The sixteen-story building constructed for the School of Business in 1930 was determined to be inadequate soon after completion. A plan had been made in the 1960s to abandon 23rd Street for a new campus on the Brooklyn waterfront, but New York’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s put a stop to this. Instead, the school faced years of ad hoc expansion into rented space and the acquisition of nearby buildings. The first expansion came in 1960, when the school acquired the Children’s Court building on 22nd Street and converted it into a student center. In 1970, Baruch College opened a new library in a seven-story building on 24th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues that had been constructed in 1906 as a large stable building. The new facility helped ease the crush of new students who entered the school that year as part of CUNY’s new open admissions policy. Baruch admitted a freshman class of 1,510 students in 1970, as compared to 690 students in 1969. To meet the need for additional space, the College continued renting space in the area and acquired the Family Court building on the corner of 22nd Street and Lexington Avenue, converting it into office space in 1983.
In 1986, Baruch adopted a campus master plan to acquire permanent facilities in the area around 23rd Street and phase out rented space. The plan identified the blocks between 24th and 26th Streets, Third and Lexington Avenues as a potential north campus. This site included a number of small commercial and residential structures adjacent to the existing Baruch library on 24th Street, and a large commercial loft building, the Lexington Building,…
