The Ugliest Thing On Earth

"Covenant" by Alexander Liberman is 45 feet high and is a standing joke at the University of Pennsylvania. If anyone on the planet likes this monstrosity, I haven't met them. The staff call it "Deuling Tampons." The only things I've ever heard about it are that it's ugly, it's too big, and that it's stupid-looking. Finished in 1976, it acts as a gateway over the Western end of the main walkway through the campus, near a few dormitories and an old church. Because the sculpture suggests the shape of a house, it makes me like it even less. Before this piece was installed and this part of the campus was developed as it is today, there was a neighborhood called Hamilton Village. The university simply bought all the buildings and used its powers of imminent domain to tear all the houses down, sometimes putting nothing in their place. For some years there was an area with park benches and trees, but those were removed in order to keep homeless people away.

The deletion of Hamilton Village is still resented by those who remember it, and for good reason. It took place in an age when race relations were still very bad in the US, and this was an African-American section on the edge of an Ivy League school that would "red line" the map for its incoming students. That meant that students were told that if they wandered past a certain street, away from the campus itself, any problems they might have there were their own fault. About ten years ago a mural was painted nearby, showing the vanished homes of Hamilton Village, just floating in space like ghosts. College officials were said to be quite upset by that.

There are many other stories relating to the controversial development of this section, and very few of them are flattering to the university. I think it's fitting for the major cultural statement, standing where a neighborhood was simply erased by the powers it annoyed, speaks so loudly of arrogance and plain stupidity.