So what happened to Macalester’s oldest building, the East Wing of Old Main? If you’ve visited campus in the last 40 years, you’ve likely noticed that the building does not look the same as it did in 1887. By the 1980s, Macalester had seen nearly a century’s worth of change. Far from the college’s only building, Old Main now housed administrative offices and a handful of academic departments, and had offered a bookstore and served as a place for students to hang out and play billiards throughout the years.¹

Several large dorms had now replaced the original men’s dormitory in the East Wing. The campus was now furnished with science halls, a fine arts complex, a stadium, a dining hall, a student union and a chapel. And there was a dedicated library, housed in what is now Weyerhaeuser Hall, although it had been overflowing with books for years. Old Main was now used mainly for academic and administrative purposes, but its future was uncertain in a campus that had changed so much over the past several decades. College administrators decided that the next step for the campus was to construct a new library, and if possible, they also hoped to incorporate the renovations of Old Main into the new design.