You mean, you were in prison?

Nah, it just felt like it sometimes. Cellblock 7 is more properly referred to as floor 7 of Daniels Graduate Residence Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. It's located at 1010 W. Green Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801. In fact, if you live there, you can write your address in the above form, with a room number. 1010 W. Green St. #XXX. Despite what they tell you in the little housing notice, there is absolutely no need to write "URH XXX Daniels Hall" and advertise to the outside world that you are living in a rabbit cage.

Wow. I've never heard of this place.

For some odd reason, the main University Residence Halls home page has no pictures of either Daniels or the other graduate hall, Sherman. Most of the information there is aimed at undergraduate students. While some of it (mainly the administrative details about rent and whatnot) is fairly useful, the Powers That Be naturally feel the need to coerce (heh) as many potential tenants to sign up as they possibly can, and so the site has a healthy dose of your obligatory multicultural photos of happy students all decked out in the latest Illini wear whilst chatting in large, sunny rooms. Amusing, yes, but not a really great indicator of what you can expect.

So what can I expect?

Well, in seven short words, you're gonna be living in a closet. However, so will approximately 500 other people in your immediate vicinity, which makes Cellblock 7 a wonderful place to meet people and make friends of all sorts. Cellblock 7's other nickname of note is, "Where the nerd world meets the third world." There are lots of both foreign students, particularly Asian, and physicists. If you want to talk about physics in a foreign language, this is the place for you! There are quite a few engineers as well. This is to be expected, as the building is right next door to the Loomis Laboratory of Physics and not too far from the Beckman Institute, CSRL, or Everitt Lab.

How small is it?

Remember that little brochure you got in the mail explaining that "these rooms are for studying and sleeping purposes only and therefore lack a lot of space?" They are NOT kidding. Throw out everything you possibly can before you move. Look to your right. The door is pushed back as far as it can go, flush against the left wall. The cabinet with the dishes on top is flush against the right wall. There just ain't a lotta space. The main space is 6 feet by 12 feet. The only place in the room that you cannot see is a desk, which is on the left. It is set back into the wall, as you can see in the picture below. Aside from the desk, you also are provided with a chair, a lamp, and a bed-like thing. Note that both the shelf full of books and the cabinet with the dishes on top belong to me. They didn't come as standard issue equipment. You are not provided with any shelving, save for the single ledge-like metal shelf above the window. There is a small amount of open storage in the closet.

"Bed-like thing?"

Yah, the furniture leaves a bit to be desired. The "bed" (heh) is some kinda futuristic 1960's conception of a sofa bed. Basically it's a thin mattress on wheels. The mattress sits on a kinda wooden frame which can roll out from the wall, and has two shallow drawers in it. (I have folded up quilts sitting on the mattress in the above picture.) The main peeve is that to achieve the sofa mode of existence, the thing has a strangely shaped padded white vinyl (?) back on it, attached to the frame, against the wall. You can see a detail of it below. This takes up unnecessary space. The white padded vinyl part is hollow and opens upwards to reveal another small bit of storage. Thing is, if you store junk on top of this "back" thing, you can't really open it to get at any junk you put inside it. But... assuming it's closed, the idea is that you roll the mattress back against the wall until it sets, and you have a sofa. At night, you pull the mattress back out on its wheels (thereby eliminating your last foot or so of open floor space) until it is fully exposed, and snooze. That is the the idea. What really happens is, during the day, you sit on the "sofa" and it makes a squealing noise and rolls right out from the wall, and then at night, you try to pull the thing out and it gets jammed in there, so that when you pull, you pull out the entire thing, frame and all, making a horrendous noise and causing all the newspapers you have piled on top of the "back" to fall behind the contraption. The mattress itself I didn't mind at all. However, I'm used to sleeping on the floor so you may feel differently. You'll definitely want to use a mattress cover. I just folded out my usual floor quilts on top of the mattress and was quite happy. The desk is HUGE. Quite nice, and with four large drawers. These can be rather hard to pull out and in when full, but definitely provide enough storage. The chair, on the other hand, was quite peevesome. It is simply too large. The armrests keep hitting the side of the drawers, it's heavy, and you'll definitely want to get a cushion if you don't like having a permanent case of what a nearby resident termed "church ass." The lamp is all right, but quite yellowish and dim. It makes a nice light for relaxing with at night, but for times when you want to really get some work done, getting a clip on desk lamp would be a good idea.

What about the room itself?

Just inside the main door there is a closet of sorts, a wooden box jutting out into the room. Inside there is a bar to hang up clothes on, and a single shelf. The upper portion is a separate open cabinet with doors. The picture to your left gives you an idea what things will look like before you bring in all your stuff. Remember folks, the right wall is just outside the picture frame... That isn't a window in the door. Rather, on the back of the main door is a metallic sticker that says "University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign" and has instructions on what to do if there is a tornado. If you peel it off you have to pay a fine of 25 dollars so you better like it. You can see also that there is a chain on the door.
The floor is cement, the exact kind of flooring that you find in old elementary schools. Actually, the outside of the building looks like an old elementary school from the 60's, with the red brick and the Helvetica silver metal letters that spell out "GRADUATE RESIDENCE" just outside the front door. Kinda smells like an old school too, but I digress. The floor is that pebbles motif, with large slabs of pebble pattern, the white with little black stone shapes, all polished smooth, and metal seams between the panels. The walls are cinder block, which is a peeve in that it is nigh impossible to hang anything on the wall. Your best bet is to use that plastic poster putty, but things still fall off on a regular basis. When you are really lucky, they fall off and right under the bed contraption where they are extremely hard to retrieve. If you want to hang a calendar, you need to put it on the bathroom door or the closet.
The room has one window. The windows are fairly large and let in a lot of light. They are the sort of old windows that have a lower panel which opens inwards and down, and an upper panel which opens outwards and up. There is a screen, with a small sliding area so you can stick your hand outside the screen to pull the upper window panel back in. The good thing about this kind of window is that if you are one of the lucky people with no air-conditioning, you can open the window and balance a fan on the bottom panel so it sits right in the window. You are given a set of greyish burlap-like thick curtains for the window.

What is visible from the window, then?

As you can see, my view was pretty damn good. I lived on the top floor of the tall building, which I strongly recommend for several reasons which I will explore later on. The high rise building in the center of the view is ISR, an undergraduate residence hall across the street. The reddish buildings in the lower left are other parts of Daniels Hall. Below my window is the courtyard used for various events. I could see what is going on in the main office from my window, which had its moments. At night I could see the lights of ISR from my bed, which gave things a rather cosmopolitan feel. Number 720, the subject of this article, is on the south side of the building. The south side definitely has a nicer view (the north side overlooks a parking lot and the Boneyard Creek) but during the summer it gets hot enough to peel paint. At any time of year, from around 10:00 AM to mid-afternoon it is too bright to do work at the desk without closing the curtains, which have a tendency to resist this and fall off at the slightest provocation.

How is the heating situation?

Do the words "dog days of winter" mean anything to you? There is a radiator immediately under the window, and the little black knob on the front is, as far as I can tell, strictly a ruse to provide you with the merest of illusions of having a measure of control over your heat. Sometime in October or thereabouts, the heat comes on, and stays on. It blasts. It blows. It roasts. You will sit around in shorts and a t-shirt. At least, if you live on the south side, you will. I hear that people on the north side spend their days shivering under many blankets. But if you are lucky enough to be on the hot side, you can pretend you are at the beach in all the sand you will track into the room from the sidewalks outside on snowy days.

What about bathing? A Toilet?

Each pair of two rooms shares a bathroom. The bathroom has two doors, one opens into each room. These doors are lockable from the room side, so that your bathroom mate cannot come into your room through the bathroom, but not from the inside, which means your bathroom mate can walk in on you at any point while you are occupying the bathroom. The bathroom contains one toilet (the main thing I look for in a bathroom) as well as a single shower, and two sinks. The bathroom also doubles as a kitchen, as you can see here. There are no cabinets or shelves, much less any kinda medicine cabinet, and the toilet has no cover. The main peeve, however, is that the shower has no door, but rather a "Perfect for Hotels, Motels, and Institutions!" goldenrod colored vinyl excuse for a shower curtain. This thing is more or less permanently creased in such a fashion to as to nearly prohibit it from actually containing any water within the shower, which is quite a difficult task to begin with as the lip of the shower is a measly 1.5 inches high. Both the floor and the walls are covered in grey tiles. The inside of the shower is grey as well, but some type of interesting looking marble stuff. The water controls are a single knob that dials through from cold to hot. The water pressure is VERY good and the water gets hot almost instantly. The shower nozzle is high up, too. In general, aside from the curtain, the shower is most excellent. As an added bonus, inside the shower, hanging on said nozzle, you get a free breast/testicle cancer warning signs card from McKinley Health Center.
Once a week, as posted on the mirror, you have to clear all of your stuff out of the bathroom so that Building Service can come in and clean it. At this time you are given toilet paper. Building service will see how many rolls you have, and give you enough rolls to bring you up to the standard one on the dispenser and two stuck in the pipe under the sink. If you remove all your extra TP before building service comes in, you can stockpile a huge amount of TP to be used for later fun and amusement.
Notice that the only way building service can get into the bathroom is to walk through your room. At least one day a week, you are waking up early. No need to worry though... building service isn't responsible for any items that may go missing. Hmmmm....

Ummm... you never mentioned a kitchen.

Peeve: Lack of food. Yes, there is no kitchen. Well, almost. Cellblock 7 has access to only a small quasi-lame kitchen (featured at left by our stunning model Dave, cooking for a party) on the second floor of the small two story building in the courtyard known as Little Daniels, and said kitchen is NOT to be used for the daily preparation of meals (imagine 500-plus people trying to fit into the living room of your average house, crowded around an aging electric stove with 2 bad burners). There is a decent ice machine down on the third floor of the main building, as well as a rather scary microwave, but the main Solution to this problem is the purchase of a Food Contract from the U of I entitling you to consume up to 20 meals a week prepared and served by dedicated slaves... well, okay, Dining Services employees, but it's as close as I'm ever likely to get.
"So," you ask, "wherein lies the Peeve?" Ah. You see, Cellblock 7 does not have the large communal feeding trough actually contained within it. No, the large kitchen/eating facility is actually intended for undergraduate students mainly, and as such is located inside the large Illinois Street Residence (commonly known as ISR) across the street. Problem is, all the residents of ISR (a much nicer building than Cellblock 7, btw) are forced to leave town for any and every vacation as it is assumed they have Real Homes with their parents someplace. Those who do not are invited to spend 12 bucks a day to reside hotel-style in Cellblock 7 for the duration, but as far as I know none of them actually accept the offer. Hell, might as well spend the money on a real vacation somewhere. Anyway, this means the communal cafeteria is CLOSED for every single break. Cellblock 7 itself never closes but for the interim you are left with (1) fast food, (2) fighting over the little kitchen, or (3) Bathroom Cuisine. Point of advice: You don't wanna mess with the fridge in Little Daniels. The note on the door about being cleaned once a semester bears no relation whatsoever to the actual state of affairs. If you find a green tupperware full of mystery meat in there, I can tell you it's been in there since Thanksgiving break 1995. In winter there is no problem. Just hang your food out the window.

Adventures in communal food consumption.

Remember, it's not just a MEAL, it's an adventure. Should you desire the communal feeding trough option, the easiest place to go is the Illinois Street Residence Dining Hall. Where else are you gonna have meals prepared and waiting for you on demand, with entertainment as a side dish?
Questions? Are you a current or former inmate? Thinking of moving in? Sound out!