Gatke Hall

This was originally Salem's first dedicated post office, constructed back in 1903. The man behind it was James Knox Taylor, the Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury. Taylor oversaw hundreds of federal buildings across the country, and he designed this heavy Beaux Arts structure, a highly decorative, classical architectural style known for its grand, theatrical details, with a massive steel and brick frame just to support the sheer weight of its thick Ashland sandstone exterior. Now, buildings made of steel, brick, and solid stone generally tend to stay exactly where you put them. But Salem has a habit of endlessly uprooting its monuments. Earlier, we saw the State Capitol, an institution that shifted its political weight around through fires and relocations. Gatke Hall, however, shifted its literal, crushing physical weight right down the road. In 1938, to make way for a new federal building downtown, this enormous stone structure was lifted entirely intact, placed on a complex series of rollers, and painfully nudged down State Street. It was a monumental engineering marvel for its era. The painstakingly slow journey took six whole months to complete. Imagine the agonizing progress of dragging thousands of tons of delicate masonry, inch by inch, without cracking a single window or splitting the stone. I complain when I have to help a friend move a sofa. They eventually parked the building right here, on a lot that had sat tragically vacant since 1871. That was the year the university's original wooden, three-story building, which had started as a manual labor school, burned down to ashes. Gatke Hall filled that empty historical scar perfectly, stepping in to serve as Willamette University's College of Law. In 1952, the building absorbed another piece of Salem's discarded history. A ten-foot-tall, nine-hundred-pound statue of Lady Justice was salvaged from the tower of a demolished Marion County Courthouse. She was hauled into the foyer of Gatke Hall, where she greeted law students for forty years until she, too, was packed up and relocated across campus. It seems everything connected to this structure involves careful transplantation. Even the building's namesake, Robert Moulton Gatke, loved to alter the landscape. He was a political science professor and a passionate horticulturist who personally planted many of the giant sequoias and rhododendrons that decorate the campus. Gatke Hall has even hosted some modern, albeit brief, airborne departures. In February 2007, a twenty-year-old man trying to evade the police suddenly leaped out of one of these second-story windows. He miraculously survived the plunge, only to be promptly arrested by state police in a neighboring building. A truly terrible escape plan.