Although not yet extant a century, the history of the Harvard Union has been as erratically interesting as the oldest timber in the Yard, reflecting throughout the popular theme of social transition.

Any undergraduate today returning to the building will lose his eyebrows in the stratosphere. Specially, a door has been carved from the kitchen to the entrance hall; tables and chairs, light maple with stiff backs, crowd the lounge, newspaper, and chess rooms; the piano sits sullenly in the entrance hall; the radio hides somewhere upstairs; and worst of all, the sanctified first floor lavatory has been opened out into the old zoo, displacing a lion's skin, and gleaming in the aluminum splendor of steam-tables a la mode.

Yet, if it all is a little hard to swallow, a review of the Union's past will mellow the gloomy outlook. When it was first opened in 1901, its appearance was unrecognizable to any present undergraduate. The original disposition of rooms and corridors revealed a Baroque cross-plan.

Open arches in the entrance hall contained a barber shop, a news stand, and two oppositely place corridors, that in the left being the only entrance to the main dining room on Prescott Street. An open band-stand stood outside the main lounge, overlooked by the private dining rooms on the second floor, and bed-rooms on the third.

Soon Lost Old Flavor

Almost everyone in or connected with the College was a member, club members as well as the un-clubbed. The purpose of Major Higgins, who had sponsored the construction to the extent of $150,000 was at first achieved; Democracy had to a considerable extent been brought to Harvard.

But membership dropped off. Early memberships decreased; and few new Life Memberships were added to the lists. Meeting land rents to the University became increasingly difficult. Readjustments were missing. The Business School moved in and out of the west end; the H. A. A. set up its offices under the kitchen. The barber shop moved to smaller quarters in the basement and eventually died out entirely. Throughout, however, membership was sufficient to retain the Union status.

The combination of depression and Mr. Harkness, in 1930, nevertheless, combined to remake the Union completely. The adoption of the House system and the University's plan to feed all undergraduate students left the Freshmen, inheritors of Yard dormitories, without an eating or meeting place.

The Union was the one building that could solve both problems. The changes were most brutal. Yearly membership ceased; only Life Members retaining their eating privileges. The Freshmen, with their smokers and vaudevilles displaced all else, only to be displaced by the Navy in 1942.