Old Lisner Hall, 1912-1938

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When GW moved to Foggy Bottom in 1912 it took over the old St. Rose’s Industrial School at 2033 G Street, N.W. This building stood until 1938, when it was razed to make way for the current Lisner Hall. Below is a story from the Washington Evening Star on the eve of its demise:

Rooms that have sheltered thousands of George Washington University students, stairways that have been worn to their treads during more than two decades, will give way before the wrecking crew on Monday when the tearing down of old Lisner Hall begins. The building, a landmark on the University Campus is being demolished to make way for a fine new library, the gift to the university of the late Abram Lisner, founder of the Palais Royal and for many years a university trustee.

It was Mr. Lisner’s generosity which made possible the acquisition of old Lisner Hall by the university 26 years ago and one of the last acts of his life was to approve plans for the modern building which will replace it. For the countless Washingtonians who have attended classes there and worked and studied in its dim, overcrowded library, fond memories cling around “Old Lisner.” Built in 1880 to house the beneficences of St. Rose’s Industrial School it was taken over by George Washington University in 1912 at the time the University was making its first drive to center its activities in this vicinity. Announcement of the gift was made at an alumni dinner, at which Mrs. Lisner, a member of the Columbian Women of George Washington University, helped receive the guests with Miss Mabel Boardman of subsequent Red Cross fame, who had recently been awarded an honorary degree by the University and appointed the District’s first woman commissioner by President Taft.

In the chapel on the second floor, before the university’s student body had grown to its present size, Dean Wilbur beloved of countless students and alumni, used to conduct the university’s own chapel exercises. Here, the Dean also held his famous Browning and Shakespeare classes. In the memories of many a student now grown to maturity, the almost medieval light reflected from the chapel’s glass stained window is inseparably intertwined with discussions concerning Macbeth’s stormy career or the tragic fate of Browning’s soldier priest in “The Ring and the Book”.

Between classes too, successive generations of students have congregated on the stairways of “old Lisner” or in front of it, to discuss how they would wag this old world were its destinies in their hands. The site of the new Lisner Library on G Street between Twentieth and Twenty-first streets, N.W is in a neighborhood which in the 80’s and 90’s was in the heart of Washington’s fashionable “West End.” Here lived those in command of the land and sea forces of our country as well as the representatives of foreign governments to the new Republic.

It still retains the characteristics of a still earlier day in our city’s history when it was designated. “The First Ward,” and of an earlier one yet, two centuries ago, when this part of Washington was not Washington but the independent town of Hamburg. At this time the nearest neighboring towns were Georgetown, Carrollsburg and Bladensburgh with the intervening country, woodland and pasture. George Washington himself in the immediate vicinity of the Lisner Library and the university’s other recently constructed buildings designated the site which he thought most appropriate in all the Nation’s Capital for the great national university which he hoped might some day rise here. Still another gift of Mr. Lisner’s subsequently to be erected will be the university’s magnificent auditorium for which he made provision in his will.

Document Information

Images: 1
Photographic Credit: GW University Historical Photographs Collection
Author or Source: Washington Evening Star, Sept. 10, 1938
Document Location: University Archives
Date Added to Encyclopedia: February 21, 2007
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist

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