In helping researchers at the University Archives, I’ve come across a good deal of Greenwich Village history that I find interesting. Most recently I’ve been searching for the historical origins of NYU ghost stories and subsequently have read a great deal about the old University Building and thought I would share some information about this long gone university institution.
The University Building was the first structure built specifically for New York University. It was designed in a Gothic Revival Style that mimicked the collegiate architecture in England and broke with other contemporary American universities’ preference for red brick buildings. One writer for the New York American in 1837 wrote, “An Englishman led unexpectedly, by moonlight, through Washington Square, might, at first view of the University, imagine himself approaching King’s or Christ’s, or either of several other Colleges at Cambridge or Oxford…” The corner stone of the University Building was laid in 1833 overlooking what is now Washington Square but what at the time was a recently closed potter’s field. The bodies of 20,000 indigents, unknowns, and epidemic victims still lie under Washington Square Park. In an unpopular decision, the university’s founding fathers had the stone cheaply quarried by convict labor from Sing Sing. Unfortunately the competition with convict labor angered professional stonecutters and incited the “Stone Cutters’ Rebellion” which required the action of armed troops to quell the violence and tension.
The University Building was completed in 1835 and stood at the corner of Waverly Place and Washington Place facing the square. However when the University Building opened it was too large for the student body and there were rooms rented for residence and studios among a number of artists, inventors, and 19th century personalities. In 1838 Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, a painter and inventor, created the telegraph while living at the University Building. It was also there that the first daguerreotype was taken in America by Professor John Draper. His apparatus was very primitive, a cigar box was involved, and the subject was his sister, who supposedly sat for him for a half hour on the roof of the building. Other notable residents were Samuel Colt who invented the six-shooter and Theodore Winthrop, a lodger who wrote “Cecil Dreeme”, a novel taking place at a university much like NYU in a building that seemed to mimic the bohemian community that had sprung up in the University Building. The novel, published in the mid-nineteenth century, was quite a popular gothic story, complete with a gender-bending heroine pretending as a male artist at the university as well as a haunted turret and a forbidden romance. Rumors of the ghost of a student who killed himself in a turret of the University Building became widespread in the 1880s and these stories seem to find their inspiration in that gothic novel which chronicled life in the University Building. Here is a link to a great photograph of the University Building from the 1870s as well as a little more information about the building’s legends.
However, towards the end of the 19th century, Chancellor Henry McCracken was looking to move the undergraduate college away from Washington Square. It had become more urban and he wanted to relocate to an area in the Bronx where there could be a more unified campus and athletic facilities. Initially the fate of the University Building was up in the air. There was discussion about moving the building stone by stone to the new University Heights Campus in the Bronx but it was deemed far too costly so the decision was made to demolish it. On May 21, 1894 the destruction of the University Building began in earnest. However some of the pinnacles and gargoyles were kept and taken to the University Heights Campus for the purpose of making a memorial to the building which had been so central to the university. Those pinnacles which were included in the Founder’s Monument at the new Bronx campus were later mounted in front of Tisch Hall. Henry James wrote of the demolition of the University Building from The American Scene,“…The gray and more or less hallowed University Building – wasn’t it somehow with a desperate bravery, both castellated and gabled- has vanished from the earth and vanished with it the two or three adjacent houses, of which the birthplace was one. This was the snub for the complacency of the retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable…but that we have only to reflect an instant to see any such form of civic piety inevitably and for ever absent.”