Between the ornate marble of Showalter Hall and the beating heart of students rushing to class that is the Pence Union Building (PUB), Tawanka Hall is, at first glance, a sizable but easily forgotten piece of campus.
“Once the new PUB was remodeled in 2019, the university outgrew Tawanka,” Paul Kile, the director of dining services, said.
Until then, the building’s Main Street Dining was a high-traffic, one-stop-shop for students in the middle of classes, with an all-you-can-eat dining service suited to a more social community.
At its peak, the dining hall served around 2,000 meals per service, Kile said. Now, dining services serve an average of 2,500 meals per day.
“The goal for Tawanka, for Main Street Dining, was to build community,” Kile said. “And it was a great community builder for 40 years.”
Tawanka’s dining hall died a slow death. During the peak of the operation, Tawanka’s entire upper floor comprised twin dining halls with a kitchen in the center, including a full-service bakery. Currently, one dining hall is empty, the kitchen is storage, and the second dining hall was converted into departmental offices in 2003.
Built in 1964 and renovated in the mid-1980s, Tawanka’s former dining hall is a far cry from the minimalistic aesthetic of the PUB’s design, with dust-ridden street-signs and ‘80s-style wood-paneling across the unused, cavernous space.
While disused, the former dining hall isn’t empty. The PUB doesn’t have any storage space, so that’s what the dining hall’s dry, refrigeration and freezer space provide. To feed an entire university of students, food staff are always transporting huge amounts of food and equipment between the former and current dining hall.
Beyond the closure of Main Street Dining, the operations of dining services as a whole have grown and shrunk as necessary for the enrollment rate. During peak enrollment of the 2000s, dining services operated 10 separate locations across campus. Six of those are vestigial emblems of a bigger university that is no more.
“There are facilities we’ve moth-balled that we could open, if we needed to,” Kile said. “But the university is not projecting any growth over the next two years.”
There are currently no concrete plans to reopen Tawanka’s dining hall, leaving the echoing space as a memento to the university’s past. However, Main Street Dining might yet have another life, though without the full utilization of the kitchen or bakery.
“[The university is] actually having conversations about repurposing this facility, this space, as some type of an event location simply because there aren’t a lot of venues on campus that will hold 200 to 300 people.”
