Shepard Hall is the largest of five Gothic buildings at the college City College of New York (CCNY) campus located in the Borough of Manhattan, originally constructed in 1907. CCNY was the first higher education institution in the U.S. to be entirely publicly supported and was originally called the Free Academy. Shepard Hall is the main CCNY facility and houses the departments of music and media and communication arts. The Great Hall in Shepard Hall holds up to 1,000 people, depending on the occasion. Like the city it serves, the 400,000-square-foot building is always open and “never sleeps."
Shepard Hall is a cultural center for CCNY and has many important rooms, including the Great Hall. Albert Einstein and U.S. Presidents Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Franklin D. Roosevelt gave speeches at the Great Hall. Albert Einstein first presented his theory of general relativity outside of Europe at CCNY.
Our team was retained by the New York State Dormitory Authority (DASNY) to provide architectural and engineering design for the installation of a new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible elevator at the center tower that will run from the cellar to the sixth floor. We also modernized two existing elevators to improve ADA accessibility to the upper floors and serve the needs of a growing student body and faculty members.
Shepard Hall holds registered landmark status under the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission (1981). Our work featured complex design and maintenance due to the requirements of keeping the landmark characteristics of the building undamaged and adhering to multiple regulatory agencies’ requirements.
Hydraulic elevators have an average vertical range of three to four floors and are slower than traditional traction elevators. Our team designed a new elevator with a travel distance of six stories. This required a hole depth of over 80 feet since the piston had to travel up 80 feet and below ground 83 feet. Specialized equipment was designed to be able to reach six floors, including increasing the size of the shaft structural items and larger pumps.