Larry Lee has been experiencing a familiar feeling lately.

“For the past several years, at every commencement, I’ve had this tremendous sense of anticipation for the following fall,” Allegheny College’s associate vice president for finance and planning recently confessed. “I know the students are going to come back to a place very different from the one they left — and that’s exciting to me.”

During her four years at Allegheny, which came to a formal end with Sunday’s commencement, Meghan Perry saw those changes. When she arrived on campus as a freshman, for example, the renovation of Henderson Campus Center was newly finished and construction had just started on the Patricia Bush Tippie Alumni Center, Perry recalled during a Wednesday afternoon interview at the office of Meadville Redevelopment Authority, where the brand-new graduate is finishing up her assignment as a Davies Community Service Leader.

Now, construction is complete on a major student housing complex known as the North Quad, to cite just one recent example, and under way on the massive Vukovich Center for Communication Arts in the heart of the campus.

“It looks really good,” Perry said of the current state of the campus. “With all the new construction, people get excited — it brings life to the area.”

According to Lee, the excitement has only just begun. “I can’t imagine a busier summer,” he said in what may be the understatement of the week.

The Vukovich Center Project

For starters, the Vukovich Center is scheduled to be “substantially completed” by Aug. 23. Once the final details have been attended to, Lee expects they’ll start occupying the building in October and holding classes in it by second semester.

The building itself, however, isn’t the only component of what Lee refers to as the Vukovich Center Project.

“One thing that hasn’t been much talked about yet is what we’re calling the Gator Quad,” he explained with a grin.

On the northwest corner of the quad — named in honor of the school’s beloved mascot — will stand a 14-foot bronze sculpture by Arizona artist Mark Rossi of the Allegheny Gator.

“It will be a nice little quad area — very nicely landscaped,” Lee explained. “It’s the type of gator that will be really good for visiting families to take pictures.”

Occupying the area between the Vukovich and Campus centers, the quad will be divided by two diagonal pathways intersecting in the center. “I think it is going to become the most active artery on campus,” Lee predicted.

The appearance of the entire area will be dramatically improved by fall.

An adjoining area, for example, will bear a resemblance to the nearby Senior Circle with the addition of a circular brick walkway and benches. The western entrance into the Campus Center, which Lee described as “a little worn and tattered,” will be redone with new concrete. And at nearby Caflisch Hall, one of the college’s residence facilities, an addition at the back that houses a computer lab will be removed and replaced by a new portico, similar to but not as elaborate as the portico on the east side of the Tippie Center.