WHEN WE WERE NORMAL
A Historical Augmented Reality Walking Tour
Expanding Northward
LOCATION: FOYER COLUMN EAST
Before the Sanders building opened in 1963, there was a baseball diamond at the corner of North and Ross Street. Foul balls tended to soar towards Mr. Philip Madonia’s property on North Street and in early June of 1960, a baseball broke his window–again. Madonia’s lawyer sent President Ralph Weston the bill for $37 and warned that if further precautions were not taken, they would get an injunction against the school. While the City of Fitchburg paid for the damages, Weston assured Madonia that construction of a new administration building would start soon, eliminating the athletic field and the foul balls along with it.
Sanders, then known as the Administration Building and Library, was designed and funded in conjunction with the Weston Auditorium and the Condike Science Building. Justifications for the Administration and Library building cited the pressing need to free up space for classrooms in Thompson Hall to meet the demands of increased enrollment.
While the 1955 Anderson Report estimated the college could only accommodate 500 students, in 1960 the college already had some 800 students crammed into crowded classrooms and enrollments were expected to balloon to 1200 by 1970. Demand was so much higher than capacity that less than 25% of the freshman applicants for the 1961-1962 year were admitted.
Sanders provided office space for the president, various deans, the alumni office, registrar, and bookkeepers all on the second floor. To support the expansion of liberal arts programs and to accommodate a collection befitting a college, Sanders was fitted to include a library.
Even after the building was completed, further additions were necessary to discourage the misplaced energies of neighborhood children. While there was once a breezeway between the library and the science building, the university closed it off to provide a reading room. According to Mr. E. Edward Rossi, the breezeway was “a large waste space that the local children use as a playground and caused untold damage, malicious and otherwise.”
