The Moving of Cunningham Hall

Cunningham Hall was DOWN the hill from the Henry yesterday and earlier today.
It’s Imogen Cunningham Hall. It was originally built as the Women’s Building for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition to showcase women’s art and to provide hospitality to visiting women.  It then served as a center for campus and community women until 1916, when it was put to other use. After the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution granted women the right to vote in 1920, younger women thought they had gained full equality with men and that they no longer needed a strong women’s network. They gradually forgot about the building. Decades later, a resurgent feminist movement sparked its rediscovery. Women reclaimed the building in the early 1980s and named it Cunningham Hall for Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976), the pioneering artistic portrait photographer who graduated from the University of Washington in 1907. Cunningham Hall houses the Women’s Information Center and the Northwest Center for Research on Women.

Tomorrow Cunningham Hall will be UP the hill from the Henry.
I can’t describe how strange it is to see a BIG building in an unusual, new place.  The way it is currently sitting – on the wheels of a giant trailer, on the hill that leads up to the plaza around the George Washington statue, makes me totally dizzy. Its’ moving up the hill now. Very, very slowly.

Here’s what it looks like from the Henry’s conference room window:

more building moving drama, after the jump.

Cunningham Hall Looming Outside the Henry Windows