Fountain of Youth

The second Fountain Fest, held in May 2001.

On May 3, 2000, Stony Brook University marked an incredible milestone. The completion of the extensive makeover of its Academic Mall from a dreary, lifeless space with not one bench to sit or gather to the incredible bench-lined, flowering, inviting, welcoming avenue it is today, complete with a glorious fountain that brings life to the heart of campus every single day through spring, summer and fall.

A Fountain Festival was held that day to celebrate the first sprouting of the new fountain, a party to show all Seawolves their new, improved mall. Now students could gather to play frisbee on the Staller Steps (once a cement-filled pit) or sit outside the library on a bench after grabbing lunch at the SAC or to gather to enjoy Strawberry Fest or Earthstock.

The Stony Brook campus had been transformed, thanks to the vision of the president at that time, Shirley Strum Kenny.

As outlined in Paul Fain’s article about the “feisty” president in The Chonicle of Higher Education in 2006:
When Shirley Strum Kenny toured the campus in May 1994, shortly after being named the university’s president, she was aghast at what she saw. The university’s mall featured splayed, patchy blacktop and a pedestal missing its statue. Most of the buildings faced outward, toward parking lots, and were built in an architectural style that was sometimes referred to as “neo-penal.” There was, as she recalls it, not one bench on the entire campus.

The mall under construction in 1999

“You didn’t see any people,” Ms. Kenny says. She remembers saying to a friend during her tour, “This is so ugly — what are we going to do?”

What Kenny did was to bring in landscape artists to develop a cohesive plan to create a space that would be functional, welcoming and sustainable. 25 years later, the mall continues to be a place for students, faculty and staff together.