In Wallace Stegner’s short story Beyond the Glass Mountain, two alumni (an Iowa City businessman and a Yale professor) meet after 17 years apart. The visitor from Yale …

found himself at the corner of College and Dubuque Streets in Iowa City, at a little past ten on a Sunday morning in May, and as he stopped on the corner to let a car pass, the utter and passionate familiarity of everything smote him like a wind….the stone lace of the hospital tower…the union and the reserve library strung out along the riverbank…

This location is now the Pedestrian Mall.

Wallace Stegner’s plaque on the literary walk shows four silhouettes of friends huddled together and it reads:

All of us felt it. We must have. For in front of their gate, before we drove away still wearing their burnooses, we fell into a four-ply, laughing hug, we were so glad to know one another and so glad that all the trillion chances in the universe had brought us to the same town and the same university at the same time.

Quadrangle Hall, commonly called ‘Quad’, was located on the West campus, just five blocks from the Pentacrest. It has since been torn down.

The Quad is where Stegner and his roommate, Wilbur Schramm, shared a room.

On campus they had rooms that adjoined in an old, brick dormitory called the Quadrangle, and shortly after getting to know each other, they opened the connecting door, creating a suite of a bedroom on one side and a study on the other. This arrangement also gave them ample space so that they could play catch for a few minutes in between study sessions.