Pratt Institute Memorial Hall

205 Ryerson Street | also 199 Ryerson Street, 255 Ryerson Street | Clinton Hill | built 1975

Open on the map3 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1926

    Pratt Institute builds Memorial Hall as an assembly hall honoring Mary Richardson Pratt

    Memorial Hall went up in 1926-27 north of the Pratt Institute Main Building to give the school an assembly hall. It commemorates Mary Richardson Pratt, the second wife of the Institute's founder, Charles Pratt. A one-story sandstone entrance section with a gable links it to the Main Building, which dates from 1885-87.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1926

    John Mead Howells, co-winner of the Chicago Tribune Tower contest, designs Memorial Hall

    Memorial Hall was the work of John Mead Howells, who trained at MIT, Harvard and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. From 1899 to 1917 he practiced with I.N. Phelps Stokes, designing academic buildings such as St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia and Woodbridge Hall at Yale. In 1922 he and Raymond Hood won the competition for the Chicago Tribune tower.

    “With Raymond Hood he won the Chicago Tribune tower competition in 1922 and remained associated with Hood for a series of notable skyscraper designs.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1926

    Memorial Hall is built in a neo-Romanesque style to match the older Pratt buildings

    Howells chose a neo-Romanesque style for Memorial Hall, a revival that enjoyed moderate popularity in the 1920s. The brown-brick hall has round-arched openings with engaged colonnettes on the ground floor, and a large arched opening in its gable holds three smaller arches flanked by columns that carry carved figures. Mosaics outline the ridge of the gable. Its forms and materials echo the Romanesque Revival Main Building and South Hall beside it.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Nearby

All 13 buildings with stories in Clinton Hill