GrandMarc Residence Hall (YMCA) @ Northeastern U | 291 St. Botolph Street | Fenway

[joebos]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

I just went back to the beginning of this thread and wow, did they really chop this thing down. The earliest rendering show at least 30 stories, that thing was massive!

I prefer the taller tower. The recent proposal looks awkward proportionally or from a scale standpoint.

 

[Tombstoner]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

I disagree-- they both look pretty McTower to me, but the 30 story version seems even less "academic." I'm not a fan of mega-residence halls in general--I don't think they lend themselves to the notion of community that is really important to the undergraduate experience. 17 stories is also too big (for this function--I simple-mindedly like tall towers like everyone else) but only 1/2 as impersonal.

 

[porter]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

^Realistically for a city campus you can't not have mega residence halls. If the student wants to go to a city university, this is what they should expect. And there isn't much sense of community at Northeastern anyway with all its commuters and 12000 students, its just too big. Another mega dorm isn't going to make it any worse.

 

[dshoost88]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

^Realistically for a city campus you can't not have mega residence halls. If the student wants to go to a city university, this is what they should expect. And there isn't much sense of community at Northeastern anyway with all its commuters and 12000 students, its just too big. Another mega dorm isn't going to make it any worse.

I'm sorry, but I have to call a "mega B.S." on that statement. I just did a research project on the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood(s) with regards to structures that facilitate a sense of community in the neighborhood, and after attending Northeastern University for the last 4 years I can assure you the school promotes a greater sense of community than any establishment abutting or within the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood. Through the greening of campus quads and corridors, Northeastern now features the Krentzman Quad, the Library Quad, the Sciences Quad, the Churchill/World Series Way Quad, the West Village Quad, the Freshman Quad (Spear Place), and of course Centennial Commons on the heart of campus. Unlike the collective 'Colleges of the Fenway' and even our neighbor to the north (Boston University), Northeastern's open spaces are frequently bustling with student-sponsored activities, visiting families, impromptu music performances, wiffle ball games, ultimate frisbee tournaments, BBQ's, and even the casual sunbathers looking to catch up on studies or enjoy the pleasant weather. Yet while the transition from some neighborhoods to others is quite abrupt in parts of Boston, at least at Northeastern the transition is smooth, representing the positive relationship the school has looked to foster with the surrounding communities in the neighborhood.

Also, you're misinformed with regards to admissions & ratio of people living on campus/around campus. After the completion of International Village, Northeastern now houses nearly 60% of its student body on campus. Its student body is around 15,000 people and enrollment has been capped for entering freshman classes to about 2,800 students. Be that as it may, of course there are those students that must live off campus and "commute" to NU. But it's important not to misidentify what this commute actually is. Well over 85% of Northeastern's students live within a half mile of the university within on or off campus housing--their commute simply requires a short walk or bike ride to the campus, or perhaps even a hop on the "T". But between the student body and the faculty/administration, less than 15% physically drive cars to "commute" to campus. And as Northeastern moves to house more of its students on campus, that percent of cars on campus will continue to reduce.

NU's campus is only 73 acres big--large enough to accommodate our vast student body, yet intimate enough in scale that it not only takes less than 12 minutes to walk between the two furthest points on campus, but also promotes an environment that fosters a VERY rich sense of community. Physically speaking, it annoys me that someone would make the claim that NU is too big to have a sense of community and might likely argue that a school that's hundreds of acres larger is small enough to accomplish the same task. That's poppycock.

I work as a tour guide at Northeastern's Visitor Center and would be more than pleased to arrange a tour for you to see exactly what I'm talking about. Just shoot me a message.

 

[TomOfBoston]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

My guess is that "porter" has not been on the Northeastern campus for 20 years, if ever.

 

[Ron Newman]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

20 years ago, Northeastern had a considerably larger student body and was much more of a commuter campus. (The campus was also much uglier than it is today.)

 

[porter]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

I'm sorry, but I have to call a "mega B.S." on that statement. I just did a research project on the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood(s) with regards to structures that facilitate a sense of community in the neighborhood, and after attending Northeastern University for the last 4 years I can assure you the school promotes a greater sense of community than any establishment abutting or within the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood. Through the greening of campus quads and corridors, Northeastern now features the Krentzman Quad, the Library Quad, the Sciences Quad, the Churchill/World Series Way Quad, the West Village Quad, the Freshman Quad (Spear Place), and of course Centennial Commons on the heart of campus. Unlike the collective 'Colleges of the Fenway' and even our neighbor to the north (Boston University), Northeastern's open spaces are frequently bustling with student-sponsored activities, visiting families, impromptu music performances, wiffle ball games, ultimate frisbee tournaments, BBQ's, and even the casual sunbathers looking to catch up on studies or enjoy the pleasant weather. Yet while the transition from some neighborhoods to others is quite abrupt in parts of Boston, at least at Northeastern the transition is smooth, representing the positive relationship the school has looked to foster with the surrounding communities in the neighborhood.

Also, you're misinformed with regards to admissions & ratio of people living on campus/around campus. After the completion of International Village, Northeastern now houses nearly 60% of its student body on campus. Its student body is around 15,000 people and enrollment has been capped for entering freshman classes to about 2,800 students. Be that as it may, of course there are those students that must live off campus and "commute" to NU. But it's important not to misidentify what this commute actually is. Well over 85% of Northeastern's students live within a half mile of the university within on or off campus housing--their commute simply requires a short walk or bike ride to the campus, or perhaps even a hop on the "T". But between the student body and the faculty/administration, less than 15% physically drive cars to "commute" to campus. And as Northeastern moves to house more of its students on campus, that percent of cars on campus will continue to reduce.

NU's campus is only 73 acres big--large enough to accommodate our vast student body, yet intimate enough in scale that it not only takes less than 12 minutes to walk between the two furthest points on campus, but also promotes an environment that fosters a VERY rich sense of community. Physically speaking, it annoys me that someone would make the claim that NU is too big to have a sense of community and might likely argue that a school that's hundreds of acres larger is small enough to accomplish the same task. That's poppycock.

I work as a tour guide at Northeastern's Visitor Center and would be more than pleased to arrange a tour for you to see exactly what I'm talking about. Just shoot me a message.

Well I would have come better prepared if I thought I was going to get fact-checked on every sentence. I'm currently a third-year student and I have to call bs on most of your statements. In fact its mostly the overzealous tour guides that they get to pump out all this "community fostering" stuff and that raised my hopes initially.
Just having a bunch of carnivals and seminars and whatever else they call them doesn't make a community, and you see the problem is that people like you think it does. People don't mix at events like this if they don't know each other, they go with their circles of friends. That's not community, it's a bunch of people in the same place at the same time. I moved off campus after freshman year, as did at least three quarters of the people I know at NEU. I feel like I got gipped out of a good freshman experience with the apartment style living because I disliked all five of my other suitemates and it's hard to meet other people on the floor when all the apartment doors are closed all the time (and the dorm rules, though maybe necessary, are suffocating).
It is true I think that there are a lot of small niche communities here and there mostly based around clubs. I know this girl in the Philippino Club and she seems to be great friends with all the other people in this club, as an example. There's a lot of fragmenting along racial lines like this and language lines too, I often come across groups of Indians and Asians speaking their home languages to each other, which is great don't get me wrong, but it's got nothing to do with me. I don't fit into these niches and I think many of the rest of us who don't are the ones who feel this way. There is no broad sense of community for Northeastern, if I see someone on the street wearing NEU garb I don't feel like there's a connection there like there should be.
For a comparison I'll site Emerson College, another urban school, though not a College of the Fenway. I don't know what they do different, but I'm banking on its smaller size being the reason its community is so strong. Three of my best friends attend and I can say positively that their school does it better.

My original point, now that we're so far off topic, was that mega-residence halls are necessary for city colleges with large enrollments like this. I guess my first new point is that they need to be better designed to foster interaction between the residents (seriously the Little Building at Emerson does this so well, weekend nights were positively festive in these dorms, and half the entire floor would gather to watch a movie in the common room or something). My second new point is that numbers of clubs, amounts and sizes of outdoor events with bad live music, a campus that only takes 12 minutes to walk across, and lush landscaping do not make a community, and that overzealous university employees with agendas should stop spreading this propaganda to prospective students only to increase application numbers and make Northeastern look like it is more selective than it is.


And TomofBoston, its advisable that you not accuse other members of things, it takes away from this forums' sense of community lol.

 

[dshoost88]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

Well, porter, all I can say is that my experience at Northeastern has been radically different from yours. I cannot imagine where you lived your freshman year unless you're an honors student that lived in West F. I lived in the "freshman dorms" my first year at Northeastern in the Engineering living learning community; there were about 100 guys on my floor, a big common room, and most of us knew each other. We had Nerf gun wars occasionally, toga parties, impromptu gatherings in each other's rooms (which BTW, we always left the doors open to so we could socialize amongst each other), and since we were all engineers we frequented the common rooms to work on homework assignments together or study for exams. I even use to throw "Office Parties" every Thursday where 30-40 of us would gather around the big screen TV in our lobby and watch NBC's The Office. Of the 50 or so people I lived amongst freshman year in my wing of the building, I still talk to 15-20 relatively regularly. We go to hockey games together, we see movies opening midnight at the Regal Fenway, and we play frisbee/volleyball around campus when the weather permits.

I lived on campus my first 3 years at NU and only moved off campus this January for some permanency with a residence (because students likely have to move every other semester). My colleagues at the visitor center, my classmates at Northeastern, and even the thousands of families that visit our university can see quite clearly that Northeastern University does foster a sense of community. It's up to you, though, to take advantage of it. Nobody expects all 15,000 students to hold hands and be all rainbows and sunshine all the time; of course there will be niches and groups that identify more commonly with each other. But even so, there is nothing stopping YOU or any student from interacting with others and stepping out of your comfort zone.

And with regards to the new YMCA residence hall, I applaud the architects for taking the steps to consider shared spaces for the students that will be living there. Along with common rooms on every floor of the building, there will be an over-sized first floor lobby for more billiards tables and media space, and then the entire top floor of the building will be a multi-use space to be used exclusively by the building's residences and for a few university sponsored events throughout the year.

One last thing, Porter: What do you think makes a community, and what can Northeastern do to better facilitate community?

 

[KentXie]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

I know this girl in the Philippino Club and she seems to be great friends with all the other people in this club, as an example.

WHOO BARKARDA! Would that girl happen to be Mia Roque?

While I see your point, I think this mainly has to do with your expectations. People will always be divided into their groups in any university and I doubt you would find any large university that is anything different unless they have a sports team that is in a major conference. Pharmacy kids will always group with pharmacy kids, blacks with the blacks, etc etc. However that isn't always true and many clubs are often doing collaboration events to mix students up. Just this weekend there was a cookout at West Village sponsor by many of the Frats and Sororities and the turnout was great. Note that I'm not in a frat and neither were many of the people there. However I am one of those folks that often gave shout outs to people who are wearing NEU gear and I do feel a connection, maybe because it seems that NEU is often in the shadows of BC and BU. Whether other people feel it or not, I don't know.

I feel like the type of community you are looking for belongs to universities that are either really small or has major conference sports team. You'll find the same kind of community at BU and to some extent BC (from my friend's experience).

 

[kennedy]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

Maybe by urban standards Northeastern has a large enrollment, but by national standards, it seems very much in the middle. 15,095 is the number Collegeboard has, I tend to consider >22,000 as "large." There's about 32,000 people at my school, and I think we have a very strong community - and it certainly isn't limited to the dorms.

I don't see the problem with "megadorms." I think people typically associate with people on their floor for the most part, so adding more floors shouldn't take away from the community. "Community" is rooted in the word "common;" it is a group of people with shared interests, passions, or circumstances. Filipino Clubs simply have race in common, students at small schools find that simply sharing an education is enough to form community.

The size of a dorm will have little to do with forming community (nor will the size of the campus). What will make a difference, are things like "learning communities," Greek life, athletic pride, etc. Schools need to offer as many ways as possible for students to find something in common with one another, regardless of what those may be. So, build the tower. Designate each two floor section as the engineering level, or the arts level, or the communications level, and have these halls share their common areas to encourage interaction. Sometimes people won't get along (it pisses me off when Mizzou tries too hard to force me to like the people in my dorm, because the activities they organize seem immature), but give people the opportunity to meet and socialize. I'm in a journalism learning community, and I thoroughly believe that the people I have met and got along with will be my friends throughout college (two are my pledge brothers, one of which, I happened to meet in the elevator on move in day).

The point I think I'm trying to make is that "megadorms" aren't necessarily bad for community (although they certainly can be), and like a few others have pointed out, some creative design with regard to how each floor interacts can help shape bonds. I don't think anyone ever expects a community to form throughout an entire building, however.

 

[JohnAKeith]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

This is a good conversation. More of this, please.

 

[TomOfBoston]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

porter said

I disliked all five of my other suitemates...

Ah, I think we are on to something here.

 

[joebos]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

don't see the problem with "megadorms." I think people typically associate with people on their floor for the most part, so adding more floors shouldn't take away from the community. "Community" is rooted in the word "common;" it is a group of people with shared interests, passions, or circumstances.

The original comment that started this discussion was a response to mine saying that I preferred the taller building. I don't see the problem with a "megadorm" either. How do universities in NYC handle their dorms? I'm assuming they build upward due to the cost of property there. Wouldn't you be able to create community through thoughtful design? The treatment of the MIT Media Lab's common spaces, which are shared between floors, come to mind.

I lived off-campus when I was in college so I don't have a lot of experience with dorm living.

 

[kennedy]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

In hindsight, if no one else is bothered by the discussion, we should continue. I edited my post. (Maybe this is what the site was missing for so long.)

 

[Tombstoner]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

I think joebos is asking the right question. In a world of tighter spaces and more mega-everything, how can design facilitate community and permit a sense of intimacy? I would add to that the challenge of "being alone among others" when we want to. Of course people like Sherry Turkle write reams about this in terms of invasive communication technology, but I think it applies to built environments as well.

 

[castevens]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

Well over 85% of Northeastern's students live within a half mile of the university within on or off campus housing--their commute simply requires a short walk or bike ride to the campus, or perhaps even a hop on the "T".

And for the past 3 years (and up until May 6), I have counted as one of the 15 percent who do NOT live within 1/2 mile of campus - but, for a majority of that time, I have been actually going to BWH/MGH/other places for clinical rotations, and I have not actually stepped foot on campus in months despite being considered a "student."

Just trying to reinforce that even the 15% statistic is a bit misleading because not all "students" go to campus.

 

[castevens]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

athletic pride

Bingo. I feel that a majority of the deficiency in community at NU is a result of a deficiency in the above. I can tell you that over the past 8 years that I have been a student at NU (yes you read that number correctly), the sense of community seems to have increased over time. When I first started at NU, the basketball team played in Solomon Court, which holds less people than my high school gym. Yes, it looks awkward to have 1/8th of Matthews filled for a basketball game, but its still bringing in more people than it used to. The hockey team, despite being rather good, couldn't sell out a game for their lives. Now it's pretty common to see standing room only at Matthews. Obviously the football team was terminated, but that had a lot to do with location - it was so damn inconvenient to get to Parsons Field to watch a crappy team play.

Anyway, I'm not saying that athletics is the only thing to blame for a 'lack of community,' but I do think that other colleges and universities have a better sense of community. Having said that, I will reiterate that I don't feel as though Northeastern is that bad on the community front.

 

[datadyne007]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

The treatment of the MIT Media Lab's common spaces, which are shared between floors, come to mind.

Simmons Hall does this too.

MassArt's Artists Residence has these great double-height communal areas in the mid-section of the building:

It appears that this concept will be taken further with the new dorm tower. There appears to be a multitude of double-height spaces on every other floor:

 

[Tombstoner]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

Hadn't seen that rendering of the MassArt dorm before--it is new? Looks like a great building!

 

[Tombstoner]

Re: YMCA/ Northeastern Dorm (formerly GrandMarc at St. Botolph)

Anyway, I'm not saying that athletics is the only thing to blame for a 'lack of community,' but I do think that other colleges and universities have a better sense of community. Having said that, I will reiterate that I don't feel as though Northeastern is that bad on the community front.

I'm not a student, but I pretty much live on the NU campus. I'm struck by the lack of student-oriented retail (interesting coffeeshops, restaurants, cinemas, etc.) and the poor way that NU/Colleges of the Fenway/MFA/the Fens seem to relate (or not). Ironically, I think it would be more of a community environment if people felt like they were interacting with other academic and residential communities. There is so much potential in this corner of Boston that just isn't being catalyzed into a whole bigger than the sum of its parts.