Bailey Hall
About this property
Bailey Hall is the largest auditorium at Cornell University, an Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. The auditorium seats 1,300 people, and it is named for Liberty Hyde Bailey, the first dean of what is now Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Bailey Hall was constructed in 1912, according to the Greek Revival architecture design of Buffalo-based architect Edward Brodhead Green, an 1878 graduate of Cornell University. It is shaped as an amphitheatre, with a colonnaded portico wrapping around its south side, and monumental stairs leading up to 11-foot main doors. It was built by New York state and initially intended for use by Cornell University agriculture students, but it also filled the need for a large auditorium that could be used by the entire university. As originally configured, Bailey seated 1,948. It was described as having "acoustics by God, seats by Torquemada," a reference to its wooden seats and severely raked floor. In 1984, Bailey Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2006, the building reopened after a major rehabilitation which brought it up to modern building codes and made it handicapped-accessible, albeit at the cost of several hundred seats of audience capacity. The road and small parking lot immediately in front of Bailey were converted into a pedestrian plaza which was opened to the public in 2007. The flagstones of the plaza are hewn from bluestone, similar to the material used to construct the Stone Row on the Arts Quad. Some of the stones were thermally treated to alter their colors to achieve a cosmetic effect. The benches ringing the plaza extend to 300 feet in length, each having been hewn from a single Oregon Douglas fir. A fountain carved from local stone into a natural, sloping shape invoking Ithaca's gorges is featured on the southern edge of the plaza.
Location
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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).
Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Questions about this property
When was Bailey Hall listed on the National Register?
Bailey Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 23, 1984.
What type of historic resource is Bailey Hall?
Bailey Hall is classified as a building in the National Register of Historic Places.
What is the period of significance for Bailey Hall?
The period of significance for Bailey Hall is recorded as the industrial era.
Can I research the history near Bailey Hall?
Yes. Aubrey Research reports search National Register listings, battlefield records, land patents, and other primary historical sources within any radius of a US address. A report for an address near Bailey Hall will include this listing and all other historical records in the area.
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