26 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN On the fifth floor of the Clayton University Center at Packer Hall, in an area thought to be sealed up for decades, workers renovating the iconic structure found portraits etched into walls that seemed to hark back to the building’s early days. One etching appears to capture the downward twist on Professor Hugh Wilson Harding’s signature mustache. Harding was a physics and mechanics professor who in 1883 helped establish Lehigh’s electrical engineering program, one of the first in the United States. Another drawing seems to depict Henry Coppee, Lehigh’s first president, with his billowing white beard and mustache. Scratched into the wall alongside the pictures are ham radio codes and presumably students’ initials and first names. It’s not clear when the drawings were made or who made them, and the mystery adds to their intrigue. The drawings are among the relics workers have been uncovering as they undertake an extensive renovation of the Clayton UC, originally known as Packer Hall. “It has been fascinating to be shown some of the hidden gems that have been uncovered during the renovation,” said Carol Hill, director of student center facilities and operations. A small brick fireplace was uncovered under layers of material removed from the first floor. Above the fourthfloor ceiling, the handcrafted wood railing and stairs leading up to the original fifth floor were discovered. The original south exterior stone walls were exposed after being covered up during a renovation in 1956, Hill said. Items discovered inside walls and air intake handlers as workers dismantled the interior of the building include glass soda bottles and old beer cans, a logbook from 1961 where students listed who last used a projection screen in the building, bulbs for the projector, sterling silver cutlery adorned with the letter “L,” old student ID cards and hand-cut nails from the 1800s, said Jim LaRose, project manager. Also in the area where the drawings were found, workers discovered two fossils thought to once have been displayed in the Asa Packer room when it housed a museum. One appears to be a fossilized tree trunk impression that was likely collected in the anthracite coal fields north of the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. The Clayton UC’s fifth-floor rooms were once used as dormitories. When Lois Black, director of Lehigh University Library’s Special Collections, visited the space during renovations, she was reminded of the Tenement Museum, a former tenement house in New York City’s Lower East Side that had been closed for more than 50 years when building codes in the city Left, a wooden gargoyle (Janus, god of thresholds and transitions) that used to be set above the doorway in the faculty lounge area. Right, a blocked-off door on the fifth floor. Bottom, one of the etchings discovered in a closed-off fifth-floor room. CHRISTA NEU
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