The New and Old Oberlin Campus, and Starting for Home in 2004

Dudley Peter Allen Memorial Art Building -----87 North Main Street

The Art Building was erected in memory of Dr. Dudley P. Allen. The building was completed and dedicated June 12, 1917. Allen Art Building has been extended towards Hall Auditorium since 1959.

I spent a lot of quality time in this building. By chance, my roommate took the first semester of Modern Art (which covered the time prior to the Impressionists). When I flunked beginning German, I substituted the second semester of the Modern Art course which went from the Impressionists to the present (which in those days was 1959). This gave me an excellent grounding in art which I would not otherwise have had because it would not have occurred to me to take Art History. My roommate enjoyed her first semester of art so much that she dropped intermediate German and took Dr. Stechow's Baroque Painting in last semester. (She was a senior - I was only a junior)

The college art collection is small but of excellent quality. My college art professor, Ellen Johnson believed that all students should experience living with art. So in the early 1940s, she started an art rental program which allows students to borrow original works of art. With a student I.D. and $5, any Oberlin student can rent two pieces from the rental collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum for one semester. Since 1940, only one artwork has been damaged beyond repair. The rental collection now includes more than 400 paintings, including works by Goya, Matisse, Picasso, Joan Miro, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Moriko Mori.

The directions at the checkout include a plea not to hang the art in the bathroom




Bosworth Hall and Fairchild Chapel --50 West Lorain Street This building is on State Route 511, a principal thoroughfare for traffic. It is across the street from Tappan Square. Currently it houses Oberlin's Office of Development and Alumni Affairs.

Bosworth Hall was designed by Cass Gilbert, the same architect that also designed Cox Administration Building, Finney Chapel and Allen Art Building. Off campus, he also designed the Woolworth Building and the United States Supreme Court Building. When I was at Oberlin it served as the School of Theology including housing for the theology students. As such, I had very little to do with it.

Cass Gilbert drew the plans for this, his final Oberlin College building in 1919. The idea for this building, the graduate school for theology, was his last attempt at the creation of a visual harmony of buildings around Tappan Square. Funds for the building, however, were inadequate for a decade until a gift of $400,000 from the Rockefellers supplemented the original bequest of D. Willis James and construction began in 1930. The quadrangle complex replaced the 1874 Council Hall, which had been condemned by the state inspectors. By 1930 Cass Gilbert's declining health caused the Gilbert’s firm to bring in a young architect in Gilbert's practice to finish the oversight of the construction of the building.

Fairchild Chapel, which is not only a musical performance space but also the site of dozens of marriages every year, is located directly through Bosworth's center double doors. The dorm section of the Theolog is now Asia House.


catering tents with Peters in background


Cox Administration Building


New Mudd Center Library ---148 West College Street

Mudd Center houses the majority of the 2 million items in Oberlin's library collection (separate science, art, and music libraries are scattered across campus). It was built in between Wilder (Men's Building) and Dascomb in what used to be a big open space.

The size, breadth and quality of the library collection rank Mudd among the best undergraduate library systems in the nation. Oberlin has always been a college with a top flight library. Equally important from a student's perspective, Mudd is a wonderful place to study. From large couches and tables to private carrels and spherical "womb chairs," students can always choose somewhere comfortable to work. Probably this is more comfortable than the straight chairs and small tables that we used to have in the stacks.

Many students are also fond of Mudd's bright, multi-color decor. The basement -- widely known as "A-Level" -- is a popular place for students to meet for study groups, to chat, and to unwind. A-Level also houses the library's reserve room and the Houck Center for Information Technology.


Wright Physics Lab -- 1 0 North Professor Street

Modeled after M.I.T.'s interlocking science buildings, Wright Laboratory is named for aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, whose older sister attended Oberlin and taught them about physics. (The former Zoology lab was named for a different Wright).

Recently renovated, Wright has housed Oberlin's Physics Department, Physics Library, and numerous classrooms for more than 50 years. I never had any classes in this building.


Rice Memorial Hall - this was formerly one of the Conservatory practice buildings. Today, Rice Hall is filled with faculty offices. The construction project of King Memorial Hall included the renovation of Rice and the removal of its top floor.


Clark Bandstand - Tappen Square


Tappen Square being readied for graduation

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Sunday morning early, we checked out of the dorm and gave back the magnetic keys. I accidentally left my sweater in the room, which I didn't discover until that night.

Bob then drove around


Art building from the street



Tappen Square Boulder painted with good wishes for/by the graduating class.


from a car driving by. I don't remember this from my time at Oberlin. I think this tradition started later after the time when I graduated.


so I could take a picture of Tank Hall (from the car) where I lived as a Freshman. But I didn't take this photo - it must have been taken by my mother if the date on it is correct.

Tank Hall ( formerly Tank Home) was built at 110 East College Street in 1896 as a home for children of missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. It was named in memory of Mrs. C.L.A. Tank of Green Bay Wisconsin, who gave $10,000 toward its construction. For ten years, 1922 to 1932, it was used as a hall of residence for women. After three years, it became a freshman women's dorm for forty-seven women. All the women were freshmen except for the junior counselors.

Now forty-two students live in Tank, and an additional forty take meals in the co-op.
This large old house is located on the east side of campus in a residential section of town. The dining room is paneled with wood, and the huge front porch (with swing) and spacious lawn are popular places to relax. Menus at Tank tend to be varied (which is probably a polite way of saying that sometimes it's not edible.) The students that live and board at Tank are part of the 582-member Oberlin Student Co-operative Association (OSCA) which is the largest co-op program of its kind in the country. In addition to Tank, it includes three other housing and dining co-ops (Harkness, Keep, and Old Barrows), and four board-only co-ops (Fairchild, Baldwin, Kosher Co-op, and Third World House). Students involved in a co-op typically work from four to six hours each week, preparing meals, washing dishes, and, in room-and-board co-ops, cleaning hallways and bathrooms.


64 East College Street - Charles Martin Hall house

I didn't know what the significance of this house was, but I took a photo of it when I was on the way back from taking a photo of Tank Hall. This 1853 house "was once home to the family of Charles Martin Hall (OC Class of 1885). Hall's experiments in a laboratory at the rear of the house led to his discovery, at the age of 22, of the electrolytic process for producing aluminum. Hall later became a prime figure in the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). The Charles Martin Hall House was designated a National Chemical Historic Landmark in 1997 in recognition of Hall's scientific work there."

We then drove down to Westervelt, and I got out and took some photos.

2004 Westervelt

This building was erected in 1873-74 by the village of Oberlin for use as a high school. In September, 1926, Mr. Edmund C. Westervelt of South Bend, Indiana, presented the property to Oberlin College, together with two business properties, all as an unrestricted gift for any use that the College might wish to make of it. When I was at Oberlin, scuttlebutt had it that the building had been condemned and that was why it could no longer be used as a high school.

In the winter of 1926-27 the building was renovated for use as classrooms and given the name "Westervelt Building." It was mainly used by the departments of English and Modern Languages, laboratories for the work in Accounting and Mechanical Drawing and faculty offices.

We usually tried to avoid having classes in Westervelt because it wa so far off campus, but I had an 8:00 beginning German class in this building my Junior year. This was the year I was treasurer of the co-op, and at the beginning of the semester, I often had cash to deposit in the bank. The bank did not open until 9:00, so I would sometimes attend class with a couple of thousand dollars in my purse to deposit in the bank after class.

Westervelt Hall was used for classes until the King building opened in 1961. It remained vacant except when it was used by the Co-Op Bookstore after their original building was demolished until the new structure was available in the business district. In 1974 it was listed in the National Register of Historic Sites. It was sold to the city in 1976 and then to A.H.Clark in 1979. The Nord Family Foundation purchased the building from Kenny and Ada Clark in 1995. In 1996 it opened as the New Union Center for the Arts. The building also houses "Uncommon Objects," Allen Art Museum's gift store.


And then we left town heading south on Main Street (Ohio 58) for Wellington