Historic site sparks concern

Some are worried that the historic value of the former Osborn Clubhouse and Third World Center, which was renamed the Fields Center in 2002, will be lost if demolition plans go ahead.

“We must record our fervent concern regarding the possible demolition of the Osborn Clubhouse,” Robert Venturi ’47 — designer of Wu Hall — and his wife Denise Scott Brown said in a letter to University Architect Ronald McCoy GS ’80.

McCoy received a letter expressing similar concerns from W. Barksdale Maynard ’88, who has lectured on architectural history at Princeton, the University of Delaware and Johns Hopkins University.

“No 19th-century building has been demolished since 1965,” Maynard said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian. “It is a very serious matter to contemplate the destruction of one of the 20 buildings surviving on campus from pre-1900.”

University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said, however, that no decisions about the building have been made, though the University’s Campus Plan proposes that 86 Olden St. will be incorporated into the Andlinger Center.

The University is “in a phase where we are considering options with and without 86 Olden,” she said.

Though Cliatt said that the University will take the historical value of the site into consideration, she explained that sometimes the preservation of historical sites must be considered in light of new goals.

“We always seek a balance of respect for our past history, but also seek to ... promote new missions of the University,” she said. “There are buildings that become very old, and to preserve them for just historic reasons would not support the mission of the institution.”

Still, Maynard called the building “very rare” and argued for its preservation.

Built in 1892 as the Osborn Clubhouse, the space was used for nearly 80 years as the home to the Princeton football team in what Maynard called the “golden age of Princeton intercollegiate sport.”

Maynard also noted the building’s historical significance, explaining that it “played an important role in the historic desegregation of the Ivy League.”

Future generations would want to visit a preserved 86 Olden St. to “see where Michelle Obama [’85] spent time on the campus [and] to see how the University was integrated,” he said.

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Obama told the ‘Prince’ in 2005 that during her time at the University, “the school’s few African-American students ... created a community within a community and got involved at places like the Third World Center.”

The University Board of Trustees will meet on March 26 to discuss the location’s incorporation into the coming Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

Correction: Due to an editing error, the former site of the Fields Center was identified as a pre-19th century building when, in fact, it is a pre-20th century building.