As the ground for the Gateway Project is finally broken, I have to say that I never thought it would happen.

Two years is a long, mad time to live amid empty lots and broken promises, as anger transforms to disbelief and then to apathy.

And for me, the dominance of Campus Partners meant the death of something very special, an end to the days of a very fascinating time in my life and the life of many others – thousands fresh out of high school, stacked in high rise apartments, thirsty for the first glimpses of a life that will come to define them in hindsight.

Granted, when I lived on West 11th Avenue in Siebert Hall for a year in 2000-2001, I knew I would only catch the last year or so of the glory of this section of campus, the tail-end of a defining cornerstone for droves of kids that had come before.

But though I only knew the last dying days of those blocks with such a long and crazy history, I knew it well. In fact, the feeling that the end was near seemed to make the whole situation that much crazier, the Mardi Gras carnival psychology of excess before absence.

Anyone living in those high rises along West 11th knew that area, one that had long transformed into college legend, before it came crashing down. The endless chaos – lines of happy revelers wrapped north along High Street, pinned between the brick wall of Panini’s South and the thick metal cables police had strung between telephone poles to keep kids from spilling into traffic.

I can remember my friends’ place on West 9th, hanging out on the porch of their barren shack of a house before stumbling in fits of laughter two blocks over to the Spot, to Not Al’s Pub, to Panini’s South – me singing Led Zeppelin hits in the street.

It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled, indeed. Ha. Since last Thursday night, maybe, when we last stumbled over here to find people dancing and yelling and wearing halter tops in January and people smoking, drinking and getting wild.

True, it was wild in the classic, romantic sense of the phrase, when those things are still rewarding and innocent and without consequences, understanding that on most nights there would be something to get into – pre-parties, after parties, people hungry for something else and willing to sacrifice part of themselves to do it and unafraid how the action will be labeled in the future.

For me and a lot of others, an energy like that of south campus is a hard thing to live without once it becomes obvious that it is missing. The times were too entertaining, too over the top, that thinking back on them, they seem like a mirage.

Unfortunately, the same energy that made it such a unique place eventually ended up killing it, making it too wild, too evil in the eyes of everyone making the decisions and policies. Ironically, what made it such an explosive place to go, in the end, caused its own demise, imploding it back onto itself like an unwanted skyscraper.

And like a demolished building, south campus was demolished to make way for something new – for coffeeshops and graduate dorms and offices – construction for a new project that will never be able to rival the past.

The energy is gone, torn down with the buildings and the bars. Though what has really been lost is hard to say. I can remember sitting down early in 2000 to fill out my housing application, realizing that a place as big and bold as OSU requires a very special sense of what is right and wrong, what can be excused under the guise of experience and what I wanted to become and what I didn’t.

South campus – even at the end – was the perfect place for making those kinds of distinctions, for straddling the fine and delicate line between those kinds of categories, for pushing the limits that I had previously been told were there.

John Ross is a senior in comparative studies. He can be reached at [email protected].