The UT Tower Was Built to Hold Books

Most people know the UT Tower as the thing that turns orange after a big win. It was built to be a bookshelf.

By the late 1920s the University of Texas library was out of room. The obvious spot for a new one was the top of the hill, where Old Main stood. Old Main was the university’s first building, a yellow brick Victorian Gothic thing finished in 1899, and nobody wanted to be the one to knock it down. So the architect Paul Cret came up with a slow plan. Build the library behind Old Main, leave the old building alone for another 20 years or so, and finish the job sometime in the 1950s.

Then the New Deal came along, and Washington started lending money for public building projects. UT’s supervising architect, Robert Leon White, wanted in. Beauford Jester, who chaired the regents (and later became governor), went to see Vice President John Nance Garner about it. It probably didn’t hurt that White grew up with Garner’s son. The Public Works Administration came through, and Old Main was gone by early 1935, about 20 years ahead of Cret’s schedule. UT historian Jim Nicar has the whole story if you want more.

The Main Building opened in 1937. Most of the tower was book stacks, with room for about 1.7 million volumes, and students weren’t allowed in them. You asked for a book at the desk, somebody went up and found it, and it came down to you on a dumbwaiter. That was fine until the collection got big. By the 1960s students were waiting half an hour for a book. The main library moved out to the new Perry-Castañeda Library in 1977, and the tower filled up with offices.

Not everyone was a fan. J. Frank Dobie, who taught English at UT, said the Tower “looked like a toothpick in a pie” and “ought to be laid on its side and have galleries put around it.” For a library, that might not have been the worst idea.

A few more things about the Tower

• It’s 307 feet tall, about four feet taller than the Capitol. Nothing in Austin topped it for 20 years.
• A classics professor named William Battle wrote his own line for the south entrance in 1935, “The records of the past shall bring light and courage to them that come after.” The faculty committee picked John 8:32 instead, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” When it was carved, UT only admitted white students. Heman Sweatt’s lawsuit got him into the law school in 1950.
• The carillon up top has 56 bells. The biggest one weighs 7,350 pounds.
• The orange lights first came on in October 1937. Rules written in 1947 saved the all-orange Tower for one occasion, beating A&M on Thanksgiving. The lights went dark for most of World War II.
• On August 1, 1966, a student shot people from the observation deck for 96 minutes, killing 14 and wounding more than 30, before Austin police reached him. Texas Monthly’s oral history is worth your time. The deck closed in the mid-1970s after several suicides and didn’t reopen until 1999. A memorial by the Turtle Pond lists 17 names.

If you ever waited on a book to come down from the Tower, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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TEKS alignment (7th grade Texas History)

• §113.19(c)(7)(E). Analyze the political, economic, and social impact of the Great Depression and significant issues of the 20th century on the history of Texas.
• §113.19(c)(17)(B). Identify the contributions of Texas leaders such as John Nance Garner.