Jones Building before and after Renovation

[JacSue Kehoe]

Our first memories of Jones, not yet the laboratory we know today, were mainly auditory and olfactory. Our only visits to that building during the McClintock years of the course were for participating in dances and parties in the large and dimly lit interior at nighttime. It was a time when marijuana was part of the lifestyle of students coming to the summer courses, and it was in fact my introduction to the associated odor. But it wasn't long until Jones was scheduled to become a neuroscience laboratory to be used during the "academic year" by permanent Cold Spring Harbor neuroscientists, who were asked to liberate it during the summer months for those of us teaching experimental courses.
I remember the renovation of the building; to make it useful to electrophysiologists. They rendered an interior that must have seemed shocking to those who knew the building only from the outside, since the exterior belied the modernity of the interior. Although the walls, ceiling and major structure remained as before, and remained compatible with the age of the building, the experimental modules placed throughout the central part of the large open expanse were clearly of the space age. These modules were designed to isolate, electrically and mechanically, the experimental set-ups that we and others would be using to record from nerve cells. At the inauguration, while champagne was flowing, it became clear that these requirements were not yet met. As the builder jumped on the outer floor to demonstrate the mechanical separation of the modules, the recording electrode which had been placed in a neuron in one of the experimental set ups promptly popped out. Back to the drawing board!