In the end, new suites with wall-to-wall carpeting, snow-white walls and polished moldings skylights and high-tech furniture made the difference. Also, the new North House offices feature glass enclosures and split levels, while Cabot boasts a spacious, multi-purpose junior common room.

"The administration felt that housing should be improved to the kind of standard of the river houses," said North House Master J. Woodland Hastings. "It worked," he added.

"People weren't choosing to go to the Quad," said Mortimer, who helped direct the renovations. "If we could find some way to increase the amenities in the Quad," he recalled thinking, the image of the houses might change. The result was big common spaces and a balance of singles and suites. "The only thing we couldn't do anything about was the perceived disadvantage of distance."

Shocking Popularity

To most who were randomed into the Quad in earlier years, its new-found popularity arrives as a "shock," said Mitevski. "It reflects a change not inherently but in the way people perceive the Quad."

According to Parsons, that was the goal. Since Radcliffe days dating to the late 1960s, the Quad houses' cold singles off of hallways--intended to preserve the purity of its all-women residents--made living there experiments in social deprivation.

"People had felt isolated at the Quad," Parsons said.

"It makes a difference to the feeling of any house that [students] are not suffering but happy to be there," said Hastings.

As Bok told well-wishers at ribbon-cutting ceremonies of a re-done North last year, changes may well indicate a permanent shift in the balance of popularity.

"By all accounts," Bok said, "I think North House has the most attractive accomodations in all the University." And as the president said, times may prove "the emergence of the new Quad, a triumph of co-residency."