http://www.tallahassee.com/story/life/2016/01/15/fsus-dated-kellum-hall-coming/78849888/
But for thousands of freshmen students like myself in 1969, they were our first home away from home. They were the first place we could call “mine.”
So for those of us who spent one of the most important years of our lives in that dorm, for those of us who gaze upon Kellum every time we drive down West Tennessee Street, the demolition evokes sadness.
Or not.
“Kellum had a good run,” said an unsentimental Mike Scheiner, Operations Manager for Tallahassee’s Public Works Department, who has been my good friend since we met as Kellum Hall residents in 1969-70. “Things change, life moves on.”
Better dorms, room to expand
Kellum and Smith are coming down because today’s freshmen don’t want to live in tiny rooms and share communal bathrooms. Today’s college freshman wants his or her college residence hall to have large, well-furnished rooms, with individual bathrooms, WiFi, kitchens, study rooms and comfortable lounges.
FSU gives students those kind of accommodations when it builds new residence halls today. Last year, two other 1950s-era dorms, Deviney and Dorman, were replaced with adjacent new edifices featuring two-bedroom suites, lounges, kitchens, etc. The old Dorman and Deviney halls were demolished and on their site two modern residence halls are under construction and due to open by August 2017.
Kellum and Smith each held about 500 students,. The two new dorms under construction on West Jefferson Street, named Magnolia (479 residents) and Live Oak (433), will provide nearly the same occupancy.
“Our new construction since 2003 has been either apartment style or suite style,” said FSU Director of Housing Dave Sagaser. “It’s been very popular with our incoming students and their parents.”
FSU provides housing for 6,387 students in 18 residence halls. More than three quarters of on-campus residents (76 percent) are freshmen.
“It’s the key to retention and graduation rates,” said Mark Bertolami, FSU’s director of planning. “Studies show that 90 percent of those who make it through their freshman year remain in school. So you put a kid in a dorm, he plays intramurals, he joins the Spanish club. If you can capture that freshman in his first year and make college vital and attractive and welcoming, he will stay.”
Actually, demolishing Kellum and Smith is a two-fer for FSU, which has the smallest main campus (451.6 acres) of Florida’s 12 state universities. Removing Kellum and Smith, plus eventually nearby residence halls Rogers (built in 1969) and McCollum (1975), opens up what Bertolami calls FSU’s “Great Northwest.”
On those several dozen acres between Tennessee and Call streets, FSU intends to build a complex of classroom/research buildings and residence halls. FSU will also use the demolition of Kellum and Smith as an opportunity to straighten out Chieftan Way from Academic Way to Call Street; the street currently snakes in front of Kellum Hall then around Smith Hall.
Under former president Eric Barron, an oceanographer, the plan was to turn the Great Northwest into primarily a science compound. But Bertolami says many ideas are being considered now, as officials prepare to formalize a new 10-year master plan in 2017.
“Our challenge is to find funding and space (for new buildings),” Bertolami said. “The beauty of (demolishing old residence halls) is we can put students into more comfortable (new residence halls) and free up untapped acreage.”
Living quarters a bit Spartan
DeGraff Hall, then a two-story, L-shaped building on Tennessee Street, was built in 1950 as FSU’s first on-campus residence hall for men – three years after FSU converted from a women’s college. DeGraff (replaced by a larger residence hall in 2007) wasn’t enough.
Smith Hall was built in 1952 and Kellum Hall in 1959, both as men’s residence halls; it would be the 1970s before almost all FSU residence halls became co-ed, with alternating floors of men and women.
Kellum and Smith both were built with federal bond money, which covered the cost only of construction not furniture. That’s why beds in Kellum and Smith – each with one top and one bottom bunk —were built into the walls.
Each room has two closets, a sink and a small refrigerator. There were no individual bathrooms, only cramped communal showers and toilets, one per wing. There was no air-conditioning in Kellum or Smith until the 1990s.
Yet for baby boomer-aged men, many of them from middle class families of modest means, Kellum and Smith were nice enough.
“Kellum was more modern than Smith,” said Tallahassee attorney Jon Whitney, who lived in Smith as freshman and Kellum as a sophomore. “I thought both of them were decent living conditions.”
“The gang showers were tough to get used to; guys snapping towels and that kind of stuff,” Scheiner said. “The gang showers were always a source of humor and sometimes embarrassment.”
In recent years, Kellum residents complained regularly about the building’s aging conditions. In 2011, the student newspaper, FSView, wrote a story about students who claimed to have gotten sick because of mold in the building. Sagaser said – and demolition officials confirm – Kellum did not have mold.
But Sagaser and Bertolami said it would be prohibitively expensive to renovate Kellum Hall to modern standards. Instead, FSU will spend $1.8 million to demolish it (and presumably the same amount to demolish Smith in 2017). They are spending $59.5 million to build the two new residence halls under construction on West Jefferson Street.
Granted, Kellum and Smith have been the low-cost, on-campus housing alternative: Students paid $2,300 per semester for housing in Kellum and Smith, compared to $3,500 per semester for FSU’s newest dorms. But Bertolami said FSU plans to renovate Salley Hall (built in 1964 as FSU’s first suites-style residence hall) and make it the low-cost option.
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