregg,” Wainwright says. “She was really a mother in the most positive way, being a role model, someone who never failed to support the things she loved.”
Wainwright also appreciated Nancy’s elegance and grace when she would host afternoon meetings for the Friends of the Gregg at her home. Her pleasantness always made the meetings fun, Wainwright says, and she always left thinking Nancy was a “grand woman.”
“She was just one of those critically important people in the evolution of the Gregg,” Wainwright says. “The fact that it’s named for Nancy and John is a testament to how important she was.”
There will be a memorial service at 2 p.m. today in Raleigh at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church.
01.04.2012
It’s been a mild winter so far, but most of us remember that unexpected snowstorm that may have paralyzed campus but didn’t stop students from having fun. We ran a selection of your memories of snow and ice in the winter issue of NC State magazine, and here are some more that we thought you would enjoy:
My freshman year found me living on the second floor of the field house for Riddick Stadium. One of my roommates was from Miami, Fla., and had never seen snow. That year, 1947-48, there were two 9-inch snows in Raleigh. My Florida roommate and several other classmates spent both nights—all night—out playing in the snow. I stayed in and slept tight.
– Dean Angell ’51
My friends and I built a snowman that was six snowballs high at Wolf Village during the first snow of January 2009. It was the same day as the presidential inauguration. I remember going out early that day to walk around the snow-laden campus with my friends, coming back in to watch the inauguration and warm up, then promptly heading back out to have some more fun in the snow!
– Lara Jazmin ’10
There was a terrible ice storm in Raleigh around December 1967. When the temperature dropped that night it completely shut down traffic. It was dangerous to even walk on it. I was renting a room in a house at Ferndell Lane just behind the Gateway Restaurant on Hillsborough Street. (The house, painted blue, is still there, but the restaurant is gone.) One of my good friends who also rented a room in the house decided to challenge the ice by riding his skateboard down the sidewalk. My roommate and I tried to discourage him but he was a fearless thrill-seeker and off he went. He may have gotten half way down the hill when all of a sudden his skateboard shot out from under him in one direction and he in another. He received a severe cut but was laughing about it. We tried to stop the bleeding and encouraged him to go to the campus infirmary. He recovered quickly but I assure you it did not deter him from his activities. The next morning I tried to walk to class and the ice was so slick I fell down three times before getting there. I have not seen ice that bad since.
After a few months of very cold weather that winter, we finally had a mild day. It sparked a lot of energy among the students, and we were itching to do something outside. Someone came up with the idea of having a shaving cream fight between our dorm (Alexander) and the dorm next door. We challenged them and they enthusiastically accepted. We all lined in front of our respective dorms with shaving cream cans in hand and went at it in the courtyard. We never knew who won because everybody was having so much fun that we started spraying anybody. A photo of the event was captured in the Agromeck. We all had a great time and it was a good clean way to get rid of that burst of energy.
– Jesse Thomas ’67
In the fall of 1958, I was a freshman living in Becton Dormitory. One night in December, an infamously hard chemistry quiz was given in Nelson Hall. A windy blizzard was in progress, accumulating about a foot of snow, but no quizzes were ever canceled because of weather. After the quiz I returned to the dorm where I had to make an inked drawing for my mechanical drafting class the next morning. After trudging through the snow and biting wind, it took quite a while to warm up my fingers so that I could do the drafting assignment. I had no sooner started the drawing than my roommate, who had no drafting assignment, returned from a local tavern where he and his cousin had been celebrating after the chemistry quiz. He had a beer can in hand and, being unsteady, was sloshing it around. I quickly covered my drawing. My room was no place for this task. As I considered what to do, a friend who lived in Bagwell walked in to ask me a question about an assignment in our math class. I ended up taking refuge with this friend and his roommate. (Fortunately, many of the rooms in the quadrangle still contained third beds, which had been occupied for several weeks by sophomores who were waiting to move into the newly completed New Dorm, later named Bragaw Hall. In my friend’s room I completed my drawing and had a peaceful night. The next morning when returning to Becton, I found that the snow on the steps between the Berry basement and the ground in front of Bagwell had been sculptured by the wind in an unusual fashion, showing the ferocity of the storm.
– Tom Buchanan ’62
12.21.2011
This fall saw the completion of the chancellor’s new residence on Centennial Campus beside the Park Alumni Center. And now NC State has opened the residence’s doors for its community to see. We went inside to see the new digs. Click here to see the photos we got.
The university broke ground on the project in March 2010 and finished construction this October. Known as “the Point,” the residence features a 5,400-square-foot downstairs that serves as a welcoming area for Chancellor Randy Woodson to entertain guests and donors. “It is a gathering place where university partners and collaborators can gain a sense of our core values as a university,” says Woodson. “We take pride in our new residence as we do in all of NC State’s accomplishments both at home and abroad.”
Upstairs, the residents live in a private 3,100-square-foot area. NC State College of Design Dean Marvin Malecha led the design of the home, which replaces the residence on Hillsborough Street that served as the chancellor’s home since it was built in 1928. That building will become the home of the new Gregg Museum of Art & Design.
The project cost $3.5 million, none of which came for public or state-appropriated dollars. Instead, private donors made the Point a reality with their private dollars and in-kind donations, like furnishings.
12.08.2011
NC State broke ground last week on Centennial Campus for a new student housing project slated to open in fall 2013.
Centennial Campus Apartments, located across from Hunt Library, is a $129-million, 550,446 square-foot facility that will house sophomores, juniors and seniors. Students will live in apartments with one to four private bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. The capacity will be 1,195 students. There will also be a bookstore, an array of dining options and three different courtyards.
The project will also include 30 lofts that will accommodate graduate students. (Click the Centennial Campus Apartments link above to access three webcams documenting the project’s construction.)
The project arose from a 2002 task force that looked at the direction of student housing on NC State’s campus. One of the recommendations was that with the College of Engineering and the College of Textiles relocating there, Centennial Campus needed student housing. “The belief was that if it was going to be a true college campus where students could live and learn, it needed to have some basic elements,” says Tim Luckadoo, associate vice chancellor for student affairs.
Luckadoo says no state appropriations and no private money went to the project. Instead, he says housing borrowed for the project, and will pay back the loan with receipts from the apartments’ housing, dining and bookstore.
One of the major amenities at Centennial Campus Apartments will be a new living and learning village. Entrepreneurial Village will enable students to work together on developing ideas and getting them to market.
“You might get an engineering student with a marketing student with a communications student,” says Luckadoo. “They become a team. They will have activities geared toward them that deal with how you grow from an idea to a successful corporation.”
That village will join a movement already afoot at NC State — there are currently nine living and learning villages — in developing more learning communities. Luckadoo says that is a goal in Chancellor Randy Woodson’s strategic plan and that it is based on research that such communities help shape a positive learning experience.
“Students who live in the villages, their grades are better,” Luckadoo says. “Their retention is better. They have more awareness about the world.”
10.04.2011
The Third Annual Pinhole Challenge is over, and the results are in.
Well, most of the results are in.
Your vote is needed to award the People’s Choice prize. To vote, you have to drop by the Crafts Center, check out the various images of NC State and then vote (only once, please) on “your favorite image that best represents the spirit of NC State.” Judging will run through 5 p.m. on Oct. 21. The winner receives $100 and a free Crafts Center class.
The Judges' Award winner
Meanwhile, the Judges’ Award went to Pamela Ocampo, who is working on a masters in computer science. Here’s what the judges had to say about Ocampo’s photo of the atrium at D.H. Hill Library: “Her stunning photograph of the Atrium is wonderfully composed in a great display of visual clarity and depth of field.”
Ocampo received $100 and a free Crafts Center class.
The judges also gave out an award for the photo that best captures the ongoing renovation of the Talley Student Center. Nicole Vayo, a biology major, won for what the judges called a “perfect snapshot that captures this special time on campus.”
The renovation of Talley Student Center
Over 50 NC State students entered the contest by capturing images of NC State through the eye of homemade cameras. One student captured an image of the Memorial Belltower with an Altoids candy tin.
You can check out all the photos in the Pinhole Challenge on the Crafts Center’s Flickr site.
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