The practice of renting out the top floor and roof of 14 Plympton for student parties stopped in 1992.

During the production of the 1992 election issue, a student group had rented the space for a party, Barnes says.

While they were dancing, the newsroom ceiling shook and the upstairs toilet overflowed on top of the computer that received stories from the Associated Press.

After that, Barnes says, he felt the space should not be rented for parties any more. But the business board continued to rent out the space. Barnes would then call the renters and "disinvite them."

"Renting out the space for parties was a suit waiting to happen," he says.

The building included other sources of income. The architects had built adjoining offices to be rented out "as a good source of revenue for the building endowment," Barnes says.

The graduate board chose the English Language Center as a tenant for the upstairs rental space in the spring of 1997.

The 1991 renovation of the building added space and technological changes not possible with the old building. Yet some features of the old building, like the graffiti-covered women's bathroom, were not duplicated in the new.

"It's hard to say [if the new building lost character]," Walkowitz says, "since much of the `character' had to do with what we put in the space, how we operate there, and much of that didn't change, it just became easier--[we had] a bigger room to hold dummy meetings, but the dummy meetings still happened."

Yet Barnes says something was lost in the renovations.

"In the end, the new [building] is better--much more space, more desks, more offices, fewer safety hazards," he says. "It certainly enables a better paper to be put out. But certainly anyone who denies a little something was lost is being foolish.