The College Bookstore has taken many shapes over the years: an orderly series of shelves in an unused classroom; a cozy if threadbare brick-lined space in the basement of a residence hall; and most recently, a bright new space at the heart of campus, adjacent to our coffee shop, the theater and auditorium, the quad, and the Mitchell Art Museum. Appropriately, the College Bookstore sits between the two main academic buildings on campus.

The lawn in front of McDowell Hall is one of the most picturesque parts of campus. Facing towards Prince George Street and its row of colonial houses, the lawn has a brick pathway through the center that slopes gently up to our historic McDowell Hall, the oldest building on campus and our most central class building. Several fully mature trees shade the grass, including massive oaks and the new Liberty Tree. A historic replica of the Liberty Bell and a monument to WWI soldiers flank the main entrance to campus, and the beloved croquet team regularly practices on the grass by the Barr Buchanan Center to the right. Scattered throughout the lawn are a few very sturdy folding Adirondack chairs and six benches by the walkways, which dot the entire space and are constantly in use during good weather.

The Great Hall is the central room on the first floor inside McDowell Hall. Large, rectangular, lead windows bring in the morning light on the eastern side and twilight on the western side. From a second-floor gallery, one can look upon the Freshman Chorus Concert or a Waltz Party. McDowell Hall has pleasant acoustics and a feeling that is both warm and formal. Freshman Chorus, that great solidarity-enhancer for every freshman cohort, meets in the Great Hall every Thursday. Musical ensembles rehearse and perform in the Great Hall. Plays are staged, receptions are thrown, lectures are read, and contra dances are called in the Great Hall. On the walls of the Great Hall, you will find portraits of Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, and many of the presidents of St. John’s, but not a portrait of John McDowell, the first president of the college. The building was named in his honor shortly after Humphreys Hall was named in 1857.

The gym (reverently dubbed Temple Iglehart by Leo Pickens, former Director of Athletics) is a distinguished facility with a beautiful, shiny basketball court and wooden track hanging from the ceiling. Sitting against the interior of the gym’s brick walls are rustic, reclaimed church pews. None of them are the same, which contributes to the antique, historic feel. Through the three arched windows on the eastern side of the gym, one can see the sun rise, and through the three arched windows on the western side of the gym, one can see the sun set. It is common knowledge that sunlight streaming through the gym’s windows is the most striking during the wintertime around 11 a.m.

In 1934, the college deeded a prime corner of the campus to the State of Maryland, where the state built the Hall of Records, facing directly across the front lawn of the campus at Woodward Hall. For fifty years the two buildings lived a parallel existence: while our library collection was growing in Woodward Hall, the state’s collection of archives was growing in the Hall of Records. When push came to shove for the archives, the state constructed a new building on Rowe Boulevard in 1984, and the accumulated contents of the old Hall of Records were painstakingly moved about three-quarters of a mile, in what they called the Haul of Records.

The all-brick Mellon Patio located outside the Mellon Lobby is a new addition to campus after recent renovations. In warm weather, it’s filled with four-person tables. Sometimes these tables are pushed together when a language class is held outside in sunny weather, or they’re cleared away for a game of foursquare on the brick. Abutting the largest class building and across from the coffee shop and busy upper field, the patio is a lively space that still has students studying or doing homework on occasion.

The Foucault Pendulum provides a meditative backdrop for Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus sing-alongs, yoga classes, and concerts. During afternoons, the sunlight shines brightly through the two-storied windows that line the south side of Mellon Hall. In the center of the large stairwell in the far corner of the building hangs our Foucault Pendulum—one of only a few hundred in the world—proving that the earth rotates.

The Quad is indisputably the spiritual center of campus. Flanked by two historic dorms and the beautiful McDowell Hall, the Quad opens on its fourth side to a set of steps, leading to the back of campus sloping down to College Creek. This fourth side has benches and tables along the wall at its edge and is frequently filled by students and tutors alike. The space itself is beautiful, being made of brick and surrounded by grass and historic buildings.

Before 1966, the area behind McDowell Hall, between what is now Edensword Hall and Fielding-Rumore Hall, there was simply a lawn, with a grassy area sloping down to the level of the Iglehart Gym and Mellon Hall. The Quad and terrace overlook were adapted from a campus master plan submitted to the college in the early 1960s by I.M.Pei and Associates.

Many intramural and pick-up games occur on the Upper Field such as soccer, volleyball, croquet, and the college’s very own, unique handball. On warmer Monday and Thursday afternoons during the academic year, students lounge on blankets and sit on clustered Adirondack chairs while finishing up their seminar readings. The end-of-year intramural marathon begins and ends under the trees that line the Mellon side of the Upper Field which also happens to be the site of our annual opening year barbeque.