Hall of Fame
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a memorial building at Munich, Bavaria. It was completed in 1853. It consists of a Doric portico with projecting wings on a high basement of masonry. At the center is a colossal statue of Bavaria in bronze, 62 feet high, representing a woman holding a wreath in her raised left hand, while the lion of Bavaria sits at her side. The portico contains eighty busts of celebrated Bavarians. Acting on this suggestion, a similar memorial is on foot in New York City. A fund of $100,000 given to the New York University for the purpose, has been expended in building a colonnade five hundred feet long on University Heights in upper New York. The site is a magnificent one over-looking the fields of the Hudson and the Harlem. Panels to the number of 150, two feet by eight in dimensions, are to bear the names and the dates of birth and death of 150 famous native Americans. No one is eligible until at least ten years dead. The authorities submit names to a jury of one hundred members, themselves eminent men, representing all states of the Union. Any name receiving a majority vote and confirmed by the University senate is admitted to the Hall of Fame. In 1903 twenty-nine names were selected. They received from ninety-seven to fifty-one votes each. Named in order they are: Names No. Votes. George Washington 97 Abraham Lincoln 96 Daniel Webster 96 Benjamin Franklin 94 Ulysses S. Grant 92 John Marshall 91 Thomas Jefferson 90 Ralph Waldo Emerson 87 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 85 Robert Fulton 85 Washington Irving 83 Jonathan Edwards 81 Samuel F. B. Morse 80 David Glasgow Farragut 79 Henry Clay 74 Nathaniel Hawthorne 73 George Peabody 72 Robert E. Lee 69 Peter Cooper 69 Eli Whitney 67 John James Audubon 67 Horace Mann 67 Henry Ward Beecher 66 James Kent 65 Joseph Story 64 John Adams 61 William Ellery Channing 58 Gilbert Stuart 52 Asa Gray 51 In 1905 the names of Lowell, Whittier, Mary Lyon, Emma Willard, Maria Mitchell, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, Louis Agassiz, Wm. T. Sherman, John Paul Jones, and Alexander Hamilton were added. See Munich
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote in 1910 the New York colonnade on University Heights was still filling up, with forty names chosen in 1903 and 1905 and 150 panels waiting. Elections went on until 1976, when funds ran out; the Hall of Fame for Great Americans holds just under a hundred bronze busts and has never been completed. The campus itself changed hands: New York University sold University Heights in 1973 and the site is now Bronx Community College, part of the City University of New York. In 2017 the busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were removed from the colonnade after the violence in Charlottesville o Lee, at 69 votes in 1903, had been one of the original twenty-nine. The Munich Ruhmeshalle that inspired it was damaged in the Second World War and restored, the bronze Bavaria still standing before it.
Written for this edition, 2026.