THE STATELY OLD CHEMISTRY BUILDING
Image licensed through Adobe Stock. Edited.
An 1898 photograph from McClellan Hall’s earliest days shows maples, forsythias, and a grove of apple trees flourishing on the quadrangle’s lush natural carpet. From behind the greenery four stories of brick emerge with a rose window in a towered peak. In the foreground, a small animal’s motion blurs—probably Jinx, the cat of the kindly chemistry professor Walter McClellan for whom the building is named. Jinx is unable to be caught on camera, even with photography’s recent shift only a decade earlier to a chemical compound that shortened exposure time. That said, whether it was the bonding of silver with a halogen in photography or the extraction of chemical elements newly discovered for the production of medical and household goods, science was in bloom as the 19th century rolled into the next. Everything was picture-perfect at McClellan Hall, a building poised to bring the future of chemistry and education to its state and country.
The university, though, faded with the passing years in picture and in fact. Quietly, the state offered less each year, and each year the university offered less to those in its classrooms and hallways. A provost embezzled millions, and an untold amount was paid to keep something from leaking into awareness. Along the way, unseen, powerful hands grabbed what they could and another century rolled by.
Recently, carcasses of rodents have begun to appear. The Dean says that the corpses are gifts from a generous cat. It is a line she uses now with donors: “Even the cats want to help with our university of the future.”
The problem, though, began in the past. 1898, the year of the McClellan photo, was also the year that Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in their Paris lab, and Henrick Beck, stately like his professional abode, brought a new age and this new element to the university. He wore his rounded collar tightly fastened, but his sleeves rolled up swiftly in his laboratory-cum-industrial-refinery where he worked with graduate students, who sifted through drums of ore.
They overlooked the dangers of the radium they handled. They overlooked it because across America, its light emanated off the dials of watches and the sights of guns. In their labs, radium was a joy to behold as its glow brightened McClellan Hall’s windowless basement. It was claimed to cure sickness—and perhaps old age—but even in the first quarter of the 20th century, scientists understood the irony of that last statement, because only one thing “cures” age.
“Radium’s my game,” Beck told whomever would listen as he ordered tons of radium sludge and dust from foundries to be shipped to his lab in the heart of America. He ignored concerns about seepage through the building’s air shafts that spanned from basement to attic—a totalizing horror movie of spaces. He focused instead on his scientific legacy. Then he thought about his growing consultancy fees.
In a 1919 letter to the university’s president, Beck boasted, “I am birthing miracles from waste.” At first, he tested radium for use in medical treatments, even drinking some of the compound himself, but eventually he shifted to commodity goods like glow-in-the-dark treatments on light switches. Together, the university president and the professor’s private sector goals flourished, barely hidden in a place intended for the public good.
Beck is long gone. His demise happened early—kidney failure, they say. Out went the scientists of McClellan Hall, and, as the second World War arrived, in came the Archaeology Department and Museum.
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By the latter half of the 20th century, the toxicity of the building was known, but only in that passive way where the knowers remain unnamed. Selected rooms were eventually locked, areas restricted, but then the curator Alice noticed blood on her gums and the receptionist couldn’t get pregnant year after year. The museum staff had a clutter of illnesses—tumors. When Alice lost her first tooth, they placed her on leave. Shortly thereafter, the building was shuttered, and there have since been no further reports on Alice’s other teeth.
No one talked about whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s discovery of McClellan Hall’s secret was the real motivation behind decommissioning the building, and no one knows how the NRC was tipped off.
All the university said was, Everything’s under control. Your safety is our utmost concern.
But as the 21st century advanced, no one returned to McClellan Hall. Instead, they brought in contractors and radium detectors and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to determine that the most “efficient” plan was to demolish the historical building. If McClellan Hall was turned to rubble, and if the remaining soil could be remediated, no one could question what happened there. Perhaps no one would notice the ever-receding future of this Research 1 institution.
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No one walks the quad anymore. The sidewalks were removed with McClellan Hall’s demolition. The rubble has been carted away. There is a silence around the place once so prolific with talk of learning and possibilities.
The quad’s historical trees have been axed because of “a withering from the inside out,” as the arborists said. The distinguished canopy of branches was quickly felled, and the grass grows straw-like now, even during the rainiest seasons. Eventually, the lawn was replaced with sand and crushed gravel.
Even now, though, the newly planted dogwoods refuse to flower, and one day near the end of spring break, an opossum is found belly up in the dirt where McClellan Hall’s grand front doors once stood, beckoning to students.
But most noticeable is the prominence of the feral cats, who scamper with otherworldly energy and mate where they please, even though the soft grass is now merely pebbled. Their vigor feels almost greedy amidst all that has been lost, seeming to speak of something new that might arise on these hallowed grounds of education. But what it is, no one yet knows.
Abby Manzella is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements, winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. She has published with places such as Pleiades, Superstition Review, and Threepenny Review.