“Jesuit Real Estate” — the Mods at 50
“Resident Living”
I live in a gated community.
There, I said it. And I’m not ashamed.
That phrase should, if you’re anything like me, conjure some images: immaculate landscaping; expensive-looking cars, pets, and people. A genteelness. A socially inferior attendant who shoos away other social inferiors. A Wall Street Journal subscription for every man, and every man his own personal Wall Street Journal subscription unto himself.
My gated community has a few of those things, to be sure, but there are a few major differences.
For instance, every house in my gated community is nearly identical. We all have grills, the same perfectly sculpted hedges, and quaint patios attached to the living room, which is attached to the kitchen — perfect for entertaining. Each is designed for six occupants. Plenty of Natural Light.
Everyone has more or less the same amenities, luxuries, and space. While we’re all equal to one another, inside, we’re still collectively superior to everyone on the outside. You might call my community a shining example of central planning. In fact, each domicile is painted a rich Soviet red. Similarly, our units are also subject to a particularly Soviet style of collective decay.
The homes were built when my parents were children and they became an unexpected hit. They can never be torn down, and to improve them substantially, they would really have to be torn down first. As a consequence, they will always walk a sort of balance beam, never quite slum-like, but also distinctly low-end. (Jealous?)
My community also has a few peculiarities.
I can only speak for my own space, but hopefully the particular oddities of my home will be something like a representative model for the whole.
Where to begin?
Well, for a start, our occupancy is limited to six, but only insofar as that number applies strictly to human beings, because we also boast a hilarious and always-changing variety of non-human creatures. Creatures with four legs. Ten legs. Long legs. Hairy legs! Some have wings. Some are friendlier than others. Some are visibly diseased! It is a living world, and we humans are but a minuscule portion of its inhabitants. Every day in my community is a new lesson in the Jesuit ethic of interspecies coexistence, and for that I’m very grateful.
We’ve got hot water! As hot as you want it. Just make sure you shut the door very quickly if you steam up the bathroom because if you don’t, an imperceptible layer of condensation will form on the smoke detector, and that means trouble. This is my favorite feature because it prevents complacency. I’m on edge. I’m always on edge.
So, just keep the door shut.
Speaking of doors — this one doesn’t lock! It’s the main door — not quite the front door, but definitely the most popular one. Sometimes people enter who don’t “belong” there, in one sense, in that they enter unannounced and without invitation. Some are friends, some are not. Some are inebriated friends; others are unfriendly inebriates. Sometimes this happens during the day; other times, at night. This too keeps me on my toes.
You like getting looked at? Well, you better love it if you want to live where I do. They (whoever they are) decided when erecting these things that natural light was way in. As a consequence, there are no light fixtures to speak of, so unless you want to live in total darkness you better have those blinds up, up, up! You must be comfortable with constant eye contact with total strangers when you’re washing dishes, eating, playing your tambourine, whatever. It’s sort of like being at the zoo, but you’re the exhibit. This is good practice for life, because you won’t know most of the people you see on a day-to-day basis, and you will have to look at them. I cut a more confident figure in the world, for this. Just keep your robe closed.
And if you want that natural light to really work as a design concept, you better have some big fucking windows. I’m talking like, deluxe, where-did-they-get-the-glass-for-this-style views on the world.
And I lied earlier, I don’t have a grill.
Public Affairs Director Jack Dunn said that the fence is, “not trying to restrict students, on the contrary, it is trying to keep them safer. It will not be like a prison. It is beautiful and decorative and will answer a lot of concerns students in the Mods have had for years.” …In senior exit interviews, Dunn said, students who had lived in the Mods claimed that they lacked “privacy, safety and security…” “This is the equivalent to the Berlin Wall in Germany. What better way to separate the classes?” said Erik Potter, A&S ’01. — “Mod Fence Angers Seniors,” The Heights, 2000.
“Football Tailgating Policy 2002,” which each resident of the Mods was to sign upon check-in, states clearly that “all open containers of alcohol must remain inside of Modular Apartment backyards. No open containers of alcohol are allowed in the walkways of the Modular Apartments area.” — The Heights, 2002
“Elysium”
Resident Assistant and second year graduate student in the School of Social Work Kevin O’Brien describes the Modulars as “a village of red cottages at the heart of campus.” There’s little to object to in that statement. Factually, it is beyond reproach.
But it’s a rehearsed line. He knows it. He tells me as much outright.
Tonally, it glosses the fact that beyond location, “the Mods” are simply not a very nice place to live. They emit odd odors. They shake. They’re filled with lottery-lucky college seniors who think they are God’s gift to campus because they were selected as one of the 225-ish to live in what The New England Classic described in a 2016 article as a “cramped shithole” (given the rodent superabundance, the connotation here is a literal one).
It’s satirical, but what is satire if it doesn’t allude to the truth?
The Mods are cramped. Each lives six, with two beds to a room but only one desk, which even that it can barely fit. Like a holdover from some previous society where nutrition standards were much lower, the showers provide bathing space for what the average adult man must have been like at some point in the past. The temperature control is a disaster — the building is either a fridge or a furnace. It’s a testament to the on-the-spot heroism of campus utilities that we were not frozen in our beds one winter night where the heating cut out completely (though, indeed, if it came to it, it would be no large matter to simply slide into bed with one’s roommate for life-saving warmth, given the fact of the beds practically touching already). One imagines that it’s not unlike living in a submarine, or in a small ship at sea where, despite the shared adventure of being jammed into a matchbox with five other adults, it can become a deeply personal experience. Some incidents, lasting only seconds, pass before there is time for everyone to contemplate it, while others happen so slowly and gradually that they are only perceptible to the person who has chosen (perhaps out of madness) to confine themselves therein for many hours at a time.
Any substantial rainfall makes a number of outdoor paths impassable, so as on a ship at sea, a nice pair of boots are advisable.
They were built in 1970, the same year that the school graciously deigned to begin educating women.
So — in light of the above — one wonders, why would anyone on earth actually want to live there?
Well, Kevin, a Mod resident himself, hit the nail on the head: the Mods are at the center of campus. For a college student, that might as well be the center of the universe.
They are where the drinking, the parties, and the tailgates happen. They are a BC institution. They have been “permanently temporary since 1971.”
A slogan, but it’s commonly repeated to the point of being enshrined as conventional wisdom. One only needs to consider the recent developments on campus.
One professor put it to me that there seemed to be a conspiracy from within the highest levels of the Boston College enclave to completely homogenize campus through a series of dubious “improvements.”
After all, what else is there to do for a university with barrels of cash and a stagnant national profile?
The answer: spend money.
The storied Rathskeller Dining Hall, or “the Rat” (scene of many a drunken night, when beer was served to students and professors alike in some time out of mind) was disfigured in 2017 by a covert summer “remodeling.” The old polished wood pillars, dark tile floors and dingy-but-charming chandeliers were disposed of to make way for an exciting new scheme in Hospital Waiting Room. The Heights published that fall an Op-Ed that embodied the sentiments of many on campus, titled “A Eulogy for the Old Rat.”
The author, Josh Behrens, writes, “We are in the midst of a frantic race to the top of the university charts, a race whose winner is determined in part by the number of flashy amenities you can brag about on a college tour. The destruction of the old Rat is simply another symptom of BC’s disease: the pursuit of prestige above all else.”
Consider the violence done to the Old Rat, totally without the input of students. Consider the new Margot Connell Recreation Complex, probably the largest and most expensive building ever constructed on a college campus that is still possible to completely overlook from being utterly nondescript (but, it should be noted, yet remains as fine a place as any to sculpt a seriously extraordinary body). Consider Stokes South — an impressive building to be sure and a bit bolder in taste, but as one professor told me privately, so devoted to uniformity of style that he had to smuggle a chair in from his old office.
“Personal effects,” he told me in a hushed tone, “were highly discouraged.”
The Mods are many things (squat, ugly, wet) but they are not prestigious.
In this respect, they provide an experience that is highly desirable — and highly watchable.
Every football Saturday, more anthropologically-minded tailgaters can watch from their windows (or while seated comfortably on impeccable lawns) as underage students of every genus try to vault one another over the medieval spikes surrounding the village, not unlike barbarians assailing the motte-and-bailey castles of old. Trash cans, benches, stair cars, whatever — they’re all removed the night before, under cover of darkness, to discourage recreational leaping. About eight or ten feet tall each and painted jet-black, these “beautiful and decorative” fences marry sleek aesthetics to ruthless deterrence. A friend of a friend, climbing out from inside the fencing, slipped and stabbed himself in the face. He visited an area Emergency Room later that night, walking away with nothing but a minor lip laceration and a sore jaw. There was no damage to the teeth, about which he and his doctor were both apparently “pretty stoked.”
Given that he was already inside and of legal drinking age, he could have left through either of the two open gates. I include his story only to illustrate the risk that each eighteen, nineteen, and twenty year-old takes when they jump the palisade. Even if you manage to evade grievous bodily harm, you will probably be grabbed by one of the dozen or so security guards employed by BC to apprehend such people, upon which you will be physically subdued, humiliated, and handed off to BCPD. They will then ensure word gets to Student Housing, who will revoke your future Mod privileges. This is all on top of possible impalement.
But what if you make it?
What if you’re not stabbed, or the guard turns a blind eye?
Then, it might be worth it — if you make it. If you don’t, that’s fine also.
Ritual sacrifice is, too, a part of Mod life.
The plans also call for the replacement of the Modular Apartments with residences that make better use of the land. “We are a land-poor institution,” said Duffy… the Modular Apartments, constructed in 1970 as prefabricated temporary housing, occupy 5.8 acres of land, yet house only 500 students…the Commonwealth Avenue facilities would be built first, with a possible groundbreaking date sometime in 1986. — The Heights, 1984
Concerning the annual “Meet the Jesuits” social, Hanrahan said it has been discontinued due to the poor handling last year. “We [the Jesuits] refuse to attend drinking matches.”
— “UGBC Works to Effect 1985–86 Alcohol Policy,” The Heights, 1985
“A Nationally Ranked University”
There’s another commonly repeated line about the Mods, specifically that Central Committee marked them for destruction long ago, but has been thwarted at each attempt by angry alums threatening to pull their usual shipping container-sized infusions of tax-free cash.
“That,” said 2019–20 Modulars-Stayer Residential Director Tyler Dillon, “is definitely part of it.”
My roommates and I are sitting in his office, reviewing campus policy. We’re trying to host a party, a requisite part of which involves a fair degree of both legalese and mathematics.
So what’s the other part? Why do college bureaucrats bother keeping the Mods around?
“BC just built 2150, which I imagine they’ll be paying off for a while. The Mods operate at a huge profit because they’re already paid off.”
If each bed at Boston College is worth approx. $9,000 to the student sleeping in it, and the Mods sleep about 230 students, then the university is clearing something like $2,000,000 a year with those little red buildings — before taxes, utilities, and repairs. A massive project like 2150 is operating on millions of dollars of debt, because even if BC could pay for it in cash (be assured: it could), it simply wouldn’t make financial sense. Taking out loans — kicking the can further down the road — is always much cheaper.
But we’re not in Tyler Dillon’s office for an accounting lesson.
Well, actually, we are — in one sense — but mostly we’re there to register a party. If you haven’t already registered a party for the semester (we haven’t) all six of you have to meet with Tyler in his Stayer office, for what can only be described as a knitting party. With yarn generously provided by a coterie of unseen lawyers, you, your roommates and Tyler will be knitting a blanket large enough to cover everyone’s asses — your ass, your friends’ asses, Tyler’s ass, Leahy’s ass, the University’s ass, the State of Massachusetts’s ass. The Mods are a liability. They’re the only housing area where the in loco parentis-factor is reduced to nearly zero, as someone slightly older and maybe slightly more responsible doesn’t live just down the hall, ready to bang on the door to tell you to turn the damn music down.
But these rules, they’re not here to prevent catastrophe. The regulations aren’t some bulwark standing in the way of a thousand-strong, Old Testament (read: 1980’s) blowout. “Sometimes,” Dillon wists, “I feel like they could govern themselves. These measures are in place to check the worst impulses, the few real misbehavers.” A large motivator behind such precautions, it must be said, falls to liability. One drunk individual can incur massive damages. Several with, say, sledgehammers might constitute a small army.
There aren’t enough Jesuits in St. Mary’s to lap up all that spilled milk.
So there you have it: the Mods are beloved, and historic, and cheap, and won’t be torn down. The sumptuous Mod tortoise, prized for the social status which its red beauty confers, was hunted to near-extinction by the Boston College Department of Wildlife seeking to stem the tide of overzealous would-be hunters, saw its population level off through heightened regulations, and now enjoys — in select numbers — its status as a protected campus species.
For all the nostalgia, all the drunken war stories (“My band of brothers and me — we went to war on those kegs.”) — the Game Day D-Days — the fiscal reason strikes me as the most probable for the Mods’ continued existence. The Mods are here because they’re cheap as dirt to maintain, and there appear to be thousands upon thousands of people who are willing to chain themselves to the flaking red wood — standing down the ‘dozer — if it means protecting the clapboard shack where they got drunk with their friends forty pounds ago (meaning 240 collective pounds between the six).
— hallowed by usage, consecrated by time, and stained by liquor (and floodwater).
“They won’t cease to exist for a long time,” Tyler reassures me as I walk out of the meeting, my head swimming with facts and figures and the minutiae of proper party-hosting. And boy, are there minutiae. A folder was thrust into my hands containing the signs we were required to post about the party.
IT’S NOT A PARTY WITHOUT FOOD. LOW RISK DRINKING STRATEGIES. TAKE A BREAK — HYDRATE.
NO ALCOHOL BEYOND THIS POINT.
I’d forgotten to ask about the grill.
[“Sopranos” Actor Matthew] Del Negro [BC ’94] navigated the city while still reminiscing about his senior year in the Mods. Laughing, he recalled a group of friends who blocked two neighboring Mods and then proceeded to knock down the connecting wall with a sledgehammer.
“It was like its own little makeshift doorway from one to the other,” he said. “So instead of it being a six-man, it was like a 12-man. I think they hung like a towel or something between the two.” — The Heights, 2019
[The Mods] have come to epitomize what it means to “party” at BC… In one night, according to BCPD, eleven kegs were confiscated after complaints were filed by Resident Assistants. No fights or arrests are on record, simply several unhappy seniors. The police engaged in a methodical sweep of suspect houses, forcing guests to dispose of illegal substances before vacating the area. The significance of this night lies not in the fact that the police were actually following procedure, but that after months of seemingly lenient enforcement of regulations, the Mods now appear to be a target for BCPD. Is the lifestyle enjoyed by most Modular inhabitants threatened by this tightening of the reins? — “BCPD Raids the Mods,” 1993
If mod residents want to host a party, they must first be at least 50% seniors (three of six). We are. Check.
Next, we must be 50% 21 years of age or older. Check. Then there’s the matter of having been 75% (five out of six) in attendance at the building meeting (or at a later makeup meeting), having been the first to submit a request at 9 AM on Monday morning (requests are fulfilled on a first-come, first-serve basis — submit early at your own peril, because requests arriving before 9 AM are discarded) and having previously designated a sober contact (not even a single beer) for the night of the party. Check (x3?). Oh, and also, for every “unit” of alcohol, one MUST have one unit of non-alcoholic beverage AND one unit of food.
“Okay, so, if you have seven units of liquor, beer, and wine, then you also need to have seven units of non-alcoholic beverages… and seven units of food?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah.”
“We have 4.6 units of alcohol, total.”
“So if we have a case of seltzers, twelve 12 oz. each, then that’s two liters, right?”
“Well, you would need two cases. That would be four liters.”
“How many units does that count for?”
“…”
“One.”
“No — two, I think. Then we get two 20 oz. cases of hummus, and two bags of pretzels, then that’s two food units.”
“Then we get the two large pizzas, a box of Chips Ahoy, and a box of mini cupcakes, and… boom. 4.6 food units on the dot.”
Congratulations. You’re now ready to host a party.
Have fun. Let loose a little. You work hard at your classes so the stuff like this tastes all the sweeter.
One more piece of advice: don’t expect anything that isn’t bolted to the floor to remain the morning after.
To whomever has my Leaves of Grass broadside, I hope stealing it gave as much pleasure to you as drawing it — with every ounce of my soul — gave to me.
This letter, which was as insulting as it was pompous, warned me of the dire consequences that would befall the residents of my modular should we fail to relinquish our cat Aesop. Not only would our parents be notified of our gross misdeeds, but Fr. Hanrahan would declare us anathema, at least as far as BC Housing is concerned. … I’m no longer amused by your escapades, and I no longer have the energy to fight back. For the moment I’d simply like to leave you alone. In return, why don’t you leave me alone too? Sincerely yours, Kevin J. Hull Modular 38A — The Heights, 1972
The entire campus security problem vaulted to the forefront when about 60 of those militant women demanding such things as equality occupied two administration offices in March, 1971. Their action helped to bring the pitiful condition of university security services before the attention of people like [University President] Seavey Joyce…Political Science Professor Robert Faulkner had bought a new bicycle to replace the one that was stolen earlier in the year… In July, 1971, a woman was raped in the modular area after she had left a party…When she regained consciousness, she accused the security guard patrolling in the area at the time of violating her. A week later the guard left his job of his own volition. No charges were brought against him. One year earlier, the now famous “mud puddle incident” occurred, as it is called now. An extremely inebriated guard drove his automobile into a huge puddle on the lower campus, where it died. The next morning, an amazing sight greeted students. A car with a sleeping guard at the wheel sat in the middle of a large mud puddle. — The Heights, 1972
A man got engaged in my yard on Saturday, during the tailgate. He’d been texting one of my roommates for weeks, painstakingly laboring over the logistics. The photographer, the ring, flying the friends in from all over. The man had lived in our mod six years ago, and it was the only place he could think of to propose to his girlfriend of… six years. Apparently, they met here. “Here,” as in like, right over there, by the staircase. Four hundred people erupted in cheers when she said the word. She was crying. He was wearing a maroon suede tuxedo. There was a baby in the kitchen.
I seriously don’t know what to make of that — any of it.
About an hour later, while I was in the stadium (likely savoring another Boston College victory), one of my roommates was racing to catch a football when he tripped and cartwheeled backwards into the fence, hitting his head with what I can only imagine was a triumphal bong! He was horribly concussed, and horribly drunk, and he tried to go to sleep. A friend of ours (she didn’t have our numbers) slapped him awake for an hour and took him to the dining hall. He ate and passed out in his room. Hours later, we took him to the ER. Well, several of our girl friends did.
We stayed home and sat around wondering what the hell had gone wrong.
Our first thought was: well, the fence claims another victim. Then we took our caps off and observed a short moment of silence. Then we went to bed. We got a text about the CT scan around 1 AM. Thumbs down on internal bleeding. Thumbs up on mild concussion. Positive outcome, all-told. And yet, I racked myself.
It hadn’t really been my fault, so whose fault was it? I mean, we followed the rules to the letter. We’d had the requisite food units. If not for some shifty Brit with a European throwing motion we’d have been in the clear. As it was, there would be no disciplinary action. No one knew. Besides, who would there be to discipline, and for what?
Fifty years of this. Fifty years of…
I don’t think the world needs another fifty.
But as I write these lines, my eyes leave the screen and move across the room to where merely one of the probable thousand crane flies that reside in the space between the ceiling and the second floor bumps itself against a Budweiser poster, spastically flailing the impossibly long legs which protrude from its pea-like body, and I wonder to myself: who would trade this for anything?
— December, 2019
