To some, the burning of a city is a tragedy. To others, it is an opportunity. Rensselaer’s board of directors found possibilities within its city’s destruction. Fighting through the aftermath of a disaster takes courage, determination, and a steadfast devotion to an upright cause. The guardians of Rensselaer’s vision demonstrated all three. Their hard work and perseverance led to the founding of a new campus on a majestic overlook of the Hudson, something that would remain for decades to come.
Many areas that demanded improvement were exposed when the Rensselaer Institute moved to its new location. Not all were academic space concerns. Student housing, that nasty necessity that many forget, cried out for a reckoning.
If members of today’s community were to witness the conditions students endured before the 1862 fire, they would appreciate their own housing a great deal more. Students of that day and age slept either in small school-provided dormitories or fended for themselves amongst the hustle and bustle of the Trojan boom-town. However, there were drawbacks to both situations. If students lived in Institute housing, they were close to class, but there was no private escape. They slept next door to their studies, and awoke a stone’s throw away from their morning examination room.
If students sought refuge off Institute property, they were rewarded with distance, but not leg room. Rooms were tight and space was at a premium. Troy was expanding into itself as all growing cities must, pushing everything closer together. Rooms were repurposed, dividing walls constructed, and factory production areas converted to hospitable housing. Or so the landlords said.
Benjamin Franklin Greene, director of the Institute (forerunner of the office of the provost) from 1847–1859, inspected student housing and had this to say: “Students are now necessarily too much scattered over the town, their rooms, from the absence of all original adaptation, are quite too often deficient in light and ventilation.” To a 21st–century architect, a bedroom with less than four 3-by-6 foot windows and a single closed door would not qualify. Greene, however, was speaking from over a century ago, when a bedroom was not so much a living space as it was a location to sleep. When he wrote of deficiencies, he meant there was a lack of space, that rooms did not exist.
Alas, student living conditions are one area where historical record is lacking. The few references to student housing in this time period mention scattered residences around Troy, suggesting that even after the city rebuilt, conditions were similar to what Greene saw. Even at RPI, priorities were elsewhere. In 1907, the first campus housing was opened to the students, 45 years after Troy burned to the ground.
