Vassar, The Alumnae/i Quarterly

Dakota Kim ’02 has written about Ferry House (“Our House is Bauhaus,” VQ Winter 2006) with such loving care that I hope she will welcome a correction. She explains the closing of the cooperative Palmer House in 1947 with the statement, “...geographically isolated as they were, Palmer students felt a lack of participation in college activities.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth. During my year in Palmer House, 1946–47, three of us housemates were elected to head major campus organizations — College Government Association, Polit, and Community Church. It was, in fact, our intense participation in both campus activities and off-campus politics, at the time of a red scare sweeping college campuses, which sealed our dormitory’s doom.

In our supplicant meetings with them, the trustees stood firm in their decision to close Palmer House, but they did promise a new cooperative house and even asked what features we would include in the new plan. We emphasized a domestic layout that made private rooms accessible only through a shared social space, a living room, convinced that the Palmer plan might have prevented a recent suicide in another building.

Imagine my disappointment when I finally stepped across the threshold of the new Ferry House and was forced to choose: left to the social rooms or right to the dormitories. While I can admire Breuer’s modernist massing and detailing, I will always regard his layout as a lesson lost.

Barbara (Bibs) Muhs Walker ’48
Ossining, New York