Columbia’s free museum list is shrinking.

What began as a quirky idea to have our trainees profile random people in the spring has quickly transformed into an Eye tradition: We now structure our trainee program around a themed project every semester. This time, we asked our trainees to write about local businesses around campus. In pairs, they set out and visited the stores they frequent most, talking to employees, salespeople, and business owners to deep-dive into the stories behind the storefronts. In doing so, they found intrigue between shelves at a bookstore and a hardware store, tucked into the booths of a local gay bar, and on the top shelf next to dusty typewriters at a stationery store.

In the corner of Room 420 at the Spectator office, there is a wall lined with old covers of The Eye from the early 2010s, when The Eye was printing regularly. Catchy headlines from “Corps Curriculum” to “Majoring in Kink” hang above well-worn beanbags, inviting us to imagine the stories from so many years ago contained within their yellowed newsprint—stories now memorialized on our wall, the backdrop to passionate staff meetings and deliriously late nights of production.

In 1965 at a holiday mixer, when Barnard first-year Linda LeClair met Columbia College first-year Peter Behr, they were both living in their respective college’s dorms: LeClair in Reid Hall and Behr in Hartley. Soon after meeting, the pair bonded over their shared commitment to leftist politics and campus activism and began dating. By the next year, the couple was ready to move in together—and after LeClair returned from a medical leave of absence, they did just that.

Welcome to the Space Issue! This special project, presented by The Eye’s inaugural Archival Team, was borne of a curious urge to destabilize the limestone-and-brick solidity of Columbia’s campus. The halls we walk, the parks we enter (or don’t), the dorms and lounges we find community in—behind all of these seemingly-steady spaces are rich histories of activism, administrative strife, and constant renegotiations. Who is allowed to take up space on campus? Where does Columbia fit into the neighboring community? Why are we here?

Human stories are the very core of what we do here at The Eye. They drive us. Our goal as a family of writers and eclectic humans is to wade past the pleasantries of “What’s your major?” and “Where are you from?” in search of the hidden idiosyncrasies that are the stuff of late-night, meaning-of-life conversations between close friends.

In this installment of "A Room of Their Own," The Eye's new archival series investigating the renegotiation of spaces on campus, we look at how a four-day sit-in at Hartley Hall in April 1970 paved the way for the Malcolm X Lounge.