West Chester State College Quadrangle Historic District

The West Chester State College quadrangle, a 12.6-acre campus in West Chester, Pennsylvania, is the school's original campus, laid out along High Street, College Avenue, Church Street and Rosedale Avenue. Its buildings are mostly built of local serpentine stone, a greenish metamorphic rock found only in Chester County and northern Maryland. Recitation Hall, designed by T. Roney Williamson and opened in 1893, was the fourth structure on the old campus. The Model School, designed in 1899 by the Philadelphia firm Baker and Dallett in a Georgian Revival style, was built to give students a place to observe teaching. The Library followed in 1902-04 with a classical facade and a tetrastyle Ionic portico. Philips Memorial Building, completed in 1927 in Collegiate Gothic style, was the quad's first building not built of serpentine. The district is regarded as significant because its serpentine examples are rare, the stone can no longer be quarried, and the buildings together show nearly a century of changing design and campus life.