Men on Break 9/3/22

You may remember the Australian rock band Men at Work. These are real Men on Break from dorm remodeling work - an appropriate photo given Labor Day is Monday the 5th.

The dorms on the University Park campus of Penn State can only accommodate about 25% of the 32,000 undergraduate students and a very small number of graduate students. The rest of the 40,000 students live off campus or commute.

Over the past two decade, a significant number of new high-end private student housing complexes have been built in the Borough, including in the last half dozen years five 14 story apartment buildings downtown, with one under construction and another in planning. In addition, three very large townhouse complexes in surrounding townships have been built. The high-rises were able to take advantage of a loophole in the six story zoning ordinances.

Concurrently, Penn State has added new dormitories and initiated a program to refurbish and upgrade the existing dorms. The latter process involves taking three to four dorms off-line for about a year, gutting them and remodeling. The above photo is of three construction workers on a 90+ degree day taking a break on a shaded bench next to the Creamery.

Two prominent examples of the high-rise apartment buildings are pictured below - a burgundy and gray building in the foreground and tan building in the distance. These two are located on opposite sides of a major State College intersection, which also marks the southwest corner of campus. The high-rises literally "tower" over lower buildings that comprise most of downtown (including a half dozen original structures from the 1850s) and that give State College a small town character.

A major theme of the book Story of the Century (Jo Chesworth, 1996) is that Penn State and State College developed together and in a complementary manner over their first 150 years, after it was decided that the Commonwealth's agricultural college would be build in the center of the state - in a valley where there were a few isolated farms and an iron furnace. Today, it is no longer clear the relationship remains complementary.