184 38th Street
184 38th Street known as McBride Log House, was a historic log house in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Before its demolition, it was thought to be the oldest log house in any major American city to be used as a residence. Dating to the 1820s, it was one of the original buildings in Lawrenceville. Several attempts were made by historical groups to restore the building, but such efforts were cost prohibitive; the building continued to be used as a residence until the early 21st century, when it was purchased by a real estate developer. In 2011, the building was demolished; the building was constructed in the 1820s by Henry McBride, who purchased the property directly from Lawrenceville founder William Foster for $250 in 1822. At that time, Lawrenceville consisted of little more than several buildings centered around the Allegheny Arsenal. On September 17, 1862, Catherine Burkhart, a 15-year-old girl who lived in the home with her mother, was killed in an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal, where she worked assembling munitions for the Union Army.
In May 2007, the building was cited for rotting window frames, deteriorating exterior walls, crumbling wood under the roof. It was boarded up in 2008 to prevent vandalism and squatters. In April 2011, a real estate agent from the North Hills of Pittsburgh purchased the building for $43,000; the two story, two family building contained 12 rooms and 3,740 square feet of space. It was constructed using a framing technique; the logs were squared-off, rather than the stereotypical Lincoln Logs-style. A fire in 2004 exposed the original logs; the asphalt siding was removed from the outside of the building. As of 2011, the clapboards were showing the original logs underneath. After the 2004 fire, the Lawrenceville Historical Society began trying to find a way to preserve the building, but the society was unable to raise the necessary funds to purchase the building outright. In late 2006, the Lawrenceville Historical Society commissioned a study that estimated that the cost to restore the house as a history museum would cost $250,000.
Other studies have estimated the cost of restoration at greater than $200,000, not including the purchase price. The building was placed on the market in November 2008 with an asking price of $79,900. At the time, the property owners, investors in a limited partnership, hoped to find "the right buyer who will treat it with the respect it deserves." In 2008, Lawrenceville United executive director Tony Ceoffe described the dilapidated structure as a "terrible eyesore" and went on to say that neighbors were claiming it attracted vagrants and drug users. The Log House Committee of the Lawrenceville Stakeholders, led by a local architect, made an unsuccessful attempt to purchase and restore the property. In 2011, Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. noted preservationist and president of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, expressed hope that the house could be restored, but expressed doubts about the feasibility, due to the cost. Following the purchase of the building in 2011, the Lawrenceville Stakeholders expressed fear that the new owner would demolish the building.
When contacted by a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the owner indicated that there were no immediate plans for the property. Cochran expressed hope that the new owner would recognize the historic potential of the home and believed that a restored home of this age could be a "gold mine" as a single family residence in Lawrenceville, developing into a significant social center of Pittsburgh. Modifications made to the house since its construction, including 1830s cuts through the original logs to create windows, would have complicated any efforts to restore the building. Observers, including Carol Peterson, Pittsburgh's pre-eminent house historian, believed that the modifications had their own historical significance and should have been preserved in any restoration effort. In July, the owner demolished the structure, while attempting to preserve the logs, in case the building could be re-assembled elsewhere
Allegheny Arsenal
The Allegheny Arsenal, established in 1814, was an important supply and manufacturing center for the Union Army during the American Civil War, the site of the single largest civilian disaster during the war. Today, the site is the location of the nine-acre Arsenal Park in the Central Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2012, officials from the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation began drawing attention to the deteriorating arsenal structures; the Arsenal was established by the U. S. Army Ordnance Department near Pittsburgh in 1814, it was situated on 30 acres of land bordering the Allegheny River in the community of Lawrenceville. The arsenal served as a manufacturing center for the troops in the west, its peak years came during the Civil War when the manufacture of cartridges, became a high priority. Civilian employment at the arsenal increased from a pre-war total of 308 to over 1100 workers. One of the busiest facilities was the main lab, which employed 158 workers, the majority of whom were women engaged in the making of cartridges.
On Wednesday, September 17, 1862, around 2 pm, the arsenal exploded. The explosion shattered windows in the surrounding community and was heard in Pittsburgh, over two miles away. At the sound of the first explosion, Col. John Symington, Commander of the Arsenal, rushed from his quarters and made his way up the hillside to the lab; as he approached, he heard the sound of a second explosion, followed by a third. Fire fighting equipment as well as a bucket brigade tried to douse the flames with water; the volunteer fire company from Pittsburgh assisted in bringing the fire under control. By the time the fire was put out, the lab had been reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble. 78 workers young women, were killed. 54 bodies were unidentified, were buried in a mass grave in the nearby Allegheny Cemetery. Among those killed were 15-year-old munitions assembler Catherine Burkhart, who lived at 184 38th Street, 17-year-old Margaret Turney, who lived at 160 43rd Street; the most held view of the cause of the explosion was that the metal shoe of a horse had struck a spark which touched off loose powder in the roadway near the lab, which traveled up onto the porch where it set off several barrels of gunpowder.
A coroner's jury held that the accident had been the result of the negligent conduct of Col. John Symington and his subordinates in allowing loose powder to accumulate on the roadway and elsewhere. However, during a subsequent military inquiry into the conduct of Col. Symington, many of the same witnesses who had appeared before the coroner changed their testimony. There were so many discrepancies between the two hearings that most of the held views of the explosion have been shown to be discredited. In the end Col. Symington was found innocent of any wrongdoing by the army, the court concluded that "the cause of the explosion could not be satisfactorily ascertained...." Col. Symington, in a letter to the Ordnance Department two days after the explosion, speculated that it had been caused "by the leaking out of powder when one of the barrels was being placed on the platform." In fact the problem of leaking barrels seemed to be the one point of agreement among all the witnesses. Alexander McBride, the Superintendent of the Lab, had complained that the powder shipped by Dupont and Company was delivered in defective barrels with loose covers.
Symington was suspicious that the "parties shipping powder may have used barrels more than once for the shipment of powder, as the barrels have been returned to them at their request." But in the end, the final word still belongs to the Army inquiry and the exact cause remains unknown. Symington himself was sent on retirement the next year; the explosion at the Arsenal was overshadowed by the Battle of Antietam, which occurred on the same day near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Work at the Arsenal continued, a new lab was constructed by the following year. After the war, the Allegheny Arsenal served as a storage facility for the Ordnance Department and Quartermaster Corps. In the 1900s most of the land was sold off. Today the site of the explosion is in a ballfield in Arsenal Park. Nearby is the powder magazine, now a maintenance shed for the park. Brown's Island, Virginia. Exploded in 1863 The Allegheny Arsenal by Allan Becer Lawrenceville: Allegheny Arsenal - Includes a list of the names of the victims Travel Channel video on the explosion and park Allegheny Arsenal explosion Historic American Buildings Survey No.
PA-8-1, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Thirty-Ninth & Butler Streets, Penn Avenue, Allegheny County, PA", 3 measured drawings, 3 data pages HABS No. PA-8-1-A, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Commandants' Quarters, Fortieth Street, Allegheny County, PA", 4 photos, 8 measured drawings HABS No. PA-8-1-B, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Officers' Quarters, Thirty-ninth Street, Allegheny County, PA", 5 photos, 4 measured drawings HABS No. PA-8-1-C, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Barracks Building, Thirty-ninth Street, Allegheny County, PA", 6 photos, 4 measured drawings HABS No. PA-8-1-D, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, N. C. O. Quarters, Thirty-ninth Street, Allegheny County, PA", 7 photos, 7 measured drawings HABS No. PA-8-1-E, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Storehouse No. 2, Allegheny County, PA", 2 photos, 4 measured drawings HABS No. PA-8-1-F, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, PA", 2 photos, 3 measured drawings HABS No. PA-8-1-G, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Boiler House, Allegheny County, PA", 1 photo, 2 measured drawings HABS No.
PA-8-1-H, "U. S. Allegheny Arsenal, Machine Shop, Allegheny County, PA", 2 photos, 2 measured drawings HABS N
Loyal Order of Moose
The Loyal Order of Moose is a fraternal and service organization founded in 1888 and headquartered in Mooseheart, Illinois. It has about 1 million men as members, in 2,400 Lodges, in all 50 U. S. states Bermuda. It has an associated female organization, Women of the Moose, with more than 400,000 members in 1,600 Chapters in the same areas. There is a Loyal Order of Moose in Britain; these organizations together make up the Moose International. Moose International supports the operation of Mooseheart Child City & School, a 1,023-acre community for children and teens in need, located 40 miles west of Chicago. Additionally, the Moose organization conducts numerous sports and recreational programs, in local Lodge/Chapter facilities called either Moose Family Centers or Activity Centers, in the majority of 44 State and Provincial Associations, on a fraternity-wide basis; the Loyal Order of Moose was founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in the spring of 1888 by Dr. John Henry Wilson. Intended purely as a men's social club, lodges were soon founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis and Crawfordsville and Frankfort, Indiana.
The early order was not prosperous. Dr. Wilson himself was left the order of the Moose before the turn of the century; when Albert C. Stevens was compiling his Cyclopedia of Fraternities in the late 1890s, he was unable to ascertain whether it was still in existence. In the fall of 1906 the Order had only the two Indiana lodges remaining. On October 27 of that year James J. Davis became the 247th member of the Order. Davis was a Welsh immigrant who had come to the US as a youth and worked as an iron puddler in the steel mills of Pennsylvania, an active labor organizer, he saw the Order as a way to provide a social safety net for a working class membership, using a low annual membership fee of $10–$15. After giving a rousing address to the seven delegates of the 1906 Moose national convention, he was appointed "Supreme Organizer" of the Order. Davis and a group of organizers set out to recruit members and establish lodges throughout the US and Canada, he was quite successful and the Order grew to nearly half a million members in 1,000 lodges by 1912.
The membership of lodges shall be composed of male persons of the Caucasian or White race above the age of twenty-one years, not married to someone of any other than the Caucasian or White race... The National Moose Lodge bylaws restricted membership to male Caucasians. In 1972, a member invited K. Leroy Irvis to visit a lodge in Pennsylvania as a guest; the lodge dining room refused to serve Irvis on account of his race. Irvis sued the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board in federal court, arguing that the issuance of a liquor license to an organization with racially discriminatory policies constituted an illegal state action; the case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that since the Moose Lodge was a private organization, it had a right to practice racial discrimination. At the 1911 convention in Detroit, the "Director General" of the Order, recommended that the LOOM acquire property for an "Institute", "School" or "College" that would be a home and vocational training for the orphans of LOOM members.
For months offers came in and a number of meetings were held regarding the project. It was agreed that the center should be located somewhere near the center of population, adjacent to both rail and river transportation and within a day's travel to a major city. On December 14, 1912 the leaders of the organization decided to purchase the 750-acre Brookline Farm. Brookline was a dairy farm near Illinois, it was close to two railway lines and the Lincoln Highway. The leadership wished to buy additional real estate to the west and north owned by two other families, for a total of 1,023 acres. Negotiations for the purchases were held in January and February 1913, legal possession of the property was taken on March 1; the name "Mooseheart" had been adopted for the school at the suggestion of Ohio Congressmen and Supreme Council member John Lentz by a unanimous joint meeting of the Supreme Council and Institute Trustees on Feb. 1. Mooseheart was dedicated on July 27, 1913. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall gave a speech for the occasion.
While Mooseheart began as a school, it soon grew to become a small incorporated village and hub of the organization, housing the headquarters of the LOOM, as well as the Women of the Moose. The population of Mooseheart would grow to 1,000 by 1920, reach a peak of 1,300 during the Great Depression and go down to 500, the campus' current maximum capacity, in 1979. In addition to Mooseheart, the LOOM runs a retirement center, located in Orange Park, Florida; this project was inaugurated in the Autumn of 1922 with 26 acres of property and 22 retired Moose residents. It has grown to a 63-acre community with over 400 residents. Local units are called "Lodges", state groups are "State Associations" and the national authority is the "Supreme Lodge of the World", which meets annually. In 1923 there were 1,669 lodges "promulgated in every civilized country controlled by the Caucasian race". In 1966 3,500 lodges were reported in every US state, Canada and England. In 1979 the Order had over 4,000 Lodges.
Today it has 1,800 Lodges, in all 50 states and four Canadian provinces, as well as Bermuda and the United Kingdom. The entire membership is sometimes referred to as the "Moose Domain"; until at least the 1970s, membershi
Garfield (Pittsburgh)
Garfield is a neighborhood in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh, United States. Garfield is bordered on the South by Bloomfield and Friendship, on the West by the Allegheny Cemetery, on the North by Stanton Heights, on the East by East Liberty. Like many parts of Pittsburgh, Garfield is a steep neighborhood, with north-south residential streets running at about a 20% incline from Penn Avenue at the bottom to Mossfield Street at the top. Garfield is divided into “the valley” and “the hilltop.” Garfield is part of District 9 on the Pittsburgh City Council, is represented by Rev. Ricky Burgess. Like nearby Bloomfield and Friendship, the land comprising modern-day Garfield was stolen by Casper Taub from the local Delaware tribe. Taub sold it to Joseph Conrad Winebiddle, in the late 18th century. About a hundred years Winebiddle's descendants broke the family estate into lots and sold them to new residents of an expanding City of Pittsburgh; the first owner of a lot in present-day Garfield bought his plot in 1881, on the day that U.
S. President James Garfield was buried, so the neighborhood was named for the late President. Garfield's earliest settlers were predominantly blue-collar Irish laborers and their families, who worked in the mills and foundries down along the Allegheny River, shopped in local stores on Penn Avenue, built and lived in modest brick foursquare homes on the streets running up from Penn Avenue; the community almost Catholic, built St. Lawrence O'Toole Parish on Penn Avenue in 1897. From 1880 until about 1960, the neighborhood remained as it began: a working-class area. Neighborhood activist Aggie Brose described Garfield in 1960 as a place where "You sponsored each other's kids, you went to all the weddings and funerals, you never wanted for a baby-sitter, you never had to call a repairman, you didn't need for a social; when you put the kids to bed, the women went out on the stoops." Things changed in the 1960s, when some Garfield residents began to leave the City for nearby suburbs in Shaler and Penn Hills.
In response, the City's Urban Redevelopment Authority used eminent domain and attempted to change nearby East Liberty from an urban shopping area the third-busiest retail center in Pennsylvania, to a suburban one. The URA knocked down many small shops, accessible on foot or by bus, thereby opened land for larger ones, accessible by car. At the same time, the City's housing authority built several massive public housing complexes on Garfield's borders: Garfield Heights, a 600+ unit complex high up on Fern Street, the East Mall, a 20+ story tower straddling Penn Avenue at the entrance to East Liberty; these changes, designed to halt the slow trickle of Garfield residents to the suburbs, instead turned a trickle into a torrent. East Liberty lost most of its businesses, the new housing projects, inhabited by poor African-Americans, unnerved Garfield residents. In 1969 the federal government gave the City funds to enforce housing codes in Garfield so that as old residents fled, their homes were not allowed to deteriorate.
This move backfired: long-time residents, told that homes built in 1900 did not meet codes written in 1960, moved away rather than pay for upgrades. Thus began a textbook case of white flight: in 1970, Garfield had a population of 10,000 people, 80% of them white. In 2000, Garfield's population had been cut in half to 5,450 people, 83% of them black. To halt what they perceived as the neighborhood's decline, in 1975 parishioners at St. Lawrence O'Toole founded the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, a Community Development Corporation that uses private and government funds and activism to encourage homeownership and business development. Over the years, the organization has built or renovated dozens of housing units, renovated commercial properties for dozens of small businesses, from restaurants to art galleries to theater companies. In the 1980s, a similar group called the Garfield Jubilee Association formed, with a goal of creating affordable housing. In recent years, the two groups have joined together in a joint project to build dozens of new single-family homes.
In 2000, the BGC and Friendship Development Associates, Inc. formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative. The PAAI encourages artists to live and work along the Avenue by rehabbing properties, making small loans or grants for facade renovations, organizing joint marketing events such as Unblurred, held the first Friday of each month, where the venues of Garfield and Friendship open for special events. Efforts by groups like these, along with a recent recognition that massive, 1960s-style social welfare projects had negative consequences, have helped to revitalize the neighborhood. Commercially, Penn Avenue is recovering from the flight of local businesses in the 1980s; some bastions of the old neighborhood remain, as groups like the BGC and GJA, FDA have worked to keep some banks and stores along Penn Avenue. Since 1990, these have been joined by newcomers: African-American barbershops and salons, tiny family-owned Vietnamese restaurants, a series of arts-related businesses attracted by the PAAI.
There has been some positive residential development: the East Mall and Garfield Heights Senior highrise was razed in 2005, the townhouse units are scheduled to be demolished in 2007–2008, replaced with mixed-income units, as well as new replacement homes scattered through the neighborhood. Visitors to Garfield today will see a neighborhood on the rise, a blighted community, now b
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States federal government's official list of districts, buildings and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance. A property listed in the National Register, or located within a National Register Historic District, may qualify for tax incentives derived from the total value of expenses incurred preserving the property; the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 established the National Register and the process for adding properties to it. Of the more than one million properties on the National Register, 80,000 are listed individually; the remainder are contributing resources within historic districts. For most of its history the National Register has been administered by the National Park Service, an agency within the United States Department of the Interior, its goals are to help property owners and interest groups, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, coordinate and protect historic sites in the United States.
While National Register listings are symbolic, their recognition of significance provides some financial incentive to owners of listed properties. Protection of the property is not guaranteed. During the nomination process, the property is evaluated in terms of the four criteria for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places; the application of those criteria has been the subject of criticism by academics of history and preservation, as well as the public and politicians. Historic sites outside the country proper, but associated with the United States are listed. Properties can be nominated in a variety of forms, including individual properties, historic districts, multiple property submissions; the Register categorizes general listings into one of five types of properties: district, structure, building, or object. National Register Historic Districts are defined geographical areas consisting of contributing and non-contributing properties; some properties are added automatically to the National Register when they become administered by the National Park Service.
These include National Historic Landmarks, National Historic Sites, National Historical Parks, National Military Parks, National Memorials, some National Monuments. On October 15, 1966, the Historic Preservation Act created the National Register of Historic Places and the corresponding State Historic Preservation Offices; the National Register consisted of the National Historic Landmarks designated before the Register's creation, as well as any other historic sites in the National Park system. Approval of the act, amended in 1980 and 1992, represented the first time the United States had a broad-based historic preservation policy; the 1966 act required those agencies to work in conjunction with the SHPO and an independent federal agency, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, to confront adverse effects of federal activities on historic preservation. To administer the newly created National Register of Historic Places, the National Park Service of the U. S. Department of the Interior, with director George B.
Hartzog Jr. established an administrative division named the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation. Hartzog charged OAHP with creating the National Register program mandated by the 1966 law. Ernest Connally was the Office's first director. Within OAHP new divisions were created to deal with the National Register; the division administered several existing programs, including the Historic Sites Survey and the Historic American Buildings Survey, as well as the new National Register and Historic Preservation Fund. The first official Keeper of the Register was an architectural historian. During the Register's earliest years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, organization was lax and SHPOs were small and underfunded. However, funds were still being supplied for the Historic Preservation Fund to provide matching grants-in-aid to listed property owners, first for house museums and institutional buildings, but for commercial structures as well. A few years in 1979, the NPS history programs affiliated with both the U.
S. National Parks system and the National Register were categorized formally into two "Assistant Directorates." Established were the Assistant Directorate for Archeology and Historic Preservation and the Assistant Directorate for Park Historic Preservation. From 1978 until 1981, the main agency for the National Register was the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service of the United States Department of the Interior. In February 1983, the two assistant directorates were merged to promote efficiency and recognize the interdependency of their programs. Jerry L. Rogers was selected to direct this newly merged associate directorate, he was described as a skilled administrator, sensitive to the need for the NPS to work with SHPOs, local governments. Although not described in detail in the 1966 act, SHPOs became integral to the process of listing properties on the National Register; the 1980 amendments of the 1966 law further defined the responsibilities of SHPOs concerning the National Register.
Several 1992 amendments of the NHPA added a category to the National Register, known as Traditional Cultural Properties: those properties associated with Native American or Hawaiian groups
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. With its main campus located 3 miles from Downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon has grown into an international university with over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley, more than 20 research partnerships; the university has seven colleges and independent schools which all offer interdisciplinary programs: the College of Engineering, College of Fine Arts, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mellon College of Science, Tepper School of Business, H. John Heinz III College of Information Systems and Public Policy, the School of Computer Science.
Carnegie Mellon counts 13,961 students from 109 countries, over 105,000 living alumni, over 5,000 faculty and staff. Past and present faculty and alumni include 20 Nobel Prize laureates, 13 Turing Award winners, 23 Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 22 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 79 Members of the National Academies, 124 Emmy Award winners, 47 Tony Award laureates, 10 Academy Award winners; the Carnegie Technical Schools were founded in 1900 in Pittsburgh by the Scottish American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who wrote the time-honored words "My heart is in the work", when he donated the funds to create the institution. Carnegie's vision was to open a vocational training school for the sons and daughters of working-class Pittsburghers. Carnegie was inspired for the design of his school by the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York founded by industrialist Charles Pratt in 1887. In 1912, the institution changed its name to Carnegie Institute of Technology and began offering four-year degrees.
During this time, CIT consisted of four constituent schools: the School of Fine and Applied Arts, the School of Apprentices and Journeymen, the School of Science and Technology, the Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women. The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was founded in 1913 by a banker and industrialist brothers Andrew and Richard B. Mellon in honor of their father, Thomas Mellon, the patriarch of the Mellon family; the Institute began as a research organization which performed work for government and industry on a contract and was established as a department within the University of Pittsburgh. In 1927, the Mellon Institute incorporated as an independent nonprofit. In 1938, the Mellon Institute's iconic building was completed and it moved to its new, current, location on Fifth Avenue. In 1967, with support from Paul Mellon, Carnegie Tech merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to become Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon's coordinate women's college, the Margaret Morrison Carnegie College closed in 1973 and merged its academic programs with the rest of the university.
The industrial research mission of the Mellon Institute survived the merger as the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute and continued doing work on contract to industry and government. CMRI closed in 2001 and its programs were subsumed by other parts of the university or spun off into autonomous entities. Carnegie Mellon's 140-acre main campus is three miles from downtown Pittsburgh, between Schenley Park and the Squirrel Hill and Oakland neighborhoods. Carnegie Mellon is bordered to the west by the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon owns 81 buildings in the Squirrel Hill neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. For decades the center of student life on campus was the University's student union. Built in the 1950s, Skibo Hall's design was typical of Mid-Century Modern architecture, but was poorly equipped to deal with advances in computer and internet connectivity; the original Skibo was razed in the summer of 1994 and replaced by a new student union, wi-fi enabled. Known as University Center, the building was dedicated in 1996.
In 2014, Carnegie Mellon re-dedicated the University Center as the Cohon University Center in recognition of the eighth president of the university, Jared Cohon. A large grassy area known as "the Cut" forms the backbone of the campus, with a separate grassy area known as "the Mall" running perpendicular; the Cut was formed by filling in a ravine with soil from a nearby hill, leveled to build the College of Fine Arts building. The northwestern part of the campus was acquired from the United States Bureau of Mines in the 1980s. In 2006, Carnegie Mellon Trustee Jill Gansman Kraus donated the 80-foot -tall sculpture Walking to the Sky, placed on the lawn facing Forbes Ave between the Cohon University Center and Warner Hall; the sculpture was controversial for its placement, the general lack of input that the campus community had, its aesthetic appeal. In April 2015, Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Jones Lang LaSalle, announced the planning of a second office space structure, alongside the Robert Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center, an upscale and full-service hotel, retail and dining development along Forbes Avenue.
This complex will connect to the Tepper Quadrangle, the Heinz College, the Tata Consultancy Services Building, the Gates-Hillman Center to create an innovation corridor on the university campus. The eff