Each day until Jan. 1, The Post will take a look at one of New York’s landmarks on the eve of the new millennium. We’ll talk to people who work or visit here about their lives — and their hopes for the coming century.
Before there was Cooperstown — and way before there was rock ‘n’ roll — there was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in The Bronx.
“This was the first hall of fame, even before baseball,” said Ralph Rourke, director of the landmark institution, with a sweeping outdoor colonnade of bronze busts.
“We’re the first — everything else is a copy.”
Well, come to think of it, so are the guests of honor — all 98 of them, from George Washington to someone named Joseph Henry (who, for the record, discovered induced current in the 19th century).
The Hall of Fame is situated on what is now Bronx Community College, which was NYU’s classy uptown campus when it opened on Memorial Day in 1901. Bankrolled with money from the daughter of legendary robber baron Jay Gould, it was built with no expense spared.
“There was no national shrine to American achievement anywhere,” Rourke said. So NYU “decided to create an American pantheon, like the one in Rome. It was a significant honor to be elected.”
Some 25 inductees were the first to be honored, including Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But it all ended in 1976, three years after NYU turned over the reins to CUNY. Andrew Carnegie, Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton and Franklin D. Roosevelt were elected — but only FDR’s bust has been installed (in 1992).
No one, it seemed, wanted to spring for the $25,000 needed for each of the other sculptures.
“The Carnegie Foundation said, ‘We just don’t want Mr. Carnegie in The Bronx,'” complained Rourke, adding that he is mystified why the Red Cross won’t fund Barton’s bust.
Only 11 women are in the collection, and just two African-Americans — George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington.
On a campus whose enrollment is easily 75 percent people of color, Rourke said he realized things would have to change if, and when, the hall ever expands.
“We have to change the color of the inductees,” he said.
“This is contemporary America. A lot has changed. The people who voted then were white males. But this is our responsibility now, to keep up with the changing landscape.”
The Hall of Fame will celebrate its centennial in 2001. Rourke, 76, said he hopes that will be a launching pad for the next phase of the hall.
“My plan would be to go to video biographers. That’s the contemporary technique most people are comfortable with,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you rather sit indoors and view a video than stand in the cold and look at a bust?”