Bronx Community College

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The Bronx Community College of The City University of New York is a community college in the City University of New York system.

1 History
2 Campus
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

New York University's former University Heights campus, now the BCC campus

The BCC was established in 1957 through the efforts of civic-minded groups who felt that there was a growing need for more higher education facilities in the Bronx. Classes began at Hunter College, and later at the former site of the Bronx High School of Science.

In 1973, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York acquired the University Heights campus from New York University, who had sold the campus under threat of imminent bankruptcy. Beginning in the fall of that year, the BCC moved its operations to the spacious and modern 55 acre (223,000 m²) site overlooking the Harlem River. Among the distinguished early alumni of BCC is Richard Carmona, who served as the Surgeon General of the United States from 2002 to 2006.

In 2001, parts of the motion picture A Beautiful Mind that depicted MIT were instead filmed in the BCC, due to the film's low budget ^{^[1]}. The dome at BCC was also used in the filming of The Good Shepherd, an upcoming Robert De Niro film.

[edit] Campus

The BCC campus originally housed NYU's undergraduate college and now-defunct engineering school, and consists of a mix of neo-Renaissance buildings designed by architect Stanford White and brutalist concrete buildings by Marcel Breuer. Most notably, the BCC campus is home to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, the first such hall of fame in the United States. This landmark, which was founded in 1900 by Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of NYU from 1891 to 1910, was designed as part of the undergraduate college of that university. At the time, a number of prominent local universities had made the move to upper Manhattan and the Bronx in order to build bigger campuses, including Columbia University, and the City College of New York.

The Hall of Fame, which was also designed by Stanford White, was established to honor prominent Americans who have had a significant impact on the country's history and includes bronze busts of Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, and George Westinghouse.