A national historical landmark, University Hall has seen its share of descriptive titles at Ohio State, including the appropriately boring “College Building,” the original name.
Of course that last one was well before any of the current students or faculty had been born – try 1892. And yet, not much has changed, intrinsically, with the overall use and theme of University Hall.
A poem by Jerome Lawrence, OSU 1937, inside University Hall reads: “I am not just a building/Like all living things I am two-fold:/Yesterday and tomorrow.”
This seems to have always been the theme of the university – to look forward to the future with a firm sense of the past, “time and change” as the alma mater goes, and University Hall exemplifies this idea by being the first classroom on campus. It was the fourth building on campus, not the first, as some have erroneously concluded.
Many current students have had classes in University Hall, but not everyone knows that the hall once held classrooms, dorms, faculty residences, physical science labs and the school cafeteria. Every aspect of college was experienced in University Hall when Ohio A&M opened to 19 students (24 by the end of the year) in 1873. The relative merit of a school dance in 1876 prompted much debate and was not approved by the faculty.
The original University Hall was designed in the late Victorian, second-empire style popular at the end of the 19th century. With 15-foot stories and tall windows, University Hall was an imposing building made ever more so with the addition of the tower clock in 1903. Now it seems kind of quaint next to the grand main library, hidden in a grove of trees at the northwest end of the Oval.
Razed and rebuilt from 1972 to 1976 because of structural damage inflicted by time, over-use and faulty craftsmanship, the newer University Hall now houses the graduate school, the College of Humanities and the Department of Philosophy. Most of it’s quirky charm has been replaced with modern amenities, like central air conditioning and plumbing that works. The rats and roaches that used to share office space with the philosophy and humanities scholars have been evicted, and modern electrical wiring was put in to accommodate contemporary needs.
No longer will students and faculty have to worry that a piece of the tower clock would fall on them as they stepped off the main staircase. This happened a few times, the first in 1881 when a piece of the tower rim fell and struck a professor; then in 1883 an earthquake shook some more roof off. No one was injured. Then again, more pieces of the roof fell in 1913; lightning struck the tower in 1929 whereupon the administration lowered the tower 15 feet; and finally, right before the summer of 1967, large slabs of sandstone fell down on the main entrance. University Hall is still the centerpiece of the university. Incoming freshmen have orientations that begin and end with University Hall. Today, 130 years after the construction of the hall it is still used it classes, offices and as a meeting place. It has also been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the Department of the Interior, one of only three buildings on campus to receive that distinction.
