WAVE ASPIRE
The River House is going to be in high demand. Active student groups really enhance the student life experience, and this will give them a space to collaborate and host their campus events. —Katherine Thomas
Trainer said, however, that he’s excited about the effort to recreate a single place where students from across campus, of different majors and interests, can get to know each other. “It will also be a home away from home for our non-traditional and international students. Students will see that a professor isn’t just a scholar standing in front of a class or a lab, but a real person. That mingling…will help develop lifelong relationships and friendships.” That’s just the kind of feeling Katherine Thomas wants for future students. The May 2013 JU graduate is now a Presidential Fellow working to enhance the student experience at the University, and said she has heard many a tale of the Rathskeller from alumni. As a student, she was active in Greek life, won the University Award for Outstanding Service and Co-curricular Involvement and was a Student Alumni Association founding member. During her years on campus, she said, she always questioned why there wasn’t a current space like the Rat, and was envious of the stories she heard.
“The Rat was a great idea, a place where people felt welcome, and that’s very important on a campus,” said JU Past President and Chancellor Emeritus Fran Kinne. “It’s amazing how it just brought everyone together, even if you just were meeting someone for 15 minutes. It was a centerpiece that people felt a part of. It was a dream, really. And very successful.”
“The River House is going to be in high demand,” she said. “Active student groups really enhance the student life experience, and this will give them a space to collaborate and host their campus events. Also, if there was an active River House when I was a student, I’m sure more commuter students would stay on campus after classes to participate in student activities, because all students would have a space to call their own.”
Cost, who arrived on JU’s campus in 1977 at age 18, can attest to that.
A revived River House
The Rat served up “a million stories of breaking down barriers, collective group cheers and this agreed-upon community spot,” he said. “It wasn’t just where everyone knew your name, like on ‘Cheers’ — it was where everybody knew everybody’s name.”
The River House has its own history, of course. It was Jacksonville University’s original President’s Home, built in 1957 and occupied by Presidents Franklyn Johnson and then Robert Spiro. When Fran Kinne became president in 1979, she chose to remain in her own home.
Ask for an example of a special moment at The Rat, and Cost’s memory goes back to his first semester.
The house sat empty for years — JU put up a couple students there in the early ‘80s, but that didn’t last more than a semester. In the latter part of that decade it was used for Athletic Department offices, and then Alumni Affairs and Marine Science occupied it.
“Here I am a freshman, and I go in and I see my R.A. from Williams (Hall), one of the best baseball players we had. And he was there in the band. I’m looking at this big hulking jock, an authority figure to me, and he’s playing this great acoustic ‘70s stuff with a band called BB&T. I’m having a beer listening to him, and he’s appreciating the applause, and I remember thinking: ‘Wow, Brian Crawford is a real guy. OK, we are students together.’ The place was very humanizing, very democratizing.” Alas, after Florida raised its drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1985, the ride was over. The Rat closed. The tap had run dry. “It was a happening place, and then it was gone,” said John Trainer, a biology professor at the time and now a senior campaign officer for University Advancement.
Now, with generous donations from the Stein and Frisch families, financial assistance from JU service contractor Sodexo and numerous other alumni contributions, the River House is getting its due. “The challenges here are to take a 1950s-era residential building and try to change it into something transformative, but that still feels like home,” said Negaard. “We want to deliver it quickly, and we want students to know that the administration that is driving this gets it: They understand their needs. “Many students have said they want a place to hang out where they don’t have to drive. This will be the whole package, for students,