Each floor shares two lounges in opposite corners of the building.

“Who knows how much that one number will contribute to your depression?”Īt Plex, suite-style living means around five students share one bathroom, but otherwise have individual spaces. “A number can kind of screw you over for an entire year,” she says. Praeger felt trapped and cheated, especially because her and her friends’ placement in the residence hall was entirely out of their control. “It kind of just pushes you farther into it.” “If you get into kind of a bad cycle where if you’re upset or kind of depressed about something, it doesn’t force you to get out of that environment at all,” Praeger says. But the single rooms still sometimes pulled them into solitude. It helped to spend as much time as possible away from the residence hall, and gather in one of their rooms when they had to be home. They’d heard the rumors: Plex was depressing, filled with antisocial people who didn’t have anywhere else to go. Senior Lexy Praeger and her friends were not happy when they realized their priority numbers landed them in a suite on the third floor in Plex for their sophomore years, rather than in Kemper as they had hoped.

For too many students, it is a bleak spot in their time at Northwestern an experience they just need to get through. The exclusively single-style living, lack of community engagement and architectural structure work together to create, for a small number residents, a truly nightmarish, isolating living experience. While no longer nicknamed “Suicide Hall,” Plex still has a reputation for exacerbating – and in some cases causing – mental health issues. Indeed, the University has never struggled to fill space since Plex’s opening, and while it may be the least desirable housing option for many upperclassmen today, it still accommodates about 475 students – 85 percent of its 560-person capacity. Still, 60 students were on the waitlist for a room in Plex that year. The building was seven when residents jokingly offered “special suicide rates” to a group of high school seniors visiting Plex on a tour, according to a 1980 Daily Northwestern article.īy 1981, the residence hall had come to “represent all that was grim and cheerless about Northwestern life,” said student Carl Briggs in a 1981 Daily editorial. In it, he claimed the dorm had a reputation for contributing to students’ emotional problems and depression. Plex was six years old when, in response to Mitrenga’s suicide, local PBS journalist Michael Hirsh featured the residence hall in his film College Can Be Killing.

It was five years old when 20-year-old resident Jane Mitrenga killed herself in her car in the front parking lot of the building. Foster-Walker was only a year old when the first residents asked to move out in 1973, complaining of loneliness and isolation.

Plex dance