In the early years of the 20
th
century, a place called Sleepy Hollow was the setting for the rite of passage called Cap Night, when thousands of students?virtually
all
the students?gathered in a natural amphitheater in the light of a great bonfire to watch male freshmen turn themselves into sophomores.
Actually, it appears that two natural amphitheaters went by the name Sleepy Hollow. They lay across the street from each other at the north end of Observatory Street.
The first Sleepy Hollow?which held the name for several years after 1905?was at the northern edges of Palmer Field. Imagine you’re walking down the slope from the rear of the Detroit Observatory toward the Palmer tennis courts and track; you’re in Sleepy Hollow, with the rise toward Couzens Hall to the north and the rise toward Alice Lloyd Hall to the east. But in 1905, neither of those buildings was even a twinkle in an architect’s eye. The only substantial building nearby was the Observatory.
By day, in the warm months, Sleepy Hollow was a place where physical education instructors took women students for calisthenics and dancing. Indeed, Professor William J. Hussey, director of the Observatory, objected on grounds of modesty to the city’s plans to extend Huron Avenue through Sleepy Hollow. Passing traffic, he said, would “deprive the girls’ athletic field…of the privacy which is most desirable and without which much of the freedom of the exercises…will be lost, as they are naturally diffident about appearing in public in the gymnasium costumes which make the exercises beneficial.” (The extension was never built as planned, though several streets in the neighborhood were rerouted or obliterated as the medical campus grew.)
Then, every year in early June, came Cap Night.
By custom, all year long, U-M freshmen were made to wear a certain style of gray cap whenever they went outdoors. Forget your cap and you were in for upper-class hazing. It symbolized freshman serfdom in the era when rivalries between the classes were powerful.
On Cap Night, the students marched in a massive parade from State Street to Sleepy Hollow. There they sang Michigan songs, celebrated the year’s triumphs in sports, heard speeches by famous upperclassmen, and finally, in the evening’s climax, watched the freshmen take off their hated caps and hurl them onto a towering bonfire. It was their ritual release into the freedom of sophomore status.
Then, somewhere in the 1910s, for reasons that aren’t clear, Cap Night and the name Sleepy Hollow crossed Observatory to a larger swath of empty land. It lay along the lower leg of the meandering trail called the Boulevard. Today, if you look closely, you can still see the shape of the second Sleepy Hollow under parking structures and medical buildings?a broad half-bowl sloping downward and eastward toward the new Mott Children’s Hospital. It was big enough to accommodate thousands of students and thousands more onlookers, as the few surviving photographs show. The ritual march from Central Campus continued. Afterward, back in town, the movie houses offered free shows.
All this made for strong memories.
“Cap Night at the Hollow stands out as one of the lovely pictures,” recalled an alumna named Mildred Wood, who graduated in 1910, “the light of the huge bonfire reflected on the faces of the crowd on the hills?the songs, dances…”
Evalynn Walker, a graduate of 1916, quite agreed.
“Cap Night, out on the Boulevard,” she said, “was a far more thrilling and impressive spectacle than any stilted formalities could ever hope to make Commencement.”
But by the 1940s Cap Night had faded out, and the second Sleepy Hollow went down under the bulldozers.