FAYETTEVILLE — FAYETTEVILLE - More than 3 1/2 years after a University of Arkansas sorority announced plans to build an ornamental gate near Old Main, its alumnae and members met on campus to celebrate its completion.
Despite a construction delay, price-tag increase and a concern last summer that the signature gateway would violate the state fire code, Pi Beta Phi sisters were able to complete the project.
Friday afternoon, they dedicated the structure amid much fanfare.
UA-Fayetteville campus leaders joined Pi Phi, as the sorority is known informally, in a ceremony that attracted roughly 300 on the plaza between Old Main’s back door and the Fulbright Peace Fountain.
The gate faces Maple Street, which runs north of Old Main and is two blocks south of today’s northern campus boundary.
The ornate structure is 30 feet tall at its highest point and 120 feet long, said UA development spokesman Danielle Strickland. A wroughtiron gate at its center canopen and close. The materials include limestone, native Arkansas stone, granite and wrought iron from Vienna.
“Wow. That’s a gate. Holymoley!” UA Chancellor G. David Gearhart declared as he took the podium under a tent sheltering 150 white wooden chairs behind the gate entrance. “I didn’t realize it was going to look like this.”
Those familiar with the project have said it was a marriage of the UA sorority’s desire to celebrate its centennial anniversary in December 2009 and UA leaders’ efforts to offer potential donors a chance to donate for architectural features befitting the campus’s master plan.
In February 2009, alumnae of Pi Phi’s Arkansas Alpha Chapter on the Fayetteville campus announced plans to raise $900,000 for the decorative gate.
At the time, UA said it planned to match the gift, likely a 100 percent match, with time, labor and materials for improvements surrounding the gate. Those improvements were planned in the early 1980s as part of a $10 million fundraising campaign to save Old Main, the campus’s oldest building.
The original Old Main renovation plan involved replacing a curvy street known as Campus Drive that once connected Maple Street to Dickson Street. Campus Drive closed sometime during the late 1970s or ’80s, according to newspaper archives, and was later converted to the wide bricked walkway behind and to the west of Old Main.
But the university lacked funds to finish the last leg of the walkway, extending it to Maple Street. For some years, the space consisted of an asphalt circle drive and a fewmarked parking spaces.
The walkway now extends all the way to Maple Street.
By 2011, UA estimated cost of the Pi Phi gate had risen to $1.1 million and state Sen. Sue Madison called the state fire marshal, who determined the gate entrance’s original 12-foot width was 8 feet too narrow to comply with the Arkansas Fire Prevention Code of 1999. UA planners altered the gate’s design, keeping true to its original appearance.
On Friday, Jay Huneycutt, director of the campus planning office, said the gate entry and a wide swath of grass on its west side each can accommodate the city of Fayetteville’s largest firetruck.
The sorority’s fundraising efforts resulted in 392 individual gifts totaling more than $1 million for the university’s first signature gate, UA officials said.
UA ultimately matched the sorority’s gift by making improvements valued at roughly $1 million to the area behind Old Main, Huneycutt said.
The gate was a catalyst for improvements such as more bricked walkways, realigned sidewalks, new lighting and repairs to the Fulbright Peace Fountain.
The names of four alumnae who were key in the gate’s creation and their year of initiation into Pi Phi are carved into a gray paver stone directly in front of the entrance:
Marilynn Moseley Porter, 1973.
Karen S. Kennedy (now known as Karen Kennedy Morton), 1974.
Patricia Shelton Pyle, 1970.
Julia Peck Mobley, 1963.
Porter of Little Rock said during the ceremony that Greek life taught the women lifelong lessons in human relations.
“If we were single - alone - we wouldn’t be standing here today,” Porter said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 09/22/2012