College Coeds Kicking It on Clark Street
We’ve lived in some pretty nice dormitories in our day, but nothing campared to the pre-war splendor that 180 Pace University students are enjoying this year in Brooklyn Heights. The Clark Street residence hall–with its black and white marble floors lined with brass and gold accents, its roman columns and its hallway candelabras–was completed this…
We’ve lived in some pretty nice dormitories in our day, but nothing campared to the pre-war splendor that 180 Pace University students are enjoying this year in Brooklyn Heights. The Clark Street residence hall–with its black and white marble floors lined with brass and gold accents, its roman columns and its hallway candelabras–was completed this summer. Students, who are shelling out between $12,000 and $14,000 for the nine-month school year to live there, also get use of the flat screen televisions, DVD players and ethernet service that come with each room. Times have changed, but then again we were still a couple of years away from having an email account when we graduated from college.
Clark St Residence is Place to Live [Pace Press]
well, yay for the students, but the neighbors are suffering… I hate that the students stand in front smoking all the time. The area could definitely support a boutique hotel! I don’t know what happened to that idea, but it was probably financial. I know that the dorm/hotel took forever to be built, partly because an adjacent building, 111 Hicks, sued the dorm/hotel’s developer or owners several times for negligence and not adhering to Landmarks guidelines.
I saw some lucky students moving in there a few weeks ago. The new Feil Hall for Brooklyn Law is pretty nice, too.
And you should realize that technically speaking, this new dorm is not “pre-war” because the building was completely rebuilt from scratch due to the 1995 fire.
The reason this dorm is so “luxurious” is that it was originally planned as a boutique hotel, but they changed it at the last minute into a college dorm.
The old St George Hotel, from which the dormitory is carved has a storied past. Apparently the hotel was the largest in the country up until the Bellagio was built in Vegas a few years ago. I found this fact difficult to believe, but if you look at the massive structure of interconnected towers it becomes clear how massive it once was. Apoparently it used to be the place to see and be seen in the 20s and 30s. To get a sense of the scale and grandeur of the place, check out the Eastern Athletic Gym in the basement of the building. Apparenlty it used to house a huge salt water pool (now reduced to accomodate basketball courts, and other modern facilities.) There was a huge fire in the building in 1995, the largest blaze in the city in 20 years. And though the dorm has recently been renovated, it has been an overflow dorm for many city colleges for years.