This is the fourth of my Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet series of blog posts, the focus of each being a landmark building here in Eugene. Many of these will be familiar to most who live here but there are likely to be a few buildings that are less so. My selection criteria for each will be threefold:
- The building must be of architectural interest, local importance, or historically significant.
- The building must be extant so you or I can visit it in person.
- Each building’s name will begin with a particular letter of the alphabet, and I must select one (and only one) for each of the twenty-six letters. This is easier said than done for some letters, whereas for other characters there is a surfeit of worthy candidates (so I’ll be discriminating and explain my choice in those instances).
This week’s selection begins with the letter D, for which my selection, which is not free of controversy, is the formerly named Deady Hall.
University (Deady) Hall
The first building on the campus of what would become the University of Oregon still stands today, 148 years after its builder, W.H. Abrams, laid the cornerstone. Though architect William W. Piper designed the three-story structure in the then-popular Second Empire Style, its relative lack of ornamentation and absence of polychromy evokes nothing if not the mystery and portent we associate with the old castles, abbeys, and towering gray manors of a Gothic horror novel. True to this impression, the formerly named Deady Hall is haunted by its history.
As reported in a 2012 Daily Emerald piece, that dark history includes the finding in 1877 by Professor Thomas Condon of a well-preserved human skeleton in the building’s basement (later identified as belonging to a man from New York who had been missing; no explanation exists of how his remains ended up in the basement). Additionally, Deady Hall’s toll claimed William Piper, the architect, who following the university’s failure to compensate him fully for his services and his ensuing financial travails, committed suicide by jumping off a train.
Unnamed upon its opening in 1876, photographs from that time show “The Building” standing alone on the campus, in stark contrast to its setting today amid paths lined by mature conifers and big leaf maples. Until the completion of Villard Hall in 1886, it would be the university’s sole building, hosting not only classes for UO’s complete enrollment but also for a preparatory school (Eugene would not have its own high school until 1901). The university informally named its oldest building “Deady Hall,” in honor of Matthew P. Deady, judge of the Territorial Supreme Court from 1853 to 1859 and president of the UO’s Board of Regents from 1873 to 1883. The university officially conferred the name “Deady Hall” in 1926 on the 50th anniversary of the building’s opening.
Though an accomplished politician and jurist, Matthew Deady clearly held racist views. He supported slavery and helped draft the state’s constitution, which initially barred black people from residing in Oregon. Damningly, he wrote “If we are compelled to have the colored race amongst us, they should be slaves.” Notwithstanding the context of his time, and indeed the complexity and contradictions of his views (which admirably included his efforts to protect Chinese workers from discrimination and racially motivated violence), Deady never entirely disavowed his stance toward African Americans, even after supporting the Thirteenth Amendment (which banned slavery in 1864).
In response to a set of demands presented by the Black Student Task Force in 2015, University of Oregon president Michael Schill initially decided to not recommend renaming Deady Hall, but did endorse removing Fredrick Dunn’s name from the wing of the Hamilton residence complex that bore it. Dunn, though head of the Department of Classics at UO, was also “Exalted Cyclops” of the Eugene branch of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. As I wrote upon the renaming of the wing in honor of DeNorval Unthank, it was clear to a majority in the university community that honoring an avowed racist has no place today at a public institution of higher learning. President Schill’s reasons for not choosing to do the same for Deady Hall were nuanced but have since been rendered moot in the wake of the racially charged social upheaval we witnessed over the past year. Deady Hall—now University Hall—will be renamed.
In a well-balanced and researched essay for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Matthew Dennis and Samuel Reis-Dennis address the complicated questions about history, public memory, ethical judgment, and American society and political culture raised by renaming controversies:
“If, say, in the case of Matthew Deady, one wished to preserve his name on Deady Hall so as to honestly confront the past, acknowledge the ugliness of Oregon’s history, and register how it has violated university values, then are we not associating Deady with reputation-destroying “ignominy” in the process? Ironically, taking the opposite step—de-naming Deady Hall—would remove the spotlight from Deady. And it would seem to eliminate any need for Deady to publicly defend himself from the grave. Namesake buildings do not speak in complex and nuanced ways about the men or women they celebrate —if they resonate at all, they offer praise, they edify. Should the University of Oregon wish to remember Deady and the early history of Oregon, in all its shame and ugliness, then it could do so through other means—via a historical plaque, for example, that assesses Deady as a complicated historical figure without lionizing him.”
Buildings alone can only do so much to influence our behavior and beliefs. On the other hand, should our architecture be resilient no matter how much the sands of public memory shift? Proponents for the autonomy of architecture argue that social, cultural, economic, and political factors should not play a role in the production of form. I have a hard time separating architecture from the entire context of which it is a part. Our buildings do reflect how we see ourselves, and in part we do view our world through the lens of architecture. Meaning also inheres from the history lived within our buildings and by the encumbrances of the values that history accrues.
I support the de-naming of Deady Hall because choosing not to would perpetuate a campus environment of cultural insensitivity a historical plaque alone cannot redress. Try to imagine the feelings of African American students upon first learning of Matthew Deady’s beliefs. Sitting within an unrepentantly named Deady Hall would be discomforting and hurtful. If the building continued to bear his name, many of these students can only then conclude the university chooses to turn a blind eye toward the persistent structural inequities of our society and the historic plight of the black community. The intent of renaming is not to gloss over the historical record by imposing a fraught set of current beliefs and worldviews but rather to acknowledge the past forthrightly.
No comments:
Post a Comment