Waldschmidt Hall

The story

Waldschmidt Hall sits on the bluff above the Willamette River in North Portland, and it is older than the university that now uses it. In 1890 members of the Methodist Episcopal Church bought land in what was called the University Park district and commissioned the Portland architects McCaw, Martin and White to design a building for a new school, Portland University. The first brick went down on August 24, 1891. The architects took Henry Hobson Richardson's Sever Hall at Harvard as their model, scaling it down and simplifying it, and the result cost about $32,500. It was named West Hall in the expectation that an East Hall would one day stand beside it; the companion was never built.

For a time West Hall was the whole university. The original blueprints, kept in the university archives, show a dining room, assembly hall and kitchen on the first floor, classrooms, offices, the library and music rooms on the second, and dormitories for men and women on the upper floors. The Methodist venture did not survive the financial depression of the 1890s. The National Register nomination says it closed in 1893; Wikipedia says the school defaulted on its loans and gave up the campus in 1896.

The empty building found a new future through Archbishop Alexander Christie of Oregon City. According to a story repeated in the nomination, he noticed it high on the bluff while returning to Portland by boat and decided it would suit a Catholic university. Accounts of the purchase differ: the nomination describes a $20,000 price the archbishop could not raise, while Wikipedia describes a trade of two church properties plus one dollar. Either way, Columbia University opened in West Hall in September 1901 with 52 students, and in February 1902 the Congregation of Holy Cross, the order behind Notre Dame, took charge. It began as a boys' school with some pre-college classes, added a junior college curriculum in 1921, admitted women through a nursing college in 1934, and in 1935 became the University of Portland. Holy Cross ran it until a lay board of regents took over in 1967.

The bluff has an older history as well. The nomination identifies it as the point on the Willamette, then called the Multnomah, reached by William Clark's scouting party of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in April 1806, and a bronze plaque marking the spot was set beside the hall in March 1948. From 1916, at the urging of Brother Tobias O'Brien, flowers and ivy were added to make the building "more attractive and picturesque," in his words; the ivy grew past the fourth story before it was stripped in 1958 because its weight was damaging the brick.

West Hall became a Portland landmark in 1970 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in September 1977, after a plaque ceremony that February led by university president Paul E. Waldschmidt. A major renovation began in 1990, designed by Soderstrom Architects and costing about $5.5 million. Working from the original plans and old photographs, it repaired sagging walls and floors, brought the building up to seismic and other codes, restored the hardwood floors and re-created the front entrance. The building was renamed for Waldschmidt in 1992, and the work was completed in October 1993.

The legend

The ghost of Waldschmidt Hall is a single, sketchy figure: a student of the school who is said to have drowned in the Willamette River in 1911 and who, according to campus lore, has haunted the building ever since. If the date is right, the death would fall in the Columbia University years, when West Hall still housed students and the school was small. Beyond that, the story is remarkably bare. The student is not named, no account says whether this was a boy or a girl, and no specific phenomena, such as sightings, sounds or particular rooms, are attached to the tale in any known source.

The earliest written versions on record are Halloween features in The Oregonian, the Portland daily, in October 1993 and October 1996, which Wikipedia cites; they are not available online. No ghost investigation or television episode has been found. University archives and the student newspaper have not been searched for a 1911 drowning, so the event behind the legend remains unconfirmed. For now, the story is best read as a piece of campus folklore attached to the oldest building on the grounds, the one where generations of students lived, ate and studied.

What remains today

The hall still stands on the bluff. The nomination describes a brick building of four and a half stories in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with grey squared stone masonry at the ground floor, a truncated hipped roof with hipped dormers, and an entrance set in a deep recessed arch under a slight pediment. Round towers with conical caps flank the front door, and another rises at the middle of the rear wall. Cast-iron and brick bands separate the third and fourth floors. Inside, the rooms have long been adapted for offices, but the 1990s renovation was designed to keep the original look. Today it is the university's oldest building and holds administrative offices along with some classrooms.

Visiting

Waldschmidt Hall is a working administration building on the private campus of the University of Portland. You can see the exterior from the campus grounds, which overlook the Willamette, near the spot marked in 1948 by the Lewis and Clark plaque. The interior is a place of work for university staff, so do not wander the offices or attempt any after-hours exploration. No ghost tour of the building is known. If you would like to visit, check with the university first, and be considerate of students and staff during the academic year.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #77001114 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #77001114) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Waldschmidt Hall — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Vancouver, WA 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Portland, OR 1897 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1897 · Public domain (USGS)
6. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.