The Move Uptown and New Colleges in The Boroughs

1900

By the end of the 19th Century, space is a serious issue at City College, prompting the state legislature to authorize funds to purchase new property.  Forty locations are considered, but in the end the Board of Trustees chooses a two-block parcel between St. Nicholas Terrace and Convent Avenue,  from 138th to 140th Streets. Another parcel is added later, which extends the future campus west to Amsterdam Avenue. The renowned architect chosen for the project, George B. Post, designs what is to become an iconic campus of five neo-Gothic buildings: the main classroom and administrative building, the preparatory high school, a gymnasium and buildings for chemistry and mechanical arts. After three years of construction, the buildings are completed in 1906. Eight decades later, in 1984, the entire North Campus is added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Groundbreaking for the new City College campus in 1903.

1907

Four years after ground is broken at its new uptown campus, classes begin at the College of the City of New York.

Looking through the gate on Convent Avenue to Shepard Hall at the The City College of New York (Photo-Illustration by Roy Roche).

1914

The Normal College is renamed Hunter College, after its first president, Irish immigrant Thomas Hunter.  By 1920 the college boasts the highest enrollment of any municipally funded U.S. women’s college. Its growth prompts a move from an East Fourth Street armory into a distinctive, neo-Gothic structure on Park Avenue between 68th and 69th Streets, part of which still stands today. In Hunter’s early years, the New York State Legislature approves the establishment of Hunter College High School and elementary school.

Students exiting Normal College on Park Avenue in 1890. The Normal College was renamed Hunter College in 1914.

1919

CCNY’s School of Business and Civic Administration opens in the original Free Academy building.  The antiquated building gives way to a new 16-story building that opens in 1929. It is described as “the largest structure anywhere devoted to the teaching of business methods and practice.” The school will eventually be separated from CCNY and become Baruch College.

1926

The state legislature establishes the Board of Higher Education with the mission of integrating the college system and expanding public access in the city’s outer boroughs. The board’s first duty is to establish a collegiate center in Brooklyn. Attorney Moses J. Stroock is elected the first chairman of the board.

1930

In Brooklyn, the annexes of CCNY and Hunter merge to form Brooklyn College, the city’s first public coeducational liberal arts college.  The campus is initially housed in rented office space in the shadows of the elevated IRT tracks in downtown Brooklyn. Within a few years, trustees approve  a new, formal Georgian-style campus on the last large tract of undeveloped land in the Midwood neighborhood, which had served variously as a golf course, farm, football field and staging area for the Barnum & Bailey Circus.

On Oct. 2, 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, silver-plated shovel in hand, breaks ground for the college’s new campus. In October 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrives in a motorcade to lay the cornerstone for the gymnasium (now Roosevelt Hall).  “I am glad to come here today and to wish Brooklyn College the fine and successful future that it deserves,” he says. “May it live through the generations to come for the building up of a better American citizenship.”

Circa-1935 sketch of the new Brooklyn College campus and construction of the library in 1936.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia breaks ground for Brooklyn College’s new campus on Oct. 2, 1935.

Meanwhile, a major step forward in Manhattan: Women enroll in City College’s School of Business and Civic Administration — a triumph of sorts over the Hunter College administration’s long-held opposition to women enrolling in business courses. The Board of Higher Education soon decides to admit women to all technical and professional courses at City College.

1931

Hunter builds the first of four Gothic-style buildings on its 37-acre Bronx campus, constructed by the state Works Progress Administration, near the rural Jerome Park Reservoir.  In its first decade, Hunter-in-the-Bronx, as it is named, serves freshmen and sophomore women. During World War II, the Navy will use the campus to train WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). The campus will later be the site of Lehman College.

1931 illustration of Hunter College’s Bronx campus, later site of Lehman College.

1933

In a budget-cutting move–at the height of the Depression and with a surplus of school teachers in the city–the Board of Education disbands three teacher training colleges in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. That spring, 1,931 displaced education students (mostly women) are transferred into Hunter, City and Brooklyn Colleges to continue their education, with new teacher-training curricula quickly put into place.

The early years of the Great Depression, meanwhile, are a time when City College becomes known as a hotbed of political activism. Students and faculty join the nation’s first anti-war movement, a continuing reaction to World War I.

Student antiwar protest at City College in 1933.

1937

The Queens branches of CCNY and Hunter merge–creating Queens College. The coeducational liberal arts institution is located in a collection of red-roofed mission-style buildings in Flushing that had housed delinquent boys. On Staten Island, meanwhile, petitions signed by more than 2,700 residents are sent to the Board of Higher Education, appealing to them to establish a municipal college in their borough.

Aerial view of the Queens College campus in Flushing in 1937

1938

Mayor La Guardia requests that the Board of Higher Education establish a two-year course of study to train fire and police department personnel. It is initially established as a division of the City College School of Business, the forebear of Baruch College.

1944

A state-appointed committee, charged with surveying municipal colleges in New York City, issues the first report laying out a structure for what will eventually become CUNY. Led by renowned educator George Strayer, the committee puts the onus on the Board of Higher Education for developing an integrated system of colleges for New York City. The first in a series of “Strayer Reports” recommends that each college define its own mission within the system and that an ambitious construction program be undertaken to upgrade inadequate facilities.