Queens College - Silhouette Yearbook (Queens, NY)

Page 14 text:

The first real construction of the project was the big gym, Q build- ing. Along with the E Annex and K Annex, it was bought from the government as part of Army Surplus, This big white building, by far the largest single room on the campus, was the first indication that Queens College was due for tremendous growth. Unfortunately, the water sys- tem and the nets of electric cable required to service such a large struc- ture had to be laid below the surface of Queens College-a project which involved the first tearing and breach-

Page 13 text:

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Page 15 text:

ing operations on the college lawns. Students soon got accustomed to long, unexpected trenches darting across campus, to large, flat, brown iron plates laid across the trenches, to sudden unexplained chasms in odd public places, and most of all to the huge amounts of red-brown mud stirred up by the excavations. All these nuisances sank to the status of mere nugatory hindrances when the gym was completely reconstructed. The tremendous beams, the gleaming yellow floor, the huge amount of square yards of air, and especially the glistening, transparent backboards for the baskets, all of these un- expected trophies made a large impression on the collective ego of Queens College. We had finally achieved a large basketball court, if nothing else, our players no longer had to confine their practices to moody dribbling in the cellar under H auditorium, in the fear that long passes would bounce furiously back from the formidable network of waterpipes clinging to the ceiling of H gym.