Reflections on 100 years and more of Chemistry at Corcoran and at GW even prior to Corcoran
After reading the CCAS story, "A Century of Discovery: Corcoran Hall Marks 100 Years of Science Milestones," GW Chemistry Department Alumnus Dr. Robert Pellenbarg shared his reflections and that gave us the idea to collect more. And wow! What a fun idea this has been.Thank you Dr. Pellenbarg! What follows are reflections about 100 years of Chemistry at Corcoran Hall. They range from delightful, to hilarious and to documenting the long term commitment to scientific discovery at GW and sending freshly minted scientists out to improve our world.
I urge you to send your recollection of Corcoran Hall or Department of Chemistry reflections to [email protected] for inclusion to this or our Alumni Reflections page. Page ends with a reflection and citing of some of the history of Chemistry at GW from long time Chair of the Department of Chemistry, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Research, Dr. King. Drs. King and Noble have been collaborating on documenting history of Chemistry at GW. Dr. King's reflection is part of this work in progress.
Robert Pellenbarg, PhD and GW Alumnus reflects on his time at Corcoran in the late 60s into the early 70s--"Let's see . . . . trudging to the top floor to use the massive student chem lab on the south end of the building; (the lab looked like it had been in use since the early 1800s); standing in line at the chem stockroom with breakage card in hand; I recall that the guru of the stock room was named 'Mac', a kind, informed and patient soul; working in the lab space in May, with the tall windows open for sort of 'cooling' the lab area; the major lecture room on the 2nd floor, as I recall; Samson Hall (very difficult to access from Corcoran via labyrinthine passages); the tiny one room library in Samson which had 'some' chemical periodicals; working, my senior year, with a grad student, in the bowels of Corcoran, in a lab well below ground level; drooling over the ELEVATOR in the building, which was strictly off - limits to the students; observing the 'Tin Tabernacle' gym facility visible out of the east side of the 4th floor lab space (TT is long gone as it appeared to be in a state of collapse when I took a couple of gym classes there); a very large, very old sycamore tree adjacent to the east side of the building, but the tree was removed years ago, and so forth.
Dr. Emmeline Ha, GW BS CHEM '14, GW MD '18 wrote to Dr. Vertes, "2 years ago, I returned to GW and now teach at the School of Medicine while practicing clinically at the GW Medical Faculty Associates. I often walk by Corcoran Hall and think about those early days in your lab -- pre-fancy new building! Thank you again for the wonderful experience and your constant support for students engaging in research." Dr. Ha followed with this, "Amazing that Corcoran is 100 years. My fondest memory was actually being part of Alpha Chi Sigma and at our annual induction ceremony we took over the building and got to integrate various rooms into the festivities. I wonder if it is still happening all these years."
Dr. King, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Research shared these memories. I go back a few years, he began. These memories were prodded by the comment from an alum who responded to the story on 100 years of Corcoran Hall. I joined the Department in the Summer of 1973. I was given a lab space in the basement, which was reached by these incredibly steep stairs behind the main stairs to the upper floors. The lab was in between the lab space of Prof Joseph Levy (who was working on fluorination kinetics) and a lab space for Prof David Rowley, who was doing coordination chemistry and forensic sciences. My lab in the center did not have a fume hood, only two windows in the back that opened to a window well in the yard. Fortunately the Lab Manager at the time, Raymond Johnson, negotiated a deal to get a 4 foot fume hood which the med school was discarding in their renovation. So for a dozen years, while we were pleading a case for renovation of Corcoran for safety reasons, that fume hood was the only exhaust from the lab. On the top floor of Corcoran, Prof Sam Wren had just retired. His office, across from the stockroom, was filled with hundreds for small bottles of chemicals, which he used in his Qualitative Organic Analysis course. I inherited that course and began to convert it to Qual and Separations, introducing modern separation methods. For you see, Prof Wren also filled his office with an incredible array of distillation columns, which was his interest in separation methods. The samples of materials prepared by the students in the previous decades often wound up in the chemical storeroom in the basement. One grad student called it the "bat cave". It was a couple of bottles of those samples that brought the fire department and a chemical waste disposal organization in one Saturday, many years later. For you see Prof. Wren had his students characterize aromatics by making picrates. Well there were two large bottles of picric acid in mason jars with metal lids that were in that storeroom! Nobody dared touch them. Thankfully they were removed safely, but the incident helped motivate the University to move to remodel Corcoran, adding a stair tower on the South end for safe egress from the large teaching labs on the top floor.
Dr. Massiah, GW Associate Professor of Chemistry has this recollection, "Soon after joining the department in 2010, I read the plaques at the entrance of Corcoran Hall of the pioneers in physics that worked there and I realized what special places the building and the GW community were. The building inspires greatness."
Shanna Roth, Department Operations Manager, Chemistry shared these memories.While giants of the physical sciences once walked the halls of Corcoran, my memories of the building are humbler. Chemistry and Physics were the only academic departments in the building, and we were family. I remember sharing birthday cakes and other treats; tracking down packages; and trading advice between department Chairs and admin staff. Being one of two departments in Corcoran also gave us the run of the building, and the Chemistry department had lots of opportunities for fun. There was our attempt at indoor bocce ball. (Note that bubble wrap does not add much friction to a tile floor.) We had rolling chair races down the hallway as we tested potential chair models. One fall, we did pumpkin carving, and of course someone had to bring dry ice. The whiteboard in the department suite was home to everything from hangman and funny quotes to March Madness brackets. Corcoran Hall was definitely quirky. The stairs were steep, and the elevator didn't work half the time. It was a long way up to the 4th floor teaching labs. There was a gingko tree behind the building that dropped fruit at certain times of the year. Who could forget the smell of fermenting "stink berries" that got stuck in the doormats? Also, the bell tower would play the same song every day at noon for months at a time. Getting ready to move from Corcoran Hall to the SEH was bittersweet, and we commemorated our final seminar in COR 101 with a photo. We found creative uses for packing materials during all the craziness. Ashley Mills-Thomson and I put ourselves in boxes and took flying leaps onto giant bags of packing peanuts. It was a big adventure, and I still look back fondly at our time in Corcoran Hall.
Professor Gail Clements shared this recollection. We would regularly go search several places in the building for glassware. We scrounged up pieces for the rotovaps, manifolds and to equip our hoods. When the NMR was a mere 200, its basement room was full of bookshelves full of different equipment, including a massage mercury manometer containing vast amounts of mercury. To get an NMR, we would have to go down the incredibly steep stairs which we affectionately called, “the Stairs of Death”. Also in the basement was the “Bat Cave”. One entered this dark, dark room with a step down onto a dirt floor. The room had rows of metal shelves containing new and old and really old chemicals, all for us to use.
Of great help were Mr. Kingsbury and Anthony in the stock room. They constantly helped us with restocking supplies, offered kind words when our reactions didn’t work and gave us unlimited access to the attic. The attic was constructed of little niches stuffed full boxes containing unused and discarded glassware. Some of the pieces we had no idea of what they were or to use them. We needed lots of glassware because the Dowd lab was just starting up so we happily carted off many such pieces. However, despite all of the building’s quirks, our time in Corcoran provided some of our fondest memories. In this building we attended seminars, took courses, taught lab classes and hosted the annual ice-cream socials. We even played bocci ball on bubble wrap on the 3 rd floor.
Farewell to Corcoran Hall:
Dr. King, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Research, long time Chair and keeper of history, penned this when we moved from Corcoran Hall to the sleek modern Science and Engineering Hall--
Farewell Corcoran Hall – Hello Science and Engineering Hall
For all of its existence at the Foggy Bottom campus, the Department of Chemistry has called Corcoran Hall its home, even the Department expanded into Bell and Samson Halls and to the Virginia Campus. Although, according to an excerpt of the 1932 Newsletter of the Alpha Pi chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma, the teaching of chemistry “was taught from the very beginning of the University in 1821, chemistry was not a separate unit but was included under the Chair of Natural Philosophy. The first Professor of Chemistry was James M. Staughton, M.D., who held his position to 1830, at which time chemistry was discontinued in the curriculum of the College itself.” “In 1833 the teaching of chemistry was resumed under the direction of Lewis Henry Steiner. At the close of the Civil War the position of Professor of Chemistry, Physics and Natural Philosophy was taken by Edward T. Fristoe, A.M., LL.D under whose supervision chemistry and allied sciences flourished at the University, and as a result of his planning, chemical laboratories, rated as best in the city at the time, were constructed in the new buildings at Fifteenth and H Streets. As an outgrowth of the increase in students, a separate “Chemistry Department” was created through the efforts of Charles Edward Munroe, Ph.D., LL.D., who succeeded Dr. Fristoe in 1892.” Dr. Munroe, best known for his invention of smokeless gunpowder, was head of the Department and Dean of the Corcoran Scientific School at the Columbian University, which was renamed George Washington University in 1904. During the same time period, a School of Graduate Studies was established and Munroe was named as its first Dean of the Faculty. “Munroe introduced many new courses and brought to the University famous chemists as teachers, among who were F.W. Clarke, W.F. Hillerbrand, and N. M. Hopkins. Under his leadership the Chemistry Department grew rapidly, increasing from 26 students in 1892 to a registration of 461 when Dr. Munroe resigned in 1917.” (As a comparison, one hundred later during the 2013-2014 academic year we had nearly 3000 registrations in Chemistry Department courses.)
“Dr. Hiram C. McNeil, the new chair, successfully guided the Chemistry Department through the period of World War I. Immediately following the war, interest was renewed in chemistry and increases in both registration and in the number of courses offered resulted. In 1924-1925 a definitely defined school for graduate work in chemistry was established with a director of research and laboratory facilities.” That year, marking the centenary of the University’s first graduating class, the first academic building constructed for the University at Foggy Bottom was dedicated and named for William Wilson Corcoran, a noted banker, art collector and philanthropist. Corcoran served as President of the Corporation of the Columbian University from 1869-1888, and also established the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which now figures prominently in the news of the University. This new classroom building was occupied by the Departments of Chemistry and Physics as the undergraduate chemistry courses and laboratories were moved from the medical school to the space provided in the newly constructed Corcoran Hall. Under the leadership of Executive Officer Colin Mackall, followed by Department Chairs Benjamin D. Van Evera and Charles E Naeser, the department flourished in this “modern” classroom building, contributing to the war effort in the 30’s with Naeser’s work on uranium fluorides and in 40’s through the development of the bazooka, which took place in the basement of Corcoran Hall based on Munroe’s early work on shaped charges. New technologies (a sound system and projection room) were added to the large chemistry lecture hall on the third floor and the room dedicated to Professor Naeser upon his retirement in 1977. But by the mid 80’s, with a growing student body and a significant research presence, concerns about the infrastructure in the building to serve the needs of the department were increasing. Under the leadership of Theodore P. Perros, then Chair of the Department, and with support from the Graduate School and the College, the University invested in a substantial renovation of Corcoran Hall, creating, what were at the time, modern teaching and research laboratories for Chemistry, including a new stair tower at the south end of the building to provide egress from the large, contemporary teaching laboratories constructed on the fourth floor. Shortly thereafter Corcoran Hall was placed on the District of Columbia Inventory of Historic Sites. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
As a new generation of faculty joined the Department, even the ’87 renovation seemed to short-change the needs of the Department and further modifications had to be made to the building to accommodate the needs of the research programs. Room renovations in 1998, 2004 and again in 2012 for the research programs of Professors Ramaker, Vertes and the Dowd-Voutchkova groups respectively were necessary disruptions to ensure the successes of these programs. Concurrently, the large laboratory teaching spaces designed in the mid-80’s with a 20% growth in mind were now bulging with students to the point where we were turning away students from our classes, while new standards for safety were creating inevitable challenges that needed to be addressed, even as the infrastructure in Corcoran was showing its age. It seemed as if as each new colleague joined our community, a substantive adjustment to the infrastructure was needed to accommodate their needs, creating a real challenge to live through. The need for new facilities was becoming more evident, particularly in light of our collective strategic goal to be known as a preeminent urban research University. The solution devised by the University was to build a new Science and Engineering Hall.
Beginning in January 2015, the Department of Chemistry will have a new locus for its teaching and research programs in a spiffy new, state-of-the-art facility, the Science and Engineering Hall located between 22nd and 23rd streets. We will leave our home of 90 years for a new habitat, a structure very different from our current home. While the faculty offices for the Chemistry Department will be aggregated on two adjacent floors in the SEH, our teaching and research laboratories will be scattered through the building on almost every floor. The building is a huge space (250,000 net sq.ft.) that will be shared by programs in Biology, Physics, Hominoid Palebiology, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Biomedical and Computer Engineering and eventually by groups from the School of Medicine and the Milken Institute of Public Health. The premise is that proximity will create new opportunities for cross-disciplinary research for all of the units. While such collaborations have always been key to our success, the new facility will enhance those opportunities. Furthermore the teaching spaces will be more appropriately sized for the programs and designed and engineered to be safer and to provide greater opportunities for the latest advances in science pedagogy.
Yes I will especially miss Corcoran Hall. As a quirk of fate, it turns out that I live on Corcoran Street in the District and always found it a unique circumstance to live and work with Mr. Corcoran. I have loved the tall ceilings in Corcoran Hall, the majestic entrance, and the portal to the center of the campus and 21st street. Some things I will not miss, like the incredibly quirky ventilation systems, the lack of a loading dock and an elevator that shakes as it approaches some floors. The (grandfathered) staircase from the first floor to the basement has always been a hazard, while the attic was a maze of motors and belts for the myriad of fume hoods located throughout the building. I will never forget the day we did some demolition for the new Vertes lab in 406 and discovered a hidden attic room with 25-50L flasks along with bags of
leaves, no doubt left from the natural products extractions of Professor William Sager, or the collection of distillation columns and vials of chemicals used for Qualitative Organic Analysis that Professor Sam Wrenn had squired away in his office. There have been some amazing things that have gone on during the ninety years the Department of Chemistry has resided in Corcoran Hall from the contract work prior to and during World War II, the many veterans who returned to campus after the war, the bumpy years of Viet Nam War protests, to those amazing students who took classes with Professor Schmidt, Vincent, Wood, Wrenn, White, Britt, Caress, Rowley, and Hilderbrandt and the incredible discoveries of Professors Naeser, Van Evera, Sager, Perros, Minn, Levy, Filipescu, Montaser and Ramaker. My colleagues (Professors Cahill, Chen, Dowd, Gillmor, Licht, Massiah, McCleary, Miller, Nemes, Sadtchenko, Teng, Vertes, Voutchkova-Kostal, Wagner and Zysmilich) and I look forward to celebrating our new home and continuing the great tradition of teaching and research excellence which has been a hallmark of our Department. Though we are approaching the great move with a tad of trepidation, we are all excited about the opportunities that being in our new facilities will afford.
Once we are settled in our new home in the spring, we invite you to please stop by and take a cook’s tour of the fantastic new building. I am confident you too will be amazed and pleased. And if you have a favorite Corcoran Hall story, we’d love to hear about it and add it to our Departmental Archives.
Warmly,
Michael King
