Upsala College

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Upsala College in 1902. Illustration to an article in the Swedish periodical Hvar 8 Dag, 3:36 (1902).

Upsala College was a private college in East Orange, New Jersey, USA, founded in 1893. Construction of the campus started in 1900. The college was shut down in 1995, after several years of financial problems.

The school was founded on the initiative of the Swedish-American Augustana Synod and immigrant Swedes, and received its name partly in reference to the historic University of Uppsala in Sweden and partly in memory of the Meeting of Uppsala, which had taken place in 1593 – exactly 300 years before the founding of the college – establishing Lutheran Orthodoxy in the country after the attempts of King John III to reintroduce Roman-Catholic liturgy. (Upsala is an archaic spelling variation of Uppsala, replaced in the early part of the 20th century by the version with two P:s, except in some proper nouns which have retained the old spelling.)

The college originally opened in Brooklyn, New York City, New York and later moved to Kenilworth, New Jersey in 1898 before settling in East Orange in 1924. The campus was sold to the East Orange Board of Education, who built a high school on the site's Eastern half and sold the Western portion to the City of East Orange.

The property and buildings on the West Campus were neglected, left to deteriorate and became a serious eyesore. All structures suffered acts of looting and vandalism and one building was lost to fire. The surviving West campus buildings were demolished in the Spring of 2006. Today, the Western site is being redeveloped for upscale housing.

The East campus became East Orange Campus High School, a public secondary school operated by the East Orange School District. Former East campus buildings Beck Hall, Puder Hall, Viking Memorial Hall (gymnasium) and College Center survived to be incorporated into the new high school.

[edit] Trivia

The college was featured as a demolition project (used resources recovery) in the Coal Miner episode of Dirty Jobs on August 8, 2006, a popular show on the Discovery Channel.
Much of the 2001 movie Riding in Cars with Boys was filmed on the campus.
Some of its famous graduates include Allen Klein and Vin Scelsa, creator of the "Idiots Delight" radio program heard on commercial and now public radio (WFUV in the New York area).
Seymour "Swede" Levov, the main character of Philip Roth's 1997 novel "American Pastoral", is a graduate of Upsala.