At the yearly “Naked Formal,” Adams House residents would invite models for classes in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies to come nude.

According to Spaepen, many other students would end up taking off their clothes as well.

“When you went up to the library there were naked people milling about,” she says.

Although Spaepen says the arts continued to be popular in Adams, by her senior year she noticed fewer people were dressing up in drag for their traditional Halloween “Drag Night.”

Jocks in Cement Blocks

Only a few blocks away, Mather House retained a much quieter atmosphere—since the overwhelming percentage of athletes who lived there were often away at practices or games, according to House Master Leigh G. Hafrey ’73.

Hafrey says when he and his wife, Sandra A. Naddaff ’75, took over as Masters in 1993, Mather housed a disproportionate number of athletes, including most of the varsity football team.

While Hafrey remembers some raucous weekend parties, he says the silence when the teams were on road trips was more noticeable.

“For us, the striking thing was a lot of people weren’t around,” Hafrey says. “It was kind of lonely.”

Dinner in the dining hall usually consisted of the football team sitting together at one of the three long tables that used to span the length of the room, Hafrey says.

Self-Segregation

But not every House’s character was formed around students’ mutual interests. Some Houses, like Eliot and Pforzheimer, fell prey to self-segregation by wealth or race, according to Matthew Gentzkow ’96, a tutor in Eliot House.

“Eliot was supposedly the blue-blood, ‘more Harvard than Harvard’ House,” says Gene Koo ’97, a tutor in Pforzheimer House who lived in Eliot as an undergraduate. “If you were to go through the yearbook I think you could basically look at the skin color of people in the House and you would see it was decidedly lighter skinned than Pforzheimer House.”

In 1996, The Crimson reported that only 4.8 percent of Eliot, Winthrop and Kirkland residents were black, compared to 24.6 percent of residents in the Quad Houses—Cabot, Currier and Pforzheimer.

Mather housed the highest percentage of white students with 78.9 percent.