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History on the Hill: Alex’s Place
Brionna Jimerson | Respect Your Elders
Degrees of separation
by Shannon Vavra
Daily Editorial Board
This article is the second in a series exploring the historical background of sites and buildings on Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus.
The library roof is a perennially popular meeting spot for Tufts students and faculty alike, especially as spring approaches. However, the site has more to it than a view of the Boston skyline. Tisch’s rooftop houses Alex’s Place, a memorial dedicated in the spring of 2009 to honor Alex Mendell, who committed suicide in 2003 as a sophomore at Tufts. According to Vice President of University Advancement Eric Johnson, it was Alex’s parents, Tom and Andrea Mendell, who first brought attention to the idea of a creating a memorial and initiated the project. “When we decided to do a memorial for Alex, it was clear to us that the rooftop was special and underutilized and also a space that he cared about,” Tom Mendell told the Daily over the phone this week. According to Johnson, who served as the university’s executive director of development at the time of the space’s unveiling in 2009, the rooftop used to have several large planter-like concrete boxes containing just dirt and grass. “It was a fairly ugly space, but it could turn into a great place,” Johnson said. According to Director of Galleries and Collections Amy Schlegel, the artistic and architectural design team for the project was selected through the standard Request for Quotations (RFQ) process, where different teams of architects and artists bid for the project. “Because Tufts is an internationally recognized university, we felt it would be appropriate to look internationally for a public artist and/or landscape architectural team to refurbish the Tisch Library rooftop plaza/ site,” Schlegel told the Daily in an email. New York-based artist Jackie Ferrara’s design was chosen from 150 artists’ and designers’ submissions, according to a 2009 publication of Around the Circle, the newsletter of the Tufts University Art Gallery’s Contemporary Art Circle. Ferrara chose to collaborate with M. Paul Friedberg, an internationally renowned landscape artist, in facilitating the construction of the design. “We liked the work of each of them separately, and they had worked together before, so it made sense,” Tom Mendell said. “So we had the combination of a landscape architect and an artist, several people from the university and us. Adele Bacow was very involved. Everyone we dealt with was terrific.” The Mendells continued to be involved — both personally and financially — throughout the process of designing and constructing the memorial. “The Mendells grew to love the project and the site so much they came along with the artists’ vision for transforming the site and made a larger gift that perhaps they were initially planning,” Schlegel said. “Of course they met Jackie Ferrara when she was first selected. So, in short, they were very engaged and involved throughout the process.” According to Tom Mendell, Alex had an idea of someday building a coffee shop on top of the Tisch Library to create a space for students and faculty to meet up and hang out. To honor this vision, the Mendells originally thought about building a coffee shop as a memorial. “The rooftop was a perfect place to do [this], but unfortunately the Tisch Library wouldn’t let that happen because they were going to put one in their library,” Tom Mendell said. Tisch opened the Tower Café in the fall of 2005. “So we were only capable of beautifying the rooftop,” Andrea Mendell said. “Before, it was an eyesore.” According to Schlegel, the Mendells decided by early 2006 that a renovation of the rooftop was ideal for the project, due to its central location on campus. This was meant to honor Alex’s involvement in a variety of student groups on campus. Alex was a senator on the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate for the entirety of his time on campus. He also served as the cochairman of the Women’s Union, a member
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Zhuangchen Zhou / The Tufts Daily
Dedicated in 2009, Alex’s Place serves as a memorial for Tufts student Alex Mendell. of the club ski team and a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. “[Alex] took a lot of pride in the Tufts campus, and he thought that students should actively be involved in the campus,” Tom Mendell said. “He got upset when people littered, things like that.” The redesign of the rooftop was intended to reflect the rhythms of both Alex’s life and campus life. After Ferrara and Friedberg were chosen to redesign the space, efforts were made to make students and faculty aware of the project on campus. “Students in a museum studies course I taught during the semester just before construction began organized a small exhibition of Jackie Ferrara’s indoor sculpture and ‘models,’ and they also produced a video interview with Ferrara and Friedberg that looped inside the exhibition,” Schlegel said. Tom and Andrea Mendell said that one of the objectives in funding this project was to create something that not only honored their son, but also benefited the Tufts community. “We think it’s a nice memorial for Alex and it’s terrific for the school,” Tom said. “We hear all the time from faculty, students and prospective students about how lovely the space is.” The open area of the memorial contains a mosaic floor that doubles as a sundial, an L-shaped trellis, raised planting beds, a clear view of the Boston skyline and the view of campus that Alex loved so much. This area was intended for and is now used for various campus functions, exhibits and special events. “We use it, actually, for alumni functions and a variety of large student functions, and there are smaller functions as well,” Johnson said. “It’s a space where people can go without having a particular function, and they can just hang out, too.” Heading farther into Alex’s Place, there are three outdoor “rooms” that are partially secluded from the rest of the roof, which provide spaces for contemplation or quiet study. A canopy overhead of limbs from river birch trees and hostas is meant to add to the meditative atmosphere of these spaces. “The use [of each space] is entirely discretionary. The visitor can decide how to respond to the space,” Ferrara said in the 2009 Around the Circle issue. “We, as designers, are facilitators. Having released the design, our interest is to see how creatively the visitor encounters and uses the place.” There are some subtleties in the design of the space as well that commemorate Alex. For example, Alex’s name is spelled out in Morse code along the northern end of the L-shaped trellis. Ferrara included this feature because pilots use Morse code and Alex was an Instrument-Rated pilot, according to Tom. An Instrumental Rating denotes that a
pilot is qualified to fly in bad weather conditions such as rain, fog or snow. Andrea recalled how Alex once piloted a plane to transport their family during a bad storm. “He flew us back from Vermont one year in a complete whiteout,” she said. Tom said that the family still does not know why exactly Alex took his own life. “He had everything going for him. There’s a lot of mystery involved. Nothing has come out in the 10 years since that tells us what was going through his head,” Mendell said. “This was a wonderful kid. I don’t know that he had any enemies. This [redesign] was a way we could help memorialize his memory and benefit the campus in a way [that would make him] smile.” Alex’s loss was devastating for his family and community. However, his memorial on the Tisch roof continues to honor his life by giving back to the Tufts community. “It was a tremendous tragedy for us and a tremendous tragedy for him,” Tom said. “He had a future. The one characteristic everyone remembers about him is how bright and curious he was. He’d always be asking more questions.” “What better way to keep his memory alive than at the university where young people and students are learning?” Andrea added. “It’s perpetual.”
Throwback Thursday
hen I was applying to colleges, none of my potentially first-generation college-bound friends had the nerve to entertain the thought of a gap year. I never thought critically about the prospect of volunteering on a political campaign or working full-time at an internship before delving into the overpriced pressure cooker that is higher education. “College is not an option; you will go to college,” my grandmother would say at the outset of any conversation we had about higher education. A lifetime of being looked over and professionally punished for not having completed a college program had taught her that, while academic pursuits and interests were just dandy, college degrees breed opportunity, for better or for worse. In my high school, the graduating seniors wrote their university acceptances on paper stars outside the college counselor’s office. I watched for weeks as stars were decked out with bubble letters of household name institutions and filled up like laundry lists of acceptances. I asked a student why he had not written anything down (as if he had to explain his decision-making), he said, “College isn’t for me.” I realized that I, like most of our peers, had assumed that the college would bring with it the promises of its magical symbolism. We had not taken into consideration the fact that so many of us truly are not “cut out” for endless lectures, rote memorization or academia. But what about our peers, the foot soldiers who maintain that college isn’t the right option, and the strength it takes to actively reject the social flogging that comes along with actively deciding against college? A great friend of mine inspired this column about the foot soldiers who opt out of college in pursuit of work, stability, discovery, duty or an unknown number of other quests and decisions and how they are judged without any regard to the internal work required to make such a decision. It is as monumental a choice to choose, at 18, an institution where you will live, study and be molded as it is to choose to be shaped in the “real world.” Not until relatively recently in Western educational history did lawyers, doctors, journalists and architects pursue higher education to learn their trade instead of the usual route of apprenticeship. An added emphasis on “formal” education instead of vocational skill makes it easy to judge the individuals who choose not to go to college because they know that it’s not the only option. The concept of a college education is extremely complex, way too intense for 600 words, and every day, it’s being further complicated, glorified and debunked by those inside and outside of the “ivory towers.” College degrees try to connote that a person has chosen one life path over another, aligned herself with another set of goals and expectations over another, and the parallel is to be drawn stiffly between those with degrees and those without who instead attend the school of life. We are going to call these degrees of separation. Let us consider the self-knowledge (or -awareness, or a lack thereof) that it takes to do that and the people who are not in college because it was not for them, because it was not made for them. These spaces weren’t made with everyone in mind — we can be honest about that. From what is taught to which programs are funded and underfunded to how dissent is “managed,” it is clear. So when someone can break from that and know it’s not for them, that is why they are they judged, put down as “go-nowhere” people. They are seen this way because they refused to enter into situations that could do more harm than good, because they don’t subject themselves to these environments.
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Tim Thurrott, a resident of Medford, cruises down Packard Ave. in 1988. Photo by Denise Drower.
Brionna Jimerson is a senior majoring in American studies. She can be reached at Brionna.Jimerson@tufts. edu or on Twitter @brionnajay.