Paint Your Dragon. The 1970s saw an explosion of murals in the Caltech South Houses, including (above right) the Crud Alley dragon, Jim Ketcham’s out-of-control plane, and a detailed rendering of a Grateful Dead album cover. Above left, from 1994, one corner of the “Swimming Eyeballs” section of Tom Lechner’s vast two-story work.

By Dave Zobel '84

It begins—no surprise—with Feynman.

Overlooking the courtyard of Dabney House, one of Caltech’s undergraduate residences, is a bas-relief featuring Euclid, Pasteur, and six other luminaries of science and mathematics. All eight are making their obeisance to a ninth figure, who hovers center-stage, shammash-like, nimbused, nameless.
Neatly stenciled under this personification of beneficent sagacity is a single word: FEYNMAN.

That annotation, added four decades ago, may be the longest-lived piece of
graffiti in any Caltech undergraduate house. In olden times, so they tell me, back when professors were called Sir and neckties were worn at dinner, the use of Institute buildings as a medium of social commentary was frowned upon by The Powers That Were. Apart from the occasional hastily scribbled phone number, errant handprint, or accidental splash of acetone, the walls of architect Gordon Kaufmann’s masterpiece had stood relatively tidy and unbesmirched since 1931.

Then came the turbulent sixties. Sit-ins and draft card burnings were all the rage, but Techers chose to express (and ex-stress) themselves less destructively and more creatively: on the very walls of their living space. Hallways, stairwells, bathrooms—any vertical surface became a legitimate target for a picture or a poem, a mural or a motto. All went unpunished; evidently the administration considered its options and decided to leave well enough alone.

But the graffiti age had barely begun before it was all swept away: Caltech went coed in 1970, and in a fit of redecoration every wall was wiped clean, every embellishment erased. The concrete canvases again stood empty, an irresistible invitation in semigloss white.

Sure enough, one day hallucinatory paint swirls mysteriously sprouted on the Blacker House hallway known as Tunnel Alley. Then a surrealistic montage appeared in a Dabney breezeway. When neither fell victim to the vigorous scrubbing bubbles of Caltech Buildings and Grounds, the phoenix was declared reborn.

More artistic outpourings soon followed. Dabney’s Alley 3 acquired a pilot’s-eye view of an airplane hurtling down on campus, poetically portraying the universal undergraduate flameout nightmare. One end of Crud Alley in Ricketts House was taken over by a meticulous reproduction of a Grateful Dead album cover. Giant murals filled students’ rooms: solar prominences in one, psychedelia in another, whirling galaxies in a third.

New graffiti sprang up: congenial phantasmagoria (“Welcome to The Edge of Reality”) mingled with Marxist double talk (“Opium is the religion of the masses—BZZZzzzzzT!”) and in-the-know fatalisms any Techer could appreciate (“Bang, bang, Maxwell’s field equations came down upon his head”). Scrawlings of a more traditional (and less printable) type also found their way onto the walls. Some bathrooms even laid in a supply of markers for the convenience of their patrons.

The artsy-smartsy movement spread across the Olive Walk in short order, and for the next 35 years, latter-day Picassos in six of the seven undergraduate houses (Fleming being the lofty exception) wrote on walls, personalized their ceilings, marked their turf. Officially, administration approval was required, but (then as now) students found it easier to ask forgiveness than permission. One room even had floor-to-ceiling shag carpeting.

When the buildings were repainted—about once a decade—care was taken to preserve many of the works. Thus, a disoriented newcomer wandering the halls of any house in, say, 1980 (to pick a frosh year completely at random) would have encountered rambling meditations and bizarre landscapes at every turn, agonized scribblings vying for space with floating eyeballs and talking mushrooms. By graduation day 1984, he would have memorized the location of every angel, python, and doodle in the building complex.

Alan Rice’s surrealistic The Birth of God (top image) still graces an archway in Dabney House, but The Flame Room (underneath), after toasting the hearts of undergrads for over three decades, has been extinguished.

Twenty years later, we find our student again wandering the halls, this time with two teenage sons in tow. Near the “Feynman” bas-relief he pauses to gaze at The Birth of God, a mural older than some Caltech faculty members, and muses Here they once stood: the wide-eyed frosh who is now a grandparent; the distraught junior who today is mortified to think that a problem set could ever have mattered that much; the gentle but mysterious supersenior who simply fell off the face of the earth. . . .

And then a new Reconstruction came sweeping through the Old South—Houses, that is. In July 2005, following months of planning and preparation, Blacker, Dabney, Fleming, and Ricketts were emptied, to be gutted, boiled, scraped . . . scrubbed.

The students were relocated to an improvised trailer park at the north end of campus, where mobile homes had been arranged into virtual Houses. (No one was surprised to find the trailers of faux Fleming standing aloof from the others.) But although the expats brought with them such campus traditions as room picks, alley challenges, and even Ditch Day, their modular units (“mods”) had no lounges, no permanent stereo interconnects to allow legions of Valkyries to Ride in unison, no hyperspace, no history. Socialization opportunities were limited by courtyards too puny for orange launchings, by doors kept shut against the night’s chill, and by the prohibitions against food throwing and table pounding in Chandler Dining Hall.

Cruelest of all, the mods (being rentals) were off-limits to major construction and painting. A pitiless list of proscriptions and commandments was circulated, a veritable Outsider-House Rules that, interpreted in somewhat lyric fashion, read as follows: No walking on roofs / No tunneling under floors / No suspending furniture from the ceiling / No constructing swimming pools by lining your room with plastic and filling with water / No entry or egress except via approved doorways / No bonfires / No graffiti.

Under these restrictions, the makeshift undergraduate residences remained as dull, soulless, and impersonal as . . . well, graduate residences. I suspect the older students had the worst of it. Frosh and smores could only imagine what they were missing, but for the juniors and seniors who longed to play Blacker Ball, Dabney jai-alai, and Ricketts foursquare again, and who missed lining hallways with mattresses for all-night study sessions or ducking into a closet and emerging from a kitchen cabinet, life in the Houses must have seemed almost a distant dream.

The exile is over. After 18 months of being of the Houses but not in them, the student diaspora has returned to new sights and new comforts. Along with a complete mechanical, electrical, and plumbing overhaul, the complex boasts central air, sprinklers, and wireless Ethernet. Strange efflorescences have been eradicated from the terra-cotta. The common areas have been restored to their 1940s-era glory.

Still, the residents have encountered a few surprises. Stairs have been built or blocked off, walls have been knocked down or put up, familiar alley boundaries have been erased. The asbestos insulation has been cleared out, but the crawl spaces are impassable now, stuffed full of ductwork and cabling. Ricketts has a working elevator, but the Zip Line (a sort of one-person aerial tramway) is gone. Whole rooms were added by eliminating the separate house libraries and creating a communal one, but the Blacker tree house was fed to the chipper.

Gone, too, is the exotic room-numbering system. No longer is there a Room 8.5, or π, or ∞ (formerly Room 00, until a dab of paint turned it into its own reciprocal). In deference to the plight of visitors from off campus (parents, say, or the occasional fire brigade), room numbers are now restricted to the positive integers, each preceded by a House initial (possibly to discourage secessionist movements, as was once attempted by Tunnel Alley, and more successfully by Dabney’s Lower 7). Blacker 19, not a room at all but only a false doorway that appeared one Ditch Day, has turned back into a wall.

The freshly white-on-white exteriors of Dabney and Blacker (left) look out on what is traditionally known as the Filipino courtyard, whose foliage was preserved as part of the renovation. At right is a look at a remodeled kitchen.

And everything has been painted. Every alley, every bedroom, every lounge, kitchenette, and bathroom glistens with layer upon layer of bright, chirpy, meringue-glossy opacity. Out of the scores of murals that existed two years ago, only about two dozen remain, selected for preservation by a representative campus committee responding to representative input selected from across campus. As for the graffiti, it’s gone: all of it, every scrap of wisdom, dry humor, and angst, lovingly conceived, every last jotted titillation—now carefully reprimed and sealed over.

Yet new seedlings are already taking root in the cleared forest. Despite scattered administrative calls for a moratorium on courtyard floodings (heavens! how anti-diluvian!), no one is proposing a ban on wall art. To the contrary, the Institute has established a protocol for approving student murals and graffiti that begins and ends with the house leadership. Cease-and-desists from the Housing Office in response to particularly controversial works can be appealed to a higher campus authority. In the meantime, those hankering for signs from bygone days can always return to the stairwells of Millikan Library, where vintage DEIs lurk undisturbed . . . or troll the subterranean byways of the steam tunnels . . . or freeze-frame Real Genius, 1984’s cinematic tribute to the quality of Caltech life.

December’s rededication ceremony was held in the courtyard of Ricketts House (which, pre-renovation, had been in the worst condition of all four). Under the rather harrowing lintel inscription STET FORTVNA DOMVS (Lat.: “With lvck, the Hovse may yet be standing”), trustees and benefactors beamed at the new unbreakable windows and ran their fingertips along the duct-tape-free masonry and nodded and sighed over the triumphant display of before-and-after blowups. Here at last were student residence halls a school could be proud of! (Reader responses to this or any other inflammatory statement should be directed to the Interhouse Committee, by way of the Student Affairs Office or the Alumni Association.)

Visitors on these occasions are occasionally heard to murmur such comments as, “If only the students cared about these buildings, they wouldn’t damage them.” Forgive such well-meaning folks for confusing decorated with damaged, for neglecting to equate well-worn with well-loved, or for believing that it is only the students who are borrowing the Institute and not vice versa. Still, the undergraduates come and go, while the buildings remain behind, their very walls a mute testament to the Law of Unintended Consqeuences. A wry sketch or a frenzied plea for deliverance scrawled in a spur-of-the-moment haze may touch the hearts and minds of others for decades before it is painted over. What you daub on the wall in midnight misery today may keep your child company in some as-yet undreamt-of tomorrow.

For this reason, let’s go the administration one better and issue a challenge to all who may be contemplating undergraduate residence beautification: Eschew sloppiness. When you scribble, scribble neatly; when you doodle, doodle with care. Not every mural has to be museum quality, not every graffito any more profound than Pompeii’s “C. Pumidius Dipilus was here,” but please—let’s see no more lettering of the words “Beware of Darbs” in anything other than a clear, professional hand; no jury-rigging of tire swings without load testing; no floodings of basements except intentionally. This is, after all, a school with a reputation for engineering excellence: even the impromptu ought not to be executed slapdash.

And what better time to make a fresh start than now? With its extreme makeover and its sparkling new fluorescent fixtures, the refurbished South House complex strikes me as an impeccably yet unnaturally clean, well-lighted place. Forty years of jubilation, hesitation, frustration, and resignation have been sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Sherwin-Williams. In Blacker, Hell Alley’s corridor of flames now smolders under a thick ice-cream coating, its fiery red overhead signs tempered to a cool green and reconfigured to spell Exit again. Dabney’s homage to underground comics in Alley 2 (“Lester mused over past midnight slayings”) has itself been consigned to the underground. Pancake makeup has been troweled over the Biohazard sign in the Ricketts dining hall. The virgin white walls of Fleming are now . . . a slightly more virginal white.

Then again, is what once was truly gone for all time? Is it all that fanciful to suppose that, one day, backscatter X-rays or thermal imaging artfully applied to the walls of the Houses will reveal palimpsest scribblings and paintings thought forever lost? That the city of eyeballs, the half-empty bottle clutched by a six-foot rat, the Death Star rising over Beckman Auditorium may rise again? A spectrographic survey of a dining hall ceiling could reveal the ancient footprints of ten thousand butter pats. A judicious splash of liquid nitrogen against a wall might bring the new paint peeling off in sheets.

Until that day, somewhere in Ricketts a trusty warrior astride a two-headed dragon stares out broodingly from just behind the paint. Dante’s dread warning—ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE—goes unheeded under its sticking-plaster of Blacker White-Out. And invisibly presiding over a hallway in Dabney, mere microns from the light of day, in the same spot where it was Magic-Markered onto a wall three decades ago, reposes the most useful piece of anonymous wisdom ever imparted to this impressionable student in his four years at Caltech:

There’s you . . .
And there’s this pile of papers.
The pile of papers exists to serve you—
not the other way around.

_________

Dave Zobel, shown above attempting to summon the phantasms of paintings past, last wrote for Caltech News on what it feels like to have been declared the worst writer in the world. He offers his undying thanks to the many former and current denizens of the Houses whose reminiscences, enthusiastically shared, gave life both to this article and to the online gallery of South House art that he has begun to assemble. All mistakes and misstatements, errors of fact or fiction, and outright distortions are, of course, the sole responsibility of the author and his multitudinous sources.