ALMOST swamped by the boxy modernism of Hunter College, the 1913 Tudor-style wing on Lexington Avenue from 68th to 69th Street known as Thomas Hunter Hall is easy to miss. When built, it was one of a dozen hospitals, homes, orphanages and other institutions devoted to the civic good at the crown of Lenox Hill, and was meant as part of a larger design that would have given the college a quite different face.
Its rooms were high and light with large banks of windows, shown in a 1919 anatomy class.
Its exterior had some decorative touches.
In the 1860s, the city began giving or leasing land on blocks it owned from 66th to 69th, between Park and Third Avenues, to institutions serving a public purpose. The earliest beneficiary was Mount Sinai Hospital, on the east side of Lexington between 66th and 67th Street. It was followed soon afterward by Normal College, established in 1869 to train female high school graduates for teaching positions, and so named because its goal was to establish norms for the profession.
In 1873, the college opened a great red brick churchlike building in the Gothic style, facing Park Avenue. The curriculum expanded beyond teacher training to include traditional liberal arts, and in the early 1910s an ambitious plan was floated to tear down the Gothic building and incorporate the entire block in a giant new structure for the college’s use. A magnificent towered Tudor-style building was to occupy most of the block on the Park Avenue side, with a similar but simpler structure on Lexington, all designed by Charles B. J. Snyder, the architect for city schools.
As it happened, only the Lexington Avenue front went ahead, starting in 1911; the Gothic-style complex on the balance of the lot remained.
Mr. Snyder’s legacy for the school system was to replace its dark, cramped boxes with high light-filled structures, often in an H-plan and often in Northern European Renaissance styles. For the Lexington Avenue structure — designed to accommodate the elementary and high schools associated with the teaching college — he must have been given a larger than usual budget, as it is completely clad in limestone.
The building opened in 1913, and the next year Normal College was renamed Hunter College, after its founding president, Thomas Hunter. (Later the building became Thomas Hunter Hall.)
Mr. Snyder’s work bears some of his trademarks: the rooms are high and light with large banks of windows. Three large cathedral windows at the top levels are visible from the street. The rooms that they illuminate, originally gymnasiums and a lunch room, are now spectacular dance studios.
In 1927, the college considered relocating to the Bronx (where an additional campus soon went up), but it remained in place. In 1936, the Gothic-style building on the Park Avenue side was gutted by fire; four years later, that was replaced by the present modernist structure, designed by Harrison & Fouilhoux along with Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. The magazine Architectural Forum noted “the more sentimental section of the public and profession decrying the omission of the customary collegiate trimmings.”
In 1946, Hunter began to admit some men, and in 1964 it went completely coed. In the 1980s, modern towers were built on the south corners of 68th Street and Lexington, connected by skywalks, which have provided some of the character of a college campus.
They replaced a grammar school, on the southeast corner, and what had begun as the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf-Mutes on the southwest corner. Now the firm Superstructures Engineers & Architects is repairing cracked stonework. Vikrant Sampat, a principal, says the company will replace 80 percent of the parapets, including the turrets.
Today, Thomas Hunter Hall (which for many years served as Hunter High School) is reminiscent of those old police station interiors on television shows like “NYPD Blue.” The space has been roughly used and has little actual ornament, but everything is deliciously intact, patinaed like an old oak table.
Mr. Snyder paved all the hallways with big lovely squares of red clay tile, which are worn down but astonishingly unchanged.
The walls are wainscoted in the same material, but in rich shades of brown and caramel, with an unusual decorative tile, the outline of a square with four C’s crossing it around its edge, at the cardinal points. This motif is repeated a few hundred times and is the only decorative pattern of thousands of tiles in the building; anyone can walk in off the street and ponder them.
The schoolrooms are flooded with light, and Thomas Hunter Hall has the ennobling quality common to simple civic gestures when carried out with care and aplomb. Most of the floors are the original wood strips, and the wooden windows appear intact. If you were born before Kennedy was elected president, you may be reminded of your elementary school classrooms.
