Built in 1835, the Gothic Revival building in the City’s burgeoning 15th Ward housed the New York Historical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, The American Geographical Society, the Chess Club, and the Women’s Library throughout its existence. The University also used the building as a boarding house, renting out rooms to numerous scientists, artists, and writers who shaped the cultural atmosphere that would typify the Village by the mid-19th century.
In 1835, notable artist, inventor, and NYU professor Samuel F. B. Morse claimed four rooms in the Old Main building for studio and laboratory space to teach the literature of the arts and design and to conduct experiments for his electric telegraph. In conjunction with another NYU Professor, John W. Draper, Morse also worked with daguerreotypes, a photographic process introduced by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre in Paris in 1839.
As a tenant at the Old University Building, Morse instructed numerous aspiring daguerreotypists within his studio space, including Mathew Brady, the father of documentary photography.