Soule Drive as evolving space
A space for social interaction with a twisted history
The history of this street from 1916 to 2023 shows how the campus has evolved from a part of the Georgetown traffic grid to an intentional space for accidental social interaction among students, faculty, and staff and a place for taking pictures.
Soule Drive is a very short east-west street on the west side of the Southwestern University campus. It is parallel to McKenzie Drive to the north and perpendicular to Maple street. The street ends where it meets West Rutersville Road at its easternmost point. The buildings located on Soule Drive include the Wilhelmina Cullen Welcome Center, the Roy and Lillie Cullen Building (formerly known as Main Building, or Administration Building), the Fondren-Jones Science Center, Mood-Bridwell Hall, and the physical plant cooling station building.
Soule Drive as it exists today is an unusual street because it violates the norms of what most Americans would call a street. When hearing the word “street,” associations to cars, traffic, and pedestrians come to mind. Soule Drive, as I am writing this entry in 2023, only has one function as a street in this conventional sense. It is a one-way entry for drivers to enter the Wilhelmina Cullen Welcome Center parking lot where faculty, staff, and visitors park.
Looking east down the street you are met with bollards blocking car traffic and the Southwestern University arch that serves as a sort of “formal entry point” welcoming people into the University. The arch, constructed in 2018, is the entry way for the Floyd and Annetta Jones Plaza, and is utilized by people in a couple of ways, most notably as a backdrop for photographs. Parents of prospective students, including my own in 2021, often utilize the arch to photograph their children. It is also where many seniors photograph themselves upon graduation.
Soule Drive was not always utilized like this, however. A Sanborn map (maps used by cities for insurance purposes) from 1916 shows that Soule Drive was originally a continuation of 11th street that ran behind the Roy and Lillie Cullen Building. In 1916, 11th street (also called Cedar Street), stretched from Walnut Street, crossing over the train tracks, to where it ended at Vine Street. Walnut and Vine both exist to this day. However, Vine Street no longer exists north of University Avenue. In 2023, 11th street extends no further east than Pine Street. These changes can be seen when comparing images 1 and 2 to a current map of Georgetown. They also illustrate a very different street infrastructure from what we see today.
Many years after this map was created, in 1957, the streets known today as Soule Drive and McKenzie Drive were still not referred to by these names. A 1957 edition of The Megaphone which announced the extension of Maple Street further north (connecting it to Georgetown north of University Avenue) still refers to Soule Drive as 11th street and McKenzie Drive as 9th street. The author discusses the University’s plans to connect Maple street to 11th (Soule) and to curb the street for use as a one-way drive. This physical change extending Maple Street and connecting it to the remaining grid streets on campus that occurred in 1957 is still recognizable to this day. A key difference between how Soule Drive was utilized in 1957 versus how it is utilized today, however, is that drivers back then could use the entirety of Soule Drive as a through street. From1957 until the 1990s, drivers could access both the circular drive named Rutersville Road (which we know today as the Academic Mall) and use West Rutersville Road to access University Avenue.
At some point between 1957 and 2003, Soule Drive was given its current name. We know this because of a 2003 edition of The Megaphone where author Kate Gedney refers to the street by this name. Gedney’s article states that Maple Street has become a “death trap.” She believed that Maple Street was both dangerous and congested and that it gave too much access to drivers from outside of the University. Gedney proposed to solve this problem by closing both of Maple Street’s entrances so that it would no longer be a through street. She recognized, however, that this would mean faculty and students would be forced to access the facilities on Maple Street by taking Soule Drive or Southwestern Boulevard. Gedney’s Megaphone article also tells us that as recently as 2003, people still used Soule Drive as a through street. This means that the change to pedestrian only access occurred more recently.
Overall, Soule Drive functions as a place of memory in a few ways. The first function is to remember Soule University, one of the four root colleges that were consolidated to create Southwestern University in 1872. Please see my other entry about Soule for more information about that function. The second function, funny enough, has little to do with being a street. It is a place where Southwestern students announce both their enrollment in, and graduation from, the university by utilizing the arch for photographs. Photographing oneself with the arch as a backdrop is a marker of personal achievement. It allows individuals to both announce the milestone of college acceptance and the achievement of graduating from college. Many people will cherish these photographs without ever associating them with Soule as a street, Soule as a root University, or Joshua Soule, the Methodist Bishop the original Soule University remembers. And this ritual itself is relatively young, so even it involves very few people.
Its third function as a place of memory is a memorialization of Southwestern University’s intentional efforts in recent decades to decentralize the utilization of cars to traverse campus and deliberately create spaces on campus that promote student interaction. The street went from what one would call a street in the traditional and normative sense, hosting cars and traffic, to being more technically a “throughway,” which is accessible only on foot. On any given day during the semester, while walking to class on Soule Drive, students can expect to run into and interact with their friends. These interactions likely still occurred when the street was open to traffic. However, with no cars, it is more likely that they will happen, creating an intentional space for accidental sociality.
