This is way tardy.

I traveled back to Boston last October — you know, before Omicron — to visit family and friends, and to join classmates at a BC football game. On the day of my flight home, I went to the campus to video some buildings and scenes that were new to me and may be to some of you.

Most of the video shows the largest building on campus — the Margot Connell Recreation Center (entrance above) — which opened in 2019. Those of you who remember the Flynn Recreation Complex will recall it was centered on three or four tennis courts, with a running track encircling them. There were also racketball and squash courts and a pool. Only later were a limited number of treadmills added.

The new facility also has tennis courts and a pool, but it provides so much space for individual workout stations as well as new elements, e.g., a climbing wall, as you’ll see in the video. You’ll also see that, last October, one of the basketball court spaces served as the campus COVID testing site.

The video also shows the campus’s newest structure still under construction. It opened in January. Housing the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science, the building is known as 245 Beacon, until there is a naming gift. It was built on the site of Cushing Hall, former home of the Connell School of Nursing, which is now in Maloney Hall. You can learn more about the new building in this Heights article.

The video opens, though, with the Thomas More Apartments, which opened in fall 2016. The student residences are just east of St. Ignatius Church, on the former site of Thomas More Hall, which had first been the home of the BC Law School and later an administrative building, housing Human Resources, Advancement, and other offices. 

If you haven’t been back to campus for 10 years or more, then you may be surprised to see what happened to the “Dustbowl,” the open space surrounded by College Road, McElroy, Carney, Fulton, and Lyons that served as an off-road parking lot in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s gone. Well, it’s been significantly reduced in scale.

Stokes Hall, the largest academic building on campus, opened in 2013. It occupies most of what had been the Dustbowl.

This post and the video are all limited to changes on the Chestnut Hill Campus. When I return to Boston this fall, I’ll try to capture some of the changes on the Newton and Brighton campuses.

Here’s the video (5:37).