Parents — and most teens — know the move to college is a child’s first official step away from the family and the first home away from home very often is a university dorm room.
Perhaps no other House Hunter column received more comment than one written in November 2003 about the new University Center of Chicago, an 18-story building then under construction at the corner of State Street and Congress Parkway.
A joint project of Columbia College, DePaul and Roosevelt Universities, the building, which opened in August 2004, looks very much like a condominium.
It houses about 1,700 students and is the largest multi-college residence hall in the nation.
It is certainly not the only new-style university housing in the area. State Street Village, a residence hall further south on State Street on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, won design awards for famed architect Helmut Jahn.
As at University Center, suites — a bedroom and private bath or several bedrooms and bath with a common sitting room — are a key part of the new dormitory equation.
Five styles of suites and apartments are available, ranging in price from $660 to $1,139 a month. Students can choose academic year or annual contracts.
The buildings are part of a national trend to build residences to answer the demand for more individual privacy.
At University Center, for example, the north side of the E-shaped building has one-room, one-bath units shared by two students and two-bedroom, one-bath suites shared by four students, on floors 3 to 18.
On the south side of the building on the same floors are four-bedroom apartments with two bathrooms, a dining area, living room and kitchen; two-bedroom, two-bath apartments, and a few single-occupancy studio apartments.
A far cry from the low-rise, women-only dorm in a university quadrangle that I moved into my freshman year, the mixed-use building has retail stores at street level and a 30,000 square-foot state-of-the-art conference center for school or business organizations.
There also is as a 30,000-square-foot dining facility overlooking State Street with a food court and an espresso bar.
But how does such a building live? Located at one of Chicago’s most prominent and busiest intersections, is it homey and secure?
With students of three schools occupying one building, does it foster the connection between residents and the school they attend that is typical on a more cloistered, single-school campus?
Three students were my guides in a recent tour of the dorm on a rainy Friday afternoon. They met me in the comfortable, roomy lobby on State Street where the high windows and the 24-hour desk with a security guard could be mistaken for a hotel reception desk.
My three guides were resident assistants Jason Hitchings, 24, a second-year law student at DePaul; Maggie Corbett, 20, a junior majoring in acting at Columbia and Jessie Harrison, 19, a sophomore majoring in English at Roosevelt.
All were perhaps predictably enthusiastic about their new digs.
They showed me the communal lounge on the third floor with a stone fireplace and doors to a 20,000-square-foot terrace, the 24-hour laundry room (large and roomy) and the 24-hour exercise room (surprisingly small).
One positive change from my college days is that this dorm is smoke-free.
While the amenities on the lower, public floors may seem glitzy to parents, the residential floors on 3 to 18 are likely to feel more familiar.
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The dorm corridors are painted in cheery colors and, like college dorm rooms everywhere, many doors along the hall are decorated by the residents for a splash of individuality and a welcome to visitors.
Harrison, who hails from the St. Louis area, occupies one of the most common arrangements, a 365-square-foot, one-room, one-bath unit for two students dubbed a “deluxe double.”
As a resident assistant, Harrison gets the room to herself and has decorated it with an easy chair and a Christmas tree. While comfortable, it seems only somewhat larger than the rooms I dimly remember from my college days and could be quite cozy for two students given all the equipment students cart to college.
At the other end of the size scale is the 600-square-foot single-occupancy studio apartment with kitchen, occupied by Columbia’s Corbett, who hails from Milwaukee.
Corbett’s unit, overlooking State Street, has a view of Sears Tower. One of 24 such units in the building, she said her older sister, who has graduated from college, envies her good fortune.
And the studio and suites configurations are a valuable housing option for schools with a swelling number of post-graduate students. Hitchings, who graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, lived at his parents’ home in Palatine his first year of law school, but “one year of commuting to class on Metra was enough,” he said.
Though some might question the mix of ages and schools within one building, Corbett said she sees positive cross-pollination in ideas and assistance that theater or music students from Columbia and Roosevelt give each other.
Harrison said she thought the bigger pool of people in the building allows for more people to find a group and a niche than was possible in her much smaller dorm last year.
Hitchings admitted that building the feeling of connection to the larger and more traditional Lincoln Park campus is something of a challenge for some DePaul newcomers.
For Harrison and Corbett, it is a different story.
After living in the close-knit downtown group of Columbia students, Corbett admitted, “I was afraid I’d lose the closeness” when she moved into this new larger, multi-school building.
“But there is a lot of closeness here,” she said. “I personally feel very connected. This is all I have ever known. Downtown Chicago is my campus.”
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Colleges by the numbers
Largest multischool residence hall: University Center of Chicago (above), with 1,680 students from DePaul University, Roosevelt University and Columbia College in a 702,000-square-foot building completed in 2004.
Tallest college building: Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, 535 feet in height with 42 stories.
Largest institution by acreage: Berry College, near Rome, Ga., with 28,000 acres.
First to be called a campus: Princeton University, in the 1770s.
First campus building: Old College at Harvard University, completed in 1644 and abandoned 35 years later.
Sources: University Center of Chicago; The Chronicle of Higher Education