Princeton Terrace Club is one of the eleven current eating clubs at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Terrace Club was founded in 1904 as the twelfth club at Princeton. It is located at 62 Washington Road, making it the only one of Princeton's current eating clubs that is not situated along Prospect Avenue.
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Membership and culture [edit]
Terrace Club is one of five clubs to use a nonselective lottery "sign-in" system to determine membership, as opposed to the selective bicker system of the other six clubs. Along with Campus, Colonial, and Cloister, Terrace switched from bicker to the sign-in system during the politically turbulent 1960s.[1] Terrace was one of the first of the clubs to accept Jewish, African-American, and female members, and today is considered on campus to be the most "alternative," politically liberal eating club. Often, members are stereotyped according to this reputation, but the actual membership is very diverse in terms of background, sense of style, and academic interests. Since 2000, Terrace has been a popular choice for sophomores, filling all of its membership slots either during first round sign-in[2][3][4][5] or by the end of the second round.
Terrace's motto has been "Food=Love" since the mid-eighties. The food is served cafeteria-style and is famous for being more "vegetarian friendly" than other clubs. Members of Terrace often refer to the club as "Terrace F. Club" or "TFC".
Terrace is often referred to by club members as "the mother," "mother Terrace," or "the womb," and members often refer to themselves as "Terrans."
Weekend events at Terrace often include concerts of indie-scene bands from a variety of genres, including rock, hip-hop, salsa, jazz, and electronica. Unlike the other eating clubs, Terrace rarely hires DJs for dancing because there are always several members who are DJs themselves. Indeed, it is not uncommon for Terrace to have more nights of live music in a given weekend than all of the other nine clubs put together. Many notable artists and groups, including Yo La Tengo, GWAR, Blues Traveler (Summer '87), Elliott Smith, Run DMC, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, Vampire Weekend, Frightened Rabbit, Girl Talk, GZA, Immortal Technique, Stereolab, and Tortoise have played at Terrace, some before they were nationally well-known. Terrace also hosts the Queer Radicals' annual Drag Ball in October or November.
History [edit]
As was then common practice for newly-founded eating clubs, when Terrace Club began in 1904, the members dined in a building on Olden Street known as "The Incubator". This small structure had previously been the original home of Cap & Gown, and had been relocated to Olden Street from Cap's current location. It served as a temporary home for many eating clubs while their own buildings were under construction or being renovated.
In 1906, the club relocated to the current Washington Road location, which was occupied by a house in the Colonial Revival style which had formerly belonged to faculty member John Grier Hibben. This building was remodeled by architect Frederick Stone in the 1920s to the current configuration with its Tudor-style exterior.[6]
A tea party at Terrace in 1936 is credited[7] as the birthplace of the idea for the short-lived Veterans of Future Wars, an organization that satirized the acceleration of bonus payments to World War I veterans by demanding that its young members be similarly paid for the services they would render their country in conflicts to come.
In 1967, Terrace became the first club to abandon the Bicker process.[8] Terrace Club and Colonial Club were the first clubs to accept women following the University's decision to admit women in 1969.[9] In 2011, Terrace became the first club to offer membership to graduate students.[10]
From 1977 until 1984, while many of the sign-in clubs faltered amid low membership numbers, Terrace was kept alive by the late Chef Larry Frazer. As an attempt to attract new members Chef Frazer began cooking vegetarian meals. Now vegan and vegetarian friendly choices are available on all of the eating club menus, but at the time this was an entirely new concept at Princeton. Students can thank Chef Frazer and Terrace Club for starting vegetarianism as an accepted alternative dining choice. Chef Frazer was actually married in Terrace Club in 1982 with the officers acting as attendants and guitarist extaordinaire Stanley Jordan as the musical performer. He remarried in 2005 at Cap and Gown. When Frazer decided to transfer to Campus Club as chef, he hired an old friend, Barton Rouse, to take his place as head chef at Terrace.
Much of the reputation Terrace enjoys today grew out the leadership and love of the late Barton Rouse, the creative force behind Terrace's parties and excellent food from the eightes to late nineties. Barton was the originator of the Food=Love motto,.[11]
Notable traditions [edit]
Many Terrace members rise to the club's challenge calling them to insert the phrase "FOOD=LOVE" into their Senior thesis projects.
Terrace members traditionally complete an "offering" upon joining the club as sophomores. The "offerings" often involve enacting minor acts of humorous mayhem around campus.
Notable alumni [edit]
- Harold Medina 1909 - Lawyer and Judge notable for hearing landmark cases of conspiracy and treason [12]
- William H. Scheide '36 - Musician, philanthropist, and humanitarian.[13] Relocated the Scheide Library, "probably the finest private library in existence in the world," to Princeton's Firestone Library.[14] A primary funder of Brown vs. Board of Education.[15]
- Mel Ferrer '39 - Actor, Film Director and Producer
- Russell E. Train '41 - President of World Wildlife Fund, 1978-1985 [16]
- Galway Kinnell '48 - Poet, translator, and author
- Madison Smartt Bell '79 - Novelist
- Stanley Jordan '81 - jazz guitarist
- Walter Kirn '83 - Novelist and Literary Critic
- Jonathan Ames '86/'87 - writer, raconteur & performance artist, creator of HBO's Bored to Death
- Todd Wider '86 - Todd Wider is an American plastic surgeon and Emmy Award winning film producer based in New York, who is active in documentary filmmaking.
- Theodore Zoli '88 - American structural engineer, and a leading designer of cable-stayed bridges. 2009 MacArthur Fellows Program
- E. Randol Schoenberg '88 - a U.S. attorney, based in Los Angeles, California. Successful case in Supreme Court of the United States Republic of Austria v. Altmann in 2004. President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
- Clifford J. Levy '89 - Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for the New York Times[17]
- Mohsin Hamid '93 - Author
- Peter Moskos '94 - Author of 'Cop in the Hood'
- Timothy Ferriss '00 - Entrepreneur, Investor & Author of 'The 4-Hour Workweek'
- Jonathan Safran Foer '00 - author[18]
References [edit]
- ^ The Daily Princetonian, February 6, 2004, "Bicker process evolves as University grows" (article by Natasha Degen)
- ^ The Daily Princetonian, February 5, 2001, "Terrace, Charter lead sign-ins" (article by Molly Bloom)
- ^ The Daily Princetonian, February 6, 2006, "Colonial, Terrace fill in first round" (article by Brett Amelkin)
- ^ The Daily Princetonian, February 4, 2008, "Charter, Terrace fill in first round" (article by Josh Oppenheimer)
- ^ "The Daily Princetonian, February 14, 2012, "Terrace takes 160, highest of sign-ins" (article by Sarah Chen)".
- ^ Terrace Club
- ^ A Princeton Companion, Alexander Leitch, Princeton University Press 1978
- ^ "Timeline of the Eating Clubs at Princeton University"
- ^ "Timeline of the Eating Clubs at Princeton University"
- ^ "Terrace votes to accept graduate students"
- ^ Gastronomica, Spring 2006 Volume 6 Issue 2, article "Eating Ivy" by Lisa Harper, p.20
- ^ Daniel, Hawthorne (1952). Judge Medina, A Biography. W. Funk. p. 45.
- ^ "In celebration of the 98th birthday of William H. Scheide". Retrieved 14 January 2012.
- ^ Yaffe, Deborah (February 11, 2009). "Book offers rare look inside Scheide ’36’s collection". Princeton Alumni Weekly.
- ^ "Member Spotlight: William and Judith Scheide". Retrieved 14 January 2012.
- ^ Flippen, J. Brooks (2006). Conservative conservationist: Russell E. Train and the emergence of American environmentalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. p. 21. ISBN 0-8071-3203-9.
- ^ Amy Westfeldt, "The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Win Pulitzers," Associated Press State and Local Wire, 7 April 2003.
- ^ Julie Kestenman (2002-04-23). "Young author Foer '99 illuminates his place in the literary world". Daily Princetonian. Retrieved 2008-01-30.
External links [edit]
- Official Terrace Club Website
- History and culture of the clubs, at Princeton's official site.
- List of shows at Terrace
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