Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The trail ends when it meets a gravel road. Turn left here and walk
through a small parking lot, then up the stairs. You'll be facing Cerf
Auditorium, built in 1936 and named for a Reed lit professor. Keeping
the auditorium to your left, walk up the hill along the cement path. Stay
on the path as it sweeps left, across the top of the auditorium, then
sneaks behind a large gray building. Keep your eye on the windows to
your right as you walk by, and you'll catch a glimpse of a mural of
comic-book characters, including
Transmetropolitan
's Spider Jerus-
alem: this is the entrance to the totally awesome Reed comics library,
called the MLLL (
mlll.org
—the website has a pretty useful comic-book-
recommendation engine).
Follow the cement path around the corner of the building, uphill, and to
the right. You'll emerge onto the lawn behind the Student Union; to
your left is Eliot Hall. Walk straight ahead onto the Great Lawn, a vast,
open, tree-dotted area that's ideal for a picnic, reading, napping, maybe
some croquet, or just appreciating the lovely campus, whose plan was
loosely modeled on St. John's College at Oxford.
Eliot Hall—more or less the architectural centerpiece of the cam-
pus—was built in 1912, in the same Tudor Gothic style that defines the
other impressive building you see from the lawn, Old Dorm Block. Look
for the Reed College seal over the southwest corner of Eliot Hall; it in-
corporates roses as well as fleurs-de-lis from Washington University in
St. Louis, where Thomas Lamb Eliot went to school. There are 13 stars
borrowed from the family crest of John Adams, a relation of Amanda
Reed's. The griffin on the seal is Reed's unofficial mascot—it has a li-
on's body with an eagle's head and is associated with protection and
wisdom. Eliot himself was that rare creature, a powerful clergyman in
the Pacific Northwest. He came to Portland in 1867 to serve as minister
at the large new Unitarian Church. He worked for a number of pro-
gressive causes, including education, child welfare, and women's suf-
frage, and he served on the Reed College board of trustees for 20 years.
Adding to his brainy bona fides, he was the uncle of literary giant T. S.
Eliot.
Eliot Hall is also where the Reed experience culminates, at least aca-
demically: seniors have to write a thesis in order to graduate, and it's a
rigorous undertaking. So each year at the end of the semester, all the
seniors who managed to complete it make two extra copies of their thes-
