Brooklyn College was founded on May 15, 1930 by the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York as the first public coeducational liberal arts college in the city. Mayor Jimmy Walker appointed Dr. William A. Boylan the college's first president. An assistant superintendent with the Board of Education, Boylan was in charge of building projects; however, critics claimed that Boylans' chief qualification was the fact that Walker was his former student and that the mayor had rewarded his teacher with a series of plum jobs in Walker's administration. In 1934, Randolph Evans, a young architect working for the Wood-Harmon Corporation, drafted a plan for a college campus on the large plot of land his employer owned in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. At the time, the land was used as a golf course, a football field, and as a staging area for big-top shows of Barnum and Bailey Circus. Evans sketched a plan of a Georgian-style campus facing a central quadrangle anchored by a library building with a tall tower. The Federal government allocated $5 million for the construction of the building and on October 2, 1935, Mayor LaGuardia took a silver plated shovel and symbolically broke ground. Also present were President Boylan and Borough President Raymond V. Ingersoll. All three men would later have campus buildings named in their honor. A year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Brooklyn College. Seven thousand people had gathered on the grounds where the President laid the cornerstone of the college gymnasium "I have seen Brooklyn College in pictures and now I have seen the real article with my own eyes," Roosevelt intoned. "Every time the Mayor of New York comes to Washington I tremble, because it means he wants something, and he almost always gets it. The project is killing two birds with one stone. It is not only putting to work thousands of people who need work, but it also is impoving educational facilites now and for generations to come. There has ben much suffering in this depression, but much good also has come out of it. It has given an opportunity to better conditions for the young people. I am interested in all projects for the improvement of education, and my wish for Brooklyn College is the fine future it deserves. May it live to build a better American citizenship.
From the description of Brooklyn College Midwood Campus Construction, 1935-1939. (Brooklyn College). WorldCat record id: 428732027
