“Patten Gym, our original gym, served our university, and has been forgotten,” Northwestern student Duward Humes wrote in an article appearing in a 1947 The Daily .
Humes’ words, it seems, are as true today as they were more than 50 years ago.
Built in 1910 on a site now occupied by the Technological Institute, the “original” Patten was a far cry from the Patten Gym students now know. In its time, Patten was the largest such building in the Chicago area and boasted the finest athletics facilities in the country.
Named after donor, Evanston mayor, “wheat king” and Board of Trustees President James A. Patten, the 300-foot-long facility contained a swimming pool, a gymnasium and a field house. By the time of its completion an extra foot was added so that it would be longer than the Chicago Coliseum.
Indoor track meets, basketball games and baseball practices were held inside the original Patten, as were both commencement and the popular North Shore Music Festival. Patten Gym was also host to the first ever NCAA basketball championships.
Held in 1939, the tournament only featured eight teams, with Oregon and Ohio State facing off in the 4,000-seat Patten for the title. The pregame festivities included an exhibition featuring NU’s intramural basketball all-stars playing the game as it had been invented — retrieving the ball from peachbaskets with broomsticks. Dr. James Naismith, the game’s inventor, was there to watch the Ducks trounce the Buckeyes a modest 46 to 33.
The first Patten was greeted with great enthusiasm among the student body, the Daily ran a headline exclaiming “All Hail the New Gymnasium!” and called the old gym Patten replaced “the apology of all Northwestern students” and “the butt of all jokes from the Chicago papers.” And it certainly was.
NU’s first gym, erected in 1876, was the result of a student meeting called by Frank M. Elliott and W. G. Evans, son of university and Evanston founder, John Evans. The students formed a stock company, sold $10 shares and made $4,000 to build the first gym. Fraternities contributed parallel bars, ladders, boxing gloves, fencing equipment and a bowling alley and students helped in the actual construction.
The completion of Patten improved not only the conditions for men’s athletics, but also women’s. The Women’s Athletic Association, responsible for raising the money required to fund all women’s sports, was founded in 1911, just a year after Patten’s dedication. The next year, WAA put on a fund-raising minstrel show that soon became an annual event and evolved into the present day Waa-Mu Show.
After railroad supply tycoon and philanthropist Walter P. Murphy donated $6.7 million in 1939 to create a Technological Institute on NU’s campus, the days of the grand old Patten Gym were over, making way for the “new” Patten. But the action was not without complaints from Evanston residents, who thought the construction of a gym so far north would have an “unfavorable effect” on neighboring residential areas, according to the Evanston Review.
Upon the gym’s completion in 1941, it boasted a 75-foot swimming pool, a rifle range, nets for golf practice and a gun room. It was also hoped that the new gym’s proximity to Roycemore Field — now Long Field — would increase student involvement in intramural sports.
Although the new Patten featured technological innovations like underwater pool lighting, it was nothing like the architectural triumph that the original Patten was. In his nostalgic article about the old gym, Humes was quick to point out what the campus had lost.
“Remember — we may have many great buildings in the centuries to come; but will we ever again be the community center of the North Shore?” he wrote.
