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BBC Russian Nassau Hall (which gained the nickname North College) was dingy and drafty compared to the newly built dorms, but into the 1850s it kept its reputation as the "swell" residence on campus. Aside from the somewhat larger cupola, it would have seemed little changed to anyone who had seen the original as constructed a century earlier. But in March 1855, yet another fire, this one starting in a student's room on the second floor, reduced the place once again to nothing more than its exterior walls. President John Maclean Jr., in office for less than a year, following his predecessor Stanhope's example, turned to the alumni for rebuilding funds, and looked to Philadelphia for an architect. Unfortunately, Princeton's choice, the fashionable designer John Notman, was far less circumspect than Latrobe had been, and he initiated an architectural vandalizing of Nassau Hall more damaging than anything the redcoats and rebels of 1777 or the hothead students of 1807 could have imagined.

Notman was a champion of the Florentine Italianate Revival style, first made popular by Queen Victoria's Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and imitated thereafter, in the 1850s and 1860s, by mansion owners and church builders all across England and the United States. Notman himself had brought the style to Princeton with his design for the Prospect mansion on the old Morgan estate near the college (later the president's house, and currently the university's faculty and staff club); and when given the commission to remodel Nassau Hall, he tried his best to turn the old Georgian pile into a squat, squared-off, archwindowed imitation Tuscan villa. He was restrained by the college's demand that he utilize the surviving original walls; otherwise, though, he let his imagination run wild. The old central doorway was replaced by an arched stone entrance, above which Notman built a stone balcony with a large arched window. At either end of the building, he added square Italianate towers, both of them rising a full story's height above the roofline. Atop the entire building he placed a new cupola, much larger than its predecessors, that utterly dominated the building beneath it.

Notman also changed the building's interior. The old staircases flanking the central entrance were replaced by winding red-stone steps in the new towers. Partitions arose across the east and west hallways, in order to discourage student pranksters and rioters; new hallways connected adjacent rooms to create single rooms; a new library room was placed on the building's south end; and the entire place was joisted with galvanized iron as a fireproofing precaution. The improvements, especially in the spacious new library, were obvious; and when workmen hung Peale's portrait of Washington (which had been rescued yet again from the flames) on the library's north wall, a clear connection was made with the old Nassau Hall. But when students finally returned in August 1856, they occupied a very different structure from the one completed exactly one hundred years earlier.

Nassau Hall's second century, from John Notman's restoration to the awarding of Edmund Wilson's honorary degree, was much less turbulent than the first - and, architecturally, much kinder. During the decades after the Civil War, the building of additional dormitories led to the departure of the resident undergraduates, replaced first by museums and laboratories and, after the completion of Palmer Laboratory and Guyot Hall in 1909, by academic administrators. (John Grier Hibben, president from 1912 until 1932, was the first president to have his office in Nassau Hall; and beginning in 1924, the building was devoted completely to offices of the university's central administration.) Notman's most egregious error, the brooding Italianate towers at the building's eastern and western ends, was partially corrected in 1905, when the tops of the towers were cut down to conform with the main building's roofline. (Notman's grandiose cupola had been earlier improved by the installation of a fourfaced neo-Georgian clock in 1876, a donation from the Class of 1866 in honor of their tenth reunion.)

The outstanding positive contribution of the 1856 restoration, the new college library, was rendered superfluous when the nearby Chancellor Green Library was completed in 1873. After serving for more than thirty years as the college museum, the room was handed over in 1906 to the firm of Day and Klauder, which designed the impressive Faculty Room. Modeled on the British House of Commons, the room is still used for faculty meetings, debates, and official convocations. Thirteen years later, in the patriotic aftermath of World War I, Day and Klauder also redesigned the entrance hall as a marble memorial to Princeton's war dead, beginning with the names of ten ex-students killed in the American Revolution.

Decorative elements also sprouted up outside Nassau Hall, at odds with President Burr's old admonition against "superfluous ornaments," but not with the building's basic integrity. Beginning some time in the 1860s or 1870s, successive groups of graduating seniors have planted ivy around the building's wall, marked off by discrete inscribed stone tablets.' In 1879, the graduating seniors - including one Thomas Woodrow Wilson - presented a pair of sculpted lions (adapted from the House of Nassau's crest) to guard the hall's entryway. Thirty-two years later, when the lions were much the worse for wear - and by which time, worse still, the tiger and not the lion had become Princeton's mascot - the same class donated the two recumbent, placid bronze tigers, designed by the renowned sculptor A. P. Proctor, that continue to adorn the main entryway.

A year after Proctor's tigers appeared, President Hibben, the first president to move his office into Nassau Hall, was inaugurated - and the young Edmund Wilson arrived for his freshman year. A generation later, when Wilson received his honorary degree, Nassau Hall was virtually unchanged. And so, apart from some interior and minor exterior alterations finished in 1967, Nassau Hall remains the same today.

Time has softened most of the old wounds, including the self-inflicted ones. Not that the old spirit of unrest has completely departed. By moving the administration's nerve center to Nassau Hall, the university (so renamed in 1896) ensured that, from time to time, Nassau Hall would be a staging ground for protests, by activist students (most notably over the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and over Princeton's investments in South Africa fifteen years later) and, more decorously, by complaining faculty members (over the entire panoply of university issues).

Still, the prevailing note today is of sturdiness and tranquility. It takes some historical research, and a little historical imagination, to see beyond all that to a deeper appreciation of what the building has been through, and what it stands for. No longer the largest structure in town, dwarfed by the towers of Gothic dormitories and postwar science labs, Nassau Hall is, on close inspection, far more than an administration building: it is a battle-scarred monument to the university's - and the nation'scontinuities and changes. As I pass by and see it, artificially illuminated, at workday's end, it glows as an emblem of Princeton's better nature, which is to be (as Woodrow Wilson proclaimed in 1896) a university "in the nation's service."

Inside the truncated unfortunate Italianate towers, countless footfalls have worn down the stone steps into venerable slopes, blending in with the genuine Georgian surroundings. And, from a distance, even Notman's cupola looks more graceful with the passing of years, vaulting above the small forest of the Front Campus, breaking through the modern car-infested clamor of Nassau and Witherspoon streets, beckoning to what Edmund Wilson called the "languid amenities" of a place of great privilege and great learning.