News release Public Information Office   SLU 10880   Hammond, LA 70402   phone: 985-549-2341   fax: 985-549-2061 publicinfo@selu.edu Spring 2004 news releases Public Information home News archive Contact: Christina Chapple Date: 4/25/05   Click on image for publication quality photo  BRINGIN’ DOWN THE HOUSE – Southeastern Louisiana University President Randy Moffett speaks to the crowd before taking the controls of a bulldozer and contributing to the demolition of Lee Hall at the “Bringin’ Down the House” ceremony April 21. The demolition of the 40-year-old dormitory is the last phase of Southeastern’s $55 million new student housing program. Former residents of the dorm gathered to share memories and celebrate its history.  SOUTHEASTERN CELEBRATES HISTORY OF LEE HALL DORM        HAMMOND -- It was the big daddy of dormitories -- 154,000 square feet of living space with capacity for approximately 800 Southeastern Louisiana University students. Now, dingy and dilapidated in comparison with the new residential community surrounding it, Lee Hall is just weeks away from being history.         So, history is what Southeastern celebrated on Thursday (April 21), when students, alumni and staff who lived and worked in Lee Hall for more than four decades got together to share memories of the huge four-story, 93-unit structure, home to some 30,000 students since 1964.        They gathered across from the old dorm, which Capstone Building Corp. workers had already begun reducing to rubble. President Randy Moffett donned a hardhat and manned the controls of a bulldozer – under the watchful eye of Capstone project superintendent Danny Connell – to play a ceremonial roll in “bringin’ down the house.” The former Lee Hall residents signed their names on a dorm door and posed for a group photo with the metal sign that adorned the building’s façade.        Moffett recalled that Lee Hall served first as a men’s residence hall, then a women’s hall. It was later used as the freshmen residence for men and women, and ended its existence as a men’s hall again in 2004. It also housed countless participants in freshmen orientation sessions and a wide variety of summer camps.        “When Lee Hall was built and for most of its years it was a state of the art facility that provided a great home for our alumni,” Moffett said.         Two of those alumni – Steve Leon, director of auxiliary services; and Jackie Dale Thomas, director of leadership development/student activities – remembered their days in Lee Hall as students and as members of the university’s housing staff.         “We had no TVs or Internet in our rooms back then – in fact, no Internet anywhere,” laughed Leon, who lived in Lee from 1974-76 and has worked with student housing since the mid-1980s. “Since female guests were not allowed in the hall, students spent a lot of time together in the lobby playing cards, watching TV, shooting pool or out in the yard throwing Frisbees or playing volleyball.”        As associate director of housing from 1980-1988, Thomas lived in the Lee Hall apartment reserved for on-site housing staff. “How many millions of memories do you want?” she said.         “I know when many of you walk by this building you don’t see what I see,” Thomas said. “It goes back to the old cliché of not judging a book by its cover. If you could look through my eyes, there are a lot of things you could see and taste and smell and hear.”         Thomas recounted amusing incidents about being attacked by swimming red ants when the area around the dorm flooded, and high-spirited young summer campers who pulled fire alarms and wrapped one of their number in toilet paper, mummy-style. But she also made clear her fondness for the venerable dorm.        “What I see across that street is not the rubble that we have right now,” Thomas said. “I see a chapter in the book of history called Southeastern, called Lee Hall and the Lee Hall community. I see the faces of so many people who have made my life richer and have made this a richer university.”        Brad O’Hara, vice president for student and public affairs, said the Lee Hall demolition is the last phase of the Southeastern’s on-going new $55 million housing program which began less than a year ago. Since then, four new modern residence halls have opened with four more scheduled to be occupied in fall 2005.         By early summer, the Lee Hall demolition will have been cleared and the area will become a green space for the new residential community. Moffett said bricks from the dorm will be used to build a monument marking the hall’s place in Southeastern history.        “When we change an element of our history as with the Lee Hall demolition, we do not want to forget that history,” he said. “Change is inevitable. We’re losing a part of our history, but we are creating wonderful new dorms for the students here now and the ones who will come in the future.”