This Place in Time: E-Quad/Reunion Field (y1971-13)

You are standing close to the easternmost part of campus, in what was an open field before the University Athletic Association acquired it in 1876. With the rise of college athletics after the Civil War, this became the University’s first true athletic field, hosting football and baseball games and track competitions. With the surge in popularity of Princeton Reunions in the late nineteenth century, this also became the destination for the University’s annual “P-rade,” with classes marching here before the celebrated Princeton-Yale baseball game. After 1911, the procession would pass through the new Thompson Gateway, which still stands on Prospect Avenue and was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, the same architectural firm that designed the FitzRandolph Gateway in front of Nassau Hall. In 1892, the Osborn Club House was constructed on the corner of Prospect and Olden and was used by athletic teams until 1971, when it became home to the Carl Fields Center.   In 2012, Osborn was demolished to make way for the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the latest addition to the Engineering Quadrangle.