In 2015 the Pilot House brought a PUB to campus. The renovation expanded seating and space for food and entertainment so much so as to take over most of the available Pilot House space, all dedicated to the finer elements of student life in the form of the cultivation of friendship, community, and leisure spilling over into an al fresco patio, live-streaming KDUP music and programming, and even appropriating the NAME of the Pilot House from the whole. Changing and evolving, meeting new needs and demands: but also ending an 80-year tradition.
From 1935 to 2015, the snack-space, the student hang-out— the place where students intersect between classes over sandwiches and soda– was called The Cove. Partly this recalls a time when UP was something like half a commuter campus and The Cove was a harbor providing the low-end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for day-students between intervals in the UP classroom and library pursuing the highest and happiest of intellectual goods. Partly this recalls a time before the Beau, when UP deployed a lot of nautical nicknames for stuff (Beacon, Log, Pilots).
The first Cove was located on the first floor of Howard Hall. By sacrificing some rows of lockers between the swimming pool and basketball court, The Cove acquired an open space for a dozen tables, allowing service for as many as 50 patrons (The BEACON, September 27, 1935). Always catching up to demand, the cafeteria was already swamped after one month’s operation, as this BEACON editorial applauds:
We pause in the midst of our daily campus rush to pay tribute…
For many years there has been felt a crying need – sometimes an audible one ..
.. Now the time has arrived when day students can obtain a wide variety of foods,
including warm lunches to tide them over….
in filling this long felt need, the cafeteria is a project deserving of patronage…as the
crowded condition at noon periods clearly shows (October 25, 1935).
Across campus today, venerable and multipurpose Howard Hall has been superseded by the excellence of the Beauchamp Recreation & Wellness Center. So too, The Cove is dead; long live The Anchor coffee shop in Haggerty Hall?
(Click to enlarge photos)
