It took about half a semester, but during my freshman year, up through its demolition in the spring of my sophomore year, Cate Main lounge was one of the most important places on campus to me. It was the place where my campus ministry met to pray every day, and gradually it became a central location for many friends from that ministry and tangential groups. It is one of the primary locations that I remember forming friendships and having meaningful conversation in. A couple of my friends practically lived there freshman year, and I began to spend many hours there as well. Located in the same building as the Cate Main cafeteria, with our meal exchanges, we were well-equipped to live there out of our backpacks, working at the tables, eating, and napping on couches.

The lounge was wide (the above picture looks across the width), but was also very long. Despite a piano, ping pong table, pool table, and plenty of furniture (four couches, five or six armchairs, and three or four tables), most of the room was open space. Two walls were covered in windows and glass doors, allowing for plenty of indirect lighting. The windows looked out onto a garden/lawn/sidewalk area in front of the Honors College, a building just as aesthetic as the rest of campus buildings, and with a little more charm to its shape. The doors opened onto a patio, hedged in by bushes, with a few picnic tables. Right outside the windows was the main sidewalk between the dorms and class buildings which would fill with students between class periods and subside to its usual quietness during class periods. The building itself was located very conveniently near class buildings and near the dorms.

The impressive thing about Cate Main was this versatility and convenience, combined with an interior that made it easy to use the space to socialize or work, without disturbing people doing the other. The piano was also an excellent addition. It was somehow well-tuned during all my time in college (and last I checked, it’s still doing well at the bottom of Walker Tower!), and the musicians among us, or sometimes strangers, would often provide music in the background. Because the space was so large and carpeted, it was always easy to hear clearly, but rarely too loud.

But however much Cate may have added to our lives as students, the university’s employees making decisions about buildings did not feel so warmly toward it. The outside they probably considered ugly (as evidenced by the fact that it is currently difficult to find any pictures of the building online). They disliked how the sidewalks narrowed to that one passageway by the building. They did not have a high opinion of the Cate dorms the lounge was meant to service. Many of the advantages students found in it were not perceived from the outside. There were no flashy whiteboard rooms. There was no fancy-looking-but-actually-just-uncomfortable studying furniture. There was just empty space in an inconvenient spot, with a few old pieces of furniture and a piano. Who was it doing any good? And maybe they were right and it was the best decision for the university as a whole. But we well knew its value, and felt its loss when in March of 2018 the furniture was removed and over the following months that part of Cate Main was destroyed.

We never found a good replacement for the Cate Main Lounge, and it’s only reasonable to expect that we had an unusually good place in Cate. The perfect fit that it was for our community, and the lack of value perceived in it by the university, reflect the fact that some of the most important components of a space are not among first the things one would consider when evaluating it. This has made me think more in recent years about what it is that we really desire in a space, room, or building. It’s not often the fancy things, but rather the things which affect the intangible components in our experience of a place.