Pell Hall

Pell Hall was a building designated to be built with funds from a bequest by Mary B. Pell, widow of John B. Pell Class of 1852. The bequest was valued around $500,000 as of December 1913. Her total fortune was estimated to be around $2 million, and ordered divided between Columbia, Rutgers, and the Dutch Reformed Church. The bequest was tied up in real estate investments subject to life estates, presumably with Columbia as remainderman, so the University did not immediately come into the money. As Pell Hall was apparently never built, it's unclear what happened to the money. This is particularly curious, since Rutgers came into its share of money (either $400,000 or $140,000) in 1928, with which they erected a dormitory named after Mrs. Pell's father, Wessel Wessels, and named a companion dormitory in her honor, both by 1930. Indeed, in his annual report delivered to the Trustees in January of 1929, President Nicholas Murray Butler listed a gift of $258,185.82 from the estate of Mary B. Pell as among the major additions to the general endowment in the prior year.

Location

It appears that the proposed location of the building funded by the Pell bequest moved around over time. A fundraising letter sent to alumni of the Philolexian Society in the 1910s aiming to raise money for a student center refers to Pell Hall, suggesting it might be built adjacent to Furnald Hall, a Wallach to Furnald's Hartley. However, not permanent structure was erected south of Furnald until Ferris Booth Hall. An item in a 1916 issue of Columbia Alumni News on a proposal for Van Amringe Memorial Quadrangle notes that the as-of-yet unbuilt structure opposite Hamilton Hall might one day be Pell Hall. Of course, John Jay Hall rose in that location in 1927.