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File photo \/ Jesse Stone<\/p>\n
As a college student in the mid-1980s, Lol\u00edn Martins-Crane descended the stairs of the University Center\u2019s far west side and entered the Dry Gulch, a university-owned dive bar. The current director of the Career Development Center met a DJ who would become her husband and formed lifelong friendships.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2015, Narda Perez walked down the same stairs, but the bar was gone. In its place was The Shorthorn newsroom, a space that at first, she found intimidating, but by the time she graduated four years later, had become a safe space. She ate there. She napped there. She worked there. The experiences she built in the chilly UC basement are still part of her life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For decades, students walked down the same set of stairs for different reasons \u2014 first for drinks and dancing at the Dry Gulch, later for drafts and deadlines inside The Shorthorn newsroom.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soon, there will be no stairs left to walk down.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was my home, and I was there much more than I was in my actual home,\u201d said Perez, who was Shorthorn editor-in-chief in spring and fall 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In June, UTA will begin a $160 million renovation of the University Center, a project that will close off the basement. Built in 1953, the student center has been renovated several times before university officials proposed rebuilding it in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The departments in the basement, which include UC Operations, Student Government and other student organizations, have also slowly relocated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even though they knew it was coming, the news that the space would no longer exist after the renovation left many people reminiscing about what had been hidden there all along.<\/p>\n
\u2018I would go back to that\u2019<\/p>\n
Martins-Crane can still picture how the Dry Gulch was arranged.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The stage sat up front, where bands performed beside a small dance floor. Tables filled the middle of the room. A pool table rested nearby. A diner with food was housed in the back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Tuesday nights, she returned again and again. Her now-husband stood behind the DJ stool playing alternative sets from The Smiths and Depeche Mode.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was kind of a little hidden dive,\u201d Martins-Crane said. \u201cBut if you knew that it was there, then that\u2019s the place to go.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
When The Dry Gulch opened in 1978, it was something most campuses didn\u2019t have \u2014 a university-run gathering place where students stayed after classes and bought a pitcher of beer for $1.50.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The entrance to Student Publications sits on the southwest side of the University Center. The Shorthorn has been UTA\u2019s student publication since 1919.<\/p>\n
Photo by Sarah Wesolowski<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe just thought it was the coolest thing ever,\u201d said Keith Head, who served as Student Body president in 1978-79.\u00a0<\/p>\n At first, the space was simple.\u00a0<\/p>\n There were no live bands yet. Mostly, students \u2014 and professors \u2014 came down to drink a beer, listen to country and disco music, and, as Head put it, study \u2014 or at least say they were studying.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, the place grew in popularity. Martins-Crane described packed afternoons, bands occasionally passing through, the TV playing soap operas \u2014 and, later, everyone gathered as they watched coverage of the Challenger explosion.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou go down, you have a bite, you do your homework, you meet up with people in the middle,\u201d she said. \u201cThen you would kind of end up on the dance floor in the evening.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The friends Martins-Crane met there came from different majors, backgrounds and parts of campus. What connected them was the alternative music \u2014 and the fact that they kept showing up, usually around 3 p.m. at the Gulch.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople talk about, \u2018Would you go back?\u2019 It\u2019s like, \u2018Yeah, I would go back to that,\u2019\u201d Martins-Crane said. \u201cWe were connected, we were having fun, we were young, we were bright-eyed, and ready to go and ready to tackle anything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After Texas raised the drinking age to 21, fewer students came to the Gulch. The university closed the bar in April 1992 after several years of financial losses.\u00a0<\/p>\n File photo \/ James Bland<\/p>\n Martins-Crane never had photographs from those nights.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what makes me the most sad,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s when I talk to my kids, and I always talked about the Dry Gulch, and your dad used to be a DJ, and, you know, there\u2019s nothing that I can really show them of what it looked like.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n No camera. No archive. No record of the room on the day she met her husband.\u00a0<\/p>\n Only the memory of where she danced and her coming down the stairs.\u00a0<\/p>\n The newsroom moved underground<\/p>\n John Dycus could still describe those early days in 1994 when The Shorthorn left Ransom Hall to take over the basement space: no longer a bar, but not yet a newsroom.\u00a0<\/p>\n File photo \/ Jesse Stone<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a great big bale of hay in the middle of an area that is now the advertising directors,\u201d said Dycus, former Shorthorn adviser and associate director of Student Publications. \u201cEverything else is blank and musty and dirty.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n But he was ready for the rebuild.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI saw it as a new beginning architecturally,\u201d said Dycus, who became the namesake of the newsroom when he retired in 1998.\u00a0<\/p>\n UTA carpenters, designers and painters transformed the open space where students once gathered around tables into a place for student journalists, Dycus said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elise Cooper Anthony, Shorthorn editor-in-chief in 1994-95, was part of the inaugural staff that entered the new basement newsroom. The move ushered in new newsroom technology that streamlined production and pushed the paper toward digitization, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt changed how we recruited people,\u201d Cooper Anthony said. \u201cIt changed everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Even two years later, the space still felt new.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody wanted to spill anything on anything,\u201d said Lloyd Goodman, former Student Publications director from 1996 to 2013. \u201cWe were a little bit too conscious about that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the middle of campus<\/p>\n The University Center basement carried a contradiction for the newsroom.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was underground, windowless and sometimes hard to find. It was also in the most public building on campus.\u00a0<\/p>\n That mattered.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just very much a message that, \u2018If you want us, this is where we are,\u201d Goodman said. \u201cBut it was also a message that we\u2019re in the middle of campus, we\u2019re going to cover the whole campus, not just parts of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Student Publications director Kevin Cummings said he saw the same value in the location, as it collapsed the distance between student journalists and their audience. Students could walk in and see the newspaper not as a distant institution but as classmates working, asking questions and trying to get the story right.\u00a0<\/p>\n That everyday proximity is what the renovation interrupts. The Shorthorn will move to a temporary location in the Continuing Education and Workforce Development Center while the University Center is rebuilt.\u00a0<\/p>\n The newspaper will keep publishing. But for a while, the paper will lose the everyday geography that made it feel closer to the students it’s serving. In a building where students gathered for everything else, the newspaper could say it belonged there, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to being back in the middle of the university after the renovation,\u201d Cummings said.\u00a0<\/p>\n File photo illustration \/ Leslie White<\/p>\n What to keep and what to let go of\u00a0<\/p>\n Along the hallway of the Student Publications department sit dozens of small boxes waiting to be carried away.\u00a0<\/p>\n Inside are newspapers and yearbooks. Awards and certificates. Old files. Small trinkets left by staff.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the final days of The Shorthorn in the basement, how does anyone pack away more than three decades of memory?\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe find more and more stuff that I don\u2019t want to be thrown away because it\u2019s like parts of our history,\u201d Cummings said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The plan is to carry the things that make The Shorthorn The Shorthorn, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018Blood, sweat and tears\u2019<\/p>\n Over time, the newsroom stopped feeling new.\u00a0<\/p>\n The carpets are stained. The desks have worn down. The basement carries the marks of use. That was almost the point.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou can feel something about this place,\u201d Cummings said. \u201cYou can feel the amount of work and, you know, blood, sweat and tears that people have put into it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That kind of history is hard to recreate. It accumulates slowly \u2014 in late nights, memorabilia, stories that changed the campus conversation and alumni who remember where they used to sit.<\/p>\n Who\u2019s going to remember?<\/p>\n Dycus understands progress.\u00a0<\/p>\n He knows the University Center has been renovated many times. He also realizes that the leaking and flooding every time it rains never fully goes away.\u00a0<\/p>\n The lobby of the Student Publications department, which houses The Shorthorn newspaper, is located in the lower level of the University Center on April 17 at UTA. The space was once home to the campus bar, the Dry Gulch, which opened in 1978.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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