News-Letter

Media Credit: Daniel Litwin A News-Letter reporter explores Gilman as renovations continue.

It was unbearably cold when I began my tour of Gilman and its ongoing renovations last Wednesday morning - even colder inside the building than out. I was quickly struck by the true extent of the project when, climbing a staircase to the third floor, Project Superintendent Eddie Delluomo said casually, "Good thing you came today; all these staircases are coming out in a week."

I glanced down at the steps beneath me, irrationally afraid that they might decide to demolish themselves early at the suggestion of their disappearance.

From the outside, Gilman appears much as it ever did. Although the building is covered in scaffolding, surrounded by workmen and emitting more noise than it used to, it has remained unchanged over the course of construction in all its outward essentials.

On the inside, though, it is the proverbial whole new world.

Gilman is in the midst of what Delluomo calls the dismantling phase of construction. As far as I can tell, this means Gilman's interior will continue to resemble a dusty, labyrinthine concrete wasteland, an otherworld rife with temporary staircases and plywood dividers.

Gutted, the building is practically unrecognizable to someone who spent many happy hours searching its hallways for offices and bathrooms in the past. Unless you make for a window and attempt to orient yourself using the outside world, there are virtually no remaining points of reference within the building itself.

Gone are the somewhat seedy, yellowed hallways, the two central stairwells, the endless bulletin boards and the dilapidated elevator. Gone are the vending machines, the leather couches, the bridge connecting the entryway and the HUT and the sunken bookstore.

It's not just that Gilman has been filled with workers and jackhammers or that the center of the building is being entirely restructured. It's that the landscape of Gilman has been so entirely changed that it's almost impossible to superimpose the past on the present, and more difficult still to imagine the future.

Gilman's new centerpiece, not yet installed, will be the vast glass atrium intended to inhabit the previously open space around which the building was constructed. It won't be making an appearance in the construction process until this fall, but preparations are being made for its arrival.

Continued...

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