Quincy: Open for Business

Sentimentalists may compose elegiac dactylls in memory of Georgian Grace, but the residents of Quincy House look proudly out of their fish-bowl refectory or patter happily about their duplex suits. The elevators have failed occasionally; so far there is no way to get water in the dining room; some ceilings are not completed; and the courtyard is still unreclaimed desert. But the Quincy organism is alive and functioning.

In the immaculate pumice-walled cells of the colony students are relaxing in the privacy of individual bedrooms and are furnishing austere living rooms. At meal times the House feeds its members as they pass by the brightly lit food counter. It whirs them quickly from floor to floor and through its spiracular windows provides lofty views of Cambridge.

A bas-relief offers concrete wriggles and a Henry Mooretype nude as a prelude to dinner, and on the wall of the dining hall a graphite with its protozoic forms provides the subject for half the table conversation. To the passer-by on Mount Auburn Street the people on the other side of the glass walls seem to be holding a picnic in the sky.

Though a shade short of complete, Quincy is indeed thriving; and if its visiting detractors depreciate its bare rooms and its stern modernity and term it a glass menagerie they do so with a touch of envy.