STRUCT URES
The Y: A Hundredth Birthday Promise
“On arriving at Chapel Hill I was surprised and pleased
to find the general esteem in which the YMCA was held.
The YMCA building, just completed but not wholly furnished
as yet, stood next to the University Chapel and only a step
from the Old Well and the Davie Poplar, pivotal points
of the then-campus. … Over the entrance, on the second floor,
was my bedroom, hardly larger than a fair-sized cloak room
— in which however conversations, normally stretching into
the wee, small hours, acknowledged no limits.”
Eugene Barnett, early secretary of the campus YMCA
The YMCA was for a long time
nearly the geographical center of
the campus, and there beat its
heart. It was the union, the Pit, the bookstore, the meet-me place, the hub of social
activism and the headquarters for Bible
and missionary study that involved a large
percentage of the student body.
Gerrard was the official chapel,
but the YMCA had its own. It’s
believed to be where the first movies
were shown in Chapel Hill, and it
had that linchpin of socioacademic
life, the coffee shop. It once was one
of the few places where black students felt welcome at Carolina.
So, for the Campus Y, which let
go its ties to the YMCA and YWCA years
ago, it was a long way from premier destination to a tentative date with the wrecking ball. The Graham Memorial and then
the new student union gradually pulled
the student organizations away. Mold
thrived in the basement. The Y was under-loved to the point that its upper floors
were ruled off limits.
After its friends started raising the
money to go with what the University put
up, they found much of the abandoned
space preserved as it was left — including
a knotted-rope fire escape hanging by the
east window where Thomas Wolfe ’ 20 had
had a sort of poor boy’s penthouse.
As student life drifts southward on the
campus, the Y that’s reopening this spring
— 100 years after the housewarming —
will be a magnet pulling in the other direction. The chapel, its tall windows letting in
the light again, will be a student-faculty-alumni lounge designed for informal gath-
Above, an original
skylight, shut off for
decades, now
restored.
Top right, the chapel
— in recent years a
campus snackbar with
the tall windows cov-
ered over — will be a
lounge and small-
scale lecture hall filled
with traditional N.C.-
made furniture.
Bottom right, the
original coffered
ceiling found beneath
earlier renovations.
Opposite page, a finial
restored to the pyra-
mid roof.
PHOTOS BY DAN SEARS ’ 74
