Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2009
Connecting the Campus
While the opening of the Warch Campus Center has been getting the lion’s share of attention from the Lawrence community, anyone who visited the campus recently knows it is just one of many changes for the better. Several additional projects have been completed or will soon be completed, unifying the Lawrence campus, providing better options for traversing from one side of the campus to the other, and adding new reasons to visit and explore Lawrence University.
One of the most visible of these projects is the construction of a new median garden on College Avenue, which Lawrence students cross hundreds of times each day. “Lawrence is a closely-knit community of teachers and learners, and the staff who make that environment possible. Yet the environment was not connected and, in some aspects, was downright unsafe,” said Lawrence President Jill Beck, referring to students crossing College Avenue.
A joint undertaking between Lawrence, the City of Appleton and of private donors in the historic neighborhood who funded the project, the College Avenue median garden is first and foremost about improving the safety of students and community members who cross the busy boulevard. Beautiful planted gardens, well-defined crosswalks and lighted signs will serve to keep pedestrians and motor vehicles a safe distance from each other at all times of the day and night.
Margaret Carroll ’61, an emerita trustee, partnered with community leader Pat Schinabeck to lead the median garden’s development and design. “So much serendipity was involved in this garden! The original aim was to solve the problem of pedestrian safety at Lawrence by channeling people to the two crosswalks. A garden — a natural wall — evolved as the solution,” said Carroll, who lives a short walk from campus on College Avenue. “It was an easy leap to make the garden a pretty one, not just utilitarian. The city and Lawrence and the broader community all came together around this garden. The Lawrence University signs remind motorists they are driving through a college campus, the planted median helps to bring the campus together as a whole, and the garden provides a lovely entrance to downtown Appleton.”
Similarly, a pedestrian land bridge known as Hurvis Crossing was built over Lawe Street, connecting the east and west sides of the campus seamlessly, making pedestrians almost invisible from the busy street below. Named for Tom Hurvis ’60 and Julie Esch Hurvis ’61, Hurvis Crossing is a wide, beautifully-landscaped bridge, taking students from the academic buildings on the western side of the campus to residence halls and the campus center on the east side of Lawe Street.
“It’s so much more than a bridge; it’s a welcoming spot, a gathering place for students. We couldn’t be more pleased,” said Julie. A long bench along the bridge is inscribed with the words of Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í faith. “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth,” reads the inscription. According to the Hurvises, their dream is that the bridge becomes a place where students, faculty, staff and the community can come together in unity.
Visitors to Lawrence’s iconic Memorial Chapel are encouraged to look upward to appreciate refinements inside. Following significant summer maintenance and repairs, the chapel re-opened this fall with an attractive, structurally enhanced and newly painted ceiling, revealing its architectural beauty to all attending the many concerts and lectures the chapel hosts throughout the academic year.
With the campus center now open, a flurry of construction activity took place before the start of the academic year in the former Memorial Union, now known as Memorial Hall. No longer a destination for dining, coffee and student meetings, much of the building has been repurposed as sorely needed classrooms and faculty offices. (The Viking Room remains in operation in the lower level.)
Outside Memorial Hall, sidewalks have been widened and improvements were made at the Wriston Amphitheatre with a row of small evergreen trees separating the spaces and accommodating the larger flow of pedestrian traffic to the Warch Campus Center.
Still to come is Lawrence’s new Riverwalk, a scenic interpretive walkway along the banks of the Fox River. Conceived and designed by environmental studies students and Associate Professor of Geology Andrew Knudsen, with additional research conducted by students of Associate Professor of History Monica Rico, the Riverwalk will invite visitors to learn about the history and the unique environmental attributes of the Fox River.
“Students were excited by the prospect that this Riverwalk would bring members of the Lawrence community to the river. They felt strongly that it would encourage people to come to this small natural area on campus and would help foster an environmental sense of place,” Knudsen said. “While the environmental history of the Fox River has certainly been mixed, the Riverwalk, along with the garden and the Warch Campus Center, highlight the river as an important and beautiful part of our local environment.” Construction of a portion of the Riverwalk began this summer with plans to open it to the public on Earth Day, 2010. When complete, and with new, wider sidewalks connecting the campus in all directions, Beck said members of the Lawrence and surrounding communities will be able to enjoy walking a loop of the campus. “They could go down the stairs by Trever Hall, walk along the river past the garden, past a handsome council ring, onto the fire road (behind Hiett Hall) and over to the tennis courts, up the hill on Drew Street, then past Main Hall and all of the academic buildings, over the beautiful land bridge (Hurvis Crossing) and back to the campus center. We hope walkers from the larger community will enjoy it as much as those of us on campus.”
