The urine-colored floor tiles, the on-and-off again vending machines, the artsy photographs of glass blowings, the cinderblock chic aesthetic, the sock-absorbing portals behind the laundry machines and the atmosphere of detrimentally horny 18 and 19-year-olds circulating through the moldy air.
The Hecht Residential College had it all. There are few places on campus where one could experience the luxuries of unfiltered college life, like toilets clogged by Bud Light cans, shit stains on the ceilings and cigarette butts lining the stairs of fire escapes. Hecht was one such place and for that, we are eternally thankful.
If these walls could have talked… well, let’s just be thankful that they can’t, because they’ve been demolished. Your secrets are safe in the rubble, as well as the generations of genital splooge, caulked within the crumbled pipes of shower drains.
Although Hecht has fallen, its concrete walls will always hold a special place in the hearts (and other ‘appendages’) of many ‘Canes. So many first occurred there from first nights away from home to first drunken hookups. Among these floors we found friends and enemies; we accumulated memories and mistakes; we lived lives that our parents will never hear about and our therapists will silently judge us for.
Hecht has been a rite of passage since 1968, and it will be more or less missed, in a nostalgic sort of way of course. So, for one last hurrah, let’s all pour out a cold one and give our fallen friend one last “Hecht yeah.”