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Left: Front Entrance
Once you've passed the wooden Stevenson School sign on Forest Lake Road, the entrance of the school brings you directly to the face of Douglas Hall, one of the oldest buildings on the campus. The parking lot in the front area of the school is reserved mainly for faculty and the teal Stevenson vans with the Pebble Beach Company logos. The school bus also makes stops in this area, specifically around the flagpole. On weekends, the school bus serves as an on-the-hour shopping bus for boarders, as well as transportation for various activities and school sports events. Basically, this entire area acts as the main point where almost everyone enters and leaves the campus. (A Stevenson flag, sporting the classic white Stevenson name in Cataneo BT font on a dark green background, was added directly below the American flag in 2003. I had been hoping for the California Republic flag, which I like because it reminds me Banana Republic...)
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Right: Student Center (final construction stage)
The Student Center, known as Rosen after its completed construction, was a major project right in the middle of the campus. The boarding student population generally found it to be a major obstacle during its two-and-a-half year construction from 2001 to 2003, and the projected completion date had been delayed at least twice, resulting in broken promises to the class of 2002, and I think, the class of 2001. It wasn't open to students until a couple days before the graduation of the class of 2003 (my class). Given the amount of tuition we've paid to the school (as well as the amount for the cost of the building), we were fairly irritated. One of the school periodicals at the end of the year included a hypothetical case where a student donated money for one of the chimneys and called it the Rosen shaft.
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Left: Student Center (now known as Rosen)
Construction annoyances put aside, this building was quite a collosus. It had two stories, and it probably had more total floorspace and rooms than the rest of the nonresidential buildings put together. Among the rooms in the new complex were an art gallery, classrooms with automated projection screens, a new radio booth for our school radio station (KSPB 91.9 FM), a new cafe/quasi-coffee-shop called Simoneau, a student gift shop/bookstore, a game room with a pool table, plasma screen, and ping pong table (taken from Day Hall), admin. offices, a college center, large open spaces, and lots of chimneys and fireplaces. Oh, and an "amphitheater", shown in the photo as the white stones that form the semicircle around the main entrance. Some people wondered how the "amphitheater" would work, like whether people would sit on the stones and stretch their legs on the grass, or whether people would sit on the tiles of an upper row and put their feet on the tiles of the lower row. It turned out that, during our graduation, they put folding chairs on the grass, while people's feet rested on the stones. Oh, and the school was offering engravings of people's names on the white stones if they donated $1000. Sounds nice, but I'd rather buy a second and third iPod.
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Right: Silverado and Day Hall dorms
Silverado and Wilson are gray-colored dorms, built in the 80's. Day Hall and Atwood are brown-colored dorms, built in the early 90's. Shown in the photo are Silverado in gray and Day Hall in brown. All four of the main dorms (Silverado, Wilson, Day, Atwood) have a girls-only side and a guys-only side, both connected by a large common room in the center. Because of this design, the common rooms were used very frequently, for everything from socializing to academic help. Each dorm also had four to six faculty apartments in the corners of each dorm, so the boarders were able to live with half of the total faculty population. This helped us befriend the faculty as we developed strong social relationships with them. It also made academic help and general daily life help much more accessible. (Notice the chimneys in the photo. Every faculty apartment had a chimney, and every common room had a chimney. That's a lot of fireplaces...but not as much as the Student Center.)
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Left: Day Hall Upstairs Commons
See this room in the photo? The main common rooms (the ones that connect the boys' and girls' sides) are generally four to six times this size. This room is merely a secondary common room. Only Day Hall and Atwood seemed to have these. The older dorms, Wilson and Silverado, did not. These secondary common rooms existed in both the guys' and girls' sides, and they were almost always upstairs. They're not used as much as the main common rooms, but this one in particular - the Day Hall Boys' upstairs common room - was used as a classroom for a few subjects like AP Economics, AP Computer Science, and various English classes. The faculty didn't seem to intend to use this room as a classroom, and they planned to cease using this common room as a classroom once the Student Center opened up. (And I believe that this has happened.) Still, this room holds plenty of memories for me, namely those from AP Comp. Sci. and AP Econ. (someone writing MC=MR on the window). Plus, it was nice for people who lived in Day Hall [Gordon raises his hand] because they could just get out of bed and stroll down the hall to this room...and class would start.
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Right: Talbott - the main classrooms
Talbott is a two-story building full of classrooms. During the pre-Student-Center era, this is where the majority of the classrooms were, with the exception of the science classes, econ/AP Econ, AP CS, art, music, some history classes, and a few electives. Among the classrooms, there is one computer lab, a few tiny faculty offices, and one set of men's/women's restrooms. All the classrooms use white dry-erase marker boards, as do most classrooms on the campus, and they're lit by fluorescent lights (whose lighting annoyed me) and heated by a set of white wall heaters along the windows. With that combination, it could sometimes get very warm, and add that dull lighting...zzz. I never actually fell asleep in a class, actually, but it was uncomfortable SOMEtimes.
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-Gordon Mei, September 24, 2004.
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