When moving through the halls of Pardee Hall, students are walking past history.
In its first floor lobby, one can find a mural of the first English professor in America, a timeline of the first Black students at Lafayette College and various paintings of important members of the college’s history. But maybe most enigmatic of all is the artistic addition to Pardee’s walls: the stained glass.
The stained glass windows made their artistic debut at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Made by Belgian artist Albert Servaes, they were originally given to Lafayette as a loan from the Belgian government in 1940 following their turn at the World’s Fair. The windows were reportedly only meant to stay at the college temporarily, but due to the ramifications of World War II, Belgium never formally requested the windows back.
Although given to the college in 1940, they were not actually installed until much later. Former college president Ralph Cooper Hutchinson requested permanent access to the stained-glass windows from Belgium in 1946, and in 1951, the college received the windows permanently. Two years later, in the summer of 1953, the windows were installed in what once was the “auditorium” on Pardee’s second floor.
Fast forward over twenty years later, the stained glass was moved into Pardee Hall’s lobby in 1965, where passersby can still admire them today. In 1970, Harvey S. Batdorf, a member of the class of 1928 and former director of admissions, planned on researching the stained glass to create a plaque to place near them in Pardee Hall, but this never came to fruition.
In recent years, per the college’s most recent iteration of its “master plan,” there has been discussion of renovations to take place in Pardee Hall. The building, notably the lobby, is set to get a revamped redesign in the near future that is set to modernize the space.
Nadda Pavlinsky, the project manager and interior designer for the college’s finance and administration division, feels that the stained glass windows add a sense of history to the space.
“It gives a perspective of the history of the building itself,” she said.
Pavlinsky hopes that there is a way to maintain the presence of the historic stained glass, even with the incoming modern renovation of the Pardee Hall lobby, citing the use of historical elements in Skillman Library as an example.
“When we renovated the Skillman Library, we incorporated those stained glass into the building,” Pavlinsky said. “I would love to see the same thing with the Pardee Hall stained glass windows.”
Along with other sources cited and linked, information from the college archive files provided courtesy of Olivia Naum ’26, was a main source for this article.
