Ema

Carmichael Towers East

My junMy junior and senior year have been spent on the 12th floor of Carmichael Towers 1. First, I lived in a small double in suite 1201 with a randomly selected roommate. Now I live in a suite single on the same floor with mostly my friends. Living in what feels like the same place has slightly made my time at Vanderbilt feel stagnant. My life has changed over the past two years. But at the end of each day, I go through the same doors, up the same elevators, and hit the same floor 12 buttons. Part of it is comforting and part of it makes more ready to leave once I graduate in May.

Carmichael Towers, while looking like Communist housing from East Berlin has been a great experience for me. What it lacks in amenities and practical layouts, it makes up for in convenience. I feel close to everything I need at all times. There is a Munchie Mart through a tunnel in Towers West. The vast majority of my friends live in East and West, and I don’t have to go outside to get to their rooms. Satay, my favorite guilty-pleasure restaurant to the east, is a 5-minute walk away. I am not far from most of the campus dining options. While I am in college, I prefer convenience over luxury any day. When in our lives are we going to be living in the same building as all our friends? When are we going to be able to live with 5 of our best friends? For me, the benefits of Towers far outweigh the negatives.

As for what the negatives are, I have to admit there are many. The common area is poorly laid out and inconvenient for having more than a couple people over. Each suite has room for six students, in rooms of confusingly varied sizes. There is an absolutely tiny double, the same size as a single. Then there is a large double, that is 3 times the size of the small double. The two singles are also different, with one that is larger. After researching, I believe that this layout is original and was simply the result of oddly-layout apartments. This can cause a lot of tension in the housing selection and is the reason for a lot of perspective suite groups falling apart before registration. The size and privacy of your room create a hierarchy that might cause disputes in a friendship group.

In my room, like all Towers rooms, there is only a twin bed and a wall of a built-in dresser/desk unit. While it is nice to not have to move furniture in, it becomes difficult to find ways to make your room creative or interesting. The walls are coated in a type of pain that rejects command hooks or putty for anything larger than a small poster. It is really challenging to find ways to hangs something up and not have it crash down on your head in the middle of the night. Also, a twin bed is simply too small for adult college students. There is a service you can pay to change your bed out for a double but it is expensive and not every room can fit a double. My small single certainly could not.

From the community perspective, Carmichael Towers is often called an eye-sore in local media pieces and there has been much discussion of how they fit into the West End community. They are located on the most expensive road in terms of real estate in Nashville but do not fit in aesthetically. They are also a dominant visual representation of Vanderbilt and do not fit in with the school’s view of itself and what its campus should look like.