WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW FOR YOUR WEEKEND AT THE “ROW”–
By Elaine Best
Questions regarding Tent City, the temporary replacement for Fraternity Row, remain unanswered despite its opening to the student body on Friday, Sept. 4. Consisting of six tents which are 30 by 40 feet, Tent City will be hosted on the horseshoe between Shipp and Dupre resident halls while the new Greek Village is under construction.
While Tent City was originally meant to last until Thanksgiving break, at the time of this report, Matthew Hammett, assistant dean of students for student involvement, confirmed changes regarding the length of this interim row’s duration. Exactly what has changed and how it will affect Tent City has not yet been revealed.
“As far as I know, we are doing a two week trial run with the tents where we will have them open to the entire student body this Friday, and then we will have formal rush there next weekend,” Kappa Sigma President Michael Siegel explains. “We realized that there are a number of problems that may arise with these tents, including supply power to bands, possibly having multiple bands playing right next to each other on weekends, and not having enough space to fit the amount of people we normally have in tents.”
These same issues were brought up by Resident Director Allen Lollis when he was interviewed prior to these major changes in the Tent City project.
“I would think—and this is purely speculation—that maybe there will be less band parties because of this setup,” Lollis said in an interview on Monday, Aug. 31. “And that’s not us asking, that’s my imagining this is what the fraternities will do because competing band parties right there beside each other without walls…is it going to work? I don’t know.”
The future of Tent City remains unknown beyond its two week trial as of now. Siegel mentions one potential solution that has been discussed among the administration.
“A possible solution we have come up with is having a common stage in the middle and having IFC sponsor a band on weekends,” Siegel says. However, Siegel cautions that the administration may have chosen a different option by the time this press release is published.
Originally the cost of renting the tents for the entirety of fall semester was going to be around $50,000, and the lawn repair afterwards was estimated to be about $30,000.
A few questions remain unanswered as well regarding the portable restrooms that will be provided to the student body at Tent City. For example, there is technically nothing stopping any guests from using the bathrooms within Shipp or Dupre resident halls if they choose to forgo the portable restrooms. From his interview earlier this week, Lollis asked students to avoid using these resident hall bathrooms unless they lived in Dupre or Shipp.
“I’m just going to beg people not to go,” Lollis said, laughing. “Obviously it’s college property—they can use them, but we ask that they are respectful to the college and use the portable restrooms instead.”
As of last Monday, Lollis stated that Tent City will have the same quiet hours and policies that Fraternity row had. In terms of what the future holds for these weekend gatherings, nothing concrete has surfaced as of yet. Roberta Bigger, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, made one point clear about the future of fraternity parties during a Village residents’ meeting held on Sunday, Aug. 30.
“Everybody who lives in the Village has the right to have a nice, safe place to live and not feel like they live in the middle of the row,” Bigger told the crowd of students. “We are not going to allow the apartments to become fraternity houses.”
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