Building gets new home, new purpose
Black Cultural Center will be renovated, expanded
Lafayette College’s Portlock Black Cultural Center was literally “on a roll” Wednesday.
Wednesday morning, the college propped a more than 100-year-old stone building on wheels and rolled it from 517 Clinton Terrace to 41 McCartney St. At its new location, the building will be renovated so it can become the new home for the Portlock Black Cultural Center. Renovations are expected to be finished in January.
A small crowd stood around the perimeter of the moving site at the edge of campus. The move, which cost $150,000, started a little after 8 a.m. and an hour and half later, it had already made its way across the street and was ready to turn the corner into its new permanent address.
The home, built in the early 1900s, was moved as part of a settlement that Lafayette reached with neighbors in 2018 who opposed the construction of new dorms. In order for Lafayette to build new dorms, about a dozen properties had to come down, but the college agreed to preserve the historic home on Clinton Terrace.
The home previously housed students, but was empty this past year due to COVID-19.
The renovations for the old home will include adding a functional basement and porch. The building will also have a residential space for three students, a full kitchen, office and programming area. For the interior renovations, items will be taken from the old center, such as paintings and banisters.
The current Portlock Black Cultural Center, housed at a nearby spot, has residential space, a library, computer rooms, offices and a student gallery on the first floor. All of this will be in the new location.
The new center will also fill the needs of the expanding student body at Lafayette. This year, Lafayette will have more than 800 first year and transfer students, making it the largest incoming class.
Robert Young, director of intercultural development at Lafayette, said the space is for all cultural organizations to use. The Association of Black Collegians, Brothers of Lafayette, the women’s support group and others will use the space for their programming.
“We needed a space that will accommodate a growing number of students,” Young said. “The current house, functionality-wise just did not satisfy the current needs and what the future will look like for students.”
Typically, up to 400 students are involved with the cultural organizations, Young said, so the center is a highly used space.
Having a designated area for students of color at Lafayette is needed, said Young, who was part of the Portlock Black Cultural Center when he was a student at Lafayette. Sixty-nine percent of the student body is white, and only 6% is Black.
“It’s a safe space, because there’s not too many for the Black community at Lafayette, at a predominately white institution,” he said. “What’s special about this space is that it is really for the advancement and for the functionality of Black and brown students.”
The current building that the Portlock Black Cultural Center is in will be demolished and a new facility will be built on the spot for student housing to accommodate Lafayette’s plan to increase enrollment.
For the upcoming semester, no students will live in the cultural center but it will still be used as programming space until the new one is ready for use.
“Change is exciting,” Young said. “It stresses some people out, but change is exciting. I’m excited for what that new change is going to look like. I’m excited for what the expansion of the college is going to look like.”