For a long time, students have been wondering exactly what the dorm options will be for the 2013 housing lottery. On Wednesday, ResCouncil posted a list of all the changes. We’ve broken them down for you in an easy-to-digest map:

Note: Greek and program houses located in sophomore communities will still be open to juniors and seniors.

A year ago, the University announced a sweeping plan for renovating and reorganizing campus housing. We won’t recap the details of that, but there are some important differences between that plan and the new one: Perkins will be sophomore doubles, not junior/senior singles, and Slater and Hegeman will be for juniors and seniors, not sophomores. Read more here.

Image via.

Many former Keeney residents were shocked when they returned to campus to find that the building received a major facelift. But this summer’s changes hardly end there.

Today’s Herald featured a spread that breaks down all of this and next summer’s housing changes, which aim to create a more uniform progression of housing from freshman to senior year. Since we’ve already given you a photo tour of the new Keeney, we now bring you inside some of the other renovated dorms.

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This changes everything.

Living in Keeney has been known to have its advantages and disadvantages. For a long time, Keeney Quadrangle has been defined as a hub of activity due to its large concentration of freshmen first-years (+).  Keeney was also defined by the condition of its interior: not so great (-). The furniture was old, the bathrooms were gross, and kitchen and lounge space was scarce.

As part of a larger plan for dorm renovations, Keeney is being renovated in two phases. The first phase, which occurred this summer, overhauled and reconfigured student rooms and created new “magnet lounges” (with fancy kitchens!) on the top floors. Next summer, the bathrooms and hallways will be renovated, elevator installation will be completed, and the building will be split into three separate sections. Check out BlogDailyHerald’s tour of the new and improved Keeney after the jump.

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I’m living in New York City this summer, (let’s be honest, which humanities major interested in “media” isn’t living in New York this summer?), but I visited Providence last weekend and saw something so incredible that I felt obligated to share with you all:

Brown has built stairs up to the eastern entrance of Caswell Hall.

Not only did Brown succesfully complete a logical building project, but they identified a glaring architectural oversight whose absurdity I have never fully appreciated. Facilities hoped to build these stairs last summer, but postponed the plans for the sake of bike racks and lighting. Jeez, people, you and your environmentally ethical transportation choices and your legitimate expectation of late-night safety.

These stairs represent, in my opinion, a great triumph for Facilities. Yet, I still find this to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the stairs mean less drunken scrambling and fewer scraped elbows and knees. On the other hand, the stairs mean less drunken scrambling of people drunker and more confident than I, and thus the lessening of my ability to make fun of their failures. Hmm…

Image via Ashton Strait ’13. 

Chubbs the gator hangs out on the bottom shelf of Derrick Duquette 12.5's TV stand.

If you don’t already know all about  the exotic pets some students keep in their dorm rooms, then clearly you didn’t read Wednesday’s Herald.

While the article has all the hilarious stories from students who’ve kept alligators, hedgehogs and bunnies in their rooms — as well as warnings from ResLife about the health and safety problems that pets can cause — newspapers have limited space, and we couldn’t fit in all the photos we got.

Fortunately, BlogDH has got you covered. After the jump, we have EVEN MORE PET PHOTOS! And some of them are really cute. [Read more →]

Courtesy of Brown Auxiliary Housing

An email from our favorite prez, Ruth, just announced some exciting news from the Corporation meeting this weekend:

The Budget & Finance Committee approved funding for renovations, beginning next summer, to 315 Thayer Street to expand campus housing. Currently an apartment building, the project will result in a 66-bed dormitory within the residential hall system.

Props to the Corporation for actually doing something about our housing crisis, even if it may just be a band-aid for the problem.  Here’s hoping a newly constructed dorm is soon to follow!

President Ruth Simmons has certainly been out and about on campus a lot this week.

To start off, her face has been plastered around campus on Brown Women’s Rugby Football Club flyers, advertising $2 raffle tickets through Friday to win a one-hour lunch with the president. For those without even $2 to spare, attendance at an entire team practice will suffice.

But even that price might be too steep for those residents of Barbour Hall that got to hang out with President Simmons for free, when she showed up as a surprise guest to the 2nd Barbour Family Style Potluck Feb. 8. Barbour’s Community Assistants invited the president to the first potluck last semester, but she was unable to come, Victoria Chen ’11, one of the CAs, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. President Simmons stayed at the potluck for about half an hour, chatting with students about — what else? — the upcoming Super Bowl.

But while she has appeared on posters around campus and in residence halls, there is one place where President Simmons doesn’t seem to be on students’ minds. Despite rumors that students were listing the president as a crush, not a single e-mail from Prospect & Meeting, Brown’s new dating site, has been sent to either of President Simmons’ two Brown e-mail addresses, Assistant to the President Hanna Rodriguez-Farrar ’87 MA’90 PhD’09 wrote in an e-mail to The Herald (though she added that they may have been caught by a spam filter).

“Maybe everyone is just TALKING about putting her down as a prospect!” Rodriguez-Farrar wrote.

— Nicole Friedman

The Herald examines Brown’s multifaceted relationship with the city it calls home in its five-part Town/Brown series. Click here to visit the series page with articles, maps and multimedia at browndailyherald.com.

Today, the University sprawls over most of College Hill. But since it cleared 51 houses to build Wriston Quad, growth has brought controversy when Brown’s boundaries have blurred. Here’s a look at the transformation of the neighborhood around Brown’s campus. Read the full article.

1926: Hegeman Hall is built on the corner of Thayer and George, where a row of townhouses formerly stood.

Continue reading after the jump. [Read more →]

Brown is getting ready to add at least 300 new beds on campus as part of the Plan for Academic Enrichment in an effort to relieve the ongoing housing crunch. The new rooms could compensate for such residential catastrophes as last year’s unexpectedly high freshman enrollment that saw unsuspecting first-years living alongside ovens and stoves in converted lounges.

Though these newfangled rooms were definitely hot party venues (those fridges could fit a lot of…beverages), adding new residence halls has more appeal than, say, a swimming pool.

Now all we need is our Faunce steps back (and maybe a foccacia sandwich or two) and we’ll pretend all the new beds aren’t just a ruse to create a preemptive quarantine colony for the next global flu pandemic.