Where will Butler's furniture go?

Though they're barely 40 years old, the undesirable waffle-ceilinged, brick-walled dorms of the Butler College quad will be demolished this summer, to be replaced with more desirable dorms by the fall of 2009.

But what about the hundreds of beds, desks and chairs etched with students' names and graduation years? They're going to go somewhere — though the University doesn't yet know where.

"There's no reason that the stuff should be thrown away," Butler resident Carrie Carpenter '09 said.

And the bottom line, Director of Building Sevices Jonathan Baer said, is that the furniture from the demolished dorms will not be thrown out. The University has a system in place that allows academic departments and local charities to claim the items.

All unwanted furnishings purchased by the University, from old filing cabinets to beds and desks, are first sent to the University Storage Facility at 755 Alexander Street, where faculty and staff — and then the general public — can make the University's trash their treasures.

On Tuesdays, professors can rifle through the old giveaways and get "new" desks or bookshelves for free. The facility is open to local residents on Wednesdays, when they can buy furniture and office supplies that have remained in storage for a week.

Only then can charities approved by the Department of Community and Staff Affairs get the furniture as donations, Purchasing Department manager Joseph Lane said.

For larger construction projects like the Butler reconstruction, it can be difficult to get local nonprofit organizations to accept such large quantities of used furniture, Baer said.

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Some charities, he added, refuse the furniture, claiming it's not "up to the standards of what the agency is looking for."

When the University bought about 500 new sets of dorm furnishings last summer, the purchasing department found a group overseas willing to accept the old items, Baer said. "We have attempted to donate certain things locally, but usually it's such a large volume that local organizations aren't looking for that much," he said.

Student Volunteers Council program coordinator David Brown said he was "surprised" that "there wasn't an interest in the community for furniture."

HomeFront and Martin House are two of the organizations that have accepted University furniture in the past. While HomeFront helps the homeless find food and shelter in Mercer County, Martin House helps low-income Trenton residents secure housing, education, clothing and appliances.

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A spokesperson for HomeFront's Furnish the Future program said the group usually picks up "at least two truckloads" twice a year, once in May or early June and then again in September.

Butler Construction will not begin until after Reunions in June, but students have already seen the start of the renovation project in the removal of trees in the Butler quad last week.

Trees originally slated to be permanently removed in the campus plan were saved by Grounds Maintenance who saw particular value in them, said Grounds Manager James Consolloy in an email.

A large locust tree in the upper courtyard, originally planted in a cluster of three as a memorial to three Butler College students who died during their years at Princeton in the 1990s, will be transplanted in June and rededicated to the Class of 2007, Consolloy added.

About 25 of the "more valuable ornamental trees" will be replanted at Whitman College, 200 Elm Drive, Bloomberg Hall and along Elm Drive as part of the reforestation plan, Consolloy said. Other smaller plants will be moved to Prospect Garden.