Smith Center
From GWUEncyc
Building
Title: Smith Center
Address: 600 22nd Street, N.W.
Square and lot, bordering streets: Square 57 (F, G, 22nd, 23rd Streets)
Architect: Unknown
Date of construction: 1975
Description: The Smith Center was dedicated on December 6, 1975, and was built by the Blake Construction Company. It was named for Charles E. Smith, GW Trustee and Chairman of the Committee on University Development of the Board of Trustees, in a ceremony October 2, 1973. Smith (1901-95) was a philanthropist and businessman who founded Charles E. Smith Cos., one of Washington’s largest builders, developers, and property managers. (Charles Smith was the father of Robert H. Smith, for whom the Smith Hall of Art is named). Charles E. Smith was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Public Service by the University in 1979. The building is the home of the men’s and women’s basketball teams and was the culmination of a forty-year effort to build a new gym on campus. Before the Smith Center, the old “Tin Tabernacle,” built in 1924, served the student body as a gymnasium, but the basketball team was forced to play almost all its games at venues such as Uline Arena and Fort Myer. When Red Auerbach (legendary coach of the Boston Celtics) was recruited to play at GW in 1940, the coach promised him a new gym by the time he graduated. When Bob Tallent was lured away from the University of Kentucky’s NCAA championship runner-up squad in 1967, he was promised a new field house. It had to wait until 1975, when the Smith Center was finished, and by which time Bob Tallent was coach of the men’s team. The old “Tin Tabernacle” was used for physical education classes and torn down in 1976.
Historic designation: None
Document Information
Images: 0
Photographic Credit: n/a
Author or Source: Reconnaissance-Level Architectural Survey of Properties in Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C., 1999
Document Location: University Archives
Date Added to Encyclopedia: January 19, 2007
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist; G. David Anderson, University Archivist and Historian
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