Friday. April 20, 1962
University Daily Kansan
Page 13
--building's completion in 1895 with the publication of the "University Review" for that year.
BLAKE HALL—This 67-year-old campus fixture will soon fall prey to the wrecking ball as the University expands by the addition of new educational buildings. Blake has been used for storage purposes for the past several years.
Blake Hall-Admired, Hated Yet Still a Part of the Campus
By Dennis Farney
Blake Hall must have shuddered too when the steel demolition ball smashed into the side of the old anatomy building.
Blake, never very popular with KU students and alumni, must have wondered if its many enemies were closing in for the kill at last.
Known by some as "the building with a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne behind" and described by others as "a sorry looking structure with a chubby, freckled face and a monstrous hat," Blake was born in a storm of architectural controversy 67 years ago.
SINCE THEN, three generations of KU students have regarded Blake with almost unmitigated disgust, criticized it with unrelenting zeal and waited for the day when it would no longer glower down at them as they walked to and from classes.
With the announcement of a new "master plan" for KU expansion by Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe, their hopes may soon be realized. Blake's days, like those of Fraser Hall, are numbered.
BLAKE'S PUBLIC RELATIONS problem has always been something of a paradox. Even on the KU campus where no two buildings seem to match, Blake has never been able to fit in.
Its high peaked roof, its many narrow windows and its two chateau-like towers set it apart from the rest of the buildings, giving it an air of an aloof old duchess sourly surveying the mundane affairs around her.
Criticism of Blake's architectural lines began immediately after the
"THE SANDSTONE FRONT of the physics building looks like a speckled chicken," the Review noted acidily. "The iron in the stones shows more plainly than the stone itself. If there be no lotion that will remove these blemishes, let a screen be put before the building."
Supporters of the building argued, no doubt, that a screen would hide the clock installed over the building's entrance. But the description of the clock offered by the Daily Kansan as "a Rube Goldbergian set of wheels and levers that continually were not in working order," soon undermined that argument.
ON SOME UNRECORDED date in 1914, the clock stopped. For six years the hands of the clock remained fixed at 8:25, while students pondered the cause of its break-down.
The fault lay, they decided, with the pigeons. The pigeons of 1914, it seems, liked the clock even more than did the students. The pigeons' weight as they roosted on the hands of the clock, it was reasoned, was too much for the clock's intricate set of gears and levels.
So it was with some degree of satisfaction that students watched custodians grease the hands of a new clock purchased in 1925.
THE HAPLESS PIGEONS never had a chance. Many slid off the greased hands and fell to their death on the curb below.
Everyone was happy until later that year when the new clock began running slow. With no pigeons around to take the rap, students and maintenance men alike were puzzled about the cause of the clock's erratic behavior. They were more mystified a few weeks later when the clock regained its vitality and
began to run again. And the inner workings of the clock remain somewhat of a mystery to this day.
FOR THE PAST 10 years, Blake has been used by the University for storage, a big come-down for the former physics building.
Since the cost of renovating the old building has been estimated at more than $550,000, it is probable that Blake will remain a storage depot, haughtily surveying the passing scene through its dusty windows until the men with the demolition ball write the final chapter in its sad history.
Classified Display Rates
1 inch one time ___ $1.00
1 inch five times ___ $4.50
1 inch every day
for 21 insertions ___$15.00
Monthly Rate
(two months minimum)
1 inch every day $12.00
(no extra charge)
No art work or engraving allowed
Call KU-376 or bring your ads to 111 Flint Hall
introducing
atmosphere
. . . a new word in dining pleasure. the firebird restaurant, in association with the plaza club proudly announces the opening of its elegant dining facilities for your enjoyment. the firebird will be open to serve you 5 p.m.-10 p.m. seven days a week.
the firebird welcomes you to the 1962 k.u. relays
2222 Iowa