Red Gym set to reopen

After 10 years of planning and dreaming and 1 1/2 years of construction, the new Old Red Gym is about set to re-open as the university’s first student and visitor services center.

The Red Gym, about to reopen as a student services and visitor center, had already lost some of its luster when this photo was taken in the 1930s. Many student activities had migrated to the then-new Memorial Union next door. (Photo courtesy UW–Madison Archives)

Following a $11.5 million restoration of the venerable armory, tenants will begin moving in on Oct. 19. By mid-November, the center – which will house a number of student services, the Campus Assistance and Visitor Center, the Morgridge Center for Public Service and the Office of Undergraduate Admissions- should be fully operational.

“People who remember the building as dark and closed will be surprised, I think,” says assistant dean of students Steve Saffian, who has overseen the details of the Red Gym project for the dean’s office. “There have been more than 400 windows reopened, windows that were covered over time. That includes all the odd-shaped windows that made the building interesting.”

Although the building’s interior has been opened up, those taking the tour will notice many touches of history. The steel trusses overarching the second-floor gymnasium remain, a tribute to the state-of-the-art construction techniques used when the gym went up in 1894; the cream city brick walls of both the Campus Assistance and Visitor Center and the Morgridge Center have been stripped of paint and returned to their natural state; the wide front stairways remain, designed originally to accommodate a battalion marching in columns of four; and the walls of the Morgridge Center, located in the building’s southeastern turret, still bear the scars of a firebomb from a 1970 Vietnam War protest.

In addition to the offices, the new Red Gym contains a public lounge in a newly-created mezzanine above the second floor that includes a view of Lake Mendota; a student art gallery; an Infolab; a media room for group presentations; and the multi-purpose On Wisconsin Room, on the site of the old swimming pool on the first floor.

Saffian, who has shown the building to a number of people, from grade-school groups to old-timers who remember its earlier days, says the reaction has been uniformly positive.

“Everybody thinks it’s a wonderful place,” he says.

The Armory and Gymnasium, as it is officially called, was one of several such buildings constructed as citizen militia training facilities throughout the country in the late 1800s, in response to fears that widespread labor unrest could lead to violence. The Wisconsin Legislature authorized the project in 1891 at a cost of about $127,000. But from the beginning, the building also was envisioned as an athletic and student activity center, and the second floor Drill Room quickly took on another life as an assembly space and gymnasium.

For nearly 40 years after its opening, the Red Gym was a hub of campus and community activity. It was the site of the junior prom for many years, and of UW men’s basketball until the UW Field House opened in 1930; “On Wisconsin” was performed there for the first time, at a 1909 football pep rally; large-scale student assemblies and lectures were held there, as were appearances by such luminaries as John Philip Sousa, William Jennings Bryan and Upton Sinclair. The Armory also was host to numerous political events, including the infamous Republican state convention of 1904, which featured a contentious split between the Progressive and Stalwart wings of the party and helped propel Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his Progressives to national prominence. A six-foot-high fence was erected to keep the delegates separate from the spectators, and the Progressives enlisted a group of burly Wisconsin football players to keep the Stalwarts out of the building.

Military use of the Red Gym declined in the 1920s and 1930s, and the opening of Memorial Union in 1928 and the Field House in 1930 drained the old gym of much of its student activity. Beginning in 1928, the Armory’s major role was as the final stop in the laborious class registration process, a practice that endured until the advent of automated registration in 1983. The building’s old swimming pool and basketball courts also served as a central campus recreation facility for students and staff.

Because the building was underused and antiquated, plans for its demolition began to surface as early as the 1950s. Such plans were put off on a number of occasions, in part because it was still seen as needed recreational space. The Natatorium had been opened in 1963, but it was on the far west side of the campus, and the Southeast Recreational Facility on Dayton Street was not a to become reality until 1983.

In the interim, those interested in preservation managed to protect the building. In 1974, not without controversy, it was included in the Bascom Hill Historic District, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as part of the university’s 125th anniversary celebration. In 1994, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

In 1988, Dean of Students Mary Rouse and landscape architecture professor Bruce Murray were appointed by then-Chancellor Donna E. Shalala to co-chair a committee on the future use of the Red Gym, and that group concluded that the building’s central location and distinctive appearance would make it ideal as a “front door” to the university “for visitors, prospective students, and their families and as the primary, high traffic information and service center for undergraduate enrolled students.” Rouse has spearheaded that effort since, helping to foster the project through the state building process and fulfill the university’s obligation to raise $5.5 million in private contributions as part of the project’s $11.5 million cost.