Union College

The Union College campus, officially known as the College Grounds, occupies 100 acres in Schenectady, a city of 60,000 founded by the Dutch in 1661. The Grounds are the College’s third home. In 1813, shortly after the College decided to move to the new location, the French architect and landscape planner Joseph Ramée laid out the new campus — the first unified campus plan in America. He designed a great central court, flanked on three sides by buildings and open to the west, with a round pantheon as the focus of the court.

The distinctive Ramée style, with its arches and pilasters in white, remains the dominant motif in Union College architecture. Recent additions to the campus include the Science-Engineering Center; Achilles Rink; Frank Bailey Field, an all-weather athletic field; the Morton and Helen Yulman Theater; and the F.W. Olin Center, a high-technology classroom and laboratory building. Alumni Gymnasium, the Murray and Ruth Reamer Campus Center, and Schaffer Library have received major renovations and expansion, the historic Nott Memorial has been restored to become a display and discussion center, and a $25 million project revitalized the neighborhood to the immediate west of campus by creating apartment-style housing for 160 students, a community center, and a residence hall for 230 students. The College recently dedicated the Viniar Athletic Center, home of women’s and men’s basketball; the Taylor Music Center, a state-of-the art classroom, rehearsal and performance facility; Breazzano Fitness Center in Alumni Gymnasium; the new Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology; and Breazzano House, one of the seven Minervas.

North of the central campus lie the eight acres of formal gardens and woodland known as Jackson’s Garden, begun in the 1830s by Captain Isaac Jackson of the Mathematics Department. Through the garden runs Hans Groot’s Kill, the brook that bounds through Union’s Grounds in the College song. A durable local legend, never confirmed by historians, holds that the villagers of Schenectady burned a local maiden at the stake there in 1672, and that the ghost of the dead girl has haunted Jackson’s Garden ever since.

At the center of the Grounds, on the spot designated by Ramée for his pantheon, stands Union’s most unusual building, the distinctive, 16-sided Nott Memorial. Begun in the 1850s and completed in 1875, it has been hailed by architectural historians as an important example of American Victorian architecture and is a National Historic Landmark. Facing the Nott Memorial is Memorial Chapel, built in 1925 as a monument to the Union College graduates who lost their lives in World War I. Along its walls hang portraits of the former presidents of the College.

Also near the center of campus is Schaffer Library, which houses more than 600,000 volumes, 1,600 current periodical subscriptions, together with a periodicals reading room, faculty studies, and more than 500 individual study spaces. It operates on the open stack plan and offers bibliographic instruction, interlibrary loan, online bibliographic retrieval services, electronic document delivery, and Internet workstations for access to indexes, abstracts, and full-text journals online. Automated circulation of books and other library materials as well as the online catalog are in place. The library has been a depository for federal government documents since 1901. Professional reference service is offered during most of the hours that the library is open. Within the library are several of the College’s most prized possessions, including an elephant folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, which the College purchased directly from the artist; the original Ramée drawings for the campus; the Trianon editions of William Blake’s works; the first books bought for the library in 1795; and the original College charter.

Flanking the library and connected to it by a curved colonnade are the Humanities and Social Sciences Buildings. The Humanities Building is the home for the Departments of Classics, English, Modern Languages, and Philosophy. In the Social Sciences Building are the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology. Filling the area in front of the library and between the two classroom buildings is Roger Hull Plaza (named for the former Union president), an open space with benches and flower beds. This campus crossroads was furnished and landscaped in part with gifts from parents of Union College students. It serves as the site for such formal ceremonies as Commencement and for informal meetings and conversation.

The focal point of the Murray and Ruth Reamer Campus Center is a commons area, part of a multi-level atrium looking out over Jackson’s Garden. The building also houses an auditorium, a dining hall and a restaurant, a two-level bookstore, and a variety of office and activity rooms for student organizations such as Concordiensis, the student newspaper; WRUC, the first radio station to offer regularly scheduled broadcasts; The Garnet, the yearbook; the literary magazine, Idol; and the student activities office.

Alumni Gymnasium recently added the Breazzano Fitness Center, made possible by a gift from David Breazzano ’78, a spacious facility with an extensive assortment of equipment for cardio fitness and weight training. The building also has an eight-lane swimming pool with seating and a diving area; racquetball/squash courts; and multi-use rooms for dance, aerobics and yoga programs.

Old Chapel, the former chapel and student meeting hall, is still used for many meetings.

The largest of Union’s buildings, the Science and Engineering Center, is the home of the Departments of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Psychology. Located here, and available for student use, are such research tools as a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, a Pelletron accelerator, X-ray diffraction equipment, a centrifuge, and a scanning electron microscope capable of examining a surface area 200,000 times smaller than what can be seen with a conventional light microscope.

The nearby F.W. Olin Center’s interactive computerization capabilities make the building adaptable for use by nearly every academic department and student. The Geology Department is located here, and, in addition to a variety of collaborative computer classrooms and laboratories, the center has a multi-media auditorium and a 20-inch, remote-controlled telescope.

The Arts Building is located in North Collonade in the former Philosophical Hall, which held the first analytical chemistry laboratory specifically opened for college students. West of the Arts Building is the new Taylor Music Center, completed in 2007. It includes the Fred L. Emerson Auditorium, a performance and teaching space with state-of-the-art recording technology. Surrounding the performance hall are practice rooms, high-tech classrooms and faculty offices.

The College’s student residences include South College, built in 1814 and renovated in 1936. Its counterpart on the other side of Library Field is North College. Other residence halls are Davidson and Fox Houses; West College, home for many freshmen; Richmond House; Raymond House; Potter House; College Park Hall; and apartments along Seward Place to the west of campus.