Campus Club gets little weekend action

It’s a Saturday night on the Street, and inside this club, the lights are off, the free refreshments are out for the taking, and most of the students who come are heading to the bathrooms.

At Campus Club for most of last Saturday night — from 10:30 p.m. until 2 a.m. — there was one thing missing: students. Except for the two baristas who gave out free water to the 25 or so people that wandered in at various times and usually left a few minutes later, Campus Club was empty. Many of the lights, sensing no motion, shut off. And some of those who came into the club apparently used it as a bathroom stop on the way home from the Street.

Two weeks after its opening, some students say the newly refurbished — and University-owned — Campus Club is having identity problems. Many students who visited the former eating club last weekend said it needs to find its niche on campus, especially since it is located at the “beginning” of Prospect Avenue and is right next to the eating clubs.

“[Campus Club] needs to find a way to co-exist with the eating clubs and not replace them, because it can’t,” Kate Fischl ’11 said.

Some of these students also said it’s essential for Campus to find its place — and for students to then take advantage of it.

“It’s a social network like Facebook. It’s only good when people are there,” Jack Altman ’11 said as he sat in the nearly empty Taproom Cafe.

But other students, like Chris Green ’12, said they don’t see Campus Club having a place at Princeton.

“It’s a bathroom on the way back from the Street,” Green said. “It really has nothing to draw to it.”

But earlier this week, students who were studying in Campus in the afternoon said the club offers a quiet place to do homework.

“It’s much more welcoming than a library,” Betsy Goodman ’10 said. “But not as loud as Frist [Campus Center].”

Among those who were studying there recently were graduate students. “I’ve been walking up and down the Street for four years now, but I’ve never been able to go into [the clubs],” said fourth-year graduate student Meghan Bellows. “It’s kind of fun having a place for [graduate students] to go on campus.”

In a tour of the new club last week, Campus Club director Dianne Spatafore noted that Campus offers a variety of workspaces for students, including a popular “sun porch,” a room with large windows that allows sunlight to pour in. Campus also features the student-run Taproom Cafe, several flat-screen televisions, two pool tables, chairs, tables, couches, a catering kitchen if student groups want to serve dinner, and a computer cluster with a printer.

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In the past two weeks or so, the club has also featured a variety of different events, from free Taco Bell food and kettlecorn to karaoke. On the first Saturday night after its opening, on the evening before Lawnparties, dance music provided by the DJ for the rapper T-Pain drew upwards of 1,300 people, Spatafore said.

The club is looking into scheduling more events in the future, such as a “coffee-house” series and themed events for holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, Campus Club Advisory Board chair Cindy Kroll ’11 said. The advisory board is planning to set up a new programming board in charge of scheduling events.

The club also allows student groups to reserve its rooms to host events. So far, some student groups, including Princeton Pro-Choice Vox and the Muslim Students Association, have used rooms in Campus for their organizations, Spatafore said.

“I think it’s always good to have more spaces on campus,” said Princeton Pro-Choice Vox president Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux ’11, though she noted the space had a few drawbacks. For example, the furniture in the space, she said, made hosting an open house difficult.

Campus Club opened on Sept. 18 after renovations by the University. Officials in the Office of Design and Construction did not return phone messages this week seeking the exact cost of the University’s renovations. Campus, which was an eating club for more than 100 years, ceased operations as an eating club in 2005.

It is unclear exactly how much of an impact the opening of Campus has had on the eating clubs.

Downstairs, the Taproom Cafe, run as a Princeton student agency, sells hot drinks, cookies and sandwiches, and it does not serve alcohol. “People have generally been really supportive of the idea of a student-run cafe, which I think is the main determinant of our long-term success,” cafe manager Shim Reza ’11 said in an e-mail.

Back at Campus at around 1 a.m. last Sunday morning, students said the nearly empty building highlighted the paradox of running the club. “No one’s going to come if no one else [is] here,” Fischl said.