The tour of the secret rooms on West Campus really gave me some knowledge on the past of where I live. I knew that West was very new and probably was built quite recently but I never thought about what existed here before the fancy main houses were contsructed. Professor Blalock described how the old university halls were apparently quite unsightly, of poor quality, and did not have any of the current residential college style events that West now offers. This made me grateful to be at Cornell after 2008 when West Campus was completed. He also offered insight on what West was supposed to have that was never completed because of the recession of 2008. The landscaping was never done, for example, which is why we are stuck with just two sad picnic tables sitting in the open grass field. Hopefully someday the landscaping plan will be in place and people will actually want to spend time in that fishbowl-like quad.

Probably the most interesting destination we were taken to on this tour was the War Memorial Room in Lyon Hall. We entered through these small, locked doors and were greeted by a quite large, lofty room with beautifully painted ceiling beams and stone carving. I was glad I came on this tour to see this incredible hidden room that I would never have access to otherwise.

The juiciest information we got on the tour was about the Quill and Dagger Society room, ie. where it is, how to get into it, where to enter the elevator, etc. Of course, you kind of had to be there for that…