There once was a structure, in a land before time, called the Bryan Center walkway. It was a simple bridge, constructed to convey weary wanderers from the main quadrangle to the Center of Bryan.
Over time, the powers that be decided this simple connective passage failed to exploit the opportunity to create social spaces and cooling misters that mysteriously only activate during rainstorms, or when you have your laptop open and need it to stay dry. The walkway grew into the West Campus Plaza, where good things happen.
This is but the stuff of lore, as all the students to have seen the walkway of legend have since passed into the great beyond known as the Real World. There remains not one of us who can speak of the grandeur of the walkway of yore. The Plaza is all we know.
Yet just this week, a young graduate student named Charlotte journeyed through the Plaza to find its great vision corrupted. Instead of “the bricks-and-mortar expression of Duke’s ongoing commitment to cultivate and celebrate community,” as Chris Roby called it at its inception, the Plaza was a bastion of heckling activists. Filled half with student groups tabling for their causes, and half with BC-bound students trying to avoid the first half, the Plaza seemed more a graveyard of broken dreams.
Join me on a tell-all trek from the Gothic archway connecting the West Union building and Kilgo Quadrangle all the way to the Bryan Center. I warn you: The following paragraphs are not for the faint of heart.
No more than three seconds after crossing the threshold to the Plaza this bright afternoon, I am accosted by a pamphlet-wielding ruffian hoping to secure my donation to some BS hippie cause. “Do you have a minute for the environment,” he asks, his scruff and Birkenstocks belying his sinister purpose. Beware, ye of good faith, for if you do tell him you have a minute for the environment, he will speak to you for eight minutes, and demand money at the end of his monologue. And lest you imagine the molestation complete when you dismiss him with a simple, “Sounds interesting, I’ll think about it,” remember that he will preach to you again when you walk back, forgetting the first encounter entirely.
Having survived that ordeal, I look to either side, to find flights of stairs down to the locations so offensive to the University, they lie in the sub-Plazanean depths, ’twixt the dumpsters. Included among them is the LGBT Center, an institution only less unfortunately positioned than the Center for Race Relations (wedged between the men’s and women’s bathrooms across the Von Canon rooms, I kid you not). Three cheers for pluralism, says whoever allocates space to these groups!
Moving past the stairs, the DiDA boards hang on the silver rail, quietly and ineffectively announcing grand events. No one has or will ever look at these. To the right is what some might call “foodie heaven.” Inside is Duke’s flaghsip food haven: Subway, ingeniously designed to require eight minutes in line, regardless of how long the line. The Great Hall and The Loop are legit, I have no joke about them.
Continuing along the path, Pauly Dogs tickles the olfactory senses, and… tickles… the digestive tract. In the enclave behind that famed food stand, a Republican and a Democrat chow down on a Yankee and a Veggie Delight, respectively, arguing loudly about union contracts in Duke Dining Services. Their quarrel is stopped short as a swarm of bees attacks the Republican’s Mountain Dew.
Bravely into the breach we go, for ahead lies the gauntlet of tables. “Buy tickets to my show! Come hear NAMBLA’s associate vice president for uninteresting talks this Tuesday! Donate to children with no left index finger!” Herein lies the one moment you want to have no friends. If you hold so much as a tangential acquaintance with the heckler behind the table, you will be forced to stop and discuss whatever it that person wants you to discuss. “I don’t have any FLEX right now,” you might say. “Oh, I’d love to, let me go see who else is going and decide when to come.” These tactics are not enough. “I have a computer! You can add to your FLEX right now! Plus, I have the schedule of everyone you know and love, let me work out the best performance for you to attend right here!”
The gruesome nature of this segment of the Plaza is amplified by the beauty of the opposite side. To your right are those comfy swinging, covered love seats that someone seems to claim every morning at 5:30 and never relinquishes. Seriously, have you ever seen any one of them available? What’s more, the sweet nectar of the misters are sporadically on, creating an ethereal atmosphere as tantalizing as the Siren’s song.
Finally, having traversed the gauntlet, you are now close enough to fall under the watchful eye of that perverse panopticon that is the Plaza cam. Any Peeping Tom who would fill his voyeuristic fix may do so with the click of a mouse. Somewhere, somehow, Larry Moneta is watching you this very instant.
Is the Plaza a realm of dreams, or a nightmare landscape of terror? Discover the truth at your own peril.
Charlotte Simmons is also watching you on the Plaza cam.
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