Old Blake Hall
The Chateau That Blake Built
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Blake's Brainchild
On March 11, 1893, the Kansas state legislature appropriated $50,000 for what would become the building now remembered as “old” Blake. It was the brainchild of Lucien Blake, who became a KU professor in 1887. Blake taught advanced courses in physics, astronomy, and electrical engineering.
In another environment, one might easily have mistaken KU’s original Blake Hall for the manor of a French nobleman, not the physics and electrical engineering building at a public university in the American Midwest.
Indeed, early twentieth-century photographs of the Chateau Renaissance structure conjure up images of higher living instead of higher learning. Prof. Lucien Blake was known as the best-dressed man at the University of Kansas in the 1890s and the only faculty member to employ a personal valet. The hall was an architectural reflection of the dapper and sophisticated pedagogue.
KU's White Elephant
Unlike the popular professor though, his namesake structure attracted a legion of critics. Within months after its completion, one KU student paper called the building “a sorry-looking structure” with a “chubby freckled face” that resembled a “speckled chicken.” Even as late as 1957, an article in the Kansan described old Blake as an “ugly white elephant.”
For decades, students and faculty alike mocked its perpetually unreliable tower clock – though the pigeons weighing down its hands were at least partly to blame for this deficiency. And for much of its existence, persistent rumors suggested that the building was hexed. But for nearly 70 years old Blake stood, enduring the slings and arrows of collegiate derision. When it was finally demolished in 1963, it went down not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Inside of Blake Hall
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