Fred Bleakley, a senior writer with The Wall Street Journal, came to campus for two days in February to observe our 200th birthday celebration and to see the Nott Memorial. Reprinted here is his story, which appeared March 21.
Schenectady, N.Y.
If there are ghosts, they would have been soaring with delight over the rededication recently of a High Victorian Gothic masterpiece here at Union College.
Saved from ruin by a $9 million makeover, the Nott Memorial, a giant folly and a National Historic Landmark, captures the spirit of one remarkable educator, two renowned architects and the exuberance of a time when whimsy counted as much as practicality.
The 16-sided, 10-story salute to Eliphalet Nott (Union's president from 1804 to 1866) looms over America's first planned campus. “The Nott,” as it is affectionately known, is a
hot-blooded wonder of colored stone, soaring arches and stained-glass windows sitting majestically apart from Union's neoclassical buildings of cool
gray-and-white stucco. Somehow the disharmony is enchanting-all the way up to the giant slated dome encircled with Hebrew lettering that means: “The work is great, the day short and the master presses the workmen.”
Much of what visitors marvel at has been impossible to see for almost a century. For the first time since 1903, the restoration allows a viewer on the encaustic tiled ground floor to look 106 feet up to the vaulted, cobalt-blue ceiling. The effect is like a planetarium, with literally celestial light filtering through 709 red, yellow, purple and green tiny glass “illuminators” that appear to flicker like stars as you tilt your gaze. Set in from the stone walls are 16 cast-iron columns-a
crystal-palace-like skeleton-that support the dome and second- and third-floor balconies encircling the open center space.
Only hours after workmen had finished clearing construction debris on a recent weekend, historian David McCullough told Nott Memorial fans and alumni donors that
“when every airport, every ketchup bottle, every sitcom and every magazine rack looks the same, how much more important it is to come into a structure where the idea is not to look like anything else.”
Mr. McCullough put the Nott in the same league as the the Roeblings' Brooklyn Bridge and H.H. Richardson's City Hall in Albany, calling all three “distinctive and important examples of 19th-century American public architecture.” It is also a relic of a time when Union was a leader in American education and intellectual life.
In Nott's time, Union, which celebrates its bicentennial this year, was the first nondenominational college (a union of all faiths) in the nation. First also to introduce modern languages, the sciences and engineering to the curriculum, it became an innovator in liberal arts education. Nott, it's said, was the equal of Jefferson in tearing down the walls of education that kept students from changes in society. Nott also pushed New York state to pay Union's tuition for indigent students so higher education was not just for the rich. And he usually accepted students expelled by other colleges.
A Presbyterian minister, he believed students would come to know God better by “embracing the world.” Emphasizing practical education as much as classical studies, Union paved the way for careers in medicine, law, mining and other sciences. Dozens of Nott's students went on to head American colleges and universities. He also invented the Nott stove, which for several decades gave Americans a safe, efficient way to heat their homes.
He was just as innovative when he picked an architect to plan a college campus on a hill overlooking Schenectady, in the Hudson Valley some 170 miles north of New York City. Discarding the tight, medieval-cloister look of America's colleges, the French landscape architect Joseph
Ramee envisaged a sloping plateau opening frontier-like to the West. He planned to have Union's buildings flank a Roman rotunda and a formal garden.
Construction of the North and South colleges (which remain today) began around 1812. That was several years before ground was broken for Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, even though his plans were already on the drawing board, but without the eventual domed centerpiece.
But: “Evidence shows that a large domed rotunda building being the central focus of a campus, as at the University of Virginia, came from Ramee's plan for
Union College,” says Stanford University professor of architectural history Paul Turner. A Union graduate and U.S. campus expert, he is writing a book on Ramee.
Still, for nearly 50 years Ramee's domed building never got started. Financial stewardship was not Nott's strength and his autocratic style made matters worse as he entered his dotage. But when alumni pledged funds, Nott had the foresight to choose Edward Tuckerman Potter (his grandson) as architect. One of two brothers recognized as leading American architects in the Victorian Gothic style, he immediately discarded the Ramee rotunda as too squat and opted for a grander, more flamboyant look. It was completed in 1878.
Despite Nott's renown for practicality, no one ever quite knew what to do with the 80-foot-round, 100-foot-high space. It failed as a chapel and was ill-suited as a library (though it was used as one for nearly 60 years). For a while, when the rotunda went out of fashion in this century and was considered “vulgar,” there was talk of demolishing it or making it more Union-like.
When Roger Hull became Union's president in 1990, the Nott was a leaky, decrepit giant dropping slabs of granite and roof tiles and buttressed by railroad ties that kept its stony sides from bulging further. On the ground floor was a theater in the round. Upper stories housed an art studio, a dumping ground for old props “and more dead pigeons than I wanted to count,” said Mr. Hull.
Still, it was the symbol and, some say, the soul of a school that has 18,000 graduates and 2000 current students. So
Mr. Hull decided to preserve it for current and future Unionites. As part of an even more ambitious $150 million fund-raising campaign, he set out to raise $9 million to return the Nott to its splendor and $2 million for maintenance. More than 1,700 alumni and friends gave. A surprise gift of $5 million came from Mr. Hull's late mother-in-law
Mrs. Margaret MacGregor Dyson, the mother of New York Deputy Mayor John Dyson.
Getting the money together for it was only the beginning of the job. Finegold Alexander & Associates, the Boston architectural firm that directed the restoration of buildings on Ellis Island, took on the challenge. Under its supervision, contractors ripped out the two floors separating the ground floor from the ceiling, drove 900 steel shafts through four feet of outer walls and bolted the shafts to circular steel hoops, making the Nott stronger than ever. For the leaky dome, the architects kept the horsehair insulation but devised a high-tech rubber membrane that had to be punctured and resealed for each of the tiny new illuminators. And they replaced missing tiles with new ones specially made by Craven Dunnill, the original English supplier.
At a time when colleges are so pressed for funds, it's either something of a feat or a folly to spend so much money restoring a building that does so little. It will now serve as a reception and lecture hall with a study center and college museum on its balconies.
One of Nott's critics over a century ago wrote that the building is “all show, all to catch the vulgar eye, all to be gazed at.” But as Mr. McCullough said at last month's unveiling, “It may be all show, but what a show, what a feast for the eye.”
Mr. Bleakley is a senior writer on economics for the Journal.
Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal © 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.