Hall of Fame for Great Americans

Hall of Fame for Great Americans, monument which honours U.S. citizens who have achieved distinction or fame, standing at the summit of University Heights on the campus of Bronx Community College (originally the uptown campus of New York University). A national shrine, the open-air colonnade looks down on the northern limits of New York City and stands high over the Hudson and Harlem river valleys, facing the New Jersey Palisades. The Greco-Roman colonnade, designed by the architect Stanford White, is a semicircular granite corridor, 630 feet (192 metres) long and a little over 10 feet (3 metres) wide. In its original design it was an architectural foreground for the three university buildings which it half encircles—the Hall of Philosophy, the Gould Memorial Library, and the Hall of Languages. Bronze portrait busts of men and women who have left indelible marks on the history and culture of the United States are placed, facing each other, between the simple columns. Below each bust is a recessed tablet which commemorates the person honoured.

The founder of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans was Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of New York University when the uptown campus was being created in the 1890s. MacCracken enlisted the interest of Helen Miller Gould Shepard, who, in memory of her father, Jay Gould, had already provided funds for the erection of the Gould Memorial Library and a dormitory (Gould Hall). With her aid the Hall of Fame for Great Americans was established in 1900.

It does not restrict its posthumous honour to any one class, and it includes persons of achievement in many fields. Writing at the time of the dedication ceremonies in 1901, MacCracken said, “The Hall of Fame will teach youth that leaders in science and scholarship may be as great as military and naval heroes.” He said he had in mind a monument that “would overrule sectional and partisan outcry.” Among the persons honoured in this distinguished group are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and other U.S. presidents; Susan B. Anthony; Jane Addams; Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Booker T. Washington. The busts of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant stood side by side in the colonnade until 2017, when the sculptures of Lee and Stonewall Jackson were removed in response to a growing movement to take down Confederate statues. Anyone who was a citizen of the United States, who resided in the United States, and who has been deceased 25 years or more is eligible for election.

Sculptors represented by original works in the colonnade include Daniel Chester French (Nathaniel Hawthorne), James Earle Fraser (Augustus Saint-Gaudens), Chester Beach (Walt Whitman), Richmond Barthé (Booker T. Washington) and Malvina Hoffman (Thomas Paine). There is no mortuary suggestion either in the architecture of the Hall or in its operation. It serves many who seek primarily to familiarize themselves with the great men and women of the country. To guard against any melancholy thought, a former director, Robert Underwood Johnson, placed over the wrought iron gates at the northern entrance of the colonnade the words “Enter with joy that those within have lived” and over the gates at the southern entrance “Take counsel here of beauty, wisdom, power.”