Ross @ Woodward Court, The University Of Chicago 1977

"A strict vegetarian," Ross shared my meal plan at Woodward Court. He waited in the dining room with Sylvia Plath fan Joe, Political Science grad student Takahachi and our Near Eastern Languages colleagues Liz, Rita and Carolyn. I showed my ID and went through the main cafeteria line. Ross took my empty plate to the Seconds steam table. The arrangement worked well until he tried it without me. 

Constructed between 1957-1958, Woodward Court was originally called the New Women’s Dorm, though for nearly all of its existence the residence hall hosted both men and women. By the mid-1960s, about 330 students in Wallace, Flint, and Rickert Houses called Woodward home.

For thirty-five tumultuous years Woodward Court housed undergraduates. Popularly known as the “Pharmaceutical Society” in the 1970s and ’80s, at the height of student drug use, Woodward once had much stricter codes of conduct, including midnight curfews, enforced gender segregation, and visitation rules for persons of the opposite gender, in which one foot always had be on the floor. Former residents attested to the seriousness of the codes.

Views from Woodward overlooked Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House on the other side of 58th Street, and in 1968 students could see from their rooms the South Side riots on the Midway, in which the National Guard confronted local gangs following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The buildings themselves were known to have had bleak basements, small rooms, cinderblock walls, and incredibly poor acoustics, not to mention a lack of temperature control that left rooms freezing in the winter and scorching in the late spring and early autumn.

Despite the architectural failings, students who lived in Woodward remember fondly the social relationships developed in those dank, darkly lit rooms and traditions like the Woodward Court Lectures, sponsored by then-Resident Master Izaak Wirszup, a mathematician in the College. Wirszup brought in such acclaimed scholars as physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and philosopher Mortimer Adler for periodic lectures, a tradition that continues to this day as the Wirszup Lectures, under current Max Palveksy Resident Masters David and Kris Wray.

Woodward Court was demolished in 2002 to make room for the Harper Center, and Wallace, Flint, Rickert, and Harper—soon to be renamed Woodward, in homage to the felled dorm—Houses and their students moved to the recently completed Max Palevsky Residential Commons.