The Cooper Union history

On February 27, 1860, the school's Great Hall, located in the basement level of the Foundation Building, became the site of a historic address by Abraham Lincoln.

According to The New York Times in 1863, "It was rare that those of limited means, however eager they might be to acquire a knowledge of some of the higher branches of education, could obtain tuition in studies not named in the regular course taught in our public schools.

After 1875 Saint-Gaudens settled in New York, where he befriended and collaborated with a circle of men who formed the nucleus of an American artistic renaissance: the group included the architects Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White, and Charles Follen McKim and the painter John La Farge.

The most important work of Saint-Gaudens’s early career was the monument to Admiral David Farragut (1880, Madison Square Garden, New York), the base of which was designed by White.

Working with La Farge, in 1881 he created two caryatids for a fireplace in Cornelius Vanderbilt’s residence.

Henry Adams (1891) in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C., is considered by many to be Saint-Gaudens’s greatest work.

The early institution also had a free reading room open day and night, the first in New York City (predating the New York Public Library system, which did not become free until 1895), and a new four-year nighttime engineering college for men and a few women.

In 1897 Saint-Gaudens completed a monument in Boston depicting Robert G. Shaw, colonel of an African American regiment in the Civil War.

A daytime engineering college was added in 1902, thanks to funds contributed by Andrew Carnegie.

Shortly thereafter, Saint-Gaudens left for Paris, where, over the next three years, he prepared his final major public sculpture, the Sherman Monument (1903), which was eventually erected in Grand Army Plaza in New York.

The first public meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was convened there in 1909.

His autobiography, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was published in 1913.

Green Camp, a 1,000-acre (400-hectare) tract in Ringwood, New Jersey, was acquired in 1941–44 for an adjunct educational and recreational facility.

In September 1992, Cooper Union opened its Student Residence Hall, located across 3rd Avenue from the Foundation Building, as the school's first-ever on-campus housing resource.

In 2002, the school decided to generate additional needed revenue by razing its engineering building and having it replaced with a commercial building, and also replacing its Hewitt Building with a New Academic Building.

In 2010, Barack Obama appeared at the lectern of the Great Hall for the second time and called for sweeping financial regulatory reform.

On September 22, 2014, President of the Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas delivered his first formal speech in English, sponsored by Churches for Middle East Peace, calling for peace with Israel that would include a new timetable for a two-state solution.