When I meet people at parties, I like to tell them about the Olive Pit, an enormous gravel quarry visible from the Metrolink San Bernardino Line just east of Baldwin Park Station. Peering across the cavernous open-air mine, deep enough to stack two of Claremont McKenna College’s seven-story South Quad towers on top of one another, you can see the exposed backyard fences of suburban homes a half mile away. But these Baldwin Park residents have little say in what goes on next door — the pit is in the neighboring city of Irwindale, which approved the mine’s reopening in 2017 despite a lawsuit from Baldwin Park alleging that Irwindale didn’t fully consider the project’s impacts.
Look closer, I tell my enticed interlocutors, and you’ll find many other examples of this phenomenon: If you have to place an unsightly land use somewhere, why not set it right next to your neighbor’s fence so they’ll be the ones who have to deal with its consequences?
Each time I walk back to CMC from Jay’s Place alone, as I navigate the sawtoothed terraces of the parking lot between Harvey Mudd College and Scripps College and wind through the cramped stairways and paths on both sides of 9th Street, I am reminded once more of what Olive Pit teaches us about the planning pitfalls of borders.
The 5Cs have beautiful, inviting campuses — individually. Within each college, wide paths and meticulously-designed landscapes invite students to explore and congregate. From the outside, however, these inward-facing compounds send a very different message, practically screaming at those traveling to or between the 7Cs to return to where they came from.
Perhaps understandably, we take these barriers for granted. In many cases, they are a natural response to topographical constraints and decades of evolving transportation and facilities needs. But we shouldn’t accept a status quo that contradicts our consortium’s pluralistic values, makes our daily lives less safe and walkable and adds further barriers to accessibility.
Rather than resigning ourselves to a campus of walled gardens and elevated enclaves, we must revive a vision at the heart of the urban planning that originally defined our consortium: one of collaboration and spatial connection, across the streets, hills and walkways that mark our separate campuses.
The menacing Platt Boulevard parking lot between Harvey Mudd and Scripps is one example of the challenges of inter-campus connectivity at Claremont. My journey begins with the descent from the elevated Mudd campus to the much lower sidewalk level. Depending on which side of Mudd’s Hoch Shanahan Dining Commons I’m passing, this is either a graceful, tree-lined mall that empties onto three adjacent roadways at different elevations, bridged by two separate inhospitable medians with no crosswalk in sight, or a descent down a narrow, hidden stairway into the Hoch’s loading dock, which ironically ends in a crosswalk that safely leads to Scripps.
This unacceptable, uneven street construction stems from a century-long balancing act between accessibility, mobility and parking space along what would become Platt Blvd. In 1982, founding Claremont Colleges administrator Robert Bernard’s book “An Unfinished Dream: A Chronicle of the Group Plan of The Claremont Colleges” outlined the original vision for the consortium’s campuses and proposed collaboration between the schools in planning the colleges’ central infrastructure.
According to Bernard’s book, in the 1920s, the founders of the Claremont Colleges dreamed of an idealized campus which would transcend these challenges. These original depictions of the Group Plan envisioned an unmistakably unified campus crisscrossed by long, curving pathways, with expansive fields shared between the colleges on the outer edges. “Campuses are no further away than across the street from each other,” Bernard wrote, and all “within a limited, compact area.” However, this vision was never actualized because it ignored practical constraints like topography and the need to separate traffic from pedestrians: logistical hurdles that led to obstacles now visible in the borders, like Platt Blvd, that define our current campus.
Scripps sought to close the road shortly after its 1928 founding. Still, the architects of the consortium plan kept it as a landscaped boulevard so traffic could move through the area. That spirit of central planning didn’t last — after Harvey Mudd was founded, both colleges built structures facing away from the newly widened road, and their walkways didn’t align at its edges, making it difficult to place crosswalks that bridged the median. Decades later, in the 2010s, the wide, grassy median on the Mudd side was replaced with a strip of parking elevated a few feet above the Scripps side, making it even harder to cross.
Spatial and topographical constraints are similarly to blame for parts of CMC’s campus feeling closed off to neighboring colleges. As a CMC student, I can’t help but lament the tragedy of the Cube, one of the most renowned study spaces in the galaxy, being so difficult to access from Pomona College and Scripps. Perhaps even removing Walker Wall — which marks the northernmost boundary of Pomona’s campus and separates it from the CMC campus — despite it being a key public canvas for art and public expression, would be a small sacrifice if it alone would remedy this terrible oversight. But lo and behold, 9th Street, which sits between CMC and Scripps, sits about a story higher than the street level to its south, at Pomona. If not for these roads, ramps, steps and buildings from the other colleges that awkwardly screen CMC in, the Cube itself would sit at a steep angle.
Though practical constraints such as topography and freight traffic doomed early master plans to be a fantasy, they were still an important North Star for the early development of the colleges. Reflecting decades later on his history of the colleges, a now elderly Bernard lamented the decline in coordination of the colleges’ master plans, warning that “[w]hatever may be the good will and good intentions of the individual colleges in choosing architects and in approving their building and campus plans,” the introduction of a unified 5C-wide Architectural Commission would be needed “not only for the benefit of the separate colleges, but for the sake of the neighboring colleges.”
Bernard passed away in 1981, the year before his book was published. He was among the last of the generation which remembered when the Claremont Colleges were the dream of a single group of administrators rather than the heritage of seven real-life institutions with their own disparate interests.
More than 40 years later, I live in the built manifestation of these disparate interests and spatial constraints. I’m just a student here, walking home from Jay’s Place at 2 a.m. — I have no idea if establishing an Architectural Commission to honor Bernard’s wishes would be the right way to make the walk less arduous in the long term. The literal vision of the Group Plan may simply linger as a pipe dream today, but we should hope for a future in which a student could walk from Harvey Mudd to Pomona without going far out of their way to squeeze between parked cars and navigate an unending maze of curbs and elevations to descend from one field to the road. Even if the realistic outcome may never be tearing down Walker Wall or planting trees in the parking spaces on Platt Blvd, we must remember that our campuses were always meant to be spatially unified and collaborative — we must traverse between the misaligned architectures of our colleges and make the Group Plan’s forebears proud.
Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 helped lead a student campaign to get free transit passes at the Claremont Colleges for next semester, and only realized it was connected to this article halfway through writing it.
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