In my first months at UB, the freshmen on my floor in Ellicott spread gossip like women in a beauty salon. There were two main kinds.
First, there were rumors about the other freshmen. Then, there were rumors about North Campus -why it was so ugly.
"I heard it was modeled after a Japanese prison," a girl would say, leaning in close, as if sharing a national secret.
"No, the architects of Ellicott were smoking crack," someone would respond. "I read that in 'Reach.'"
These crack-smoking Japanese prison experts intrigued me. So I walked over to the University Archives on the fourth floor of Capen Hall, piled a stack of thick scrapbooks on a table, pulled up a chair, and began to read.
What I learned is that truth is stranger than fiction.
The planners of UB had some very radical ideas. That's because in the late 1960s, when Amherst was chosen over the Buffalo waterfront as the site for UB's new campus, officials expected that the entire university - including the medical school - would move to the new campus.
The first proposal, according to Buffalo historian Mark Goldman, was for one giant mega-structure to house the whole campus.
I'm not kidding. One giant building.
On one hand, you would never have to go outside in the winter. However, on the other hand, you would never go outside at all. Lucky for us, someone must have decided that was a bad idea.
Instead, the second master plan called for each "faculty" to be housed in its own mega-structure. This plan was carried out for the most part. That's why Lockwood, Baldy and O'Brian Halls look the same - they were part of the "Law and Education Faculty" complex. Furnas, Jarvis, Ketter and Bell resemble each other because they were part of the "Engineering Science Faculty" complex.
Never built, however, was a truly gargantuan building designed for the School of Medicine. The structure - consisting of 20 diamond shaped buildings, each the size of Hochstetter Hall - would tower over the rest of the campus like how Kramer dwarfed Mickey on "Seinfeld."
In the single best decision UB has ever made, officials decided that instead of building that monstrosity, they would keep the Main Street campus open and keep the Medical School there.
North Campus was also slated to have to a mall. It would have been built on the far shore of Lake LaSalle between Ellicott and South Lake. And believe it or not, a transit system - possibly a monorail - was planned.
And there were no plans for a Student Union. In fact, the campus didn't have a real union until the early 1990s - just a small building on the present site called the SAC. The jokes about that probably never got old.
Finally, almost all the students were to live on campus in one of the 30 "residential colleges." They would live, eat and take classes with students in their college. At one time, Ellicott's six quads were the first of the 30 residential colleges.
To house the other colleges, architects considered building five to eight structures just like Ellicott. Imagine that. Most of us have enough trouble with one Ellicott. Five would have been impossible. And with Fillmore, Red Jacket and Wilkeson already taken, they would have run out of Buffalo historical figures after whom to name the buildings.
Worst of all, at one time UB wanted to paint the Baird Point columns in pastel colors. In the early 1960s, the columns -- taken from a demolished Buffalo bank -- sat in pieces on South Campus. According to an old issue of The Spectrum, officials wanted to paint it in pastels and build it there. In 1978, it opened on North Campus instead (thankfully, in white).
I left the University Archives with a greater appreciation for what we have. Later that day, as I sat in the real Student Union with some friends eating one of Ron's sandwiches, I imagined waking up in Ellicott No. 7 and taking a monorail to a class in ?AeIber-Hochstetter.
Compared to that, I think that the campus turned out pretty well.
And if you still hate it, at least be thankful that Baird Point is not canary yellow, flamingo pink, and robin's egg blue.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
