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Campus Landmarks
The famous campus stands outside the city limits — stated once, plainly
The civic fact, and the world's filing
The line: The ground the world means when it says "South Bend" most often — the University of Notre Dame campus, with the Golden Dome, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the Grotto and Notre Dame Stadium — stands in Notre Dame…
The Golden Dome — the city's face to the world
1879 – present · the image life of a gilded roof
The fame: If South Bend has one image in the world's mind, it is this one: a gold dome over a red-brick hall, a statue on top, seen across a quad or a television screen. The university's own writers say it without embarrassment …
Touchdown Jesus — a library wall named from a football stadium
1964 – present · the Word of Life mural on the Hesburgh Library
The fame: On the south face of the university's great library stands a mosaic of Christ the Teacher, 134 feet tall and 68 feet wide, made of more than six thousand pieces of stone from twenty-five countries — the Word of Life…
Notre Dame Stadium — the ground the nation watches
1930 – present · Rockne's stadium and its national moments
The place: The stadium Osborn Engineering — the designers of Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Comiskey Park — patterned at smaller scale on Michigan Stadium, and that Knute Rockne principally designed, opened on 4 October…
The Basilica of the Sacred Heart — a French glass collection in Indiana
1842 – present · pilgrimage, a funeral the world heard, and the glass
The fame: The church on the campus has been a place of pilgrimage since Sorin built Sacred Heart for the purpose in 1871 — but its documented claim on the wider world is the glass. The University of Notre Dame Press, in its…
The Grotto — a Lourdes in Indiana, and the candles that arrive by mail
1896 – present · the pilgrimage ground behind the Basilica
The fame: Behind the Basilica, in a fieldstone cave built in the summer of 1896 over ground filled with the charred debris of the 1879 fire, stands a replica of the grotto at Lourdes — the campus marker gives it at one-seventh…
The Log Chapel, whole — Badin's chapel, the fire of 1856, the replica of 1906
The smallest building in this section is the oldest story in it. The Log Chapel on the shore of St. Mary's Lake is a one-room log cabin-chapel with an attic, and everything that has ever stood on the campus began in it or beside…
Old College — the 1843 building and its long second life
Old College is the building the college actually began in, and the only one of the founding group still standing on its feet. The Log Chapel was inherited; Old College was built — in 1843, by Sorin and the Holy Cross brothers…
Washington Hall, the building — 1881, a theater, a paint-over, a restoration
Building facts only, by the discipline of this wave: Washington Hall is the university's Victorian theater building on the main quad, just east of the Main Building, and its course as a building is a clean three-act structure of…
The Main Building beyond the fire — the working life of the 1879 rebuild
The fire of 23 April 1879 and the dome that crowned the rebuilding stand at full size in the university fragment of this record (the fire, the rebuild in one summer, and the name; the dome and the statue on it — finished 1882…