Spring 2011 Issue - Lehman College

Celebrating 80
Years of Public Higher Education in the Bronx
1931 was not an auspicious year to open a new campus. What would later
be called the Great Depression was nearing the end of its second year and
would continue for the rest of the decade. Unemployment had doubled to more
than sixteen percent, and a persistent drought in the Midwest was causing
crop failures and soil erosion. But in September, in a quiet section of the northwest
Bronx, a sign of faith in the future was rising: The fi rst building on the
new campus of Hunter College—or Hunter Uptown, as it was called—opened
for classes.
By 1934, this first Gothic building, Gillet Hall, was joined by three others, set almost in the four corners
of a square. The Music Building (known then as Student Hall) stood in the northwest, looking to the
south across a manicured circular quadrangle to the Gym Building and to the east across a paved walkway
to Gillet. Between Gillet and Davis Halls, along Goulden Avenue, sat a wide stretch of open space.
A little more than three decades later, in 1968, the by-then historic campus would take on a new name:
Lehman College.
22 Lehman Today/Spring 2011