by David Hoffman and Craig Berger
A few weeks ago, a photo appeared on the Retriever Stories site showing two alums who met and fell in love at UMBC when they were students. The photo, taken in 1969 or 1970, left the two of us scratching our heads. Where was it taken?
(Original source: UMBC's Skipjack yearbook, 1970, in the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery Digital Collections).
There's clearly a breezeway in the background. But the Biological Sciences breezeway we all know and love (or hate when icy winds blow through) was not built until the early 1980s.
We only discovered the answer after we came across another photo, taken around 1980 in almost the same spot:
Take a good look through that breezeway. What do you see?
We saw the Administration Building, and to the right, farther away, a silo. That's when we realized that this place looked familiar (but so, so different).
The location: the patio behind (and above) the Meyerhoff Building lecture hall.
We couldn't stand exactly where the two photographers stood to take updated photos (there's a large brick-encased tower there now). But we got close. Here's that 1969 photo again:
And here's a present-day counterpart. What was once a breezeway is now inside the Meyerhoff Building:
Here's that circa 1980 photo again:
And here's a present-day counterpart (at least, as close as we could get):