On January 1, 1902, the Augsburg community rang in the new year with a multi-day celebration of the opening of what was then called “New Old Main”.
What follows is an excerpt edited for length and clarity from an earlier draft of “Hold Fast to What is Good,” the sesquicentennial history of Augsburg University, by Phil Adamo.
A hand drawn floor plan for New Old Main 1899
New Old Main
Omeyer & Thori architectural plan
1900
A QUARTER CENTURY after the Main building was erected, the seminary needed to expand. As the seminary grew, the building that would soon become “Old” Main was becoming inadequate to support classrooms for the increasing student body. In the summer of 1899, the Lutheran Free Church recommended that:
A new building [be built] containing class rooms, library, etc., at the cost of $30,000, the work to commence as soon as sufficient funds are collected. [1]
Groundbreaking and the laying of the foundation began in the winter of 1899, but the building was not completed until 1902. Several factors delayed construction on the building: a national economic slump in the 1890s, falling enrollments, students from small town farming families forced to stay home due to poor weather effecting crops. Tuition income fell. The cost of building materials rose.
Funding for New Main’s construction also became entangled in a scandal surrounding Trinity Lutheran’s pastor, Melchior Falk Gjertsen, who had close ties to Augsburg. Gjertsen had traveled to Norway with August Weenaas, on the expedition that brought Sven Oftedal back to the seminary. According to Chrislock, upon his return from a different preaching tour, in 1900, Gjertsen found himself accused of “having authored and posted a salacious letter to a married woman with whom he allegedly had established a romantic relationship during his stay in Norway.”[2] The letter made the pastor look like a philanderer and a cad. Gjertsen returned to Norway to clear his name, but when he was unable to do so, he slipped out of the country before facing further legal charges. Back in Minneapolis, the Trinity congregation questioned his suitability to serve as their pastor. Georg Sverdrup, then president of Augsburg and a member of Trinity, pushed for a full inquiry. The controversy split the Trinity congregation, and Gjertsen ended up resigning, only to found the Bethany Lutheran church, just blocks away on Franklin Avenue.
Trinity Lutheran’s pastor Melchior Falk Gjertsen
Historian Nina Draxten has worked to reclaim Pastor Gjertsen’s good name, demonstrating how the woman involved, Esther Biernakowsky Paulsen, had a questionable reputation. An employee at a major bank in Bergen claimed that Paulsen had also tried to ruin his reputation through false accusations. The fellow target of Paulsen’s scam offered to sign a deposition, but his employers pressured him to withdraw his statement to avoid bad publicity for the bank. Gjertsen did recover from the scandal, and was eventually re-elected to the Minneapolis school board, where he had served before all of this broke out.[3] But Gjertsen’s good relationship to Augsburg never returned. In terms of funding the new building, donors used the Gjertsen affair as a way to distance themselves from the project. According to Chrislock, Amasa C. Paul, president of the Minneapolis Commercial Club:
Pointed to “the trouble … in connection with … Gjertsen, which if we had foreseen, would have prevented us from taking up the [fund-raising] matter at all.”[4]
In spite of these difficulties, the capital campaign proceeded. During the summer of 1901, many of Augsburg’s preparatory faculty devoted their summer to fundraising for the building, which helped to move construction along. The completion of the building in 1902 instilled a sense of pride throughout the school’s faculty, staff, and students, and the new spacious structure helped to strengthen morale on campus.
As the plans from Saint Paul architects Didrik Omeyer and Martin Thori show, New Main contained several classrooms, a library, a museum, a gymnasium, and a chapel space. In a commemorative collection of reflections on the new building’s dedication, theology professor Hans Urseth offered this description of New Main:
The architecture is uniformly classic, leaving on the mind that impression of simplicity and harmony which characterizes especially purely Greek architecture … The ornamentation by which the wall surfaces are relieved, aside from the arches and belts in the brick-work proper, consist mainly in panels of terra cotta … The symbolic figure of a lighted torch in the terra cotta of the exterior is again found in the only ornamentation in the interior—the stucco-work of the chapel.[5]
Not to mention that it had indoor plumbing! In fact, following 1902’s completion of New Main, the school had modern plumbing installed in all of the buildings on campus. Prior to this, “old, unsightly” outhouses were used on the campus, which had “usurped valuable space on the seminary block for a generation.”[6]
The one common denominator of all buildings on Augsburg’s campus, for as long as they stand, is that they are constantly being re-purposed. This fate was no different for New Main. In 1947, it officially became Old Main when its predecessor was demolished. In the course of its life, the building’s chapel has become a painting studio; the gymnasium in the basement is now a sculpture studio. The museum is no more, and the library has been moved and improved at least twice.
In 1971, the Augsburgian praised Augsburg’s campus as being a “curious combination of old and new buildings.” New Old Main, it said:
Serves diverse purposes … a general classroom area … faculty offices hidden in its nooks and crannies … an up-to-date language lab in which students may be found during all hours of the day; and it even contains a chapel which can be used alternately as a classroom or a choir practice area. Old Main indeed has a unique personality.[7]
Yet New Old Main in the 1970s was itself under consideration for demolition. One major problem had to do with accessibility. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 required that “every institution that wishes to keep receiving federal funds must be programmatically and structurally accessible to the handicapped population by June 2, 1980.”[8] Accessibility was a problem that affected the entire campus. In the 1980s, Augsburg implemented a campaign for improving accessibility across campus called “Making A Way.” This program, which began under Oscar Anderson’s presidency and extended into Charles Anderson’s, “included construction of elevators, ramps, tunnels, skyways, and powered doors to make classroom and administrative buildings accessible to all of the Augsburg community.”[9] Nowadays, the design of new buildings on campus includes accessibility considerations as a matter of course.
Yet New Old Main in the 1970s was itself under consideration for demolition. One major problem had to do with accessibility. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 required that “every institution that wishes to keep receiving federal funds must be programmatically and structurally accessible to the handicapped population by June 2, 1980.”[8] Accessibility was a problem that affected the entire campus. In the 1980s, Augsburg implemented a campaign for improving accessibility across campus called “Making A Way.” This program, which began under Oscar Anderson’s presidency and extended into Charles Anderson’s, “included construction of elevators, ramps, tunnels, skyways, and powered doors to make classroom and administrative buildings accessible to all of the Augsburg community.”[9] Nowadays, the design of new buildings on campus includes accessibility considerations as a matter of course.
Old Main of the 1970s also required renovations to make it fire-safe: replacing wooden doors and installing a sprinkler system. Additional renovations would “rid the building of deficiencies such as sagging floors, energy-loss windows, and inefficient use of space.”[10] All tolled, these renovations would not be cheap, roughly $1.5 million. Within the school, a debate began on whether Augsburg should follow through with these renovations or construct a new building.
In November 1978, the Echo conducted a student poll on the question of razing or renovating Old Main. Student opinion was almost unanimous in favor of keeping the building instead of tearing it down, stating, for example, that it was the “only classy building in the school” and that “a college should be progressive, but it should not forget its beginnings.”[11] Chrislock offered the poll some historical perspective:
Augsburg’s first generation was still here when the building was built, and every subsequent generation has used it … Old Main does represent what Augsburg is architecturally. The Greek ideal was cultivated so much by Augsburg’s founders, and the very style of the building is a reminder of that.[12]
Because of these strong opinions and arguments, not to mention the resources necessary to construct a new building, Augsburg’s Board of Regents chose to keep Old Main and pursue the renovations it badly needed. According to Richard Nelson and Dave Wood:
Today, [Old Main] remains a monument to the faith of the college fathers, a linchpin to the past, stolid and permanent.[13]
In 1984, Old Main was put on the National Register of Historic Places.[14]
Heather Riddle
Vice President for Advancement
[1] “The Annual Meeting…,” Ekko, 1:7 (15 June 1899), 112.
[2] Chrislock, From Fjord to Freeway, 83.
[3] Nina Draxten, The Testing of M. Falk Gjertsen (Northfield, MN, 1988).
[4] Chrislock, From Fjord to Freeway, 83.
[5] H. A. Urseth, “The New Building,” Mindeblade om Indvielsen af Augsburg Seminariums Nye Bygning, 1ste—3die Januar 1902 (Minneapolis, 1902), 76-78.
[6] Chrislock, From Fjord to Freeway, 87.
[7] Augsburgian (1970-71), 132.
[8] Kathy Yakal, “Augsburg and the Handicapped,” Echo, 85:3 (22 September 1978), 4.
[9] Yakal, “Augsburg and the Handicapped,” 4.
[10] Chris Halvorson, “New Facility may replace Old Main” Echo, 85:8 (27 October 1978), 1.
[11] Chris Halvorson and Holly Grotten, “Echo Random Old Main Poll—To Raise or Renovate,” Echo, 85:11 (17 November 1978), 1.
[12] Halvorson and Grotten, “Echo Random Old Main Poll,” 1.
[13] Nelson and Wood, Anderson Chronicles, 126.
[14] “Augsburg Old Main,” Landmarks & Historic Districts, Minneapolismn.gov, http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/hpc/landmarks/hpc_landmarks_21st_ave_s_731_augsburg_old_main