Last single-gender dorm standing: $13.5 million ‘restoration’ will maintain Corbin’s all-women tradition

PHOTO: The original Corbin Hall, built in 1923, is pictured in this 1925 photo from the University Archives collection at Kansas University’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

As Kansas University constructs new residence halls and renovates older ones, the buildings are all moving in the same direction: going co-ed, with increasingly more privacy and suite-style living. But there’s going to be one holdout.

Corbin Hall is KU’s sole remaining all-women’s residence hall, and even after an extensive $13.5 million renovation planned during the 2017-18 school year it will stay that way. The hall’s variety of room and sink configurations also will stay (South Corbin was built “prior to room standardization,” the KU Student Housing website notes). The building, capacity 149, has one-, two- and three-person rooms, some with one sink, some with two, some sharing a sink area with another room.

“They’re all different,” KU Student Housing director Diana Robertson said. “That’s the part that we want to preserve.”

In that sense, Robertson said, the Corbin Hall project is really more of a “restoration” than a renovation.

PHOTO: The original Corbin Hall, built in 1923, is pictured in this 1925 photo from the University Archives collection at Kansas University’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Corbin Hall, 420 West 11th St. on the Kansas University campus.

South Corbin, built in 1923, is campus’ oldest student residential facility. North Corbin, a separate but connected wing, was constructed in 1951. Corbin shares the hilltop at 11th and Louisiana streets with Gertrude Sellards Pearson (GSP) Hall, which also was all-women’s until it was renovated in 2012.

The decision to keep Corbin all female was — like many other KU Student Housing changes I’ve reported on over the past year — based on demand, Robertson said.

“We’re still filling it,” she said. “That wasn’t the case with GSP. We had trouble filling that as an all-female hall.”

At Corbin, nostalgia is almost certainly responsible for at least some of that demand, Robertson said. Generations of women have lived there, and many like that atmosphere.

Unlike the atmosphere and the variety of rooms, probably no one will feel nostalgic for another of Corbin Hall’s current features: window air-conditioners and radiators in every room.

Robertson said that’s primarily what the renovation is for. Work will re-do Corbin’s infrastructure, getting rid of window and radiator units and replacing them with central heat and air, upgrading lighting and putting new paint, furniture and fixtures in rooms.

Corbin Hall will close in May after the 2017 semester ends and reopen in fall of 2018.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Corbin Hall, 420 West 11th St. on the Kansas University campus. South Corbin, the original building which opened in 1923, is on the right. North Corbin, at left, was added in 1951.

Of KU’s on-campus apartment buildings, one is single-gender. McCarthy Hall is home to the KU men’s basketball team and about 20 non-athlete upperclassmen. KU’s 12 scholarship halls all are single-gender.

*
• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.