Tall & Urban News

UK’s Kirwan and Blanding towers—50-year-old fixtures of the Lexington skyline and former homes to thousands of students—now resemble the mangled ruins of a bygone era of student dorm living.

Throughout May 2020, hulking yellow excavators scurried over the rubble of what was once low-rise dorms. After a few weeks of work, Kirwan tower—already missing some floors—looked like it’s been given a bad haircut. Nearby Blanding tower similarly began to disappear.

The utilitarian interiors have been gutted of furniture and “artifacts,” while the university’s plan to replace the space with a modern 500-bed dorm has been paused amid COVID-19-related complications, said Keith Ingram, one of the University of Kentucky’s project managers.

As a 30-year employee of the university and a veteran of previous renovation projects within the 11-building, 13-acre (5.2-hectare) Kirwan-Blanding dorm complex, Ingram also functions as the de facto, walk-up tour guide of the site, chatting with passers-by about the complex’s past and its ongoing demolition.

“They are buildings that have had a presence on our campus for so long,” Ingram said. ”And so they are very well connected to a lot of people.”

Demolition of the site has progressed slightly ahead of schedule, thanks in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ingram said. During a normal school year, crews would have had limited hours to do noisy work, but with the nearby dorms devoid of students, crews can hammer away at the structure at any time.

Progress suggested that the 23-story towers would be largely down by the end of summer—Ingram said the crews can take down about one floor per week. Rubble and debris from the upper floors get tossed down the elevator shafts and collected at the bottom of the towers. When crews get to about the eighth floor, “high-reach” excavators should be able to finish the job, while other excavators tear through the eight low-rise dorms and the commons building which housed the old dining area.

By spring 2021, the site should be smoothed over with a large healthy lawn, disrupted only by trees and sidewalks that connect the central part of the campus to the gym and athletic facilities on Complex Drive, Ingram said. Rubble from the dorms will be pushed into the old basements and service tunnels that run beneath the complex to fill any holes left in the earth.

Everything should cost slightly below or right at US$10 million, Ingram said, well below the US$15 million cap set by the university’s board of trustees.

Ingram said that Greystar, the company which has constructed UK’s new dorms over the years, has identified three locations where new dorms could be built on the space. The first 500-bed dorm the university was hoping to plant on the site would have been located next to Smith Hall where the Kirwan low-rise dorms used to sit.

As it has done with all new construction projects, the university delayed plans to build the 500-bed dorm on top of the site, UK spokesperson Jay Blanton said in a mid-May statement.

“We will need to assess what enrollment and demand will look like as we move forward,” Blanton said.

UK officials initially announced plans for the new dorm late last year—months after the university had to lodge some students in makeshift dorms as demand for the living spaces far outpaced supply for the fall 2019 semester. Almost 90 percent of UK’s largest-ever freshmen class of 5,300-plus students sought housing on campus.

Because of the coronavirus outbreak, this fall’s freshmen enrollment is expected to be significantly lower—closer to 4,500—and university officials are consequently anticipating a $27 million drop in revenue. Across the country, universities and college admission counselors say that many potential college freshmen are considering gap years or taking basic courses online at cheaper community colleges instead of paying tuition for what may be a fully online semester for large universities, Inside Higher Ed previously reported.

Before deconstruction of the towers and dorms began in earnest, a team of university historians, archivists and photographers went on an artifact-finding expedition through the site in early February.

“I think it’s really an interesting idea to consider that buildings and the space in which people live have potential to be documents kind of ... of the life that the people that were in them lived,” said Ruth Bryan, the university archivist, who described her job simply as documenting everything UK related.

Bryan and her team made three trips to the complex, she said, searching for artifacts that may be of interest to future researchers or for items that would instantly, if seen, transport former residents back to their college days.

“The buildings won’t be here, so what can we take out of the buildings—including photographs of the interior—that will allow us to know something about them and the people that lived and worked in them in the future?”

Built in 1967-1968, the Kirwan-Blanding complex was designed by Edward Durell Stone, a pioneer of modernist architecture, who also designed the Gallery of Modern Art in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He also designed the Frankfort Capital Plaza tower, which the state of Kentucky demolished in 2018.

Dorm rooms with windows ringed the outside of the towers, with elevators extending up the building’s center. Ingram said the dorm rooms were designed in a utilitarian fashion. Initially, the beds provided storage, with hinges on the sides that would allow students to lift up the mattresses and put things inside.

UK housing officials found out that enterprising students who lived in the upper floors of the towers would use the beds to avoid walking down several flights of stairs during fire drills that caused a half-hour wait for elevators back to their rooms.

“Kids would lift up and get under their bed rather than have to walk 18 floors down to go out,” Ingram said, adding that many of the beds were eventually sealed because of the issue.

Decades later, many traces of student life were gone by the time university archivists could visit the site, Bryan said. Many of the rooms had been uninhabited for years.

She was happy to find wall decorations left behind by a former resident adviser and a tub full of 35-millimeter slides that held old images of student life. She was “really excited” for a series of food safety posters that she found in the dining area, which she knows sounds “so stupid. . . but that’s so now.”

Still wanting more of the student, lived-in perspective on the towers, Bryan said she set up a Facebook group where past residents and workers can share stories and photos as part of a community archiving project. Ingram said many of the dedication building plaques were also removed from the site.

Archiving historical properties can be challenging, Bryan said, as modern archivists can only guess at what future researchers will want to see.

“We kind of throw hooks out into the dark,” Bryan said. “In the future, people might be interested in these kinds of topics and so we’re going to collect what we can now, knowing that we ourselves have blinders on. ”

Kopana Terry, an oral history and historical newspaper archivist for the university, joined the expedition as a photographer.

“It’s a real blessing really, to be able to go back to a place that does hold fond memories for me and being able to be there and photograph it at its end,” Terry said.

Terry never lived in the dorm complex, but when she was completing her undergraduate degree at UK in the 90s, delivering pizzas helped put her through school. She often delivered to the towers. One fond memory at the complex, she said, involved getting pelted by snowball-slinging students one winter while using her hot bag as a shield.

She said she understands why the university needs to take down the towers, but seeing those landmarks go down is a bit sad.

“I always think there is a sense of loss when something like that goes away,” Terry said. “But I try to stay positive about it and hope that they put something as equally grand in its place.”

For more on this story, go to Lexington Harold Leader.