The Hall Today
And there it sits, strengthened but still somewhat untidy, for want of money. The rooms in the foundation, at this writing, are a huge unsightly dustbin, scarcely recognizable as the orderly so-called Museum shown in early photos and overpraised by Henry MacCracken. The Museum had not reached its full potential as a showcase of memorabilia of the residents upstairs when it was converted to classrooms, then to storerooms and dressing rooms for the auditorium of Gould Library.
Whether built as chapel or auditorium, it had been put to double use; and what it was called depended on whether the function was sacred or secular. Neat and sober and situated under the rotunda, it is entered by going downstairs from the front hall. To one veteran Hall of Famer it was like a funeral parlor.
But for many uptown alumni it held fond memories. For years it had been the site not only of indoor Hall of Fame ceremonies and other functions but also of regular non-denominational chapel services for undergraduates. Attendance was compulsory and seating alphabetical by class. Students got to know one another. “A lifelong friendship was formed by Slater and Smart, who sat next to each other for four years,” said one alumnus.
A favorite hymn is said to have been Faith of Our Fathers, by Frederick William Faber. It could be sung “with vigor” and sincerity by Catholic, Protestant, Jew and Muslim without fear of inquisition. Each singer could think of his own faith and the fathers of it.
The 1981 report of the Landmarks Preservation Commission designates as worthy of protection the “basement consisting of foyer and east stairhall.” No mention of auditorium or chapel. The entire complex of foundation rooms — the entire Gould Library in fact — still has great potential for “adaptive reuse.”
The exterior brick walls of Gould are delivered from dullness by one delightful oddity, the significance of which can easily escape the casual passerby. It is a niche in the rear containing the bust of Lafayette, dedicated six decades ago on the 200th anniversary of George Washington.
Many people had thought well enough of the marquis to want to elect him to the Hall of Fame despite his being French-born and therefore ineligible. One or two made pests of themselves, and he was installed by compromise: the only famous man sitting outside the Colonnade, looking at the great occupants inside, protesting in the inscription underneath, “I am an American citizen and an American officer.”
Down the walk on the remains of the earthwork Fort Number Eight is a tableau of mixed metaphor from the storehouse of British-American history. A plaque on a flagpole declares its significance. The flafpole itself is the mast of the sailing yacht Shamrock IV. Given to NYU in 1925 by Thomas, Lipton, teamaker and perpetual loser in the America’s Cup races, it was intended as a radio antenna to thank NYU men who served in World War I and as celebration not of defeat but the triumph of Anglo-American friendship. Three vintage artillery pieces point in the general direction of Fort George, across the Harlem River, which cannot be seen: one old gun now takes dead aim at a college building constructed in front of it just yards away.
The setting is such as to tickle the imagination of visitors who happen to see it. It seems lost, even though it is but a one-minute walk from the Hall of Fame. The college community takes it with the composure of daily encounter, thoroughly unconcerned about being “in the line of fire” on Battery Hill, as it is sometimes called.
Almost a hundred years ago Henry Mitchell MacCracken stood on the spot — his highness, Henry, king of the hill — and exclaimed, “This is the place!” In the beginning was the word.
In the end is the “most unkindest cut of all”: few Americans of the present generation know of the existence of the Hall of Fame, in spite of MacCracken’s confidence in the durability of its renown. Among the residents of the New York metropolitan area, memory of the Hall is faulty, not to mention the residents of Spokane and San Diego.
A Sunday supplement in the New York Times in the summer of 1989, ran a short feature called The Best Things in Life . . . places to see, for little or no money, in the Boroughs of New York, Among them were Riverside Church, the upgraded graffiti on the stone outside Grant’s Tomb, and Woodlawn Cemetery. Not a word about the Hall of Fame.
In the summer of 1990 the Associated Press repeated the slight. An article on the “real” New York as opposed to the city of storied horrors told us that “tourists equate the Bronx with the Yankees and the Zoo.”
“New York eradicates; New York creates,” said a Times piece of August, 1991 on tourist attractions. It carried no notice of the Hall of Fame or anything else in the Bronx.
Come July 16, 1992, and the Democratic National Convention was in town. That morning the N.Y. Times quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt III as deploring the absence of a good New York City statue of his grandfather. That afternoon, before a goodly turnout, he unveiled a bust of FDR in the Hall of Fame. The event got little notice. Come late summer, and the Times Travel section thought one of the “irresistible attractions” of the Bronx to be the Botanical Gardens, not the Hall of Fame, which remained resistible.
Shirley M. Hufstedler, former U.S. Secretary of Education, federal judge, and one-time Hall of Fame elector, wrote, “one of the many omens that we live in neither a kinder nor a gentler age and that we suffer amnesia about our history is the fate of the Hall of Fame.”