S103. The carpet muffles the sound of footsteps. Each rolly-chair has hinges that squeak when you lean back—some are missing arm rests, the backboard crooked, the cushion permanently stuck a foot below the desk top.
The chalkboard is smudged, never fully cleared for the next issue, where names are assigned to the pages being laid out in the simplest fashion. But sometimes the nicknames that come about are memorable, laughable; Americentrism Arber, Ping Pong Ethan.
Most of the time, we’ll have music playing during layout, but the most notable sound is the clicking. The click of the mouse as it drags pictures and text back and forth, back and forth. The clack of the keyboards as we scramble to beef up our intros just a little bit more. And chatter—the same questions being asked about the ways of Adobe InDesign we’ve never been able to memorize, thinking out loud about our next headline ideas—does ‘Cloudy with a chance of snacks’ sound right?
A word to describe S103: cluttered. There are newspapers strewn over the cabinet tops, collecting dust in the file cabinets, stacked on the table in the middle of the room. There are two basketball hoops, six tiny, foam basketballs, and, as a result, tinier pieces of orange that decorate the corners of the floor. There’s a basket of untouched apples, purpling with overripeness. The kitchenette that houses our microwave and mini fridge and rusted sink is a room that’s been trifled with. A Potbelly sandwich once sat in there for weeks, turning rock hard, the rotten smell perforating the room.
But the lights—yards and yards of bulbs shining yellow. The overheads are never on—we rely on our standing lamps and the illuminating white glow of the computer screens to see clearly. But beneath the string lights are my most prized possession in this space: our polaroid pictures. Tens of memories are held up on the blue paper bulletin boards by tacks of a hundred different colors, each one captioned with something niche and vague and humorous—PHOEBE!! The St. Marks Incident. Kupu with salad.
There is something untouchable about S103, no matter how lived in it looks. It is chock-full of inside jokes, embarrassing moments, the borderline traumatic times InDesign didn’t save and a newspaper page was lost the night before we sent it to be printed. It is crowded with Friday Night Layouts where we spent more time playing Rose, Bud, Thorn than doing work, Saturday mornings fretting over deadlines between bites of Bagel Art cuisine, AM support News meetings with our very own homemade slides and all the laughter in between. Some weeks, I spend just as much time in this room as I do in my own room at home.
I don’t think of S103 as a classroom—it’s a hideaway for free periods and a haven for lunch. It’s our meeting room, our interview room, our work space. Sometimes it felt like a prison—trapped in the never ending ways of layout, meticulously moving every text box just one more millimeter towards the center, deleting accidentally and cursing and restarting and oh, my God, CC libraries isn’t working again.
I always thought people were lying when they said they met their best friends through something like a newspaper club until it happened to me. S103 laid the foundations for our friendship between its paperlined walls and wooden cabinets. We bonded over the stress of editing, the mysteries of our kitchen/closet and the hours spent pretending to edit stories and not learning InDesign—instead opting to exchange gossip and make several trips to the bathroom for no reason.
But really, to me S103 isn’t just a classroom, or just a place to eat lunch, or just a room for layout. It’s where I realized I wanted to be a journalist, and where I found the support to pursue just that. It’s where I met some of my favorite people, proudly displayed some of my favorite pictures and made some of my favorite memories. Because it was never really about the room—it was about the signatures on the wall of The Kitch from editors of past years, and the cabinets filled with issues that date back decades. It was about the people who filled the space, the people who made it worth returning to over and over again, the people who ensured I’d always look back fondly on our times in S103.
I can take my polaroids wherever I go. I can hang new lights, make new friends, write new articles in new newsrooms. But I can’t replicate S103—its secrets and its smells, its broken chairs and exposed ceiling, the place where I, and countless others, laughed and cried and wrote and loved and lived. There will never be another room like it.
