Editor’s Note When I first started this project I wanted to create a magazine where the content was driven by student surveys. This idea stemmed from the article The Neoliberal Arts, by William Deresiewicz that demanded liberal arts institutions to teach students how to learn and analyze instead of following systematic school mission statements. The Negative became a medium for me to ask questions about an institution I had spent four years at. As a designer I wanted to investigate how journalism and design interacted with one another. What started as design project became a humbling endeavor into the ephemeral nature of information, and the history of Fredonia. I would like to personally thank all of those who helped me with this project.
I.M. Pei and Partners Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, State University of New York at Fredonia, New York, 1960-1968
Things You Should Know
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A section filled with information by students for students. Survey generated content on the ins and outs of Fredonia. Learn the easy way so you don’t have to struggle through it.
Music This Fall
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Rich Seck reflects on the best songs of the fall. Including artists such as Travis Scott, Neon Indian, Kurt Vile, and Joanna Newsom.
08 Black Jacks Fredonia’s favorite dive bar just turned eighty-two years old. In celebration Black Jack’s owner shares a brief history of the longest standing bar in the Fredonia area.
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On the Cover
The Spirt of Spine
The rumors are true; The Spine will be removed over the summer of 2016. Instead of kicking and screaming, lets remember what The Spine meant to Fredonia and it’s campus.
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Things That You Should Know Why You Should be using the Fredonia archives As of recently the archives started open hours for Fredonia students. Before you had to set up an appointment, and now you are free to walk in and browse the archives. If you have a research project surrounding Fredonia this is a great source of information for you to use. Go through the collection of primary resources from Fredonia’s History. This collection can give you first hand insight on your projects through photographs, records, newspapers, and other antique items.
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The Secret Fitness Center The Schulz Fitness center is a pretty convenient tool for students that live on campus and especially for residents of Schulz hall. All you need to enter is your Fred card and as soon as you sign your name in, you can use any of the equipment they have. There are Dumbbells, bench presses, and several different machines that you can use for different muscle groups. In the back section of the fitness center, there are several treadmills that can also be used. The Schulz fitness center is also nice if you want to get away from the often crowded Dods fitness center; Schulz is usually relatively empty considering not many people know about it. Overall, its a convenient place for a workout.
Getting An Absentee Ballot With the presidential election approaching, it is important to be involved in the voting process. In a study in 2012 by the US Census Bureau, only 38 percent of 18-24 year olds participate in voting. Low voting averages for the youth could be attributed to multiple reasons, including your location. Unfortunately, it is harder for college students to vote if you’re from a different county than the college you attend. In order to vote while avoiding the drive home, there is the option of an absentee ballot. An absentee ballot is ballot that can be completed and mailed in advance of an election by a voter who is unable to be present at the polls. This makes for the perfect solution to any college student far away from home. Applications for Absentee Ballots are available at your county board of elections. You may also be able to download a PDF version of the New York State Absentee Ballot Application Form. The applications must be mailed to your county board no later than the seventh day before the election or delivered in person no later than the day before the election. If you cannot pick up your ballot, you have the option for the board of elections to mail it to you. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-573.pdf http://college.usatodaycom/2015/09/25why-college-students-arent-voting/
The Best Solutions to Fredonia’s Weather When you first arrive in Fredonia you succumb to the mercy of your window fan. Late August is a slurry of nights spent restless, in a pool of your own sweat from the humidity. The weather in Fredonia is not forgiving, like anywhere in Western New York, but here are some solutions. The beginning of the school year is always humid; make sure to invest in a fan, if not two. The dorms claim to have air conditioning, and many of the off–campus houses don’t, but if you are looking for sanctuary in the heat look no further than the library for free air conditioning. The humidity in Fredonia might be bad, but the winters are by far the worst. Don’t be left high and dry during the winter, and bring a solid winter coat and a pair of boots. You will be happy in mid-November when you get stuck in a surprise snowstorm
Student Complaints “Why do they have you sign a code of conduct about not smoking on campus, but don’t enforce it.” – Deztian Skyler-Brian Orsolits
“They don’t give you enough money back when you sell your books back to the bookstore” – Chase Townse
“The prices at the Williams Center are too expensive, I can’t buy a sub with meals because it’s to expensive.” – Corde Smart
“Professors who publish their own books, and force you to buy them for their class. Their books might not be the best expert opinion on that field.” – Jane Madeline
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THE FALL IN MUSIC Travis Scott’s Rodeo Sums Up Rap Music for 2015
There are few emerging artists more polarizing than Travis Scott, he of the dual deals (Grand Hustle as a rapper and G.O.O.D. Music as a producer) and the punk rock antics, a Kanye West progeny who is continuously changing shape. One minute he’s Kid Cudi, the next he’s Young Thug. The rager has made a living parlaying aesthetics into musical capital, but there’s value
This image is of Australian origin and is now in the public domain because its term of copyright has expired. According to the Australian Copyright Council
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in his ability to repackage styles and sounds into something that requires little to no unpacking. After releasing a solid buzz-building free studio album, Days Before Rodeo, last year, Scott follows it up with his long-awaited major debut, Rodeo, a master class in the pyramid scheming of rap industry politics.
The Five Kool albums of Fall 2015 By Richard Seck
Kurt Vile - B’lieve I’m Going Down Very Bob Dylan-y folk-y rock-y album that just fucking works in a time where rock music being pushed to the back. a good album to listen to on a 50 degree night with your windows open. Oneohtrix Point Never Garden of Delete While the internet is hung up on vaporwave, Daniel Lopatin (the man behind OPN, arguably the dude who spearheaded vaporwave) is moving forward. This is like, the most future album I’ve heard all year. Lots of electronics, noise, and ambience. Like I can see people picking up on the sounds he’s throwing down here, influencing electronic music through the next year or two. Lianne La Havas - Blood Neo-soul album that I kind of had on the back burner for a month, but came across her NPR Tiny Dest Concert on youtube and just watching her perform, you can feel how much life is in these songs. Now I listen to it almost every day.
Joanna Newsom - Divers Joanna Newsom makes some of the most organic, beautiful music I’ve come across. With Newsom’s sweet harp plucking and cozy melodies, it’s the perfect fall album. Filed under music to go apple picking with your girlfriend to. Neon Indian VEGAS INTLNight School It’s like popping a workout tape in your VHS that you ordered off of a late night informercial. Lo-fi dreamy funky disco shit. Please only listen with tight pants on or you probably won’t get it at all.
Top 10 Trax: Lianne La Havas What You Won’t Do Kurt Vile That’s Life Though Young Thug Best Friend Oneohtrix Point Never Sticky Drama Neon Indian Slumlord Sun Kil Moon / Jesu America’s Most Wanted Mark Kozelek and John Dillinger Travis Scott Oh My Dis Side Nicolas Jaar Fight Julia Holter Feel You
Photo of Alan Palomo of Neon Indian performing at Republic New Orleans in 2015, taken by Threemonths
Eryka Badu Hotline Bling Remix
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82 Years of
A brief history of one of the longest standing bars in Fredonia. 8
Picture of the original owmer of Black Jack’s, Jack Privateer, Taken in 1935
How long have you owned the place? 13 years. I started working here in 1991 to 1999 and then got up and moved to Colorado. I heard it was for sale in 2002 and I came back to buy it. Did you know the owner before? When I worked here it was for the original family. The college bought it off them and the school ran it into the ground. The original family owned it from 1933. Is that why it’s named Black Jack’s? Yes, there is a gentleman here who I believe is the original owner. (points to a picture
hanging up on the wall.) My understanding — now I wasn’t around then— but talking to older people there is a gentleman who comes in all the time and talks about the old days. Apparently Jack Prevetira and the grandfather who I worked for, who’s last name was Pattie, owned the bar together. The bar was originally on the corner of eagle and main and was called the Eagle Street Café. At some point they changed the name to Black Jacks in the ‘60s and when they moved over here they changed the name to what it is now BJ’s. I get asked about what it stands for all the time though.
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“I was just sitting at home eating dinner, and I get a phone call from the bartender working. They said the bar was on fire. I came down as soon as possible.” Has Bj’s always had a culture? Coming from conversations with older people, when it was on Eagle and Main through the ‘30s and ‘50s, there was a lot of gambling and other things. But as far as I know, I have been here since the 90s, and it has always been like this. Talking to the original family who owned it, during the ‘70s it was always different. In the ‘70s, it was way more chaotic with drug use. Obviously that can’t happen here now and doesn’t. Back then it just seemed freer. Back in the ‘90s it was Goths and Punk Rockers.
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Have you guys always had shows? Ah, we started in earnest I guess. When I use to work here there would be shows but it would happen very rarely. Maybe once a month, someone would come up to the owner and ask to play. It usually never went well because it was usually the “odd People” who performed their Avant-Garde
music. In 2004 ,a student here, who asked if I could start putting on shows here, approached me. I said we will see how it goes, and it just kind of worked out. So I guess we started it kind of. Best band that played here? Well MGMT played here. Funny story about the MGMT, in 2006 when their first album was being recorded in Cassadega. My friend Dave owns the recording studio and once in awhile he will ask if the band can play live. They had an opener and there was 100 plus people here and when MGMT played there was only 18 people. After that Phantom Planet, Slater Kenny, Mogwaii and of course Summer People. Then there was a band from Japan who has played here, who I can’t remember for the life of me, but they were great. I would say the band that played the first show of the semester here, Second Trip, was awesome. At first I thought it was very “Sabbathy,” but they
also sounded a lot like Sound Garden. I really hope that they come back and play a second show here. Has it always been tradition to use a chainsaw to cut the cake? I try to carry on traditions from the original family owners and that was one of their things. Also the beach party and the fire blowing too. I have the belief that if it’s not broken don’t fix it. If it's been here for 82 years, I’m not going to fuck with it. The chainsaw is a lot of fun though. You know, I am just about people having fun; that’s all I care about pretty much. Do you have a favorite memory? Well, I met my wife here as corny as it sounds. We didn’t meet as customers, we both worked here. I met her one day, she came walking in, and I said, “who is that?” And that was it. So obviously that is my favorite memory. She is my wife and she is just awesome. Tell me about the time BJ’s burned down? Well actually there was a fire upstairs. It was during the winter and there was a space heater plugged into a power strip that was plugged into another power strip. Really smart, right? Our damage here was mostly water and smoke damage, since the fire was upstairs. We were closed for ten weeks. We were so bored. I was just sitting at home eating dinner and I get a phone call from the bartender working. They said the bar was on fire. I came down as soon as possible. Thankfully, no one was hurt. But our ceiling and flooring fell. Our floors use to be really old, so I’m glad that gave me the opportunity to fix it. I saved a lot of stuff off the walls. I took a lot of photos of how the bar looked before hand. It's hard to fake the look of this bar, so I tried to keep that feel and history of the bar. Over the last three or four years I feel like it is back to normal. But I would say my favorite thing on the wall would be that maxim magazine. The Flaming Lips did a photoshoot here and I was it, so that was pretty cool.
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THE SPI OF TH The rumors are true; The Spine will be removed over the summer of 2016. Instead of kicking and screaming, lets remember what the Spine meant to Fredonia and it’s campus. 12
RIT HE SPINE 13
“They weren’t just designing the buildings, they designed the layout of the buildings”
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As you enter Fredonia’s campus, and make your way down Old Main Drive. One can observe the large abstract shapes of concrete, and red brick that compose the buildings one campus. Towards the end of the road lies a hulking bridge connecting the Williams Centers and The Daniel A. Reed Library. This bridge, once the main passage to and from the library, is now a ghost of its former self. Weathering concrete, and unstable columns now house students from snowfall and rain during walks to and from the library. The architecture designed by I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb was once a bragging point from Fredonia is now a headache for the school. In the summer of 2016 it will be removed for the following semester. As the rumors circulated through campus many students, faculty, and architecture fanatics began to scoff at the idea that it would be removed, myself include. What I have realized is that instead of being angry at the situation, we should remember the importance of the bridge, and what it meant. Generations of tall tales have circulated through Fredonia surrounding ideas behind the campus architecture, partially due to I.M. Pei’s auspicious reputation. The second half is wrongly accusing the stairs as a form of riot control for students. When you look at Pei’s catalogue of work you can recognize the consistency in geometric forms, and concrete. This stems from Pei’s formal education, and the modernist ideals of the mid 20th century. At the age of 17 Pei came to the United States to study architecture at MIT. Following that he enrolled in Harvard’s graduate program to study
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under Walter Gropius, a founder of The Bauhaus School in Germany. There his influenced was reinforced by the leaders of modern architecture including Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. During the 1950s there was a divergent from the modernist movement created called brutalism. The term brutalism is not associated with the perceived ideas of violence, it stems from the French béton-brut – literally “raw concrete” – the movement’s signature material. The movement is heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille erected in 1952. The building was a composite of steel and exposed raw concrete consisting of repeating modular shapes, and wonky geometric forms. When you compare the architecture to the rest of the brutalism catalogue you can see the trends that Fredonia’s campus is associated with. During the 1960s Governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed for an expansion of the SUNY system, creating the need for more on campus infrastructure. So in 1967 Fredonia hired I.M. Pei and Partners of New York to create additions to Fredonia’s campus. Henry Cobb, Pei’s partner, would oversee designs for the Kirkland Complex, Andrews Complex, Reed Library, Houghton, McEwen Hall, Rockefeller, Maytum Hall, and The Williams When I sat down with Kessler he began Center. to delve into the idea that the campus was designed as whole, not just random The architecture was comprised of additions. “They weren’t just designing mostly reinforced concrete, and red the buildings, they designed the layout brick, which is consistent with the bru- of the buildings. The campus layout talism. The red brick was used in order consists of the Spine (the bridge beto pay homage to the older infrastruc- tween the Williams Center and Reed ture, while the academic buildings were Library), which is a huge check mark. composed of the reinforced concrete to Basically what Happens is you start at insert a new aesthetic direction. While the Williams Center and then travel the average student can observe these to the library and then travels to The attributes of our campus, I wanted to Rockefeller Arts Center,” stated Kessler. know more so I interviewed the cam- The campus as a whole is comprised out pus architect Markus J Kessler for more of a large checkmark, a Circle When information. you look at Cobb’s major plan, you can
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recognize that majority of the designs were not applied to the campus. The large field around this spine was intended to be a checkerboard of concrete paths and grass, which are now numerous pathways from one entrance point to another. The spine itself is actually elevated, what is underneath is not considered the spine. It is always at a raised level and then eventually reaches the ground, towards Rockefeller. When I asked Kessler about why part of the spine was being removed, he went into detail about the hassle of board formed concrete and our modernist architecture. “We have always been very con-
scious of this board formed concrete. It is very unique, but there is plenty of other campus built identically to this one. For example the Amherst campus in Buffalo is the same as this, but you wont find this amount of board-formed concrete anywhere else. We are very sensitive to that, but unfortunately sometimes architects look more at the design of the building other than the functionality of the building,” stated Kessler. Although The Spine is major concern, it is not the only part of campus that is falling apart. In Fredonia’s budget for 2015-2016 there will be $4.5 million put in to rehab the exterior to McEwen Hall. This plan includes removing the existing windows and replace with new, energy efficient units. Repairing the entire cracked and spalled exterior, board formed concrete to match the finish and color of the existing surrounding concrete. Abate all hazardous material associated with the existing windows.
Above all removing of The Spine adjacent to McEwen Hall. The misfortune associated with The Spine is not only water damage, but issues with one of the columns. Mark Kessler stated, “We found that the closest column of the road near the building was not doing too well so we decided to implement a pillar to take the weight of that column. We didn’t know when failure would happen, but we couldn’t do anything.” The underlying problem was that the bridge could become unsafe on campus, so Fredonia reached out to a company called MJ Engineering who gave ultimatums for the compromised structure. During the interview Kessler listed off the options as, “first you could repair it and do that for x amount of times, tear it down and rebuild it for y, or tear it down and do something else for z.” In a disappointed state he began to mention that with the climate for state funding Fredonia can’t afford to take it down and rebuild.
The stairs descending down the upper level of library towards Thompson Hall, and Fenton Hall.
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Due to these issues the decision has been made to remove the spine and that will happen this summer. That is not to say that there will not be an alternative solution to The Spine, but it will be at grade level. This will be a community effort; Markus mentioned that there will be a board assembled from the academics, student affairs, alumni sponsors, and the new president for SA. This board is responsible for the critiquing of the design so that the spirit of Pei and Partners’ Spine will not lost forever.
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Special Thanks This magazine was driven by forces other than mine, and without the people who contributed to this magazine this project would have never come into fruition. I would like to thank the people who allowed me to interview them for this project including; Rob, Markus Kessler, Rich Seck, Jack Erhard, Max Rogan, Chase Townse, Deztian Skyler-Brian Orsolits, Corde Smart, Veronica Penoyer, Jane Madeline, and Margaret Drzewiecki. I would also like to thank my professors Megan Urban, and Jason Dilworth for tolerating me, and challenging my abilities. Most importantly I would like to thank my family for supporting me when I need it most. Without everyone there wouldn’t be a magazine, and for your help I am truly thankful.
The State University of New York at Fredonia. Consolidated Operating Budget 2015-2016. Fredonia, NY: SUNY Fredonia, 2015. https://www.fredonia.edu/admin/budget/pdf/2015%20Consolidated%20Operating%20Budget.pdf. December 18, 2015 "Interview with Markus Kessler." Personal interview. 14 Dec. 2015. Reiff, Daniel D. Architecture in Fredonia, New York, 1811-1997: From Log Cabin to I.M. Pei. Fredonia, NY: Published for the Fredonia Preservation Society, by White Pine, 1997. Print. Http://www.pcfandp.com/. Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2015 Hopkins, Owen. “The Dezeen Guide to Brutalist Architecture.” Dezeen The Dezeen Guide to Brutalist Architecture Comments. Dezeen, 10 Sept. 2014. Web. 06 Apr. 2016..
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