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Today, Pforzheimer House residents regularly swipe into the Adams House dining hall without a passing thought. But unbeknownst to many, this is a hard-won privilege that their Pfoho predecessors fought for during a militant episode in Harvard’s history: the Adams-Pfoho Dining Hall War of 1999.

During the fall of 1999, upperclassmen regularly flocked to Adams’ centrally-located dining hall to grab a quick lunch between classes. But this led to overcrowding, food shortages, and unpaid overtime for dining hall workers, triggering House residents to take up arms in defense of their dining hall.

Their first weapon of choice – a large gong — was rung whenever a non-Adams house student attempted to sneak into the dining hall. When this failed to deter hungry outsiders, Adams House put white stickers on its students’ Harvard IDs to mark who was allowed to eat in the Adams Dhall.

This angered many interhouse students who liked to eat in Adams — especially those in Pfoho House — according to Pfoho House Committee chair Manuel A. Garcia ’00.

“People did not like going back to the quad for lunch,” Garcia said. “Everyone would go to Adams House — especially quad people.”

So, as a response, the Pfoho House Committee held a vote to symbolically ban Adams House residents from their dining hall, which, to Garcia’s surprise, failed to pass.

Still, this incited retaliation in turn from Adams residents, who on October 11, officially declared war on Pforzheimer House and claimed the “Pf” of Pforzheimer as their own, calling themselves “Pfadams House.”

The first shots of the war were fired on October 13, when Pfoho residents broke into the Adams dhall and stole the gong.

In response, Adams residents plastered posters across Pfoho that read “the sun never sets on the pfadams empire,” crossing out all “pf”s from Pfoho across the House.

Adams House Committee Chair David L. Levy ’00 said the House’s retaliation against Pfoho was not only an escalation in the dining hall war — it was a moment of bonding for Adams House residents.

“We were the second randomized class in Adams. So by the time we were seniors, the House had been fully randomized,” Levy said. “We had come into the house in this transitional moment when the Houses still were trying to figure out, what did it mean to have a House identity when people weren’t actively choosing their Houses anymore?”

Pfoho responded to Adams’ attacks by locking the gates to Adams House with a padlock. They also posted notes on freshman dorm doors which told them that Annenberg, the freshman dining hall, was closed, and that they should eat at Adams instead.

To resolve the dispute, the warring Houses agreed to compete in an October 17 battle, where both Houses’ masters would preside over a football game, drag contest, and tug-of-war contest.

If Pfoho won, its residents would gain the right to eat in Adams for a year without being plagued by the clang of the gong. If Adams won, Pfoho agreed to permanently relinquish the use of its “Pf” to Adams House.

Levy said the outcome of the competition rested on the results of the tug-of-war competition.

“The tug of war was like, okay, that could be anyone’s game,” he said. “We knew they were going to beat us in football. We knew we would beat them in drag.”

But he said Adams students planned to “throw” the tug-of-war competition to create a “peace treaty” to give Pfoho residents a “special status in the dining hall.”

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“We also now have this way of being like, ‘Hey, listen, we came up with a compromise. Pfoho can come use our dining hall, everyone else can go fuck themselves,’” Levy said. (He clarified that the expletive should be spelled with a “pf,” as in “Pfoho,” and that his account of the contest might have involved some revisionist history.)

Adams House Masters Sean G. Palfrey ’67 and Judy S. Palfrey ’67 said that on the day of the competition, Adams students paraded up to the Quad on Massachusetts Avenue – blowing whistles and waving banners – and carried a cage with Pfoho’s “Pf” locked inside.

In the end, as Levy had anticipated, Adams won the drag performance and Pfoho won the football game and tug-of-war, leaving Pfoho as the overall victors in the war.

Pfoho residents were given Adams Dhall stickers on their IDs, and a sign which read “Property of Pfoho” hung over the Adams gong for the following year.

Garcia praised the War for creating a sense of House spirit in the newly randomized environment.

“It was actually a nice House spirit-building activity that I still remember really fondly 25 years later,” he said.

To this day, Pforzheimer residents are allowed to eat in the Adams dining hall whenever they wish. The tradition has also expanded, with Cabot and Currier Houses now eating in corresponding River dining halls.

“It’s one of those cool things that it’s actually lasted so long,” Garcia said.

—Staff writer Ellen P. Cassidy can be reached at ellen.cassidy@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @ellenpcassidy.

—Staff writer Evan H.C. Epstein can be reached at evan.epstein@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X at @Evan_HC_Epstein.