The McGregor Room at Alderman Library

    For the second stop on Library Tour Fall 2014 we visited the McGregor Room, a hidden jewel nestled several floors below the main floor of UVA's Alderman Library.  Alderman is an impressive place, too vast and nooked-and-crannied to get a proper overview of in one visit.  The McGregor room is surely but one of dozens of little havens within Alderman, each with its own distinctive character and special features.  I hope to revisit Alderman many more times and explore the whole range of rooms, halls and floors it has to offer.  But for this week, we happily spent our two hours in the Tracy W. McGregor Room, on the second floor of the East Wing.

    After entering through the main lobby of Alderman with its echoing floors and tall, vaulted ceilings, we passed by tidy rows of computers and gleaming white walls that stretched the length of the lobby.  We pushed through a glass door and into the East Wing stairwell and went down two winding levels.  The stairwell and lobby were both spacious, and fairly sterile and institutional looking. But when we pushed through the door to the second floor, the mood immediately changed.  The lighting was much dimmer, and as we exited the stairwell and stepped into the second floor hallway, we were greeted by an imposing figure: the dark and formal carved stone portrait of Tracy W. McGregor himself.  He looked very serious.  From Mr. McGregor's picture we turned to the left and saw the doorway to the McGregor Room beckoning to us.  I had heard several UVA graduates refer to this room as "the Harry Potter room", and standing in its entrance now it was apparent why.  The decor in the room was antique and traditional, quite a contrast from the stark grey-and-white computer rows upstairs.  Here the walls were lined ceiling to floor with dark, pristine wooden shelves, each one filled with books.  The floors were carpeted and the room was lit (not brightly) by several tasteful chandeliers.  It was cozy in the McGregor room, warm and masculine- just like Tracy W. McGregor himself, I'm sure.  I half-expected Mr. McGregor to stride out at any moment from behind one of the chocolatey-brown bookcases, smoking a pipe and pouring a glass of brandy.  It was a very comfortable space to spend two hours.

     Only one unfortunate thing happened.  I was reading over some of my archived journal entries from about ten years ago, sorting through and seeing what I wanted to keep or work on more.  Basically, as I was reading over what I had written...there is no good way to say this...I kept cracking myself up.  I kept coming across a line that struck me as funny, and each time I had to cover my mouth and put my head on the desk as I stifled my laugh and shook silently like a third grader.  And I'm a grown ass woman, so that had to look kind of weird.  I'm not sure if the material was really that hilarious.  But the more I read, the more I laughed, to the point where tears were streaming silently down my face.  Because as comfortable as the room was, it was also as silent as the grave- and everyone in there was very serious.  Much more serious and silent than in the Charles L. Brown Science & Engineering Library, just for the record.  Because it was a formal, traditional setting and everyone was serious and silent, it was sort of like being in church and trying not laugh.  I was sure Grandfather McGregor was going to sternly chastise me at any moment, but that just made it funnier.  I don't think I disturbed anyone, but it was a little bit embarrassing.  However, even with an inappropriate fit of giggles, my two hours in the McGregor Room were productive, pleasant, and even restorative.  It is certainly a room that I look forward to revisiting in the future.

Note:  A previous version of this post had misspelled Mr. McGregor's first name.  Thanks to the careful eyes of my friends at the UVA Library, I have removed all superfluous "e"s from the text.  VR