The Chat. We all know it – I assume most of us like it. It’s one of the only places to get breakfast on weekdays, it’s where you stop in for snacks between classes, a prime location for studying and talking in equal measure. A place for chatting, if you will.
When I decided to write about the history of the Chat, I assumed it would be simple. I’d have an excuse to dig around the Campus Archives, find some neat pictures, and write up a timeline. Submit, publish, kick back, and take it easy.
Oh, dear reader. How wrong I was.
For one, consider this: there’s no sign. I’m completely serious. As I’m writing this in the Chat itself, there’s not a single sign designating it as such. And you’ll see this trend continue in various places on campus. Very few official sources document this area as “The Chat”, and many of those are student-created.
For another, there’s no logo for the Chat. Rumor has it that there used to be a logo, but it was discontinued. Again, it seems like an insignificant detail, but it begs the question of “why?”. Digital design students would surely jump at the chance to design a campus logo.
These observations are what first got me invested in this Chat-centric mystery. For what is a pretty central fixture on campus – a landmark on par with the Grey Towers and the library – there seems to be a strange lack of documentation.
Now, I may not be a history major, but I love for oddities and puzzles like this. So, I began my life like many great sleuths: by emailing someone who hopefully had more answers than me. Adam Hess of Landman Library was my first contact. With his knowledge and expertise (and my undeterred curiosity), we sifted through the Campus Archives in search of metaphorical nuggets of golden history.
Our haul was minimal – a scattering of photos, a handful of references. Though that’s not to say it was useless. I still learned quite a bit about the history of our beloved Chat, and Beaver College history in general.
For one, “the Chat” is not the full name. It’s a nickname akin to Jim for James or Dick for Richard (however that works). No, the full government name of our dear eatery is The Chatterbox. It feels like the equivalent of nicknaming a child May for Mayonnaise, personally, but it was the 60s. Or maybe the 50s. Maybe the 40s.
Onto the next elephant in the room: dates. A little birdie named Professor Michael Dwyer told me he thought the name “Chatterbox” originated from the 60s, but I believe it may have existed long before that. To fully grasp the context of my next ramblings, we’ll have to take a brief detour to some Beaver College history, and Jenkintown.
Let’s turn back the clocks a bit. The very name “Arcadia University” is actually a relatively recent invention. As I’m sure many of us know, the school was known as Beaver College until 2001. A slightly-lesser known piece of trivia is that the Glenside campus is also a fairly modern change – up until the mid-60s, Beaver College made its home in Jenkintown, which was only a short car ride from our contemporary home. Both campuses actually coexisted for a time, before consolidating everything to the Glenside campus where we reside today.
The Chatterbox was a product of the Jenkintown campus first. While I’m not quite sure of the exact location, we have various digitized pictures from the early 60s depicting a diner-like environment. Records from earlier than that are spotty – the pictures are hard to make out, and it’s difficult to discern if it’s the same location. However, they are still labeled “The Chat”, implying that some version of the eatery was in operation in the 50s, possibly earlier.
After moving to Glenside, the Chatterbox was left homeless and wandering. In the Archives were a variety of correspondences and plans that were outlining hopes for the new Glenside campus. Space was at a premium, and an influx of new students meant larger housing and larger classrooms. Left out, however, were mentions of food on campus. The main Dilworth dining hall gets a few mentions, but nothing about our darling Chat – save for one throwaway mention of a possible location.
None other than the other campus darling, the Grey Towers Castle.
That’s right. Before it housed a series of dorm rooms and offices, the old Beaver administration had a lot of plans for the castle. As far as my research can tell, this never panned out – a single picture from 1950 labeled “Castle Chat Scan” may disprove that, but it’s impossible to know without more context and evidence.
Here is where the timeline begins to get very messy. There was no other official documentation of the chat until modern times and the Commons, but official documentation isn’t our only source.
There are various pictures that claim to be of the Chat, many of them taken in the 70s and 80s – long after the Jenkintown campus was left. Architecture wise, the pictures from the 60s and the 70s look very similar, implying that somewhere on the Glenside campus, a version of the Chat existed. Where it was, the world may never know.
It’s also worth noting the digitized pictures look vastly different from earlier photos kept on analog slides. This hints at a rather interesting possibility – the idea that there was a Chatterbox at both Jenkintown and Glenside, maybe even at the same time.
In the 80s, there was either a completely different location or a severe makeover – the latter seems more likely, but we aren’t able to tell for sure. We get very few wide shots of the room, but the few we have seem to be the same place.
We lack any digitized pictures from the 90s – maybe students wanted to forget all the animal print and baggy jeans. Instead, we pick right up in the year 2001, right around the change to Arcadia University. The pictures we have are zoomed in on a set of four students, without much of the room visible – however, the tiled floor and walls suggest a completely new spot. Personally, I think this is the earliest evidence of our modern day Chat.
Even with all I’ve presented today, there are still more holes that Swiss cheese. Most of what I’ve said is based on conjecture and personal speculation, and squinting a little too hard at blurry photos. Still, it fascinates me, and I hope this oddly specific deep dive was entertaining to you as well.
Maybe you know something about the Chat that I don’t – you had a relative who went to Beaver College in the 70s or 80s who can confirm the location, or someone who remembers the switch from Jenkintown to Glenside. Maybe you have the inside scoop on why no one’s made a modern logo for the place. Maybe you just really, really like weird campus history. If any of those apply to you, then my email is open, dear reader.
Emma “Not a History Major, Just a Nerd” Pegram
Featured image (and all other images) by Emma Pegram via Arcadia University Archives.
