A New Quad House Opened

"Happy Birthday Currier House!" Giselle Crosa '98 exclaimed earlier this year.

For 25 years, Currier has been home to roughly 365 undergraduates, and throughout that time it has managed to offer an environment its residents find freiendly.

"It's one of the more social houses; one of the few places where you can meet a significant portion of the House," says Aelaf D. Worku '98.

Many say the most important aspect of the house is its diversity. Because other houses have traditionally been more popular in the housing lottery, many of those who now live in the newest of the three houses in the Radcliffe Quad have been randomly assigned there, providing a true cross-section of students.

"[Our students] are almost a mirror of the College," says William A. Graham Jr., the Currier House Master. "That's what attracted us to it."

Baird Professor of Chemistry Dudley R. Herschbach, master of Currier House from 1981 to 1986, says many black students traditionally have chosen to live in the Quad and especially Currier.

He attributes this result to the fact that the year after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, blacks made up 8 percent of Harvard's incoming class rather than the 1 percent of previous years' classes.

During a time of heightened racial tension, many in this large new group of blacks saw the river houses as "monuments to the society that had excluded their ancestors. Currier was new and had no baggage," Herschbach says.

Distinctive Architecture

The house was originally built to help diversify the Quad; however, at that time, gender rather than ethnic diversification was the priority.

The mother of Audrey Bruce Currier '56, after whom the house was named, said when the house opened in 1970, "How fortunate it was we hadn't known that men would be admitted [to Currier House] until now and that the building was planned for women. Otherwise some of the best civilizing features might never have been considered."

Previously, the Harvard men lived in houses near the Charles River, while the Radcliffe women lived in dormitories in the Radcliffe Quad which have since been restructured into Cabot and Pforzheimer houses.

To accommodate some of the overflow caused by rising admissions of female students, Daniels tower--one of four towers that now make up Currier House--was built in 1966 or 1967, and, according to Graham, "Currier was designed around it."

Currier House was plagued early on by many problems, particularly telephone abnormalities.

The October 3, 1970, Crimson reports that Currier students were dismayed that they would have to pay higher monthly rates because they were required to use "touchtone, trim-line phones instead of regular phones."

Less than a month later, free long-distance lines were installed by mistake rather than phones which would only call on-campus.

"One boy from Winthrop House made a two-hour call to his girl-friend in California," reported The Crimson. Total expenses were more than $10,000 before the phone company caught the error.

The focus of Currier House's architecture is its central entrance. To feel the pulse of the house only requires sitting by the bell desk at its entrance for a few minutes during term-time, says Graham.

A job working the graveyard shift at the desk from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. is particularly popular.

One can do homework and watch who comes home with whom--supplying the House with "good gossip" since the single door prevents Currier residents from sneaking into their rooms, says Currier resident Peter S. Cahn '96.

The large, central dining area also serves as a meeting place.

"You have to go by the dining hall to get anywhere. [The House] is set up like a funnel," Graham says.

Cahn notes that the inside of the house functions very well and that renovations completed this year have made the interior more beautiful.

"[Graham] redesigned the dining hall [and] added new carpets, a new fountain and landscaping this summer. There are new lights, new floors," Cahn says. "Apparently, the House was dingy before. Now there's a tree swing. People seem to take more pride in the House as a result."

Building a Community

But over the years, the House has developed a strong sense of unity through other commitments.

Herschbach says intramural sports played a large part in uniting the community in the early 1980s.

In the Adams House Raft Race that used to take place annually on the Charles River, Currier once entered a thirty-foot long Viking Ship. The ship did quite well, although "since no one ever knew what the rules were, if you crossed first, you never won," Hershbach says.

Over the years, other traditions have taken hold. There have been all-day readings of Moby Dick and Paradise Lost, ballroom dancing in the large meeting room known as "the Fishbowl" and the annual toga party.

One alumna, Dorina Abdullah '85, says she was especially fond of the foosball and the "strawberry and champagne brunches."

Worku says other alumni probably remember flooding the courtyard to form a skating rink during cold winters and "blow-out parties in the 10-man suite known across the Eastern seaboard."

Professor of the History of Science Emeritus Barbara G. Rosenkrantz '44, the house master from 1974 until 1979, recalls noisy parties that led neighbors to call her.

Since she disliked asking parties to stop, she "had a bright red bathrobe and just marched around in it. It had a chilling effect [on a party]; all I had to do was march through a room," she says.

Currier was known to have had particularly rowdy parties under the aegis of co-masters Gregory Nagy and Holly Davidson.

"Holly and I were innocent of some of the undergraduate customs," Nagy says. "I don't think we even knew what a keg was before we were House Masters."

Not only the traditions but also some of the unusual one-time events have helped to mold the Currier each resident remembers.

Herschbach recalls one such incident in which late one night several students asked if he had a "look at the seal."

"We went upstairs to a room packed with kids. One kid was a volunteer at the New England Aquarium," Herschbach says. "Sitting there in the bathtub was this baby seal. I don't know if you've ever seen a baby seal, but it has a thick, marvelously velvet coat and emits squeaks."