The University now has four dormitories or halls of residence for women. Two of them were completed in 1916; the Martha Cook Building on South University Avenue, given by the Cook family of Hillsdale, in memory of their mother, and the Newberry Hall of Residence on State Street, a memorial to Helen Handy Newberry, the wife of John S. Newberry, '47, given by her children. The Martha Cook Building is probably the most sumptuous and complete college dormitory in America and cost something over $500,000. It is an unusually beautiful example of Tudor Gothic, always a favorite style for college buildings. Simple in its main lines it reveals an extraordinary perfection in detail as well as comfort in its appointments and a richness in decoration which cannot but have its happy influence on the one hundred and seventeen fortunate women who live there. Less elaborate but equally attractive as a home for the seventy-five girls it is built to accommodate is the Newberry Building, which, though smaller and simpler in its architecture, embodies every essential found in the larger building. It is of hollow tile and stucco and cost about $100,000. Similar in general plan and appointments, though built of brick, is the adjacent Betsy Barbour Dormitory, which was completed in 1920, the gift of Ex-Regent Levi L. Barbour, '63, '65_l_, of Detroit. It stands on the site of the old ward school building on State Street, used for many years by the University as a recitation building, and soon to be razed now the new dormitory, just to the rear, is completed. Alumnae House, the fourth girls' residence hall, was, as the name implies, furnished by the alumnae of the University. It was made over from a quaint old dwelling on Washtenaw Avenue at a cost of about $18,000, and accommodates sixteen self-supporting students.
A final group of buildings, very necessary in an institution so large as the University, is composed of the heating and lighting plant, the nearby laundry in the one-time ravine at the east of the old "Cat-hole," and the University shops and storehouse a little distance south. The old power house near the Engineering Building was abandoned in 1914 when the new plant, situated on a lower level than the Campus and reached by a spur from the railroad, was ready for service. It cost approximately a third of a million dollars, and furnishes heat, compressed air, electrical energy, and hot water to the Campus and adjacent buildings through a series of tunnels nearly ten feet high which extend as far as the Union, half a mile across the Campus.