"Happy Birthday Currier House!" Giselle Crosa '98 exclaimed earlier this year.

For 25 years, Currier has been home to roughly 365 undergraduates, and throughout that time it has managed to offer an environment its residents find freiendly.

"It's one of the more social houses; one of the few places where you can meet a significant portion of the House," says Aelaf D. Worku '98.

Many say the most important aspect of the house is its diversity. Because other houses have traditionally been more popular in the housing lottery, many of those who now live in the newest of the three houses in the Radcliffe Quad have been randomly assigned there, providing a true cross-section of students.

"[Our students] are almost a mirror of the College," says William A. Graham Jr., the Currier House Master. "That's what attracted us to it."

Baird Professor of Chemistry Dudley R. Herschbach, master of Currier House from 1981 to 1986, says many black students traditionally have chosen to live in the Quad and especially Currier.

He attributes this result to the fact that the year after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, blacks made up 8 percent of Harvard's incoming class rather than the 1 percent of previous years' classes.

During a time of heightened racial tension, many in this large new group of blacks saw the river houses as "monuments to the society that had excluded their ancestors. Currier was new and had no baggage," Herschbach says.

Distinctive Architecture

The house was originally built to help diversify the Quad; however, at that time, gender rather than ethnic diversification was the priority.

The mother of Audrey Bruce Currier '56, after whom the house was named, said when the house opened in 1970, "How fortunate it was we hadn't known that men would be admitted [to Currier House] until now and that the building was planned for women. Otherwise some of the best civilizing features might never have been considered."

Previously, the Harvard men lived in houses near the Charles River, while the Radcliffe women lived in dormitories in the Radcliffe Quad which have since been restructured into Cabot and Pforzheimer houses.

To accommodate some of the overflow caused by rising admissions of female students, Daniels tower--one of four towers that now make up Currier House--was built in 1966 or 1967, and, according to Graham, "Currier was designed around it."

Currier House was plagued early on by many problems, particularly telephone abnormalities.

The October 3, 1970, Crimson reports that Currier students were dismayed that they would have to pay higher monthly rates because they were required to use "touchtone, trim-line phones instead of regular phones."