I was immediately angered to hear the university decided to demolish Warren Hall. I think that it is human nature to be comforted by the things we are used to, and Warren Hall is just one of those images that I always associate with Hayward and pleasant memories of the East Bay area.

I could point at Warren Hall from Fremont, and see it in passing on the I-880. It was one of my favorite things to focus on stuck in the horrible traffic every Bay Area dweller has to endure on that cursed highway.

I remember my first tour on campus as a prospective student, when our school was still CSU Hayward. Growing up in the East Bay, I had been on childhood fieldtrips to the University Theater. CSU Hayward was where I saw “James and the Giant Peach,” “Gone With the Wind” and a handful of other plays in elementary and middle school. And yes, I am one of those people who are still a little bitter about the name change.

Stepping back on campus for the first time as  a transfer student last fall, I was impressed by the new Student Administration Building, but also relieved that the campus still had the overall look that I’d grown up with, despite the fact that it was now called CSU East Bay.

Prior to applying here in 2010, I was gathering information on what I needed in order to transfer and I walked straight into Warren Hall to find out. By the time I started classes last year, Warren Hall had already been out of use for two years. I have two aunts that graduated from the university when it was still CSUH and they had no idea that the state of Warren Hall had become so bad.

Talking to my aunt, Lorynne Dupree, who received her teaching credential from the university in 1988, she admitted she was shocked that the building had been out of use for so long. “I remember having classes in Warren Hall,” she said. “I had to walk clear across campus to get to my other classes, but by some miracle I made it.”

My aunt admits that once she learned that the building had been declared seismically unfit a few years ago by the CSU Seismic Review Board she could understand why they would no longer use it. I agree safety should always be first. But I cannot help feeling that Warren Hall could have been saved. After all for over 40 years it has been an icon for the Bay Area.

Apparently in 2004 Californians also thought Warren Hall was important enough to save. Voters approved the Statewide School Repair and Construction Bond Act, which allocated more than $30 million for seismic work on the then 34-year-old building.

In 2005 the CSU Chancellor’s Office proposed a retrofit of Warren Hall. A feasibility study and seismic renovation scope done by Huntsman Architectural Group included seismic retrofit schemes, building and code upgrades, and alternative investigations of partial deconstruction and renovation as well as studies to look into a total replacement.

But all of that would have been quite expensive. Obviously. Could it really cost more than the $30 million plus that Californians agreed the university should have? President Norma Rees, at the time, thought so.

“In place of spending that $31 million to retrofit an old building, we would be allocat[ing] those funds to build an entirely new building on another part of the campus,” Rees explained in a memo to staff and faculty in 2005. She said $31 million would not cover the asbestos abatement needed, upgrades to elevators, and lighting and air handling equipment which would be mandated to provide a usable building after a seismic retrofit.

In a previous interview with The Pioneer, Jim Zavagno mentioned abatement and demolition would cost around $9 to $12 million. That’s too expensive, forget abatement. Who needs healthy lungs? The loans we have to repay with this new interest rate hike are going to kill us all anyway.

Okay, so healthy lungs are important; but asbestos removal needed to be done whether the building was coming down or not. That being said, the fate of Warren Hall has been sealed for a long time. It is no secret that it was declared seismically unsafe years ago.

In March 2006, the Board of Trustees approved schematic plans for CSUEB’s Student Services Replacement Building. That building is what we have come to know as the Student Administration building. The cost of this project was a staggering $42,360,000, according to the audit report.

So we decided not to use $31 million to retrofit Warren Hall but instead we spent more than $40 million on a brand new building? And what about the $50 million that is said to be going into a new building that is going to “replace” Warren Hall? That is over $90 million dollars total. I don’t understand why we couldn’t just fix the building that makes us stand out in the horizon.

The new buildings our campus has built over the last several years are needed for the continuing growth of the student body population. I get that. But with Warren Hall gone, and no visual way to point out the campus, we are disconnected from the community. Fellow CSUEB student Joe Tolo asked, “Now, how am I supposed to point at my school from miles away?” Sorry Joe, you can’t.

No more pointing us out from a distance. No more looking out an airplane window on your way back to the Bay and seeing Warren Hall standing tall, representing Hayward. Pilots will now circle the Bay Area for days not realizing how close they are to the Oakland Airport. It’s no longer a visual landmark.

My memories and familiarities are important to me. As cool as the demolition looked, I was sad to see Warren Hall go. I will always be a “they could’ve saved it” advocate. That building was a distinctly visible icon and one of the prides of the city.

Yes, Warren Hall was demolished, but to many of us it is still standing. And it will continue to stand for years to come