The college celebrated 50 years since the founding of the Free Academy in 1897, the year that Upton Sinclair graduated from the College of the City of New York. Its reputation had grown, not only in New York City but across the country, and other American cities tried to emulate the success of the college.

Expansion of the campus was already being planned when an article appeared in The New York Times on October 24, 1894, describing the celebration in honor of President Alexander Stewart Webb’s twenty-five years of service to the College of the City of New York. At this event the President of the Board, C.H. Knox, “alluded to the cramped quarters in the present building; to the recent unsuccessful attempt to acquire a new home, and promised that he should do all in his power to secure new and sufficient accommodations for the college.”

 

Students in the 1890s took an active role in trying to persuade politicians to improve conditions at the College of the City of New York. Upton writes in his Autobiography about his early foray into the political sphere, foreshadowing his later socialist beliefs.

“The crowding in our ramshackle old building had become a scandal, and an effort was under way to persuade the legislature to vote funds for new buildings uptown. No easy matter to persuade politicians to take an interest in anything so remote as higher education! We students were asked to circulate petitions, to be signed by voters; and I, in an access of loyalty to my alma mater, gave my afternoons and Saturdays to the task for a month or two, and went the rounds of department stores and business houses. Not many of the persons invited to sign had ever heard of the matter, but it cost them nothing, and they were willing to take the word of a nice jolly lad that a free college was a good thing. I brought in some six or eight hundred signatures, and got my name in the college paper for my zeal.” (p.40)

It was not until 1897 that plans for a new campus really began to be formulated and there was an exhibit of the various plans in the 23rd Street college building. It took ten years until the new campus at St. Nicholas Heights was realized and it was then that more students could finally take advantage of the wonderful education that the College of the City of New York offered.