In 1894, New York University tore down the 1835 Gothic Revival beauty that was the school’s main building.
This lovely structure on the east side of Washington Square had housed all of the college’s functions.
For six decades, it anchored the college community and watched the neighborhood go from posh and stylish to more bohemian and rougher around the edges.
By the 1890s, NYU had decided to move its undergraduate school to the Bronx, and the main building had outlived its usefulness.
Lucky for us, when the building met the bulldozer, NYU officials saved one architectural detail: a small spire, complete with a handful of grotesques.
They ceremoniously named it the Founder’s Memorial and brought it to the new Bronx campus, where it spent most of the 20th century.
But the Bronx campus was sold off in the 1970s, and NYU once again concentrated its educational offerings in Greenwich Village. When the school came back, the spire came returned as well.
Today it sits off West Fourth Street between Bobst Library and Shimkin Hall, a modest sliver of the 1830s hiding in the shadows of the modern city.
Tags: Building Spire NYU, Founders Memorial NYU, New York in the 1830s, NYU history, NYU in Greenwich Village, Washington Square 19th century
Ephemeral New York 
January 26, 2015 at 10:06 am |
Shame about the gothic building didnt also survive but its really good news that the spire has survived to tour NY.
January 26, 2015 at 10:53 am |
By coincidence, I just mentioned the NYU building in a post about Harvard’s Gore Hall, which was built a few years later and also based on King’s College Chapel at Cambridge. As with NYU, Gore Hall also has some surviving pinnacles:
http://roadtoparnassus.blogspot.tw/2015/01/gore-hall-1838-1913a-lost-harvard.html
–Jim
January 26, 2015 at 11:25 am |
Hello
Can I ask a question??
Sent from my iPhone
>
January 26, 2015 at 1:50 pm |
If only they would go to the Bronx now instead of destroying what’s left of the Village. Perhaps they could take the plague of student renters from the East Village with them.
January 26, 2015 at 2:52 pm |
Love the 2nd view of the old NYU building from the perspective of one of the stately — still extant– row houses with high stoops on the south side of Washington Square
January 27, 2015 at 9:34 pm |
I think you mean the north side. That view looks to be from my old school Saint Joseph’s Academy.
January 26, 2015 at 11:09 pm |
This is a great find! And right up my alley, too…
January 26, 2015 at 11:18 pm |
Thanks Jeff! You can feature them in the New York version of your wonderful book of gargoyles in Washington DC:
January 31, 2015 at 4:00 am |
[…] NYU was tearing down cool buildings in the 1890s as well (Ephemeral New York) […]
February 1, 2015 at 2:06 pm |
NYU should have stayed in the Bronx. They are destroying the fabric of Greenwich Village with their real estate monstrosities.
March 9, 2020 at 5:21 am |
[…] returning to the US in 1839, Morse set up a studio on the roof of the Old University Building on Washington Square with John William Draper, a chemistry professor also interested in Daguerre’s process. […]
March 9, 2020 at 11:22 am |
[…] returning to the US in 1839, Morse set up a studio on the roof of the Old University Building on Washington Square with John William Draper, a chemistry professor also interested in Daguerre’s process. (Draper […]
September 6, 2021 at 4:33 am |
[…] New York: A Guide to the Metropolis. The NYU building opened in 1835, but was demolished in 1894. (A piece of the building remains on West Fourth Street as a […]