At Harvey Mudd, a Parking Problem of a Different Sort

Parking is so tight outside Harvey Mudd College’s dining hall that some students have to prop up their boards several columns away from the dining-hall entrance and walk the rest of the way. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Claremont, Calif.— When Harvey Mudd College students head for dinner, skateboard parking is at a premium outside the college’s Hoch-Shanahan Dining Commons. Fortunately, Harvey Mudd is about as skateboard-friendly as a college could be. Not only is the campus organized as one long straightaway, with a gentle east-to-west slope, but the buildings are ornamented with blocky protrusions that make perfect skateboard holders, accommodating both long and short boards.

Although Harvey Mudd’s buildings call to mind the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, they’re actually by Edward Durrell Stone. The blocky protrusions, by the way, are known locally as warts, and the college claims to have more than 25,000 of them. A wart with a face and limbs, Wally Mudd, appears regularly in campus publications—as well as on a parking spot reserved for the college’s president, Maria M. Klawe.