Building a Proper Campus

From left: Ground-breaking ceremonies, Fiorello H. LaGuardia - October 2, 1935. The original Brooklyn College campus as alumni of the 1930's remember it.

In 1934, Randolph Evans, a young architect working for the Wood-Harmon Corporation, drafted a plan for a college campus—a Georgian-style campus facing a central quadrangle and anchored by a library building with a tall tower—on the large plot of land owned by his employer in Midwood. At the time, the land was used as a golf course, a football field and the staging area for the big-top shows of Barnum and Bailey Circus.

Evans presented his plan to President Boylan without an appointment. Boylan was pleased with what he saw, and the next day they went to Midwood to look at the property. On December 21, 1934, the Board of Estimate of the City of New York approved the purchase of the Wood-Harmon lot for $1,625,528. In January, the Public Works Administration of the federal government allocated $5 million for the construction of the buildings. And on October 2, 1935, Mayor La Guardia, in the presence of Boylan and Borough President Raymond V. Ingersoll, took a silver-plated shovel and symbolically broke ground for the new construction. All three men would later have campus buildings named in their honor.

From left: The Wood-Harmon property, a 40- acre field in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, became the site of the new campus for the growing Brooklyn College. Construction of the Brooklyn College library. Construction of Boylan Hall.

A year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came on campus and laid the cornerstone of the gymnasium in front of 7,000 people gathered on the grounds. "I have seen blueprints and I have seen photographs and now I see the real article with my own eyes," Roosevelt said. "This project is…improving the educational facilities of this great Borough, not just for today but for generations to come.

 "Out of this depression, while there have been much misery and much suffering, there has also come much good; because…there has been given to this country an opportunity to get better schools for the young people. I am glad to come here today and to wish to Brooklyn College the fine and successful future that it deserves. May it live through the generations to come for the building up of a better American citizenship." In 1947 the Hygiene Building (as the gymnasium was called) was formally renamed Roosevelt Hall at a ceremony attended by Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.

In 1938, President Boylan stepped down and was succeeded by 39-year-old University of Chicago economics professor Harry Gideonse, who led the college for the next 27 years. An innovative educator and a fearless advocate for the college, he built a distinguished faculty, yet some of his decisions before and during the McCarthy era—to expel left-leaning academics, to close the student newspaper Vanguard, and to shut down student government—remain highly contentious.