Columbia’s Global Center is located at Reid Hall in the heart of the Notre-Dame des Champs neighborhood of Paris. Reid Hall has hosted international undergraduate and graduate programs and a full calendar of lectures, conferences, and artistic performances over the past century. It has thus earned a significant place in Trans-Atlantic cultural relationships.
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HISTORY
The history of Reid Hall befits its new status as Columbia Global Center. Deeply local in its origins and dating back to the 18th century, its original structure housed a porcelain factory. It left bank location took advantage of underground kaolin deposits as well as Paris’s soon-to-be global market for Parisian ceramics. In 1799, as revolutionary France began to consolidate itself as an empire, the three Dagoty brothers leased the manufactory. After they were named official providers to Empress Josephine, they expanded the premises. By 1812, they employed over a hundred workers. The main building, with its entryway and a garden originally opening onto rue Notre-Dame des Champs, had come to resemble what exists today: a ground floor, two upper floors, and an attic lit by the ten casement windows that look out onto the street and the ten others looking out onto the garden side.
The courtyard well is the same that the manufactory used, and we still see elements of three warehouses and four storerooms, though the one richly ornamented with mirrors and decorative shelves has disappeared. Dagoty porcelain was truly global, not only enhancing the dinners of tout Paris, the castles of Compiègne and Versailles, but making its way to provincial America where a full service, featuring a patriotic American eagle, set the table at state dinners hosted by President James Monroe.
In the 1820s, as the Parisian porcelain market flagged, and the Dagoty firm moved its production out of the city, the buildings on the rue de Chevreuse underwent their first conversion to international educational purposes. In 1834, the site became home to the Swiss protestant educator J-J Keller’s boarding school. The first such institution since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, it welcomed well-to-do French Protestants and visiting foreigners to entrust their “young gentleman” to the establishment’s strict discipline. Charles King, President of Columbia College, parked his son there while the family toured Europe in 1865. The seventeen-year-old André Gide lived at the Pension Keller in 1886, an unhappy experience for the adolescent boy which he later described in Si le grain ne meurt. The Keller Institute closed its doors in 1893.
In the 1890s, as cosmopolitan and immensely rich Americans came to Paris, the property came to the attention of the philanthropist and social activist Elizabeth Mills Reid, daughter of the California financer Darius O. Mills and the wife to Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune and Minister Plenipotentiary to France from 1889 to 1892.
Elizabeth Mills Reid
The site especially interested Mrs. Reid because it was located near the rue Paul Séjourné, where American men artists had established a clubby environment that made their expatriate experience in Paris more enjoyable. Wanting the same benefits for young American women artists, Mrs. Reid purchased the premises on behalf of her “American Girls Club.” It says how many young foreign women were congregating in Paris that in 1913, Mrs. Reid bought a neighboring property and constructed the annex, which included seven artist studios looking out onto the garden. Mrs. Reid also built the Grande Salle, which is still used for lectures and exhibitions, to link the new and old buildings.
When the U.S. committed troops to the Great War in 1917, Mrs. Reid made the property available to the American Red Cross. The Maison Verte, now a classroom, was originally built as a clinic for convalescing soldiers.
With the U.S. now a permanent presence in post-Armistice Europe, a group of American women, “The Ladies” as Mrs. Reid called them, thought to use the premises as a permanent residential center for university women. Emancipated American women wanted to matter in the new age of U.S. internationalism, and Mrs. Reid’s daughter-in-law, Helen Rogers Reid, educated at Barnard College and later President of the New York Herald Tribune, was enthusiastic about the project. Thereby, Reid Hall came into being. The founding signatories, “the Ladies,” as it were, in addition to the Reids, were all leading educators of the elite women’s colleges of the time, notably Virginia C. Gildersleeve (Dean of Barnard College), M. Carey Thomas (founder of Bryn Mawr College), and three other women educated at Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. Dorothy Leet from Barnard was its first Director, and Smith College established the first junior year to be hosted on the premises.
Virginia Gildersleeve, M. Carey Thomas, Helen Rogers Reid with Virginia Gildersleeve and Nicholas Murray Butler, Eleanor Roosevelt with Dorothy Leet
Reid Hall showed the internationalist face of American feminism in those years, welcoming numerous women students, artists, and professors. The French Association of University Women (AFFDU), which is the national branch of the International Federation of University Women (FIFDU), became a member of Reid Hall in 1922. French scholars, civil servants and intellectuals came to the Franco-American center to introduce students to the study of French theater, literature, and art, and to debate major questions in French political life. Nadia Boulanger was among the guest lecturers.
Rigorous study within Reid Hall was complemented by the rich cultural atmosphere of the Montparnasse neighborhood, and especially by four neighboring cafés and their international artistic clientele: Le Dome, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole at the Vavin crossroads. This “School,” made up of café and artistic society, co-existed with the schooling students received at Reid Hall. Sometimes, the two worlds intersected. Students were delighted to have the chance to talk to Gertrude Stein at one end-of-the-year party, invited there by one of her artist friends who rented a living and workspace in one of Reid Hall’s studios.
During World War II, the Americans gone, Reid Hall became a refuge, first for Polish university women, then for Belgian teachers, and later for the women students of the Ecole normale supérieure de Sèvres. After the war, long-time friends of Reid Hall took the site back and rebuilt a university center, which now accepted men as well as women students.
Bequeathed to Columbia University in 1964, in the mid-1970s Reid Hall found a renewed mission in the hands of its new director, Danielle Haase-Dubosc, educated at Barnard College and Columbia University. Together with Brunhilde Biebuyck, then director of the Columbia-Penn Programs in Paris, she saw Reid Hall establish partnerships with many Paris university centers in the 1990s. As a first experiment in “mondialisation,” with the backing of Provost Jonathan C. Cole, Reid Hall opened its Institute for Advanced Scholars, bringing individual researchers to Paris to collaborate with their European peers through the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and other Parisian institutions of high education.