“We commonly refer to the address of the first floor Geography Research Unit, whose exterior entrance door faces Campbell Hall, as Ellison 1629, or just ‘1629.’ Please note that the official address to this entrance (the sign that is posted next to the door) is Ellison 1629G. You can remember this by ‘G’ for Geography. This exterior door is used to get to the interior offices located in the Geography Research Unit offices that are assigned to researchers, grad students, and visitors who have space assignments in 1629 with the letters D, H, J, K, L, M, or N. The exterior door on the opposite side of the building labeled just 1629 is Professor Tommy Dickey’s new office. Right next door to his office is the exterior door to EH 1629A, which is the office space for Prof. Dickey’s research group.”
Got that? Clear as mud, but it covers the ground. Bernadette Weinberg, our Academic Personnel Analyst, wrote the above memo as a well-meaning attempt to give Professor Dickey a bit of relief from a steady stream of geography students who confuse his office with all the others that begin with the number 1629. To compound the confusion, there’s no sequential order to the office rooms numbered 1629 D, H, J, K, L, M, or N. The 2nd floor of Ellison Hall also has a baffling sequence of room numbers. Why is the Star Lab listed as EH 2610 and the Spatial Computing Lab, next door, listed as EH 2616? Are there two invisible rooms in between, à la the train station in a Harry Potter book?
And then there’s the matter of the floors of Ellison Hall. The north wing has 3 floors, and the central section and south wing each have 6. That often baffles newcomers, especially the ones that use the north wing elevator in an attempt to reach floors 4-6. And the numbering on each floor doesn’t help. While the first number of a four digit room number refers to the floor, the second number refers to the hallway (and the last two numbers refer to the actual rooms of any given hallway on any given floor). But why do the hallway numbers in Ellison start with 6, 7, or 8? Where did 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 go? It turns out that 1-5 are hallway numbers reserved for Phelps Hall (Buchanan got the number 9). Got that?
Finally, there’s the matter of what is meant by the terms north and south in Santa Barbara. The south wing of Ellison is the wing nearest the Pacific Ocean, and, as us old-timers know, the ocean is south and not west, due to our geography and the literal wrinkles of our geology. But then, why is Freeway 101, which parallels the ocean as it runs through Santa Barbara, labeled 101 North and 101 South? Perhaps these perplexing issues account for the fact that we have such a good Department of Geography—only an expert could even find the place!
PS: Thanks to José Saleta for explaining the hallway demarcations. Article by Bill Norrington
