The Cooper Union

A free school for working people, where Lincoln gave the speech that carried him to the presidency

Local name: The Cooper Union — Foundation Building

Collection: Greenwich Village and the East Village · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Cooper Union’s Foundation Building on Cooper Square · Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Cooper Union, a college founded in 1859 by the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper. He believed that education leads not only to personal prosperity but to harmony in society. Cooper made his school free for working people. He admitted women as well as men, and the color of a student’s skin did not matter, which was a bold step for its time. The main building went up from 1853 to 1859, designed by the architect Frederick Peterson. Its floors rest on rolled wrought-iron beams, some of the first used in New York. The beams were rolled at Cooper’s own works in Trenton. Later, beams like these made skyscrapers possible. Cooper also had a round shaft left in the building for an elevator, at a time when passenger elevators barely existed. In the basement he built the Great Hall. On the twenty-seventh of February 1860, a politician from Illinois who was almost unknown in New York spoke there: Abraham Lincoln. He argued against letting slavery spread into the new western territories. He ended with the words: let us have faith that right makes might. The speech was a sensation, and Lincoln himself later said it carried him to the White House. Frederick Douglass, the Lakota chief Red Cloud and the women’s rights campaigner Susan B. Anthony all spoke in this hall. In 1909 the first public meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was held here. Cooper also opened a free reading room stocked with the latest newspapers. His motto was simple: great wealth is a public trust.

Visiting

7 East 7th Street, Cooper Square. It is a working college: you can go inside for public lectures and events in the Great Hall, listed on cooper.edu. The building can be seen well from the street on every side. Subway: the 6 train to Astor Place, or the R or W to 8th Street–NYU.