The first time I visited Seashore Hall as an undergraduate student employee in the department of dance, I’d never heard of this neglected-looking building lurking in the background of downtown Iowa City like Boo Radley’s house.
After graduating when I was hired as a videographer at the now-defunct Center for Media Production located in Seashore, my excitement about the new job was tempered by the strange ambience of this place. Its original purpose was a university hospital, which made it awkward for pretty much every use thereafter. We stored our production gear in a dungeon-like space that legend had it was the hospital morgue, and the concrete ramps and sub-basement suggested it was once a place that people came but often didn’t leave.
Since the medical center relocated across the river in 1920, Seashore Hall’s main use side from housing the steadily growing psychology department was as swing space, a purgatory for programs either on their decline or way to someplace else. I often wondered which category our department belonged to.
Roaming Seashore Hall I was reminded of the words of the enslaved tour guide and prolific early explorer of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, Stephen Bishop, who described that subterranean world as ‘grand, gloomy and peculiar’; the same could be said of Seashore, which felt like stepping into another century. The cavernous hallways, ample daylight and charming antique fixtures almost made up for wasps bumping against your office windows, the occasional roach sightings, and the funereal quiet that always pervaded. I enjoyed the old-fashioned push-button light switches, and walking up or down the wooden staircase in the central wing with its massive bannister and wide, creaky steps moved you through time as well as space. In quieter moments, I would imagine nurses in their caps making their rounds through the patient wards of a century ago.
Our offices were scattered across several different areas of the building, giving me ample time while walking the halls to muse on the fate of a place that seemed so removed from the mainstream of university life, and wonder how long it could survive in an institution that had since moved on. As my former boss remarked upon his first visit, it felt like “the remnants of a once-thriving enterprise.”
I’d heard talk of both remodeling and demolition plans for Seashore Hall since I started in summer 2007, but the flood of 2008 and the decade of rebuilding projects that followed pushed it once more to the back of the backlog, likely sealing its fate. A new psychology building project which required the demolition of the south east wing in 2017 marked the beginning of this end, and the wormhole of 2020 would only hastened that demise.
When I went to see the demolition in progress, it was on a day work was paused and I noticed the last section standing was the same wing where I’d once worked. As I stood in the lot of the new Psychology and Brain Sciences building, eyeing the shell of our old workspaces, I felt for that moment like the only person aware this piece of university history was in its last throes of existence.
Where Seashore Hall once blocked out the sun is now an open expanse of dirt, letting in plenty of daylight for green space or whatever else will come in its place, and I admit it’s an improvement; I thought I would miss it more. Perhaps institutions like ours are not so defined by their past as I thought and more fixated on the future. Still, I suspect that somewhere on this sprawling campus there’s a worthy successor to Seashore Hall aging in plain sight.
Additional reading: reflections on Seashore Hall by my University of Iowa colleagues Richard Lewis and David McCartney.
