Connecticut College

Dorm

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: At work we have graduation for our interns and residents at the end of the month, but I think folks have already mostly packed up their kids at school and have started the summer. I have vague memories of each of my dorm rooms although I never went in for decorating them much. (Yes, given my post-college attachment to stuff that seems surprising, yes?) As I remember the dorm rooms were designed to be impervious to hanging things on the wall. Early on I attempted a poster or two which promptly peeled from the wall and I gave up. I was an art major however so it isn’t like there was stuff around.

Two out of the three dorm rooms I had in college (one year I lived in London) were in the original or at least early buildings of the college. Connecticut College has these beautiful, old stone buildings and at least one of my rooms had original leaded glass windowpanes – I was on the ground floor and folks would occasionally take a short cut in via the window. I don’t pine for my college experience a lot, but this photograph does make me think about it. I always enjoyed the history of the college when I was there. It had been more than a decade co-ed at that point, but the ghosts of industrious, smart women past always seemed to lurk pleasantly around.

Katherine Blunt, first woman President of the college and the dorm named for her. We just called it KB.

I had a hot pot but wasn’t one of those people driven to attempt to cook a lot in my dorm room. I had a dark pink comforter on the bed (it came to NYC with me and stayed with me until it was in shreds a number of years later) and not much else in the line of decor. I have two coffee mugs from those days and quite unconsciously I happen to be drinking from one right now, also a dark pink. The other is a heavy old fashioned white stoneware one that I nicked from the dining hall. (Kim was just drinking out of it the other day and complaining that it doesn’t hold enough coffee which is a fair criticism.)

I purchased this photocard from a woman who said she collected this very thing (early dorm room photos) and if she was letting this one go, I do wonder what her collection looks like! It is an interesting genre – clearly the urge to document an early experiment of living on your own as a young person was strong. There is nothing that dates this postcard – it was never used so no postmark. It could in fact easily be Connecticut College, which was founded as a women’s only college in 1911.

A careful look quickly reveals that this is a woman’s room, purse hanging from the chair was the first clue, although it is overall quite feminine really – the chafing dish (the early 20th century equivalent of a hot pot – kids probably are allowed microwaves now!) which sits nicely on a side table complete with a flower cloth is another significant indicator. The carpet is flowered as well, and the dresser has a lacey doily. It is covered with photographs, as are the shelves above and we can even see a few more in the mirror.

Palmer Library, Connecticut College for Women New London. This was turned into classrooms I think when a new library was built well before my time there.

Pennants hang all over – one in the mirror says Amsterdam, but the others are for schools or places I don’t recognize and since I can’t have both a mirror and magnifier I have trouble reading. A pincushion, a calendar (which I cannot read the year or the month on) and a few other baubles decorate the walls and an envelope is also pinned to the board next to the calendar on a sort of pinboard there.

There are two chairs and I wonder if this room was shared and we are only being shown one person’s half. At Connecticut College the majority of the original dorms has single rooms with only a few suites of shared rooms. (Newer dorms introduced in the 1960’s had more double rooms.) However, this could also be a guest chair.

The seller had several other versions of dorm photos for sale (presumably rejects from her collection) – all great although the others appeared to all be men’s dorms, often with them in the photo. I would have purchased more, but they were relatively expensive and I was already loaded up with cat cards. I assume, as there were fewer woman’s colleges, that there are fewer photos of their rooms so I like that aspect of this one. You get the feeling that it was a moment when after much hard work it was just right and she had to take a picture.

Bathing Beauties

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today’s post focuses on a small bevy of beach beauties all originating from a single album. If I understand correctly, although found in the Midwest, these photos were probably taken in New London, Connecticut. Fastidious Pictorama readers may remember that I graduated from Connecticut College, located in New London (a post about that can be found by clicking here on Train tracking), and therefore these images strike a particular cord of memory of the beaches there.

As college students we did occasionally find our way to the beaches of New London and the surrounding areas. However, given that I returned home to the Jersey shore for the months of June, July and August, I tended to be in New London off season and have no memory of having been swimming there, nor do I think I ever even wore a bathing suit while there. I do have a very fond memory of being at Harkness beach late one night in the snow however. There is a boardwalk sort of arcade. It was very beautiful and I remember regretting that I never had seen it in season.

At the time of these photos New London was still largely an enclave of some wealth and privilege. The college was already there, attracting the more Bohemian young women of a moneyed class. As I have written previously, for a variety of reasons the town has mostly fallen on hard times, a cycle of struggling and failing to achieve urban renewal. However, there is an area near the water where the old mansions still exist and the shoreline is largely beautiful, if somewhat marred now by industry.

Given the singularly female focus of these photos I wonder if they were attending the college which was at that time, a single sex all-women’s school, although for them, like me, this would be out of season. Or perhaps at least they were chums from school there.

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I purchased other photos from this album which I will share in future posts, but I will note, these women liked to be lined up for a photo. (You will see more of this in those later posts.) Looking at what to us today appear to be impossibly ancient swimming attire, they appear quite natural on them and they certainly do not seem encumbered by them as we might think today. The water is crowded with people, wading and lounging in what looks to be fairly shallow water, perhaps on a sandbar of some kind. I look especially at the picture of them submersed in the water, up to their necks, and I envy them! This is what vacations were when I was a kid.

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Meanwhile, I especially like the image of the woman alone on a now deserted beach. Her long white cotton dress and a jaunty scarf. Perhaps early morning or evening, before or after the crowds of the day, both lovely times to be at the beach.

Pams-Pictorama.com

By comparison Kim and I are more or less wrapping up our sort of a summer vacation this year. At some point we mostly gave up and shifted into working, albeit perhaps a bit less than usual, slowing to a jog instead of the long hard sprint of spring into summer. I have never failed at vacationing so resoundingly, my list of household ambitions largely unsatisfied, truly unable to unplug, let alone visits to the shore or lazy days.

Sidewalk dining at Veselka earlier this week.

Some ambitions were met, new shades were finally installed (this after our window replacement last October, the huge boxes containing them sitting in our one room like furniture since March), the bottom of a closet cleared out as needed for storage. However, other bookcases that required sorting out – in one case a coat of paint needed (I got as far as purchasing the paint), and a new carpet for the living room were among the items not achieved.

Kim and I ate out for the first time since March, Veselka in the East Village, and we tried a Vietnamese restaurant for take out near home. Our old favorite Mexican joint across the street reopened, to our great happiness and surprise as we thought they were clearly victims of the virus economy, closed first for renovation and then through the intervening months since March.

However, I cannot say I really got rested – I suspect Kim would say the same; he returned to several hours of inking daily in week two. Work continued to need my attention and I remained restless. I will take this last week before Labor Day at something less than full throttle and see if I cannot rest up a bit more. Somehow this year, with the whole world standing on end and trying to reinvent itself, letting go of the reins entirely was not possible, not for me. Labor Day weekend is on the horizon, let fall begin.