When I was a little kid about ten or so, back in the early 1930s, my father took me to the Hall of Fame. No, not the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, which didn’t open until late in the 1930s, or the Pro Football Hall in Canton, founded in 1963, or the Basketball Hall in Springfield (1968), or any of the others that came along. This was the original Hall of Fame, the real one, which the Cooperstown hall copied, and on which all the other sports halls are based.
The hall my father took me to was The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, on the campus of New York University on University Heights in the Borough of the Bronx in New York City. NYU has since shifted its main campus to the Washington Square section of Manhattan, and the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York now occupies the University Heights area. The Hall of Fame is still there, but it doesn’t have the stature it once had, or the glamour that infused it in the early decades of the 20th Century. Hardly anyone goes to that hall of fame anymore. Hardly anyone knows it’s even there.
I don’t know what happened, except that times change, and places change. I do know that when I was a kid it was big stuff. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was beautiful, almost majestic. It had beautifully sculptured bronze, life-sized busts of the honored Americans, each in its own space in a wonderful outdoor colonnade, curving 630 feet along a terrace high above the Harlem River, which separates the Bronx (on the mainland) from the upper reaches of Manhattan Island. I remember the excitement you felt whenever you saw the great curving colonnade from the roadway far below.
That Hall of Fame opened more than a century ago, in 1900, the brainchild of a man named Henry MacCracken, who was Chancellor of New York University. He found a wealthy philanthropist, a woman named Helen Gould Shepard, who put up the money to start it – $250,000 – an enormous sum back when people could own a house and support a family on $25 a week.
There were supposed to be busts of 50 great Americans at first, with five more to be added every five years. It didn’t quite work that way. Only 29 made the initial cut in 1900. The picks were made by a 100-person College of Electors, which had to have at least one person from each of the states. There were only 45 states then; I suppose that when Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union later on, they also joined the College of Electors, although I’m not sure. In any case, the voting rules changed pretty quickly, and in 1905, not five but eight famous Americans were added, and another nine were anointed in 1910. By the time I visited in the 1930s, there were 70 in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, and there are more than 100 now, although since the 1970s the election process has more or less withered. Four electees are still waiting for their busts to be sculpted and installed. Sports halls of fame work much better.
The need to spread the College of Electors among all the states probably contributed to the inclusion in the Hall of Fame of Great Americans of some odd, not so great, or at least relatively unknown people. Sure, the Hall has busts of folks you’d expect to be there – Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and that crowd – but there are some you wonder about. In the original group of Great Americans chosen in 1900 were Joseph Story, George Peabody and James Kent, and you can win a Starbucks latté if you can tell me anything about any of them. Of course, there are some plaques in Cooperstown that seem odd choices, too. What do you know about Tommy McCarthy, Freddy Lindstrom or Bobby Wallace?
The Hall That Started It All reviewed by Rananjay Parmar on October 27, 2015 rated 5.0 of 5
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