The view from Orange Street

Back in my day...
    By Chris Clemens

Hello. My name is Chris Clemens, and I'm an on-campus wannabe. I live in a house at the corner of Orange and Bradley streets, about a block down from the entrance to I-95. I'm an undergrad, but I live in a hazy, limnal Twilight Zone where grad students walk the streets like kings and property values go down year after year. I live in the Grad Student Ghetto.

Down here, you're closer to your TAs than you've ever wanted to be. I've received mail for a woman who TAed my British novel course. I get my laundry tips from a physics grad student—now there's a man who knows his delicates from his permanent press. It's like section meeting all the time around here—do you know what it's like to bluff your way through section, think that you're safe from Wallace Stevens for a week, and then run into your TA on the street outside your house, only to have him discern that you never did the reading at all? It's nerve-racking. It's enough to give you a persecution complex.

Life in the Ghetto, however, is not just about physical proximity to the men and women who determine your grades. It gives you a phenomenal amount of insight into the lives these furtive people lead as well. For an on-campus student, the University is like a protective shield. If he or she chooses, the Yale undergrad can live and work entirely within the boundaries of the Yale community; contact with New Haven itself can be as brief as the 10 seconds we spend doling out change to the panhandlers at Krauszer's.

In the Ghetto, though, you can't be blind to the facts of New Haven life. My roommate had his car stereo stolen twice in the space of a month and a half. He just came out on the back porch one morning and found his back windshield smashed in and his ability to play Eagles tapes dramatically decreased. The Jovin murder was doubly frightening to the TAs who teach our sections: many of them have to walk down New Haven's back streets every night on the way home from the library.

There's a weird feeling of dislocation that comes with living out here, too. It's a funky, hermetic existence—like the Snow Monster in The Empire Strikes Back, no one knows quite where you live, but they know you're out there somewhere. The dining hall, the library, and the TV room take on a sacred glow as your gateways to the Yale community. I can't tell you how distraught I was when the Administration put cable in every room—suddenly everybody started bringing TVs from home, and the Sunday night Simpsons gatherings in the TV lounge were a thing of the past. That was my family!

In addition, I never realized what a wonderful institution the dining hall system was until I moved off campus. Trust me, I know how you feel about dining hall food, but you gain a broader, more enlightened perspective after you have tried to subsist on Hamburger Helper for six months. I have friends who have tried to shop for healthy food and get by, but most of them become nervous and undernourished after a while. Most of them realize, as I did, that organic celery just isn't worth it and end up living on microwaveable cuisine.

If you have ever wondered why your TAs seem so grumpy and sallow, here's a clue: life in the Ghetto, in addition to all the other challenges at Yale, will turn an ordinary, cheerful person into a hardened, old miser faster than you can say, "No, it's 2 a.m. and I've never met you before in my life. You many not come in off the street and use my phone."

There are, of course, benefits to living off campus. It's generally a quiet and study-friendly atmosphere, though my new neighbor upstairs does have a tendency to blast Rick James a little too loudly sometimes. Also, I don't have to go to Yale Station to get my Sports Illustrated every week. You do see a different side of Yale down here, and you get a little better idea of what it's like to move away from the protections and safeguards of undergraduate life. For the many of us who will go on to graduate-level education, this will be a welcome change; the grad student community is much more dispersed and more independent than its undergraduate counterpart. For the rest of us, though, the Grad Student Ghetto should stand as a reminder that life here at Yale is really pretty damn good.

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