A hundred years ago, Princeton University had about 1,400 students, 170 faculty members, and a small staff. There were fewer than 60 buildings. Today, the University population is nearly nine times bigger, and buildings have tripled to 180. In the first panorama, taken in 1913, Princeton’s surroundings are entirely rural; the second image, taken last fall, shows the modern buildings that have replaced fields and pushed the campus in all directions. Mercer County is three times more populous than it was when Cleveland Tower was built, and suburbs now stretch to the horizon. The tower’s giddy heights have attracted countless visitors, including the undergraduate Edmund Wilson 1916, later a famous literary critic. He admired “the strange miscellany of buildings which makes Princeton; the gray Gothic of Campbell, Little, Blair, and the rest was nearly lost among the older and more obtrusive vagaries of our earliest architects.”
Four local landmarks, from left: 2-year-old Holder Tower, the triangular Stuart Hall tower at the Princeton Theological Seminary (since removed), the round dome of Halsted Observatory, and the seminary’s Brown Hall cupola — the last two dating from the 1860s.
Three towers from the Victorian era — the Dickinson classroom building, the School of Science, and Marquand Chapel — all would burn within 15 years. The bristling chimneys belong to Edwards and Dod dormitories, Victorian stalwarts still occupied today.
The golf clubhouse was shifted here to make way for the Graduate College, built on the links over the objections of former Princeton president Woodrow Wilson 1879. Among those to see the view from Cleveland Tower was F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917, who later would call Princeton “the pleasantest country club in America.”
Marking the home of University president John Grier Hibben 1882, the Prospect House tower rises over the Brown Hall dorm, with brand-new Cuyler dorm, with its many chimneys, at right. Below the little white cupola of Brokaw Memorial pool is the barnlike Casino theater where students rehearsed for Triangle shows.
Large science labs Palmer and Guyot are pictured with the rooftops of Prospect Avenue clubs between them. A ballgame is underway at Brokaw Field, today the site of Whitman College. Stately trees on Elm Drive screen Patton dormitory, with tennis courts on the future site of Wilson College.
Recently erected for Woodrow Wilson’s preceptors, these houses of Broadmead appear beyond the field where Palmer Stadium would be built the following year. A century ago, Princeton’s setting was pleasantly rural.