18 CommentsBwog doesn’t have the cash to “pimp your room,” and we certainly don’t want to raid it and then date you. So we bring you the semi-weekly feature, the “Cribs-esque” Room Hopping, continuing with…
It may be a brownstone on 114th street, but don’t walk into the sorority EAT (Sigma Delta Tau) expecting Animal-House-caliber mayhem. Don’t expect to hear the high pitched cooing of girls in pajamas having pillow fights.
And certainly don’t expect to smell that effluvia of sweat, beer, and vomit that always says “Go Greek!”
“It smells very much unlike the frats, which smell like death when you walk in,” said Rachael, one of the lucky fourteen residents of EAT’s brownstone. “We’re a clean bunch.”
Rachael (above, right) and her
roommate Maxie, both C’09, say they are so glad to live in a clean-smelling (boy, does it smell clean!), wood-panelled, wood-floored brownstone, complete with a large and comfy living room, big screen TV, full kitchens, dining rooms and fireplaces. The house also has its very own laundry room, but Bwog was forbidden to enter it, since it is used as the 61-member sorority’s “Chapter Room.” “Only sisters are allowed in,” Rachael says.
With such a nice house, the temptation to entertain and throw parties is great. But state brothel laws prohibit them from doing so. At least the law in New York defining women living together with alcohol as a brothel is not as prohibitive as brothel laws in in Winston-Salem, where Rachael says, “six women with their feet off the ground is considered a brothel.”
Maxie and Rachael get their own bathroom. They’re quite excited about it and have outfited it with a “man underwear” bath mat:
Their room is long and rectangular, but is a respectable size.
Rachael’s hung up the flags of her two “homelands,” North Carolina and Russia, and a map of Saudi Arabia, the mother-country of her foreign language of choice.
Arabic and Swahili (Maxie’s foreign language) words are
posted all over the room to help the girls study. Near Rachael’s bed, it says “tired”, near her bookshelf, it says books. And by her desk, the exclamatory and motivating:
Work!
The girls are also proud of their “wall of fame,” a shrine to randomness they’ve posted on the divide between the two sides of the room.
There’s something YouTube related on the wall about frying chickens and Ms. Peaches. It’s mostly inside jokes, but they said they will accept submissions for the wall of fame.
All in all, the girls like the sorority life. “We have great dance parties,” says Rachael (sans alcohol, of course).
“It’s the perfect location away from the craziness of McBain,” says Maxie. And after her first-year living situation, she says, “I will never ever share a hall bathroom ever again.”
–Photos by Justin Gonçalves
Have a tricked-out dorm, or wish to volunteer a friend/foe’s room? E-mail bwgossip@columbia.edu, and we’ll send a correspondent to scrutinize your living space for next week’s edition of room hopping!
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18 Comments
@Frat Sororities don’t have parties because women don’t know how to get shit done. No other reason.
@i love maxie and rachael.
@duh If the frats are willing to throw parties, why in the world would sororities bother? the sisters still get to party at the frats, then go home to a nice clean house that doesn’t smell like vomit and cheap beer. doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me.
@thank you double standards.
@you don't have to have alcohol if it’s a sex party…
@alcohol is a social lubricant.
@The Dink Yo, Maxie, you were in Carman, which don’t HAVE no hall bathrooms…..sheeeit.
@and the links to the ever reliable snopes.com
the sinking library:
http://www.snopes.com/college/halls/sinking.asp
the brothel law:
http://www.snopes.com/college/halls/brothel.asp
@a few urban legends are true, but most are false. in the case of the brothel laws, it is generally bullshit. most colleges that have frats but not sororities were started as male colleges, so the sororities got into the game late, and thus don’t have the financial backing of long histories.
also, the no parties in sororities is pretty typical as the liability would be an absolute bitch for the nationals to deal with. leave that sort of legal fiasco for the guys.
@Ugh STD’s standards have gotten really lax as of late, they look like they belong in AXO.
@A friend I love Maxie and Rachael.
@does that make barnard an enormous brothel?
@i thought the EAT sorority was a bad joke…its real?!
@lucrecia It’s actually SDT in our alphabet, Mr. Here’s my main question: why are sorority women so unconcerned about the sexist party policies they are subjected to? Why is a woman’s brownstone a brothel, but a men’s brownstone isn’t a rape-den? When have you EVER been to a party in a sorority house? And why not? because of some crazy sexist rules, kids. that’s why.
@you're kidding me. I think the SDT girls once planned a meeting to protest the non-existing New York brothel laws, but PiKE was having a beer-pong tournament or something and they were too busy baking them a pie.
Bwog: how about some basic fact-cxhecking before you take a source’s word as fact?
lucrecia: if you are asking why “sorority women” are “so unconcerned,” you clearly don’t know anyone at SDT.
@Oh, thank God My favorite was an MIT friend of mine claiming “BU doesn’t have any sororities because blah blah brothel law” — except BU *does* have sororities.
This campus has a WAY higher level of myth pervasiveness — that Ghostbusters crap in particular, but many more. Not that every college’s dorms weren’t designed by a jail architect, and the library is sinking because they didn’t account for the weight of the f***ing books, and blah blah blah…
@north carolinian yeah, I’m pretty sure the six people one is too, since a little ways east from Winston-Salem we were always told that an “orgy” is defined by NC law as “six people together in a room without socks on and their feet in the air”
@brothel law I thought the brothel law was a myth.