ack in 1945, Georgia State — then called the Atlanta Extension Center of the University System of Georgia — was growing at a quick clip, and its lone classroom building on Luckie Street was struggling to keep up. While the college desperately needed more space, material shortages following World War II made new construction impossible.
Over on Ivy Street (now Peachtree Center Avenue), a six-story parking garage caught the eye of George Sparks, the school’s director and future president. Sparks had big plans for the building’s 180,000 square feet of reinforced concrete and thought its rampways would make life easier on veterans with disabilities returning to school on the GI bill.
It was called the Bolling Jones Building, named after the Atlanta Stove Works president who built it. Over the years, it housed not only the Ivy Street Garage parking company but also several offices and street-level businesses, including restaurants, tire shops and a women’s hat store. Built in 1925, the city’s first multistory garage featured staggered floors and two sets of shorter ramps — great for storing and moving cars but something else entirely for getting students to class.
“It was one of the first examples of the modern garage erected in American cities in the mid-1920s,” says Tim Crimmins, professor of history and director of the Center for Neighborhood & Metropolitan Studies. “It was part of the larger transformation of downtowns caused by the rise of skyscrapers and automobile ownership and the need for municipalities to control parking on the street.”
After acquiring Bolling Jones for $300,000, Sparks transformed it into classroom and office space within a year using war surplus materials he obtained from places like the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta, Ga., and nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The college’s new home became Georgia State’s first permanent building and held its first classes in 1946. Enrollment soon exploded, and campus had to expand. When many departments and classrooms moved to Sparks Hall after its construction in 1955, the sciences stayed behind in Bolling Jones. In honor of the school’s first dean, it was renamed the Wayne Kell Science Hall in 1964.
For years, the college only occupied the first two floors of the building and rented out the other four — as well as the street-level storefronts — to defray the school’s operating costs. While students trundled up the ramps to class, the rest of the building was bustling with business and activity. Tenants included the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Southern Bell, the Board of Regents, the Veterans Administration, a cotton broker and a package delivery service called the Railway Express Agency. Always looking for ways to bring in money and keep the school in the black, Sparks even installed a sawmill on the fourth floor when lumber was in high demand.
“Everything was in there,” says university archivist Laurel Bowen. “Rents from the building were a very lucrative source of money for operating the school. But as the student population kept exploding, we kept moving people out as we needed space.”
As the school took over the remaining floors, it installed bowling alleys, a recital hall for plays and concerts, and a student-run barber shop. Sparks even wanted to build a rooftop student recreation center, a “Campus in the Sky” featuring a dance floor, a mock beach for swimming and sunbathing, and courts for tennis and badminton. Engineers weren’t so sure, though, so the plans never went anywhere.
Amid Kell’s endless reconfigurations, remodels and facelifts, one thing has stayed put from the beginning: the eatery on the first floor known as the Refectory. The word simply means “dining hall,” and Sparks personally chose it because he liked the way it sounded.
The Refectory quickly became part of the school’s identity, a central gathering space for everything from quick snacks to course registration. For years, students crammed into the small basement café to choose their classes from a ring of towering blackboards that reached up to the ceiling and lined the interior of the room. Each one bore the latest information for every section of every class — line by line, column by column — amid an incessant stream of runners darting in and out and up ladders to update the number of available seats.
In some ways, Kell Hall has come a long way since then. The birthplace of science at Georgia State, it housed a biosafety level-4 lab and rooms full of bubbling chemical reactions, subatomic machinery, cadavers and lab animals — from crustaceans and rodents to birds and primates. It became an icon of Georgia State’s achievements and enterprising spirit — a place where the breakthroughs of scientists and students were only matched by their stories.
But what a pain, though, right?
ack in 1945, Georgia State — then called the Atlanta Extension Center of the University System of Georgia — was growing at a quick clip, and its lone classroom building on Luckie Street was struggling to keep up. While the college desperately needed more space, material shortages following World War II made new construction impossible.
Over on Ivy Street (now Peachtree Center Avenue), a six-story parking garage caught the eye of George Sparks, the school’s director and future president. Sparks had big plans for the building’s 180,000 square feet of reinforced concrete and thought its rampways would make life easier on veterans with disabilities returning to school on the GI bill.
It was called the Bolling Jones Building, named after the Atlanta Stove Works president who built it. Over the years, it housed not only the Ivy Street Garage parking company but also several offices and street-level businesses, including restaurants, tire shops and a women’s hat store. Built in 1925, the city’s first multistory garage featured staggered floors and two sets of shorter ramps — great for storing and moving cars but something else entirely for getting students to class.
“It was one of the first examples of the modern garage erected in American cities in the mid-1920s,” says Tim Crimmins, professor of history and director of the Center for Neighborhood & Metropolitan Studies. “It was part of the larger transformation of downtowns caused by the rise of skyscrapers and automobile ownership and the need for municipalities to control parking on the street.”
After acquiring Bolling Jones for $300,000, Sparks transformed it into classroom and office space within a year using war surplus materials he obtained from places like the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta, Ga., and nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The college’s new home became Georgia State’s first permanent building and held its first classes in 1946. Enrollment soon exploded, and campus had to expand. When many departments and classrooms moved to Sparks Hall after its construction in 1955, the sciences stayed behind in Bolling Jones. In honor of the school’s first dean, it was renamed the Wayne Kell Science Hall in 1964.
For years, the college only occupied the first two floors of the building and rented out the other four — as well as the street-level storefronts — to defray the school’s operating costs. While students trundled up the ramps to class, the rest of the building was bustling with business and activity. Tenants included the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Southern Bell, the Board of Regents, the Veterans Administration, a cotton broker and a package delivery service called the Railway Express Agency. Always looking for ways to bring in money and keep the school in the black, Sparks even installed a sawmill on the fourth floor when lumber was in high demand.
“Everything was in there,” says university archivist Laurel Bowen. “Rents from the building were a very lucrative source of money for operating the school. But as the student population kept exploding, we kept moving people out as we needed space.”
As the school took over the remaining floors, it installed bowling alleys, a recital hall for plays and concerts, and a student-run barber shop. Sparks even wanted to build a rooftop student recreation center, a “Campus in the Sky” featuring a dance floor, a mock beach for swimming and sunbathing, and courts for tennis and badminton. Engineers weren’t so sure, though, so the plans never went anywhere.
Amid Kell’s endless reconfigurations, remodels and facelifts, one thing has stayed put from the beginning: the eatery on the first floor known as the Refectory. The word simply means “dining hall,” and Sparks personally chose it because he liked the way it sounded.
The Refectory quickly became part of the school’s identity, a central gathering space for everything from quick snacks to course registration. For years, students crammed into the small basement café to choose their classes from a ring of towering blackboards that reached up to the ceiling and lined the interior of the room. Each one bore the latest information for every section of every class — line by line, column by column — amid an incessant stream of runners darting in and out and up ladders to update the number of available seats.
In some ways, Kell Hall has come a long way since then. The birthplace of science at Georgia State, it housed a biosafety level-4 lab and rooms full of bubbling chemical reactions, subatomic machinery, cadavers and lab animals — from crustaceans and rodents to birds and primates. It became an icon of Georgia State’s achievements and enterprising spirit — a place where the breakthroughs of scientists and students were only matched by their stories.
But what a pain, though, right?
AS TOLD BY
H. ELLIOTT ALBERS, Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience
WILLIAM ANDERSON (B.A., B.S. ’17)
LAUREL BOWEN, University Archivist
DAVID BOYKIN, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry
TIM CRIMMINS, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Neighborhood & Metropolitan Studies
W. CRAWFORD ELLIOTT, Associate Professor of Geosciences
JEFFREY GLOVER, Associate Professor of Anthropology
BARBARA JOHNSTON (B.A. ’69, M.Ed. ’71, S.Ed. ’74, Ph.D. ’87)
EMMA MASON (B.A. ’13, M.A. ’16)
SAM MASSELL (B.C.S. ’51), Mayor of Atlanta (1970–74)
CARL PATTON, University President (1992–2008)
SPENCER ROBERTS, Digital Librarian
CLIFF STEAGALL (B.S. ’87)
AMANDA WALK (B.A. ’12, M.P.P. ’14)
I have fond memories of that old garage. I was there during the days that bomb shelters were in vogue, and Kell Hall was like a concrete fortress academic experiment.
SAM MASSELL,
FORMER MAYOR OF ATLANTA
The Long Goodbye
PATTON: From the day I arrived on campus, I thought Kell Hall was antiquated and really should be torn down.
ROBERTS: Georgia State has been talking about destroying Kell Hall for 50 years, almost as long as it’s owned it.
BOYKIN: When I interviewed here for a position in chemistry in 1965, the provost told me I could expect to move out of Kell Hall in three years. Approximately every 10 years thereafter, there was the story: “Oh, we’re going to be moving out of Kell Hall into here or there.” Come 2018, we finally moved out of Kell Hall.
PATTON: The idea was we’d build the Petit Science Center, and there’d be enough space for everyone to move out of Kell Hall so we could get rid of it. But our research was ramping up so quickly that, once we opened up Petit, it was immediately full. There was no space. So, we had to keep Kell Hall.
ALBERS: We didn’t have the infrastructure we really needed. It was always doing what we could with what we had. We were scrappy, though, and we were able to get things done.
ELLIOTT: We persevered considerably. It was inefficient and unattractive to say the least, but there was incredible gut-level commitment and can-do. A lot of good science got done in fairly primitive conditions. We were pretty productive in spite of Kell Hall. It’s a measure of how dedicated faculty and students were that we walked into Kell Hall every day and did our work. We put up with all this.
Hell Hall
MASSELL: I have fond memories of that old garage. I was there during the days that bomb shelters were in vogue, and Kell Hall was like a concrete fortress academic experiment.
STEAGALL: It reminded me of Gotham City. Discolored, rusted metal. So much concrete. Antiquated equipment. Big steel pipes and exhaust fans. Structures coming out of the roof and windows. Dark. You’d always hear dripping sounds. The rampways were a crazy burnt red-orange color that added to the whole morbid ambiance of the place.
WALK: I think that was the strangest thing about Kell. It felt lawless and semi-paranormal at times.
PATTON: Everybody who had a nonromantic view of the building hated the place.
BOYKIN: Kell Hall is not ideal laboratory space. The round posts, the low ceilings, the plumbing — it was a gigantic patchwork.
PATTON: The truth is it was a horrible building that was converted badly and remained horrible. Converting a parking garage into a classroom building — that’s a long stretch. Some things would just hit you right in the face, like columns blocking your view of someone trying to give a lecture.
ELLIOTT: You had these big concrete pillars all over the place, which covered the reinforced steel girders. You couldn’t go 25 feet without running into one of those girders, and so you had to squeeze classrooms and offices around and between them.
CRIMMINS: When the schedule of classes came out, the thing you feared most as a faculty member was discovering that you were going to be teaching in Kell Hall. And so, we had to figure out a way to avoid that. What I remember doing is always requesting audiovisual support because there was no such thing as audiovisual support in Kell Hall.
ELLIOTT: Another faculty member was lecturing in high heels and punched a hole right through the linoleum with her heel. There used to be a pipe that went right there, and they didn’t plug it up right. They just put linoleum right over it.
PATTON: It’s not a good sell if you’re trying to recruit a leading scientist to your university, and you take him or her to Kell Hall and say, “Hey, this is where you’re going to live.”
GLOVER: From a functioning standpoint, really everything was just so difficult.
ELLIOTT: The most convenient thing about Kell Hall was the Post Office.
ALBERS: The infrastructure was always a problem. HVAC and plumbing and electrical — there was no grand diagram of all that. So, every time you did something, you didn’t know what was going to happen — if it was going to work or break or cause another problem somewhere else in the building.
BOYKIN: It was a haphazard array. We would have an electrical problem, and they wouldn’t even know where the breaker boxes were.
ELLIOTT: If somebody used the kerosene saw in 320, the smell would stay in the air for maybe a day or so.
BOYKIN: We had a lot of experiments that ran overnight and were cooled by circulating water. At night, the pressure would build up and pop the rubber hose. I can tell you I had many visits to Kell Hall at midnight or 2 a.m. when the plant people would call me and say, “You’ve got a flood in your lab!”
ELLIOTT: I think every room got flooded at some point. The pipes got jammed up all the time, and the water would have to go somewhere else — escape through another pipe, come up a drain, overflow a sink. During or after rainstorms, water would come up through my sink, and I was on the third floor.
ALBERS: The person who ran the crawfish lab needed to clean the aquaria every so often. The water in there got really nasty. He had a floor drain, so he poured it all down the drain. It turned out the drain just dumped out above the ceiling tiles of the floor below and flooded the developmental psychology lab with the nastiest water you could ever imagine.
I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
JEFFREY GLOVER,
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Rampways
CRIMMINS: If you look at a lot of the parking garages we build today, they’re designed the same way. They come up a half-story at a time so the ramps aren’t that steep.
BOYKIN: Part of my lab still had the parking space paint marks on the floor.
PATTON: You know, you think the ramps were cute. But they sure weren’t handicapped accessible. And there was one elevator in the building, one tiny elevator.
STEAGALL: It was like a little box — a rickety, old, creaky box. It was the kind with the buttons that clicked and were hard to push. They were made of plastic, and the numbers were worn off. I would usually take the ramps because everybody crammed in there like sardines.
ROBERTS: They did bring cadavers in on the elevator, but because they wouldn’t fit lying down, they had to stand them up on their feet.
There was no ramp to the seventh floor, so they had to get a crane to lift the cadaver caskets from the ground to the roof of the building.
SPENCER ROBERTS,
DIGITAL LIBRARIAN
PATTON: It’s not the proper way to deal with a cadaver.
ROBERTS: There was no ramp to the seventh floor, so they had to get a crane to lift the cadaver caskets from the ground to the roof of the building.
ALBERS: When we were renovating, they would have to put all the big stuff on carts and push it up the ramps. Well, one time they got up to the top of the ramp, and it got to be too heavy. The cart got loose, went down the ramp and went right through a wall.
GLOVER: I always wanted to skateboard down the whole thing.
WALK: I liked to pilfer those ancient chairs from whatever neglected room or lab happened to be unlocked and ride them down the ramps.
GLOVER: The best room was Kell 333. The ceilings were low, and it was on the ramp — one of those weird room configurations tucked along the ramps.
MASON: The dimensions were so weird. After opening the door, you immediately had to take three steps up to a false floor, like a half floor. We called it the “Wonka Room.”
AS TOLD BY
H. ELLIOTT ALBERS, Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience
WILLIAM ANDERSON (B.A., B.S. ’17)
LAUREL BOWEN, University Archivist
DAVID BOYKIN, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry
TIM CRIMMINS, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Neighborhood & Metropolitan Studies
W. CRAWFORD ELLIOTT, Associate Professor of Geosciences
JEFFREY GLOVER, Associate Professor of Anthropology
BARBARA JOHNSTON (B.A. ’69, M.Ed. ’71, S.Ed. ’74, Ph.D. ’87)
EMMA MASON (B.A. ’13, M.A. ’16)
SAM MASSELL (B.C.S. ’51), Mayor of Atlanta (1970–74)
CARL PATTON, University President (1992–2008)
SPENCER ROBERTS, Digital Librarian
CLIFF STEAGALL (B.S. ’87)
AMANDA WALK (B.A. ’12, M.P.P. ’14)
The Long Goodbye
PATTON: From the day I arrived on campus, I thought Kell Hall was antiquated and really should be torn down.
ROBERTS: Georgia State has been talking about destroying Kell Hall for 50 years, almost as long as it’s owned it.
BOYKIN: When I interviewed here for a position in chemistry in 1965, the provost told me I could expect to move out of Kell Hall in three years. Approximately every 10 years thereafter, there was the story: “Oh, we’re going to be moving out of Kell Hall into here or there.” Come 2018, we finally moved out of Kell Hall.
PATTON: The idea was we’d build the Petit Science Center, and there’d be enough space for everyone to move out of Kell Hall so we could get rid of it. But our research was ramping up so quickly that, once we opened up Petit, it was immediately full. There was no space. So, we had to keep Kell Hall.
ALBERS: We didn’t have the infrastructure we really needed. It was always doing what we could with what we had. We were scrappy, though, and we were able to get things done.
ELLIOTT: We persevered considerably. It was inefficient and unattractive to say the least, but there was incredible gut-level commitment and can-do. A lot of good science got done in fairly primitive conditions. We were pretty productive in spite of Kell Hall. It’s a measure of how dedicated faculty and students were that we walked into Kell Hall every day and did our work. We put up with all this.
I have fond memories of that old garage. I was there during the days that bomb shelters were in vogue, and Kell Hall was like a concrete fortress academic experiment.
SAM MASSELL,
FORMER MAYOR OF ATLANTA
AS TOLD BY
H. ELLIOTT ALBERS, Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience
WILLIAM ANDERSON (B.A., B.S. ’17)
LAUREL BOWEN, University Archivist
DAVID BOYKIN, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry
TIM CRIMMINS, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Neighborhood & Metropolitan Studies
W. CRAWFORD ELLIOTT, Associate Professor of Geosciences
JEFFREY GLOVER, Associate Professor of Anthropology
BARBARA JOHNSTON (B.A. ’69, M.Ed. ’71, S.Ed. ’74, Ph.D. ’87)
EMMA MASON (B.A. ’13, M.A. ’16)
SAM MASSELL (B.C.S. ’51), Mayor of Atlanta (1970–74)
CARL PATTON, University President (1992–2008)
SPENCER ROBERTS, Digital Librarian
CLIFF STEAGALL (B.S. ’87)
AMANDA WALK (B.A. ’12, M.P.P. ’14)
The Long Goodbye
PATTON: From the day I arrived on campus, I thought Kell Hall was antiquated and really should be torn down.
ROBERTS: Georgia State has been talking about destroying Kell Hall for 50 years, almost as long as it’s owned it.
BOYKIN: When I interviewed here for a position in chemistry in 1965, the provost told me I could expect to move out of Kell Hall in three years. Approximately every 10 years thereafter, there was the story: “Oh, we’re going to be moving out of Kell Hall into here or there.” Come 2018, we finally moved out of Kell Hall.
PATTON: The idea was we’d build the Petit Science Center, and there’d be enough space for everyone to move out of Kell Hall so we could get rid of it. But our research was ramping up so quickly that, once we opened up Petit, it was immediately full. There was no space. So, we had to keep Kell Hall.
ALBERS: We didn’t have the infrastructure we really needed. It was always doing what we could with what we had. We were scrappy, though, and we were able to get things done.
ELLIOTT: We persevered considerably. It was inefficient and unattractive to say the least, but there was incredible gut-level commitment and can-do. A lot of good science got done in fairly primitive conditions. We were pretty productive in spite of Kell Hall. It’s a measure of how dedicated faculty and students were that we walked into Kell Hall every day and did our work. We put up with all this.
Hell Hall
MASSELL: I have fond memories of that old garage. I was there during the days that bomb shelters were in vogue, and Kell Hall was like a concrete fortress academic experiment.
STEAGALL: It reminded me of Gotham City. Discolored, rusted metal. So much concrete. Antiquated equipment. Big steel pipes and exhaust fans. Structures coming out of the roof and windows. Dark. You’d always hear dripping sounds. The rampways were a crazy burnt red-orange color that added to the whole morbid ambiance of the place.
WALK: I think that was the strangest thing about Kell. It felt lawless and semi-paranormal at times.
PATTON: Everybody who had a nonromantic view of the building hated the place.
BOYKIN: Kell Hall is not ideal laboratory space. The round posts, the low ceilings, the plumbing — it was a gigantic patchwork.
PATTON: The truth is it was a horrible building that was converted badly and remained horrible. Converting a parking garage into a classroom building — that’s a long stretch. Some things would just hit you right in the face, like columns blocking your view of someone trying to give a lecture.
ELLIOTT: You had these big concrete pillars all over the place, which covered the reinforced steel girders. You couldn’t go 25 feet without running into one of those girders, and so you had to squeeze classrooms and offices around and between them.
CRIMMINS: When the schedule of classes came out, the thing you feared most as a faculty member was discovering that you were going to be teaching in Kell Hall. And so, we had to figure out a way to avoid that. What I remember doing is always requesting audiovisual support because there was no such thing as audiovisual support in Kell Hall.
ELLIOTT: Another faculty member was lecturing in high heels and punched a hole right through the linoleum with her heel. There used to be a pipe that went right there, and they didn’t plug it up right. They just put linoleum right over it.
PATTON: It’s not a good sell if you’re trying to recruit a leading scientist to your university, and you take him or her to Kell Hall and say, “Hey, this is where you’re going to live.”
GLOVER: From a functioning standpoint, really everything was just so difficult.
ELLIOTT: The most convenient thing about Kell Hall was the Post Office.
ALBERS: The infrastructure was always a problem. HVAC and plumbing and electrical — there was no grand diagram of all that. So, every time you did something, you didn’t know what was going to happen — if it was going to work or break or cause another problem somewhere else in the building.
BOYKIN: It was a haphazard array. We would have an electrical problem, and they wouldn’t even know where the breaker boxes were.
ELLIOTT: If somebody used the kerosene saw in 320, the smell would stay in the air for maybe a day or so.
BOYKIN: We had a lot of experiments that ran overnight and were cooled by circulating water. At night, the pressure would build up and pop the rubber hose. I can tell you I had many visits to Kell Hall at midnight or 2 a.m. when the plant people would call me and say, “You’ve got a flood in your lab!”
ELLIOTT: I think every room got flooded at some point. The pipes got jammed up all the time, and the water would have to go somewhere else — escape through another pipe, come up a drain, overflow a sink. During or after rainstorms, water would come up through my sink, and I was on the third floor.
ALBERS: The person who ran the crawfish lab needed to clean the aquaria every so often. The water in there got really nasty. He had a floor drain, so he poured it all down the drain. It turned out the drain just dumped out above the ceiling tiles of the floor below and flooded the developmental psychology lab with the nastiest water you could ever imagine.
I have fond memories of that old garage. I was there during the days that bomb shelters were in vogue, and Kell Hall was like a concrete fortress academic experiment.
SAM MASSELL,
FORMER MAYOR OF ATLANTA
I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
JEFFREY GLOVER,
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Rampways
CRIMMINS: If you look at a lot of the parking garages we build today, they’re designed the same way. They come up a half-story at a time so the ramps aren’t that steep.
BOYKIN: Part of my lab still had the parking space paint marks on the floor.
PATTON: You know, you think the ramps were cute. But they sure weren’t handicapped accessible. And there was one elevator in the building, one tiny elevator.
STEAGALL: It was like a little box — a rickety, old, creaky box. It was the kind with the buttons that clicked and were hard to push. They were made of plastic, and the numbers were worn off. I would usually take the ramps because everybody crammed in there like sardines.
ROBERTS: They did bring cadavers in on the elevator, but because they wouldn’t fit lying down, they had to stand them up on their feet.
PATTON: It’s not the proper way to deal with a cadaver.
ROBERTS: There was no ramp to the seventh floor, so they had to get a crane to lift the cadaver caskets from the ground to the roof of the building.
ALBERS: When we were renovating, they would have to put all the big stuff on carts and push it up the ramps. Well, one time they got up to the top of the ramp, and it got to be too heavy. The cart got loose, went down the ramp and went right through a wall.
GLOVER: I always wanted to skateboard down the whole thing.
WALK: I liked to pilfer those ancient chairs from whatever neglected room or lab happened to be unlocked and ride them down the ramps.
GLOVER: The best room was Kell 333. The ceilings were low, and it was on the ramp — one of those weird room configurations tucked along the ramps.
MASON: The dimensions were so weird. After opening the door, you immediately had to take three steps up to a false floor, like a half floor. We called it the “Wonka Room.”
There was no ramp to the seventh floor, so they had to get a crane to lift the cadaver caskets from the ground to the roof of the building.
SPENCER ROBERTS,
DIGITAL LIBRARIAN
Hell Hall
MASSELL: I have fond memories of that old garage. I was there during the days that bomb shelters were in vogue, and Kell Hall was like a concrete fortress academic experiment.
STEAGALL: It reminded me of Gotham City. Discolored, rusted metal. So much concrete. Antiquated equipment. Big steel pipes and exhaust fans. Structures coming out of the roof and windows. Dark. You’d always hear dripping sounds. The rampways were a crazy burnt red-orange color that added to the whole morbid ambiance of the place.
WALK: I think that was the strangest thing about Kell. It felt lawless and semi-paranormal at times.
PATTON: Everybody who had a nonromantic view of the building hated the place.
BOYKIN: Kell Hall is not ideal laboratory space. The round posts, the low ceilings, the plumbing — it was a gigantic patchwork.
PATTON: The truth is it was a horrible building that was converted badly and remained horrible. Converting a parking garage into a classroom building — that’s a long stretch. Some things would just hit you right in the face, like columns blocking your view of someone trying to give a lecture.
ELLIOTT: You had these big concrete pillars all over the place, which covered the reinforced steel girders. You couldn’t go 25 feet without running into one of those girders, and so you had to squeeze classrooms and offices around and between them.
CRIMMINS: When the schedule of classes came out, the thing you feared most as a faculty member was discovering that you were going to be teaching in Kell Hall. And so, we had to figure out a way to avoid that. What I remember doing is always requesting audiovisual support because there was no such thing as audiovisual support in Kell Hall.
ELLIOTT: Another faculty member was lecturing in high heels and punched a hole right through the linoleum with her heel. There used to be a pipe that went right there, and they didn’t plug it up right. They just put linoleum right over it.
PATTON: It’s not a good sell if you’re trying to recruit a leading scientist to your university, and you take him or her to Kell Hall and say, “Hey, this is where you’re going to live.”
GLOVER: From a functioning standpoint, really everything was just so difficult.
ELLIOTT: The most convenient thing about Kell Hall was the Post Office.
ALBERS: The infrastructure was always a problem. HVAC and plumbing and electrical — there was no grand diagram of all that. So, every time you did something, you didn’t know what was going to happen — if it was going to work or break or cause another problem somewhere else in the building.
BOYKIN: It was a haphazard array. We would have an electrical problem, and they wouldn’t even know where the breaker boxes were.
ELLIOTT: If somebody used the kerosene saw in 320, the smell would stay in the air for maybe a day or so.
BOYKIN: We had a lot of experiments that ran overnight and were cooled by circulating water. At night, the pressure would build up and pop the rubber hose. I can tell you I had many visits to Kell Hall at midnight or 2 a.m. when the plant people would call me and say, “You’ve got a flood in your lab!”
ELLIOTT: I think every room got flooded at some point. The pipes got jammed up all the time, and the water would have to go somewhere else — escape through another pipe, come up a drain, overflow a sink. During or after rainstorms, water would come up through my sink, and I was on the third floor.
ALBERS: The person who ran the crawfish lab needed to clean the aquaria every so often. The water in there got really nasty. He had a floor drain, so he poured it all down the drain. It turned out the drain just dumped out above the ceiling tiles of the floor below and flooded the developmental psychology lab with the nastiest water you could ever imagine.
I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
JEFFREY GLOVER,
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY
I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
JEFFREY GLOVER,
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Rampways
CRIMMINS: If you look at a lot of the parking garages we build today, they’re designed the same way. They come up a half-story at a time so the ramps aren’t that steep.
BOYKIN: Part of my lab still had the parking space paint marks on the floor.
PATTON: You know, you think the ramps were cute. But they sure weren’t handicapped accessible. And there was one elevator in the building, one tiny elevator.
STEAGALL: It was like a little box — a rickety, old, creaky box. It was the kind with the buttons that clicked and were hard to push. They were made of plastic, and the numbers were worn off. I would usually take the ramps because everybody crammed in there like sardines.
ROBERTS: They did bring cadavers in on the elevator, but because they wouldn’t fit lying down, they had to stand them up on their feet.
PATTON: It’s not the proper way to deal with a cadaver.
ROBERTS: There was no ramp to the seventh floor, so they had to get a crane to lift the cadaver caskets from the ground to the roof of the building.
ALBERS: When we were renovating, they would have to put all the big stuff on carts and push it up the ramps. Well, one time they got up to the top of the ramp, and it got to be too heavy. The cart got loose, went down the ramp and went right through a wall.
GLOVER: I always wanted to skateboard down the whole thing.
WALK: I liked to pilfer those ancient chairs from whatever neglected room or lab happened to be unlocked and ride them down the ramps.
GLOVER: The best room was Kell 333. The ceilings were low, and it was on the ramp — one of those weird room configurations tucked along the ramps.
MASON: The dimensions were so weird. After opening the door, you immediately had to take three steps up to a false floor, like a half floor. We called it the “Wonka Room.”
There was no ramp to the seventh floor, so they had to get a crane to lift the cadaver caskets from the ground to the roof of the building.
SPENCER ROBERTS,
DIGITAL LIBRARIAN
EXTRA CREDIT
Shortly before he graduated from the physical therapy program in 1987, Cliff Steagall volunteered to help the professor who ran Kell Hall’s anatomy lab. Recently married and with his first child on the way, the 24-year-old jumped at any opportunity to find favor with his teachers and help his chances at finishing school and getting a good job as soon as possible.
“I was trying to make things happen. I’d do anything and everything,” he says.
He successfully helped the professor clean and prep the lab for several weeks, but one night, near the end of the term, things got sloppy. Here’s how he tells it.
We had eight cadavers in the anatomy lab, which was unusual for such a small and underequipped department. That was more than a lot of the medical colleges had.
They were stored in these huge stainless steel caskets. They were like tables. The cadavers were always submerged in formaldehyde because you had to keep the integrative tissues intact.
We had to change out the fluids in the caskets for the next group of students coming in. It was one of the nastiest things you could imagine because, at the end of the quarter, all the parts and things that you’d cut off — the fat and the arteries and all that — had settled to the bottom of these tanks.
We were both underneath this thing, and there was a huge drain at the bottom that was capped with this huge fire hydrant cap. While I was unscrewing it, the guy was trying to tell me, “Before you go too far, wait a minute. I’m going to put this valve on there.”
Well, I didn’t hear him, and that big, heavy cap fell to the ground, and this stuff came flushing and gushing out — chunks of human flesh, fat, just foul flowing stuff spewing everywhere, all over us. The guy was screaming at the top of his lungs. I went to put my hands over the drain to try to stop it, but all I did was make a funnel that just funneled it all straight on top of him. He was dripping — covered in body parts — and he started screaming: “Get out! Just get out!”
He and I smelled bad for probably three weeks. You just could not wash that stuff out. It went into your pores. It was so nasty. You’d try to eat — even like two weeks later — and when you’d bring a hamburger to your face, all you could smell was death and formaldehyde.
There were probably at least 40 or 50 gallons of solution in there because it has to fully submerge a body. It’s like a massive tub. I don’t know how the man cleaned it all up.
He was pretty pissed at me for the rest of the year. I didn’t get any extra credit.
EXTRA CREDIT
Shortly before he graduated from the physical therapy program in 1987, Cliff Steagall volunteered to help the professor who ran Kell Hall’s anatomy lab. Recently married and with his first child on the way, the 24-year-old jumped at any opportunity to find favor with his teachers and help his chances at finishing school and getting a good job as soon as possible.
“I was trying to make things happen. I’d do anything and everything,” he says.
He successfully helped the professor clean and prep the lab for several weeks, but one night, near the end of the term, things got sloppy. Here’s how he tells it.
We had eight cadavers in the anatomy lab, which was unusual for such a small and underequipped department. That was more than a lot of the medical colleges had.
They were stored in these huge stainless steel caskets. They were like tables. The cadavers were always submerged in formaldehyde because you had to keep the integrative tissues intact.
We had to change out the fluids in the caskets for the next group of students coming in. It was one of the nastiest things you could imagine because, at the end of the quarter, all the parts and things that you’d cut off — the fat and the arteries and all that — had settled to the bottom of these tanks.
We were both underneath this thing, and there was a huge drain at the bottom that was capped with this huge fire hydrant cap. While I was unscrewing it, the guy was trying to tell me, “Before you go too far, wait a minute. I’m going to put this valve on there.”
Well, I didn’t hear him, and that big, heavy cap fell to the ground, and this stuff came flushing and gushing out — chunks of human flesh, fat, just foul flowing stuff spewing everywhere, all over us. The guy was screaming at the top of his lungs. I went to put my hands over the drain to try to stop it, but all I did was make a funnel that just funneled it all straight on top of him. He was dripping — covered in body parts — and he started screaming: “Get out! Just get out!”
He and I smelled bad for probably three weeks. You just could not wash that stuff out. It went into your pores. It was so nasty. You’d try to eat — even like two weeks later — and when you’d bring a hamburger to your face, all you could smell was death and formaldehyde.
There were probably at least 40 or 50 gallons of solution in there because it has to fully submerge a body. It’s like a massive tub. I don’t know how the man cleaned it all up.
He was pretty pissed at me for the rest of the year. I didn’t get any extra credit.
Animal House
ANDERSON: A bunch of crawfish that belonged to [the Neuroscience Institute] got out of their holding tanks once and were taking over the ramps and hallways trying to find somewhere to hide.
ALBERS: They escaped multiple times — sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups.
ELLIOTT: If the housekeeping wasn’t done well in the biology or anatomy and physiology labs, you saw these pretty good horsefly-type bugs flying around. I remember we were interviewing a young man for a faculty position when this horsefly comes into the room, buzzes around and flies back out.
ALBERS: One of the psychology professors would actually catch pigeons out of his window to use in experiments in his lab. That’s obviously a big no-no now.
GLOVER: Throughout Kell, over the years, departments and people end up accumulating stuff that gets put in a closet, gets lost, gets outdated, never gets thrown away. So, you end up with some really random stuff.
ANDERSON: I found a turtle skeleton in an air vent.
GLOVER: I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
ELLIOTT: One year, the people at the Refectory left some food out over break, and rats got in. They multiplied like mad. By the time the students showed back up, there were rats all over the place. You’d see them scurrying around.
JOHNSON: We called the Refectory the “Rat Factory.” That was our affectionate name for it. We didn’t even know what “refectory” meant. I mean, here we are in the basement of a freaking car park, and we’re eating there. How disgusting is that?
GLOVER: Another professor was going through Kell 316 once, and she called us up and was like, “I got some stuff that I think is y’all’s.” We opened up a box to find 30 raccoon skulls. Another one had like 30 possum skulls with baby possum skulls in little test tubes. And little notes about each one — their size, their weight, where they were collected, when they died.
On another note, I opened a drawer in Kell 100 as we were moving out, and it was full of tapes. And so, I got a couple bootlegs of Widespread Panic concerts from the late ’90s that I may have actually been at.
Animal House
ANDERSON: A bunch of crawfish that belonged to [the Neuroscience Institute] got out of their holding tanks once and were taking over the ramps and hallways trying to find somewhere to hide.
ALBERS: They escaped multiple times — sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups.
ELLIOTT: If the housekeeping wasn’t done well in the biology or anatomy and physiology labs, you saw these pretty good horsefly-type bugs flying around. I remember we were interviewing a young man for a faculty position when this horsefly comes into the room, buzzes around and flies back out.
ALBERS: One of the psychology professors would actually catch pigeons out of his window to use in experiments in his lab. That’s obviously a big no-no now.
GLOVER: Throughout Kell, over the years, departments and people end up accumulating stuff that gets put in a closet, gets lost, gets outdated, never gets thrown away. So, you end up with some really random stuff.
ANDERSON: I found a turtle skeleton in an air vent.
GLOVER: I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
ELLIOTT: One year, the people at the Refectory left some food out over break, and rats got in. They multiplied like mad. By the time the students showed back up, there were rats all over the place. You’d see them scurrying around.
JOHNSON: We called the Refectory the “Rat Factory.” That was our affectionate name for it. We didn’t even know what “refectory” meant. I mean, here we are in the basement of a freaking car park, and we’re eating there. How disgusting is that?
GLOVER: Another professor was going through Kell 316 once, and she called us up and was like, “I got some stuff that I think is y’all’s.” We opened up a box to find 30 raccoon skulls. Another one had like 30 possum skulls with baby possum skulls in little test tubes. And little notes about each one — their size, their weight, where they were collected, when they died.
On another note, I opened a drawer in Kell 100 as we were moving out, and it was full of tapes. And so, I got a couple bootlegs of Widespread Panic concerts from the late ’90s that I may have actually been at.
Animal House
ANDERSON: A bunch of crawfish that belonged to [the Neuroscience Institute] got out of their holding tanks once and were taking over the ramps and hallways trying to find somewhere to hide.
ALBERS: They escaped multiple times — sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups.
ELLIOTT: If the housekeeping wasn’t done well in the biology or anatomy and physiology labs, you saw these pretty good horsefly-type bugs flying around. I remember we were interviewing a young man for a faculty position when this horsefly comes into the room, buzzes around and flies back out.
ALBERS: One of the psychology professors would actually catch pigeons out of his window to use in experiments in his lab. That’s obviously a big no-no now.
GLOVER: Throughout Kell, over the years, departments and people end up accumulating stuff that gets put in a closet, gets lost, gets outdated, never gets thrown away. So, you end up with some really random stuff.
ANDERSON: I found a turtle skeleton in an air vent.
GLOVER: I was down in Kell 100, and there was a plastic bag in the corner by the sink, and inside was a plastic bin full of liquid. It was old enough that the lid was cracked. I opened the bag. It didn’t smell so good. It had a little label — “bear claw” — and it was sitting there decomposing in formaldehyde — flesh and sinew and bone, about six inches long. Who knows how long it had been there?
ELLIOTT: One year, the people at the Refectory left some food out over break, and rats got in. They multiplied like mad. By the time the students showed back up, there were rats all over the place. You’d see them scurrying around.
JOHNSON: We called the Refectory the “Rat Factory.” That was our affectionate name for it. We didn’t even know what “refectory” meant. I mean, here we are in the basement of a freaking car park, and we’re eating there. How disgusting is that?
GLOVER: Another professor was going through Kell 316 once, and she called us up and was like, “I got some stuff that I think is y’all’s.” We opened up a box to find 30 raccoon skulls. Another one had like 30 possum skulls with baby possum skulls in little test tubes. And little notes about each one — their size, their weight, where they were collected, when they died.
On another note, I opened a drawer in Kell 100 as we were moving out, and it was full of tapes. And so, I got a couple bootlegs of Widespread Panic concerts from the late ’90s that I may have actually been at.
The Old Mother
CRIMMINS: When the university system bought the building in 1945, it was an incredible bargain to get that amount of space when there were neither materials nor funds for new construction. That $300,000 really laid the foundation for the growth of the modern university. It gave Sparks the opportunity to create everything the school needed — classrooms, a library, a cafeteria, offices. They could even rent it out to bring in income.
MASSELL: Sparks had a lot of politician in him.
BOWEN: Sparks was shameless in promoting the school. He acquired the funding, he purchased the building, he transformed it and he filled it with a growing institution. Frankly, I don’t think we would have had a chance if he had not been such an eloquent and decisive advocate. Kell Hall is part of that legacy.
ROBERTS: Kell Hall has survived all these changes. It has been this rock at the center of campus for so long despite growth and expansion and other buildings going up and coming down.
ELLIOTT: When I was interviewing for the job, I had two other offers, and I chose this place. The other offers had better buildings and better facilities, but I could get more work done here. I was very struck with the commitment, the attitude, the esprit de corps. People were making it work despite Kell Hall, and that’s an attractive characteristic.
STEAGALL: There was some serious science in Kell Hall.
ALBERS: Kell Hall cradled science at Georgia State. Without Kell and the people who got those labs going, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are now.
ROBERTS: It’s kind of incredible that this building would resist plans to demolish it for decades. Because it has been on the chopping block from almost day one.
PATTON: Removing Kell Hall opens up the campus to the city and allows the city to look in. That building really blocks access between the campus and the city. It’s going to be a quadrangle that’s visible, that opens up to downtown. It goes back to a concept from my time at Georgia State: “We want to be a part of the city, not apart from it.”
ROBERTS: How many universities try to knock a building down for 50 years and fail? And not just fail but continually need it because it’s so necessary? I think that’s the weird legacy of Kell Hall — not just that it’s been used for so many things and is so odd but that it has always filled a vital role. So that now, after so long — finally, maybe — we can actually knock it down.
For more on the old garage, check out “Kell Hall: Capturing the Legacy,” a digital exhibit featuring 3D models, historic photos, exclusive stories and more.
The Old Mother
CRIMMINS: When the university system bought the building in 1945, it was an incredible bargain to get that amount of space when there were neither materials nor funds for new construction. That $300,000 really laid the foundation for the growth of the modern university. It gave Sparks the opportunity to create everything the school needed — classrooms, a library, a cafeteria, offices. They could even rent it out to bring in income.
MASSELL: Sparks had a lot of politician in him.
BOWEN: Sparks was shameless in promoting the school. He acquired the funding, he purchased the building, he transformed it and he filled it with a growing institution. Frankly, I don’t think we would have had a chance if he had not been such an eloquent and decisive advocate. Kell Hall is part of that legacy.
ROBERTS: Kell Hall has survived all these changes. It has been this rock at the center of campus for so long despite growth and expansion and other buildings going up and coming down.
ELLIOTT: When I was interviewing for the job, I had two other offers, and I chose this place. The other offers had better buildings and better facilities, but I could get more work done here. I was very struck with the commitment, the attitude, the esprit de corps. People were making it work despite Kell Hall, and that’s an attractive characteristic.
STEAGALL: There was some serious science in Kell Hall.
ALBERS: Kell Hall cradled science at Georgia State. Without Kell and the people who got those labs going, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are now.
ROBERTS: It’s kind of incredible that this building would resist plans to demolish it for decades. Because it has been on the chopping block from almost day one.
PATTON: Removing Kell Hall opens up the campus to the city and allows the city to look in. That building really blocks access between the campus and the city. It’s going to be a quadrangle that’s visible, that opens up to downtown. It goes back to a concept from my time at Georgia State: “We want to be a part of the city, not apart from it.”
ROBERTS: How many universities try to knock a building down for 50 years and fail? And not just fail but continually need it because it’s so necessary? I think that’s the weird legacy of Kell Hall — not just that it’s been used for so many things and is so odd but that it has always filled a vital role. So that now, after so long — finally, maybe — we can actually knock it down.
For more on the old garage, check out “Kell Hall: Capturing the Legacy,” a digital exhibit featuring 3D models, historic photos, exclusive stories and more.
Illustrations by Steve Wacksman
