February 2009 Archives

The Tiger mascot takes a well-deserved break.

The Tiger emerged as a symbol of Princeton in the late 1800s, most likely due to the growing use of orange and black as the school's colors. Football players of the early 1880s wearing broad orange and black stripes on their jerseys were dubbed "tigers" by sportswriters of the time, and "tiger" was also used as a rallying word in the college cheer.

According to Alexander Leitch in "A Princeton Companion," in 1923, a live tiger who had been captured in India by the father of a football player, Albert F. Howard '25, was brought to Princeton as a mascot, but was donated to a zoo after only a few weeks.

Since World War II, the tiger mascot as we know it today -- an undergraduate clad in a tiger suit -- has  regularly cavorted at football games and other Princeton events.

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Photo courtesy of Princeton University Archives

This one falls in the "What's going on here?" category.  In this photo from the 1910s, students are pulling a carriage in front of Clio Hall.  Does anyone have any idea why?

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Photos courtesy of Princeton University Archives

What?! The Wawa wasn't always open 24 hours a day? How did undergrads back then survive especially during those crucial midnight to 6 am hours when pulling allnighters working on their senior theses? 

For decades, the "Wa" has been a campus mainstay.  Plans for a relocated Wawa were even included into the University's proposed new arts neighborhood.

Sadly, over the past year, Wawa has closed a slew of stores in Pennsylvania. Let's hope the venerable Princeton Wawa never sees this fate and will truly be perennial.

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Photos courtesy of Princeton University Archives

Photographer Accra Shepp (left), along with master printmaker Edward Fausty and artists Esther K. Smith and Dikko Faust (right), worked with students in a Princeton Atelier course titled, “The Collotype and the Artist’s Book,” which explored the historic photographic process of collotype printing, one of the earliest photomechanical printing processes.  

The current Princeton Atelier courses for Spring 2009 are "Two-Sided Plays," led by performance artist Laurie Anderson; and "Bodies in Evidence," led by novelist Toni Morrison and installation artist Christian Tomaszewski. 

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Photos courtesy of the Lewis Center for the Arts

Two Nobel laureates, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, worked with students as part of the Princeton Atelier program in 1998.

One student who participated in the program that year said, "García Márquez wanted us to see how narrative was about storytelling. He arrived the first day and demanded: 'Give me a character. Give me a plot.'"

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Photo courtesy of the Lewis Center for the Arts