Fordham’s Rose Hill Gym is the oldest on-campus arena in Division I basketball, hosting Army barracks, concerts, legendary athletes, and much more in its storied history, SI reports in this article and YouTube video.
Rose Hill Gym was built in 1925 out of locally quarried gray bedrock—the same stone that supports the towering skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, nine miles to the south of Fordham’s campus in the Bronx. With its high arches, stained glass windows and heavy wooden front doors, it would be easy to mistake the building’s facade for a chapel (as if the Jesuit university was lacking those). The interior’s high gabled ceiling is supported by a latticework of steel trusses and is also reminiscent of a church nave. The large translucent windows on either end bathe the interior in warm natural light for games on sunny weekend afternoons—again, not unlike sitting in a pew at a Saturday evening vigil mass. But even the world’s biggest organ couldn’t make a church sound as loud as Rose Hill gets when it’s full.
This is Rose Hill’s defining characteristic. Other arenas may have 20,000 fans rattling the rafters, but Rose Hill is uniquely suffocating. There isn’t an inch of wasted space in the small gym, which means the players and fans are right on top of each other. And when the crowd gets loud, the bare stone walls of the gym offer nowhere for that noise to go.
“If you have any love for the history of the game, it’s a place that needs to be seen,” [Mike] Breen says. “If you like the movie Hoosiers and that little gym that they played in, it’s something like that. It’s like the Fenway Park of college basketball. It’s this place that was built so many years ago and still has some magic to it. I just think it’s one of the great places to see a game because it makes you think about the history of the game. Because that used to be the norm. Now it’s the exception, a building like that.”
“I love going to the gym,” says Breen, who still makes time in his busy announcing schedule to attend a couple of Fordham games each season. “Obviously I love the school, but it’s just a cool place to watch a game. There’s very few places where you can see high-level basketball in a building like that. They just don’t exist anymore.
“You’re in the last row, you feel like you can reach out and touch one of the players. If you’re in the last row you feel like a player running down the court’s sweat can fall on you,” he says. “Every seat, you’re right there. You’re right on top of the action. You can hear the officials talk to the coaches. You can hear the players talk to each other. That intimacy is what made it special and why it’s still special today.”
Rose Hill is one of those venues, though, where the game is almost secondary to the building itself. In the same way that fans come from all over to see Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and the Los Angeles Coliseum, the draw of seeing a game at Rose Hill is the ability to soak in the history of the game in an endangered species of a building.
“It’s not going to drop your jaw because it’s cavernous and it’s got the most unique in-game entertainment or the best basketball you’ve ever seen,” [Mike] Watts says. “It’s a gym that almost serves as a diary of college basketball through every era and every iteration that exists of it. Choosing to come to a game at Rose Hill Gym is choosing to write your name in that ledger and be a guest of college basketball.”
Read the full story and watch the YouTube video.
Jane Martinez is director of media relations and deputy University spokesperson at Fordham. She can be reached at [email protected] or (347) 992-1815.
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