Aerial photograph of the North Campus in the late 1920s Aerial perspective rendering of Pope and Baum's campus plan, showing the proposed auditorium building attached to Hendricks Chapel, and introducing the idea of a new axis extending northward across the Lawn into the residential portion of University Hill.

Taking the existing campus as a point of departure, Pope and Baum defined five distinct building "groups" – the Academic Group, the Men's Dormitories, the Women's Dormitories, the Medical Group, and the College of Forestry – which would be joined to one another with axial paths and streets. As their scheme's centerpiece, the architects resurrected an idea from the 1906 Plan: a very large assembly building to serve as a new focal point for the academic core. They struck a new east-west axis through the two existing quadrangles and placed a new structure at its heart. This building, which would require the relocation of the Old Gymnasium, was to be comprised of two distinct components: an east-facing chapel and a west-facing 6,000-seat assembly hall. The plan bounded the eastern edge of the Main Quadrangle with new structures, squaring it to create a well-defined central green space, 600 feet to a side. To the west of the assembly hall, the architects suggested a monumental stairway spilling down the steep hillside, flanked by new buildings aligned with the Old Row, and creating an imposing symbolic gateway to the University from Irving Avenue. 

While Pope and Baum showed a great deal of interest in the east-west "quadrangle" axis, they also developed multiple north-south axes that extended across the Lawn, joining the Old Row to the two proposed dormitory precincts sited on the north side of University Place. These north­-south axes, stitching the campus into the surrounding urban fabric, would emerge as one of the plan's most compelling planning legacies.

The 1928 Pope-Baum plan was the most detailed and comprehensive campus plan ever attempted by the University. Unfortunately, less than a year later, the Great Depression brought a rude end to the genteel social and economic circumstances that enabled institutions to pursue physical visions of a well ordered future. While Hendricks Chapel was constructed in 1930, its companion assembly hall never materialized. Fragments of the Academic, Medical, and Forestry Groups were built, while both Dormitory Groups remained on paper. The great stair from Irving Avenue, envisioned by Pope as the University's new western gateway, was never constructed. University Avenue continued to serve as the traditional approach to the Hill.

To the north of University Place, the Highlands neighborhood was continuing to evolve. Its reign as a desirable residential district was short lived; after 1900, fraternities and sororities relocating from Irving Avenue gradually supplanted the original householders. In 1915, University benefactor John Archbold purchased the William Nottingham estate, on the hillside above Walnut Park, for use as the Chancellor's residence. The Roaring Twenties – a good time for the "Greek" system – led many fraternities and sororities, flush with money, to build grand new chapter houses around the perimeter of that same city park. By the opening of World War II, Walnut Park had become a Syracuse University precinct by default. 

After World War II, when Syracuse began to build again, it did so to accommodate a postwar enrollment explosion. The sweeping Beaux Arts visions of the nation's leading campus designers, presented so optimistically two decades before, would be abandoned as the University struggled to meet the new realities of higher education in America.

THE DEPRESSION, WORLD WAR II, AND THE MID-CENTURY 

Prior to World War II, Syracuse University was a small sectarian institution with ample property to accommodate its physical needs, but few financial resources. The postwar University was a different place. Higher education had been democratized: more than ever before, Americans from diverse economic backgrounds now had the opportunity to attend college. In the vanguard of this new era were thousands of veterans, aided by the GI Bill, who were preparing to resume their interrupted lives. 

For Syracuse University, shaking off the effects of prior debt, depression, and war, the postwar surge in college enrollment represented an opportunity for institutional transformation. New York State was unusual among large industrialized states because it lacked a strong public "land-grant" university system. Guided by Chancellor William P. Tolley, Syracuse stepped aggressively into the breach and absorbed the flood of new students, quickly doubling enrollment to 15,000 by 1948. 

The University’s postwar planners worked under extreme pressure, their vision of the future fueled by enrollment figures growing on a seemingly endless upward trajectory. In retrospect, they made a number of political and planning mistakes. Today, as the University seeks to recover the coherence, if not the compact size, of the pre-1930's campus, it is appropriate too understand what went wrong during those heady postwar years. 

At first, financial constraints precluded permanent expansion of the physical plant. Instead, immediate space needs were met by the acquisition of hundreds of military surplus prefabricated buildings. The land behind Hendricks Chapel filled rapidly with prefabricated huts intended for academic use, while temporary residential cities rose at what is now the Manley Field House area and on the grounds of the University Farm at Skytop. A prefabricated dining hall called the "Quonseteria" became the new development's centerpiece. It was an inauspicious beginning to the school's greatest period of expansion, but the University soon achieved a level of financial stability that allowed it to consider a new building campaign commensurate with the institution's newfound size and status. 

In 1948, Landscape Architecture Professor Noreda Rotunno created the first of several plans intended to accommodate the University's exponential population growth. Rotunno planned an "inner liner" of buildings along the south side of the Old Row, creating a narrowed "Natural Science Quadrangle" on the site of the former Old Oval. The smaller open space behind Hendricks Chapel formalized a companion social sciences quadrangle, which was to be terminated with two new buildings framing a view across the city to the west. To house the increased student population, Rotunno also projected a dormitory group for Mount Olympus, along with several new residence halls sited to the east and north of the campus core. 

Unlike prior campus planners, Rotunno was able to see much of his work materialize, and the first fruits of the building campaign enjoyed local acclaim. After calling the University's existing campus "the classic example of hodge-podge in architecture," the Syracuse Post-Standard declared that Rotunno's work showed Syracuse was "at last, after its nearly 80 years, developing an architectural pattern." The first of Rotunno's bookend buildings for the social science quadrangle, the E.I. White College of Law, was completed in 1954. Construction of the first of the "liner" buildings, Hinds Hall (1955), H.B. Crouse Hall (1961), and Link Hall (1965), continued to reduce the size of the Main Quadrangle. Old gave way to new without sentimentality; the Old Gymnasium, which had been moved in 1928 to a site between Steele Hall and Archbold Stadium to accommodate the construction of Hendricks Chapel, was subsequently demolished in 1965 to make way for a new Physics Building. 

The University's continuing space needs, however, could not be met within the traditional campus boundaries, and it was soon expanding into the neighborhoods along the campus periphery. Beyond the campus core, new buildings rose: Shaw Dormitory (1952), Lowe Art Center (1952), the Women's Building (1953), and the Hoople Special Education building (1953). As a residential complex crowned the top of Mount Olympus, a new cluster of dormitories – Watson Hall (1954), Marion Hall (1954), DellPlain Hall (1961), and Booth Hall (1963) – was constructed along the eastern portion of University Hill, the latter facing Thornden Park, where gracious homes once enjoyed commanding views. The University also began to build major academic buildings to the north of the Lawn, with I.M. Pei's Newhouse School (1964) being the most dramatic manifestation of this new era. 

The campus' physical expansion coincided with the heyday of urban renewal in the City of Syracuse. For the University, the urban renewal process and its companion state and federal funding streams could not have come at a more opportune time. As one of the urban renewal plan's primary beneficiaries, the institution obtained a canvas suitable for its ambitions. It set about preparing that canvas, acquiring residential and commercial properties as part of a plan to expand the University northward as far as Erie Boulevard. 

Simultaneously, the urban renewal effort essentially erased the low-income neighborhood known as "the Ward," situated between the University, the hospitals, and downtown Syracuse. The Ward was replaced by an elevated highway right-of-way, public housing projects, commercial buildings, and new facilities for the growing medical complex along Irving Avenue and East Adams Street. Further inspired by visions of seemingly limitless growth, and empowered by the mandate to modernize, the University, the City, and the hospitals were remaking the face and character of University Hill.

This process reached its apogee in 1966 with the unveiling of a University Hill General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, authored by Professor Rotunno. Conceived in the modernist spirit of contemporaneous New York State developments such as Albany's SUNY campus and that city's Empire State Plaza, the plan proposed an expanded series of quadrangles, set into a landscape radically remade to accommodate the automobile. The plan included expressway ramps leading directly into plinth-like underground parking garages with new groups of residential and academic towers built atop the parking plinths as far north as East Adams Street. The proposed changes included the extension of Walnut Park northward to Harrison Street and a three-sided East Quadrangle along College Place, opposite Slocum Hall. This last idea was ultimately realized, in modified form, with the construction of the Center for Science and Technology. 

Ultimately, however, in the accelerated rush to build, short-term pragmatism often preempted long-range planning as a guide to the physical development of the campus, resulting in significant departures from the 1966 University Hill Plan. The most significant was the building of Bird Library in 1972 on the southernmost block of Walnut Park. The new library, intended to signal Syracuse's emergence as a major research institution, forever altered the relationship between Walnut Park and the Lawn. 

The University continued to acquire and demolish buildings in the surrounding neighborhoods, transforming entire blocks into surface lots to meet immediate parking needs. Other buildings were acquired as part of the University's land-banking activities, in the expectation that they would eventually be replaced by new construction. Like many older structures on campus, these buildings were allowed to gradually deteriorate. 

The staggering scope of the 1966 University Hill Plan and its predecessors, together with the con­struction and clearance facilitated by these plans, was driven by a mistaken belief that the enrollment growth of the postwar years would proceed indefinitely. That assumption would continue to inspire new development, even as local residents and students began to protest against the impact of urban renewal and institutional expansion. However, by the time Bird Library and Newhouse II (1973) were complete, this era of growth would be over. 

THE TWENTY-YEAR PLAN

By the time Chancellor Melvin A. Eggers took office in 1971, it was clear that demographic conditions could no longer power continuous enrollment growth. Making matters worse, inflation, energy costs, and disaffection with higher education had all been on the rise. Having planned for an ever-expanding future, the University now adopted a policy of retrenchment in order to accommodate its newly diminished horizons.

Unable to build anew as envisioned during the postwar era, and constrained by an uncertain financial position, Syracuse faced the need to attract students despite the marginal condition of much of its physical plant. As a result, the University turned its focus to maintaining the viability of its existing buildings. Thus began an era of strategic reinvestment, of reinforcing the functional adequacy of the physical campus. Investments were made in energy conservation, life-safety improvements, building rehabilitation, and other modest changes that would ensure the long-term viability of the University's existing infrastructure and past capital investments.

While this period saw the construction of the Carrier Dome (1980), it was also significant for the emergence of a new ethos: that of preservation, as most notably embodied by the rehabilitation of the Hall of Languages. That project, small though it was in comparison to the great dome, represented a dramatic shift in attitudes. Thenceforth, the University would consistently look to the past as an integral part of its planning for the future.

Eventually, a strategic plan was developed that included new construction. At its base, this planning effort clearly understood the importance of balancing two conflicting requirements: the need to enhance and strengthen the University's academic programs; and the need to reconcile capital and current year financial resources. This plan, ultimately referred to as the Twenty-Year Plan, sought to add new construction in order to eliminate dependence on the inefficient and marginal buildings acquired during the prewar period, and to reduce the utilization density of the existing permanent buildings while maximizing their functional adequacy. New buildings, such as the Crouse-Hinds School of Management building (1983) and Schine Student Center (1985) were now accompanied by projects bringing new life to old buildings. The former University Hospital and Steele, Smith, and Lyman Halls were renovated, and the Administration Building and Crouse College were restored to their original splendor.

Respect for the past was also accompanied by a newfound interest in urban context and the shaping of open space. These attitudes were evident in the development of the Center for Science and Technology (Sci-Tech) in 1988. This massive complex effectively shifted the core campus' boundaries one block to the east. While Sci-tech was planned as the first stage of a larger research complex, its first phase carefully defined the edge of College Place, establishing the open space sited opposite Slocum Hall's east portico. This concept had originally been proposed in the Rotunno plans. Sci-tech's design took pains to encourage east-west pedestrian movement across its site and into the Main Quadrangle, linking the student housing to the east with the core campus.

The University also built upon the legacy of the Revels-Hallenbeck Plan. Sims Hall, the former dormitory building dating from that era, was strengthened with the addition of an imposing new corner entrance. Shaffer Art Building, the new home of the University's studio arts programs, was added to the Sims complex. Its round entrance was designed to strengthen the Main Quadrangle. Similarly, the College of Law library addition marked the far corner of the West Quadrangle. These projects signaled the beginning of a new commitment to the University's original campus. 

During this time, a seemingly mundane zoning tool called the Planned Institutional District (PID) emerged as an important factor in shaping the campus. Unlike traditional zoning, which regulates the individual land parcel, the PID concept bundles properties into districts, allowing development requirements to be met over larger areas. For example, traditional zoning may require the provision of a certain number of parking spaces on a specific development site. In contrast, the PID would allow those parking spaces to be provided elsewhere within the site's district. In effect, the PID codifies the zoning code's recognition that an institution functions as a single entity, even if it occupies multiple buildings and non-contiguous properties. 

Syracuse University's PID was developed, in part, to remediate the effects of the University's post­war expansion, and the increasing public conflict regarding land use. Throughout much of the twentieth century, traditional zoning ordinances treated colleges and universities as public schools. This was significant, because public schools were allowable uses in even the most restrictive resi­dential zoning districts. Over time, it became difficult for traditional zoning parameters to accom­modate changing institutional land use patterns. Traditional zoning regarded the campus as a col­lection of discrete parcels, even though the campus functioned as a single entity. To correct this, the University sought to establish a PID governing the development of the campus core. This district covered an area extending from Waverly Avenue south to Oakwood Cemetery, and from College Place west to Irving Avenue. In 1967, the City approved the creation of the University Planned Institutional District. 

By encouraging the University to plan its campus as a series of districts, rather than as a collection of individual projects, the PID regulations facilitated planners' efforts to build a coherent campus. Therefore, during the 1980's the PID regulations would feature prominently in the University's efforts to develop a new comprehensive land use plan, one that could build sensitively upon the legacies of past campus plans and building campaigns.

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"The photographs and text on this page are provided by permission of Syracuse University from Syracuse University Campus Plan 2003, Syracuse University Office of Design and Construction: Virginia Denton, Director; Bohlin Cywinski Jackson; Frank W. Grauman, AIA; Theresa Ward Thomas, AIA; Karen L. Scott, RA; Larry Newman, Urban Workshop. @ 2003 by Syracuse University. All rights reserved. No endorsement or approval by Syracuse University is expressed or implied.