herr2ck: Upperclass Housing

Photos from January 2025.

Every time I hear Mendoza House’s original name (Neilwood Gables), I can’t help but say it in a snooty British accent. It sounds like a country club or a dorm at Harvard or something. Quite!

Mendoza House is currently a smaller dorm reserved for upperclassmen (meaning I couldn’t find a way in). It’s pretty bougie because it has kitchenettes and a bathroom in every room, but the rooms don’t have air conditioning. I don’t know any upperclassmen in their right mind who stay on campus beyond when they are required to, unless they are an RA. It is located on north campus, bordered by Norton House to the north, Woodruff Avenue and the Physics Research Building to the south, Scott House to the east, and Schoenbaum Hall to the west.

History

Neilwood Gables in 1955. (Doc Miller on Facebook)

Mendoza House was built as Neilwood Gables, an apartment complex not owned by the university but intended to house faculty and students. It was designed by Edward A. Ramsey in the Collegiate Gothic style in 1923, with a wood frame and brick exterior. The building was purchased by Ohio State’s housing commission in 1962 from the owners, Neilwood Realty. Neilwood Gables remained an apartment building by the time of John Herrick’s first entry in 1976, but it also had a research space within at some point as well. It became a dorm around the 2010s, as it is today.

MAJ Ray Mendoza. (One Day for the KIA)

Neilwood Gables was renamed to Mendoza House in tandem with the other north campus dorms named after veterans. It was named in honor of Major Ray Mendoza, a graduate of Ohio State who was a member of the wrestling team. He was a Big 10 finalist in 1991 and the heavyweight runner-up at the Big 10 wrestling championship in 1993. He graduated in 1995 with his degree in history, leaving for officer training in the Marines immediately afterwards. Mendoza continued to wrestle and even became an Olympic alternate for the 1996 games. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005, where he was killed by an IED on November 14, 2005.

Photos

Since I couldn’t go inside Mendoza House and the photo opportunities were admittedly few and far between, I opted to stop by during the January 6 snow day, where class was canceled for the first time during my time at OSU. This weather led to some interesting moments in my pictures.

The building is really wide, and I doubted my widest lens length would get the whole thing, even with my back up against Schoenbaum Hall, so I took this facade picture at an angle:

The central projection:

One thing that really caught my eye was the varied brickwork of the facade.

Beyond the usage of “soldiers,” “headers,” and regular “stretchers,” the brick is polychrome. I believe the dark purple bricks are “clinkers,” a term for when a brick is heated too heavily and takes on a unique color and texture. It’s definitely an improvement over the monochrome red seen on most buildings elsewhere on campus.

This enclosure for the stairs in back is certainly unoriginal, probably added in the 1980s or so:

The north facade:

I have always loved the “U” or “E” shape that these apartment typologies with central courtyards take on.

Here’s a look at one…note the tiny capacity of the entire complex, having only 54 rooms:

Fenestration:

I enjoy the way each entrance is articulated.

At the cornice and above the drip mold for the window, an ornamental stone panel:

It is emblazoned with three shields--two have a simple Latin cross; while the central has a circle, which is reminiscent of Ohio State’s seal, probably deliberately so. I thought the unfurling banner below had engraved script, but it looks like just odd striations. Maybe it’s just 100 years of weathering and acid rain taking its toll.

Looking up at the entrance again:

Peering through the central window, I noticed the stairwells had richly paneled wooden doors. I tried to get a photo but kind of failed. For a better look at what they probably looked like, read my older post about Cockins Hall.