With Taylor Stadium on your right, you’re standing on ground that used to shake on fall Saturdays… not from earthquakes, from 20,000 people losing their minds over Lehigh football.
Before this was a real stadium, it was basically a practice patch with no seats-show up, stand around, hope you can see something. Then an alum named Charles L. Taylor, class of 1876, pitched a proper home field. Alumni chipped in, and the biggest boost came from steel baron Charles M. Schwab and his wife, Emma. No dollar figure survives in the record here, but picture the kind of “donation” that makes an entire campus say, “Okay, yes sir.”
When it opened in 1914, Taylor was only the THIRD concrete stadium in the whole United States. That’s early-adopter territory for sports architecture… like buying a smartphone when it still came with a stylus nobody asked for. And it wasn’t just football-baseball, soccer, lacrosse, track and field all called this place home. Late in the game, Bethlehem Steel donated a grandstand, pushing capacity up to about 20,000.
But history doesn’t always win arguments. In the late 1980s, Lehigh wanted new academic space, and Taylor-beloved, worn-out, and short on parking and bathrooms-got demolished. The final game here was the 123rd Lehigh-Lafayette matchup, played in brutal cold with a minus-20 wind chill… and Lehigh still pulled out a 17 to 10 win. Hardcore.
A lot of alumni still swear this place felt better than the newer stadium-because here, you were RIGHT on top of the action.
When you’re set, Zoellner Arts Center is a 3-minute walk heading north.
