1675 LINDEN DRIVE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

1675 LINDEN DRIVE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Dane

Madison

1908

1974

university or college building

English Revival Styles

Stone - Unspecified

Laird & Cret

No

A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the State Historical Society, Division of Historic Preservation.

Large barn is of brick and half-timbering and is in a Tudor Revival style; it was designed in 1908 and built as an exhibit hall for UW Madison livestock. Original cost was $75,000.

Dubbed the “cowlesium” by a former university president, the Stock Pavilion was indeed built to accommodate livestock shows, but it has also hosted performers ranging from Sergei Rachmaninoff to rock-and-roll groups. Until 1930 it was the largest auditorium in Madison and its good acoustics. Politicians, including presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Harry Truman, also found a forum here.

Philadelphia architects designed the Stock Pavilion in the Neo-Tudor style, with yellow-brick upper stories decorated with false half-timbering over a red-brick first story, to evoke a medieval housebarn. Visitors enter through a wide segmentally-arched entranceway, which is flanked by gabled wall dormers supported by jigsaw-cut brackets. Massive gable ends, three-and-one-half stories tall, dominate the east and west elevations. Each end features a large segmentally-arched window filled with vertical strips of multi-paned windows.

"A Tabular History of the Buildings of the University of Wisconsin," Alden Aust, 1937. Feldman, Jim. Buildings of the University of Wisconsin, 1997, pp. 115-116. Buildings of Wisconsin manuscript. University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin-Madison Tour Guide: Henry Mall and West Campus, 1988.

Stock Pavilion

Jul 11, 1985

Jan 01, 1989