Today
Today the Hall of Fame for Great Americans is largely forgotten. For twenty years, in fact, it lacked the funds to hold new elections or to commission busts of the people it elected two decades ago, including Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, and Andrew Carnegie. It took nineteen years to raise the $25,000 needed to commission the bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In 1973 NYU abruptly abandoned its Bronx campus and, with it, the Hall of Fame. Eventually New York State purchased the complex and it is now under the auspices of Bronx Community College. In the late 1970s the state spent $3 million restoring the colonnade's crumbling foundation; more recently, it spent another $200,000 to restore the 98 bronze busts, many of which had deteriorated badly. By that time private gifts, which were always the Hall of Fame's primary source of support, had effectively ceased.
In 2001, Bronx Community College organized a US$ 1 Million fund-raising effort to rebuild and expand the Hall of Fame.
Along with the library dome at the Bronx Community College, the Hall of Fame was featured in the 2006 film The Good Shepherd as a backdrop for scenes taking place at Yale University. The dome of the Gould Memorial Library at the Hall of Fame served as a stand-in for MIT's Great Dome in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
Read more about this topic: Hall Of Fame For Great Americans
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