Class of 1957 - Kinkeldey Room
The Class of 1957 - Kinkeldey Room is one of several designated “quiet study” rooms in Uris Library that combines historical aesthetics with modern technology to provide an inspirational space for study and reflection. With its close proximity to the library’s books and cafe, its wireless access to Cornell’s digital resources, and its gorgeous views of Ithaca and Cayuga Lake, it is popular with today’s students.
A view of the Kinkeldey Room, then the top floor of the West Reading Room, as it looked in 1962 when the former University Library was renovated and reopened as Uris Library.
Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
The room was named, in part, for Cornell’s fourth University Librarian, Otto Kinkeldey. A music professor and internationally known musicologist, he first came to Cornell in 1923 to head the university’s music department. After leaving and working as the chief of the music division at the New York Public Library, he returned to Cornell with a dual appointment as the country’s first professor of musicology and the head of Cornell’s Library. During his tenure as University Librarian, a nine-story stack tower was added to the southwest corner of this building, providing much needed room for more books, and two new libraries were founded at Cornell – the Industrial and Labor Relations Library in 1945 (now the Catherwood Library) and the Business School Library in 1946 (now the Johnson School of Management Library).
The east wall of the Kinkeldey Room in 2002 prior to the Class of 1957 renovation project. Note the dropped-ceiling and the enclosed niche in the center of the photograph.
The Kinkeldey Room is one of five spaces in the building named for Cornell librarians. When the building was renovated and made the Undergraduate Library in 1961, Stephen A. McCarthy, Cornell’s fifth University Librarian honored his four predecessors by naming reading rooms for them. The Fiske Room, better known to students as the “Fish Bowl” is named for Cornell’s first librarian. The Harris, Austen, and Kinkeldey Rooms are positioned one above the other at the west end of the building in the space that was one of the library’s original book stacks. The fifth space, the current Reserve Reading Room, was named for E. R. B. Willis, a classical scholar who served the Library for 33 years.
Thanks to the generosity of the Class of 1957, the room was recently renovated and an historic look and feel was restored. A dropped ceiling and old fluorescent lighting have been removed to reveal the room’s original vaulted ceiling and three high windows on the western wall. The niches on the southern wall are the casements for the windows that were there until the new stack tower was added to the building in 1937. To the east is a newly restored window that opens to the Dean Room. The new chandeliers are a reminder that the building has always had electric lighting and was once filled with such magnificent fixtures.
The east wall of the Class of 1957 - Kinkeldey Room as it appears today. The vaulted-ceiling has been restored and a window looking down into the Dean Room has been reopened.
The art work in the room honors the university’s founding. In addition to the beautiful Cornell landscape paintings by artist Bill Schmidt, from the Class of 1957, the room’s portraits each tell a compelling Cornell story.
On the east wall hang paintings of two women. To the right is Margaret Kate Carleton Farrand, wife of Livingston Farrand, Cornell’s fourth president. Also known as “The Lady in Green” it was painted in 1929 by Cornell Professor of Art Olaf M. Brauner. In his book, A History of Cornell, Morris Bishop writes of Mrs. Farrand:
Known to the entire campus by the affectionate cognomen of “Daisy,” this great and vivid person imposed upon the community her robust vigor, humor, and charm. Her Sunday afternoon “at homes” were open to any student … A bold horsewoman [and] an indefatigable gardener, she promoted horse shows and founded the Garden Club of Ithaca. The five Farrand children, at various stages of growth, enlivened and delighted the University.
On the left is a portrait of Eunice Cornell Taylor by Canadian artist, John Colin Forbes. Named for her great-grandmother, she is the granddaughter of the university’s founder, Ezra Cornell. He poignantly expressed his commitment to equal educational opportunities for all persons, women as well as men, in an 1867 letter to a four-year-old Eunice:
“I want to have girls educated in the University as well as boys, so that they may have the same opportunity to become wise and useful to society that the boys have. I want you to keep this letter until you grow up to be a woman and want to go to a good school where you can have a good opertunity to learn, so you can show it the President and Faculty of the University to let them know that it is the wish of your Grand Pa, that girls as well as boys should be educated at the Cornell University.”
The south wall of the Class of 1957 - Kinkeldey Room now shows the pattern and placement of the original windows. Before the reading room was created in the 1962 Uris conversion, this space was part of the University Library's original book stacks.
On the western wall are portraits of two men who profoundly shaped Cornell’s early history. To the left is Eastman Johnson’s portrait of Justin Smith Morrill. A U.S. senator from Vermont, he sponsored the Morrill Act, also known as the Land Grant College Act, which established federal funding for higher education in every state of the country when it was signed into law in 1862.
Cornell University is New York State’s land grant institution. Its first building is named in Morrill’s honor, and Lincoln Hall, opened in 1889, is named for the President who signed the Morrill Act.
To the right is John Colin Forbes’s portrait of Henry Williams Sage, who was an Ithaca businessman, philanthropist, and the University’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees. His many gifts to Cornell include funds for building Sage College, a separate dormitory for women that is now Sage Hall, Sage Chapel, and this building, the University Library. His generous contributions also provided for the founding of the Susan Linn Sage School of Philosophy, named for his wife, the ongoing purchase of library books, and endowments for professorial chairs in ethics and philosophy. The university also benefited greatly from his business acumen, as he counseled Ezra Cornell and the board of trustees on numerous business and financial matters.
Uris Library’s Class of 1957- Kinkeldey Room is a place of quiet study. A place to reflect about the university and some of the people important to its history. As you look at their portraits, keep in mind the words of Cornell’s first president and co-founder Andrew Dickson White that: “this library will be for generations, nay, for centuries, a source of inspiration to all who would bring the good thought of the past to bear in making the future better.”