Steve Brauntuch: The case for grass on Penn's campus

Remember when the Penn campus was green? It used to be that when you walked around this campus, you were amazed by how much green there was right in the middle of this city. There were open fields with neatly trimmed grass, looking eager to pick up tread marks from the day's touch football games. Penn was always a city school. But there was something unique about having this expansive campus with green fields right in the middle of a major city. It helped separate Penn from other city schools like NYU, where campus consists of Fifth Avenue and several Third Avenue diners. So hopefully I'm not the only one who has noticed that slowly but surely, those green fields that were part of Penn's appeal are eroding, and not through natural processes. When I moved into the Quad in the fall of 2000, I was impressed that this little enclosed community had not one, but two wide-open fields that screamed for baseball catches and Frisbee games. Now, just over two years later, post-beautification project, the Quad looks even better. But the grass is for show. It's not meant for "activities" -- it's meant to sit there, looking pretty between the repaved walkways and park benches. And whereas Lower Quad used to be ideal for whiffle ball tournaments (I once struck out seven batters in one game -- you can ask me for my autograph later), the raised infield and giant black crossing paths pretty much suck the life out of that game. But it's not just the Quad. I moved into High Rise North in the fall of 2001, excited about the prospect of being flanked by open fields. My roommates and I were already planning our weekly schedules around infield practice. One year later, the building has been besieged by construction and so have the fields. The eastern side features a lovely trailer park courtesy of the new Hillel building. The western side was taken over this fall by construction on the new walkway that connects Locust Walk to 40th Street, which is actually really nice. But when the landscapers went to put the sod back down, they decided to fence it off so nobody would walk on it until it was fully entrenched in the ground. This brings up two questions: how long did they think it would take before people hopped the fence and played on the field anyway, and did they really think that grass would grow in Philadelphia in the winter? Well, there's a cannonball-sized divot in the middle of that field, so I'm pretty sure their work there is not done. It gets worse. Now there's talk of building new housing for undergraduates -- ON Hill Field. That's right, the big concrete pathway wasn't enough to disrupt the club soccer team, so administrators want to tear up the one remaining open field on campus and put apartment buildings on it. First of all, is it so hard for people to walk the extra block that they had to bulldoze a line through the middle of the field? And secondly, where will Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds play when they come to perform at Fling? (A subtle hint there for any SPEC people reading this column. The quickest way to a Penn student's heart is through his copy of "Under the Table and Dreaming.") With the acquisition of the postal lands east of campus on hold seemingly forever, it doesn't appear that the Campus Development Plan that John Fry left behind will be adding to Penn's greenery any time soon. All of this means that in the very near future, football and Frisbee games could be relegated to parking lots -- which is fine, if that's what the University really wants for its students. The point is that maybe we don't need concrete shortcuts blazed through every field on campus. Maybe we don't need to "beautify" all of our green spaces by slicing them in half. Maybe there are a few of us here on campus who actually enjoy doing more on grass than sunbathing. The groundskeepers at Penn rope off the grass on College Green in the hope that people will either trip on the one-foot high line that borders the grass or they won't step on it. Do we want every field on this campus to be off-limits? Spring is only a couple of months away. I'm hoping that there will be a place for us to throw the football around and hold our whiffle ball tournaments. I'm pretty sure that my friends and I are not alone on this one. For once, kind administrators, please stay off our lawns. Steve Brauntuch is a junior Communications major from Tenafly, N.J. and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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