MTM: Hall of Fame, Bronx, New York

So, you see the words Hall of Fame in the Bronx and wonder if I’m crazy. The Baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, and the Tennis Hall of Fame is in Newport, Rhode Island. What other Hall of Fame could there be?

As it turns out there are plenty more Halls of Fame, hockey, dance, basketball and so on. But the original Hall of Fame, the Hall that should be most revered is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, designed and built more than one hundred years ago to honor Americans who have made a significant contribution to the welfare or culture of the United States in the fields of government, science or the arts.

Dr. Henry McCracken was President of New York University from 1891 until 1910. Partway through his presidency, he decided that during the construction of a new building complex on the Bronx Campus of NYU, he would originate a Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

The project was designed by Stanford White and financed by Helen Gould Shepard. The campus stands on one of the highest spots in the Bronx and offers magnificent views of Manhattan and the New Jersey palisades. To encompass the view with the monument, White designed a 630 foot open air colonnade. Each open space is designed to hold a bronze bust of a prominent American.

The welcome page of the website has a panorama continuously showing the colonnade’s glory on a nice sunny day.

Elections to the Hall were conducted by a committee of prominent representatives of the fifty states, and a nominee had to be deceased for at least twenty five years before nomination. These rules were less stringent in the early part of the last century. Until 1920 a nominee need only be dead for ten years to be eligible.

Now you want to know who the people are who have bronze sculptures displayed in the Hall of Fame. In 1900, the original twenty nine electees included Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant. Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne represented American writers.

There were no woman in that first group, but in the selection of 1905 three of the eight Americans chosen were women. Our grand mystery leader, Edgar Allen Poe, was elected in 1910. I was surprised to see Robert E. Lee in the original group and a bit abashed to see names throughout the nominations that are totally unfamiliar to me.

But here is where we can learn all we need to know. Click on the this link and it will take you to the Face to Face History On-Line Tour.

The link opened for me at Albert Abraham Michelson, a physicist who was elected to the Hall in 1970. He was the first American to win a Nobel Prize for science.

Today the campus that was formerly part of NYU is the home of Bronx Community College, a junior college in the City University of New York. BCC is extremely proud of the Hall of Fame and cordially invites everyone to visit free of charge between the hours of 10 am and 5 pm, daily.

My personal relationship with the Hall is that of a typical Bronx girl. When I was a kid some of my family lived in a fifth floor walk up on Loring Place, just off the corner of Hall of Fame Terrace.
We used to look out the window and watch the sun play on the roof of the Hall of Fame. Sunset was often very colorful, but our view was not as fabulous as a friend’s apartment a couple of miles to the south which overlooked Yankee Stadium .

Speaking of fifth floor walk ups, I lived in one for most of my childhood and talk about views, my bedroom window overlooked Poe Park, a lovely sitting park with a band shell for concerts and dances on summer nights. The park housed Edgar Allen Poe's last home, known as Poe Cottage. I spoke about the cottage in a My Town Monday post a little more than a year ago.

I wrote and scheduled this post a few days ago and then our own Cathi Stoler found this link to an article about the Hall of Fame in the New York Times on Saturday. Cathi was kind enough to email the link to me with the comment: "I think the reporter peeked at our post list and decided to write the story."

For more My Town Monday posts, please visit the My Town Monday blog.

Terrie