Was it the squirrel that made a home called “210 The Den” so memorable? Could it have been the creative use of burlap as structural material? Or maybe the ominously large icicle?
Jeannette Goulin and Shelagh Rocchi, both Artsci’89, shared some very nice digs during their four years at Queen’s, including a sturdy home on Earl Street and a lovely apartment in an old limestone building on Princess Street.
But their most memorable student housing was … different. The house at 210 University (or 210 The Den, as Ms. Goulin and her housemates called it, for reasons now lost to memory) was, at the time, not much to look at, Ms. Goulin recalls.
It turned out, though, that besides its unique character, 210 University was sturdier than they might have originally thought. Unlike some other dwellings shared by Ms. Goulin and Ms. Rocchi over the years, it has endured. Indeed, according to Kingston architectural historian Jennifer McKendry, 210 University has lasted longer than most homes featured in “If These Walls Could Talk.” The house even predates its address by at least 10 years – it was 210 Gordon Ave. until the street was renamed University in 1890.
Though the home has had different owners and been much upgraded since the 1980s, when Ms. Goulin and her five housemates moved in, the house had been neglected, she says.
The salient feature of the main floor was a bedroom that had been carved out of the living room with framing lumber and burlap, featuring a flap instead of a door. Ms. Rocchi drew the short straw and was left with the makeshift chamber. However, Ms. Rocchi, known as “Grec” by her housemates (in her first year, the history major had a poster with the words “Greco-Roman Empire” mounted on her Vic Hall dorm-room wall), says she was quite charmed by her accommodation.
“I was more excited by the fact that it was the size of a living room,” she says. And then the squirrel showed up.
“Somehow [it] got into the house and was … tearing around the living room. It was quite panicked,” recalls Ms. Goulin, “ricocheting off the walls and scrambling up the burlap.”
“We all ran screaming to our bedrooms and slammed our doors shut, but poor Grec didn’t have a [real] bedroom, so I think she was upstairs in the hall going, ‘Let me in, let me in.’”
Ms. Goulin had lucked out in the bedroom draw. Her room was tucked under the eaves on the second floor and had two windows. The spring of her year at 210 The Den, she had a view out those windows of an icicle growing to enormous size on the eaves. It was all very entertaining until the day the icicle let go, crashed through one of the windows, and landed on her bed, where it promptly melted. “For days, I slept on the living room couch” while repairs were made, she says.
The housemates had snapped up the home sight unseen based on its location, says Ms. Goulin: three blocks from campus and right across the street from the iconic Freddie’s Grocery, once a late-night lifeline for denizens of the student quarter. And despite 210 The Den’s idiosyncrasies, the housemates never regretted their decision, she says.
In the end, the most attractive feature of the home, says Ms. Rocchi, was that it contained “a great bunch of girls,” who not only survived the eccentricities of 210 The Den, but can now remember it fondly, squirrel and all.
