Tewksbury Hall (1959) is a repulsive, decaying dormitory on the main campus of Bard College, inhabited primarily by unfortunate first-year students and degenerate upperclassmen who annually corrupt their neighbors by implicitly suggesting to them that higher education chiefly involves depraved chemical abuse and neurotic/psychotic self-destruction.

It’s architects, Peter Muller and Sidney Shelov, were both Bard alums. “Tewks,” as it is called with some distaste, is a concrete and cinderblock monolith, dark and dank, three stories tall and overflowing with the malicious memories of thousands of trips gone terribly wrong. It’s lights buzz with fluorescent exhaustion, its carpets are patterned with the burns of casually extinguished cigarettes, and its walls seem to posses almost washed out splotches of innumerable organic wastes. Recently, the wiring of the campus Ethernet and the installation of more fire-detection equipment has brought an impossible number of snaking pipes to the hallways, which complete the already tenable analogy to a bureaucratic building in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Once a party dorm, Tewksbury has finally become so reprehensibly dirty that few non-residents venture inside for too long; those who do comment incredulously on the state of the toilets (filled past the brim with shit), the rooms (usually furnished only with a bed and empty bottles), and the scent (which is, sadly, utterly indescribable).

Suitable exclusively for the alcoholic, the loud, the sick and repulsive, the insomniac lunatics, and those who mind neither glass nor vomit all over their floors, Tewksbury has been my preferred place of residence for three years.