Venable was 83 and had fought a long battle with entropy. Backhoes began knocking it down last month. All that's left is a craggy pile of brick and concrete, and the residue of eight decades of student angst. Few tears were shed.

The structure was declared terminally ill about eight years ago. That was when the UNC system began a campaign to convince taxpayers that their university system had fallen into disrepair and needed a $2.5 billion makeover. The sickly chemistry building became one of the campaign's prime examples, a a horrid and impossible place for cutting-edge science.

Voters were swayed. UNC got its money. Venable's days were numbered.

Since the building opened in 1925, thousands of students had trudged to chemistry class down its dank, musty halls. By 2000, the plumbing was so poor that puddles were common. Once, a professor slipped in one and wiped out in front of a class. Another time, soaked ceiling tiles caved in with a class in session.

Ed Samulski, a longtime chemistry professor, used to offer first-time visitors $5 if they could find his office within 15 minutes of entering the building. There were maps at the front door.

"It was still hopeless," Samulski recalled this week. His office number, typical of this sprawling, prisonlike structure: 18-1D.

The 80,000-square-foot facility had the largest footprint on campus. Inside, it seemed to go in 10 directions. One hallway was so narrow two people couldn't pass by each other without banging shoulders. Faculty members said they could get tenure if they were skilled enough to roll a bowling ball the length of the hall without touching a wall. You reached the journals in the basement library only by ducking your head and braving a narrow spiral staircase.

"You just learn to live a subsistence life," Samulski said.

When Martha Guy arrived at UNC-CH, she was impressed with Venable's new, tiered lecture hall. The labs and supply rooms, however, felt old

That was in 1939.

Guy, now 85 and living in Newland, remembers the fog of cigarette smoke that would waft through the room during exams.

"Everybody smoked, and put them out on the floor and ground them out," she said. "Some days you couldn't see the professor. During an exam, there would be seven or eight cigarettes around everybody's seat."

Over the years, there were intermittent fix-up attempts. Former trustee Tim Burnett once proposed a fundraiser -- four sledgehammer swings at Venable for $100.

The university took note. On a Web site chronicling Venable's ongoing destruction, you can buy an original brick for $100. For $1,000, you can get the brick and your name engraved on a plaque that will hang inside the building's replacement.

Adapting to 'luxury'

A new building will rise on the site, and with the new Caudill Laboratories and Chapman Hall, will form the core of the university's new science complex.

Samulski has been relocated to Caudill, a modern facility rife with science's newest technology. "It's difficult to be comfortable in this luxury," Samulski said.

Lowry Caudill of Durham, a UNC alumnus and entrepreneur whose $5 million gift fueled the construction of Samulski's new lab building, has fond recollections of his days in Venable in the late 1970s. He and other chemistry students would study all day and explore the building at night.

"You almost had to get an advanced degree to get around Venable," he joked. "If you could get around Venable, you could probably do chemistry."

Venable Hall is survived by a nationally acclaimed chemistry department and more than 4,700 graduates with chemistry degrees.