Shop Talk: A Frat Demo, a Shared Building, and a Historic Designation

“When it was completed in 1894, St. Louis Hall stood alone at the end of a horse and buggy trail that connected the school to the last stop of the West End Electric Street Car Company a mile to the east,” says a press release from St. Mary’s U. The building was added to the U.S. National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places. (Photo courtesy St. Mary’s U.)

Frat-fall: A 70-year-old fraternity house at the University of Georgia will be demolished within a month, and other frat houses may follow, as the university has plans to construct academic buildings in their place, reports the Athens Banner-Herald. The brothers of Kappa Alpha were the first to move out of their house this week. The university will strip the house of recyclable material and remove asbestos before starting the demolition. Danny Sniff, the university architect, said the house “is in really bad shape.”

No parking!: West Chester University would like to build a parking garage, despite outcry from its resident neighbors. “Members of West Chester Residents for Responsible Planning, the neighborhood group opposed to the parking garage, maintain that the university needs the proposed new 452-parking space garage on South New and West Nields streets to make up for parking spaces lost when D lot would be lost to make way for the new recreation center,” reports Anne Pickering of The Daily Local. “Now that the recreation center would be in a new location, D lot won’t lose any parking spaces. Since the university is now not losing Lot D and is adding 90 parking spaces at the Ramsey Hall location, the question was raised why the university still needs a 452-space parking garage at South New and West Nields streets.” University officials said that they planned to develop Lot D sometime in the future.

Sharing space: The University of Central Florida and Valencia Community College have broken ground on a classroom and student-services building that the two institutions will share. The 100,000-square-foot building will feature classrooms, computer labs, faculty offices and shared student services. UCF programs in nursing, electrical engineering and business administration will be housed there as well. Valencia Community College students make up 40 percent of the transfer students at UCF. The building, which will cost $23-million and will shoot for a silver certification in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, will open in a year.

Officially history: St. Louis Hall, an administration building from the 1890s at St. Mary’s University in Texas, has been added to the U.S. National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places. A press release from the university explains that St. Louis Hall was originally the site of St. Louis College, a boarding school for boys. It became St. Mary’s College and later St. Mary’s University in the 1920s. The inclusion on the National Register will allow St. Mary’s to get grants for preservation.