Random Walk
The six figures on Calder’s arches represent (from left) Nature, Art, Energy, Science, Imagination, and Law.
Caltech Turns 100—Again
Although founded in 1891, Caltech can once again celebrate its 100th anniversary. On June 8, 1910, the first building on the present-day campus was dedicated before local dignitaries and a large public audience. Dubbed Pasadena Hall (and renamed Throop Hall in 1920), it was hailed as a monument to civic pride. The first students to be educated in it arrived the following September—30 in total, all male, and all enrolled in a college-level engineering curriculum. Tuition was $150 annually.
Throop Polytechnic Institute, as it was then known, had just split apart at the seams. The old Throop had evolved into an agglomeration of six schools, teaching at levels from elementary to collegiate, with a heavy emphasis in the upper division on such practical skills as stenography, typing, and operating machine tools. The leap from vo-tech to high-tech was the work of noted solar astronomer George Ellery Hale, who had come west in 1903 to be the founding director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Hale was soon deeply in the flow of Pasadena’s civic, cultural, and educational schemes, becoming a tireless booster of Southern California in general and Pasadena in particular. He soon became bent on establishing a local technical school to train engineers (construed at that time to mean men only) to meet the needs of a booming region—in particular, to bring water and electricity over the mountains to a sun-drenched but utility-starved Los Angeles basin. By 1907 he had begun a campaign for the creation of a “high-grade institute of technology” in Pasadena and was elected to the Throop board of trustees. In that same year, an anonymous benefactor secured a site for a new, expanded campus—some 22 acres of orange groves dotted with stately oak trees in the southeast part of the city.
Throop’s original campus—acquired after a start-up year in the old Wooster Block, still a presence on the corner of Fair Oaks Avenue and Green Street in the heart of Old Pasadena—crammed all six schools into three buildings at Lincoln Avenue and Fair Oaks, a site that is today under the 210 freeway. Hale envisioned the new campus two miles east as an opportunity for an idealized building scheme in harmony with a new civic center, a campus whose laboratories would be fitted out with the latest and best equipment. Such an institute would redound to the glory of Pasadena and would surely inspire the generosity of Pasadena’s well-to-do residents.
Hale was right. The mission-style structure by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey was paid for entirely by local subscriptions, to the tune of approximately $165,000. The arcaded entrance was adorned by a set of reliefs created by Pasadena’s Alexander Stirling Calder, whose son would invent the mobile. Touted at the time as the most significant artwork in the city, the elaborate, allegorical figures were, in Calder’s words, “to give plastic utterance to the aims and scope of the school.”
The new building’s 62 rooms housed what the 1910 catalog boasted as being “the only college devoted primarily to Technology west of the Mississippi River.” Meanwhile, the other five schools were closed down or divested. The elementary school moved to a new location a block west of the new campus and became the Polytechnic School. Throop Academy remained at the old campus and eventually merged with a new public high school. And, after almost becoming UC Pasadena in 1911 and completing the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry in 1917, Throop College of Technology rebranded itself as the California Institute of Technology in 1920—so we have another 10 years to wait for that party.
An online exhibit about the 1910 campus may be found at the Caltech Archives website: http://archives.caltech.edu/ . —SE
Throop Hall (with Dabney Hall to the left) in April 1965. The president, the provost, the treasurer, and the deans had offices on the first floor. Various business offices—payroll, personnel, accounting, central files, and so on—occupied the second floor. Ed Hutchings, editor of E&S, lived in the basement with the news bureau, the alumni office, and most of development.
