Altoona's College: The Dream of Penn State Altoona
by Tim Wherry and Dr. Ken Womack
Narrative History of Penn State Altoona at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/NHPSUA/
Penn State Altoona began its life as the Altoona Undergraduate Center, owing its genesis to an inspired local citizenry who built, financed, and nurtured the college. In the spring of 1939, a campaign to raise money to renovate an abandoned grade school for a college was initiated by community leaders, and in two months they had met their goal. The Altoona Undergraduate Center opened its doors on September 13, 1939. Under the leadership of Director Robert E. Eiche, the Altoona Undergraduate Center enrolled 119 students and employed nine faculty members during its first year of operation.
With the emergence of the GI Bill, the postwar years brought new energy to the college. The undergraduate center’s Citizens Advisory Board responded to the region’s increasing hunger for higher education by seeking out a larger, permanent facility in which to house the Altoona Undergraduate Center. Having raised $36,000 from private citizens and local industry, the board purchased the abandoned 38-acre Ivyside Recreation Park, which had been a thriving amusement park from 1927 to 1945.
The park’s crowning feature was its massive outdoor swimming pool. Because the pool’s bathhouse served as the primary classroom building, the Altoona Undergraduate Center was known as “Bathhouse U.” Over the following decade, the institution continued to expand, transforming the former amusement park’s various attractions into the campus of a college. The key feature was the construction of the multi-purpose E. Raymond Smith Building during the late 1950s. By 1958, the Altoona Undergraduate Center was renamed the Altoona Campus of the Pennsylvania State University.
Penn State Altoona experienced remarkable degrees of change throughout the 1960s. Recognizing the need to finance the growth of the campus’s facilities, the Altoona Campus Advisory Board raised $400,000 from 3,400 contributors, while also securing University-backed loans. In 1964, the Altoona Campus Student Commons, built overlooking the pond that had once fed water into the amusement park’s swimming pool, afforded the institution with a focal point for its growing social and educational activities. Penn State Altoona students established annual traditions involving freshmen initiation rites and Campus Spring Week.
By 1966, Penn State Altoona’s enrollment had grown to nearly 2,000 students, and more than 4,000 donors pledged $1.1 million in capital gifts in order to meet the challenge of expanding the college’s facilities. The end of the decade saw a flurry of construction that virtually transformed the campus, including the building of such key academic spaces as the Robert E. Eiche Library, the Science Building, and the J. E. Holtzinger Building.
Throughout the 1970s, the college’s facilities continued to expand, with the completion of the Edith Davis Eve Memorial Chapel, which afforded the campus and the community with an all-faiths chapel that is used heavily for area weddings. By 1971, Penn State Altoona’s enrollment had soared to 3,400. The construction of the Steven A. Adler Athletic Complex provided the college with a large, multipurpose gymnasium suitable for a wide range of sporting events, commencement exercises, and speaker series. This trend continued well into the 1980s, with the completion of the Community Arts Center, including the 400-seat Margery Wolf Kuhn Theatre, as well as the opening of the Campus Bookstore.
By the 1990s, the Altoona Campus encompassed well over 100 acres, while also recruiting an increasingly accomplished faculty. The college’s full-professor ranks began to swell accordingly, with faculty members earning national accolades through book publication and grantsmanship, including significant attainments from such agencies as the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among a host of others.
In 1997, the Altoona Campus made history of another sort when it was re-chartered as a four-year college within the Penn State. With the necessary facilities and resources in place, including the construction of the expansive Hawthorn classroom building in 2004, the faculty began to fulfill the campus’s destiny by establishing some 20 baccalaureate programs and a wide range of cultural and academic initiatives. As Penn State Altoona, the college now has an enrollment of more than 4,000 students and employs nearly 600 people, including 160 full-time faculty. What was once the modest dream of an innovative citizenry has been transformed into a flourishing teaching and research institution of national acclaim; however, Altoona citizens still regard Penn State Altoona as “Altoona’s College"