The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: A Call
for Ending its Comatosis or Hibernation
The world’s first organization that has been specifically designated as a
“Hall of Fame” was established in New York City in 1900 (MacCracken, 1900;
MacCracken, 1901). The Hall of Fame for Great Americans honors 102
Americans. It has served as a model for hundreds of other “halls of fame,” the
most prominent being baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York,
established in 1939. While the Hall of Fame for Great Americans remains the
original icon in a history of popular culture museums visited by millions each
year, the Hall today is little known, visited by scant few, and in a state of both
physical and organizational decline. This article is a call to reawaken this
institution from, depending on how you see it, comatosis or hibernation.
The Hall of Fame came about by accident. Henry MacCracken, President of
New York University (NYU), wanted to establish a new campus in a rural area
of the Bronx. He found 50 acres on a bluff rising above the Harlem River. There
he orchestrated the construction of an entirely new campus. At the same time he
retained NYU’s Washington Square location in lower Manhattan for his
professional schools. His initial plan called for moving the main old campus
building, the University Hall, brick and stone by brick and stone, to the Bronx,
but it was soon realized that such a project was cost prohibitive. Hence he set
about to build what was essentially an entirely new campus, although some
structures in the neighborhood of the new site were converted into university
facilities (MacCracken, 1900, pp. 2-3; MacCracken, 1901, p. 563).
The building project had several buildings surrounding a centerpiece
structure combination administration library building. This building along with
the others was designed by the world renowned architect Stanford White. The
construction was made possible by a large donation (over $2 million) from—
Helen Miller Gould (Mrs. Finley J. Shepard) the daughter of business tycoon Jay
Gould. White and MacCracken desired very much to exploit the visual effects of
the campus atop the parcel of land in the rural-suburban area of the Bronx that
took on the name of University Heights. They agreed that the administrative
library building, to be known as the Gould Library, should be located as near to
the edge of the bluff as it could be (New York Times, March 8, 1900; Rubin,
1997).
White informed MacCracken that such a building location would require a
massive retaining wall. Otherwise the library structure might slip over the
precipice. The placement of such a wall would create room for a large basement
in the building, but it would also create somewhat of an eyesore defining the
glorious building above it, as people looking up toward the campus from the
west would see only the massive wall. The retaining wall needed something at