and occupations as farming, plumbing, carpentry, and shoemaking. Some of the red-tile-roofed, stucco buildings of that period can still be seen on campus. They are now pink in color, but in the old days they were a grayish beige. The architect, C. B. J. Snyder, put an owl, four owlets, and the heads of two laughing boys above and to the side of the entrance to the H or Administration Building (now Thomas Jefferson Hall), but there were not many laughing boys in the school, for it was administered with severity bordering on cruelty. In 1934 District Attorney Charles S. Colden led a grand jury investigation into charges of brutality, and as a result the institution was closed in 1935. By then a judge, Colden proposed the establishment of a city college on the premises. He won the support of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and much of the Queens community for the project, and so on April 6, 1937, the Board of Higher Education authorized the creation of Queens College. The sculptured owl, owlets, and laughing boys over the entrance of Jefferson Hall remained.
At first the College was housed in the old buildings of the New York Parental School. Five of them were built in 1907 and five in the 1920s, probably in 1925. They were designated, simply. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J buildings. The superintendent occupied F Building (on the site of the present Margaret Kiely Hall), and I Building was the janitor's domain, for it contained power and heating equipment. A larger plant was built in 1951. Five of the buildings were arranged along what is now called the "Jefferson Quad": A, B, and C on the right and D and E on the left of H Building (Thomas Jefferson Hall), if one is facing west. The infirmary was called G Building. Some of these buildings were demolished in the course of time; A Building (also called Walt Whitman Hall because it was occupied by the English Department under the chairmanship of Emory Holloway, a noted Whitman scholar) gave way to Academic II (now Margaret Kiely Hall, named for the first Dean of Faculty) in 1968, and C Building was razed when the Social Sciences Building (now called Hortense Powder-maker Hall, in memory of the famous anthropologist and early faculty member) was built in 1962. An adjoining building, the Persia Campbell Dome, was named for a member of the Economics Department who had been in Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" in the 1930s. But B, D, E, and I Buildings are still intact, as is Jefferson Hall.
Under the campus there is an impressive tunnel system that was built long
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