History Timeline
1898-99: An international design competition is held for a new look for the growing, but architecturally undistinguished, University of California. The UC regents request a new “City of Learning” in Berkeley with a physical presence that will have “an effect unique in the world.” Bernard Maybeck, UC’s first architecture instructor, proposes the event, which philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst funds.
Parisian Emile Bénard wins the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Competition. An early design of his shows six small towers scattered around campus; a later one includes five towers – one larger than the rest.
Circa 1903: Newly hired University Supervising Architect John Galen Howard begins designing a bell tower as part of new architectural plan for the university. The plan reflects Emile Bénard’s basic ideas, but is largely Howard’s own. After winning first prize, Bénard had visited Berkeley in 1900, but balked at a request to adjust his design concept and insulted the competition trustees and even Phoebe Hearst.
Howard, the Hearst competition’s fourth-place winner, now envisions one centerpiece bell tower – UC benefactress Jane K. Sather has asked for one. He is thought to have been inspired by American and European bell towers, including St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice. Over the next several years, he has various designs prepared. In one, student apartments and multiple windows are on each floor.
Early 1911: Jane Sather provides funding for the tower and bells and formally requests that work proceed on the Jane K. Sather Campanile. She provides $225,000 for the project, including a set of bells. Sather, who also gave generously to academic endowments and funded Sather Gate, a memorial to her husband, Peder, dies in December 1911.
1913: While still under construction, the Campanile becomes storage space for a massive amount of fossils collected by UC-led excavations at the Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. By 1913, 20 tons of paleontological material – including the remains of saber-toothed cats, horses, camels, ground sloths and many birds – had been brought to campus under the leadership of UC paleontologist and alumnus John C. Merriam. At first, the objects were stored in California Hall’s basement, but the location was too far from Bacon Hall, home of the paleontology department.
Still housed today on five levels of the tower, the 23,000-year-old Pleistocene bones comprise the largest group of La Brea fossils outside of the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles.
Summer 1913: Construction on the tower begins. With Doe Library, the Hearst Memorial Mining Building and several other structures finished, Howard is beginning to largely erase the 19th century campus of brick and wood Victorian buildings and replace it with a grand California synthesis of the Mediterranean world and classical design – a new “Athens of the West.” Many of the new buildings, like the Campanile, are clad in granite; others have cement or informal shingled exteriors.
“Is it too much to hope that there will be housed the soul of the university?” Howard once asked, referring to the tower.
Jan. 31, 1914: The steel frame’s completion is celebrated with a sky-high feast on the future observation deck, some 200 feet in the air. According to campus lore, UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler and 40 to 50 guests of honor — primarily construction workers, architects and engineers — climbed ladders to the deck, but after the feast, Wheeler was treated to a ride back down in a crane lift box.
In a speech given a few months prior, Wheeler had said, “Of noble grace, dignity and beauty, precious in material, in mass and height… the Sather campanile is destined to become one of the world’s most famous towers.”
March 18, 1914: The tower’s cornerstone is laid in a student-led ceremony. By late spring, the unfinished Campanile already has become a stop on the seniors’ annual pilgrimage – an organized walk during graduation week from one beloved building to the next. By mid-August, the Oakland Tribune reports that students back from summer break are discovering a “changed aspect” on campus: Two-thirds of the tower’s exterior is covered with blocks of light gray granite from a Sierra foothills quarry.
1914-1915:Twelve bells are cast for the tower by John Taylor & Co., a foundry in England. By the end of 1915, the “Sather Bells,” paid for by Jane Sather’s gift and each inscribed with “Gift of Jane K. Sather,” are cast. One of the bells bears the university seal and the motto “Let there be light,” and another has a poem on it by Isaac Flagg, a UC professor of Greek: “We ring, we chime, we toll; lend ye the silent part, some answer in the heart, some echo in the soul.”
Late 1915: Construction of the tower is complete. On Dec. 1, the Campanile’s four clocks, made in Springfield, Mass., by the Standard Electric Time Co., operate for the first time. The clock installation is considered one of the nation’s largest. The Daily Cal reports that “students will have no excuse for lateness to class now.”
Work on the Campanile esplanade — the terraces, trees, lawns and staircases surrounding the tower – is completed in early 1916. The walkway’s 54 plane trees were recycled from the grounds of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Designed to be an active, central campus square, the esplanade evolves into a tranquil, contemplative spot.
March 24, 1916:The tower opens to visitors for the first time. An elevator ride to the observation deck – a rare thing for bell towers of this era – costs 10 cents, and the price lasts for 65 years. An exception occurs in August 1944, during World War II, when visitors are charged 25 cents in an effort to raise funds for postwar student housing. From the earliest years, those with a campus ID ride free.
October 1917: The Campanile’s bells, which left England by cargo ship the previous year, arrive in San Francisco. Their journey during World War I had been delayed beginning in 1915 by the risk to British vessels of German submarine attacks. The 12 bells were slowed further in San Francisco by customs issues, but finally reach Berkeley in October 1917. They are raised by crane up the outside of the tower and swung into place, with a British bell-hanger from the foundry supervising the installation.
Comprising a chime, an instrument of fewer than 23 bells, the bells first are played by a student at a Nov. 3 Cal-Washington football game. West Berkeley factories with bells or whistles respond.
1920: Tourists flock to the Campanile, now a major tourist attraction with its stunning views of UC Berkeley and the Bay Area. More than 1,000 paying visitors tour the tower on especially busy Sundays, and nearly 6,000 visit during the summer season, creating unexpected campus revenue.
After World War I ended in late 1918, leisure time, the onset of the Roaring ‘20s and the mass production of inexpensive autos brought many sightseers to Berkeley, especially on Sundays. Cars could be driven and parked throughout campus.
Feb. 12, 1921: A bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln is put into place at the base of the Campanile’s south façade. Made by artist and sculptor Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, who created the monumental presidents’ heads at Mount Rushmore, the bust was a gift to the university in 1909 from former student Eugene Meyer and a replica of a marble one that Meyer gave to the U.S. Capitol. Meyer became owner of the Washington Post and the father of Katherine Graham, who began leading the Post in the ‘60s.
1921-1927:The Campanile opens its doors to thousands more fossils, this time from the McKittrick tar pits in San Joaquin Valley. The 9,000-to-13,000-year-old objects excavated by the UC Museum of Paleontology include the remains of dire wolves, coyotes, camels, mammoths, many kinds of birds and small rodents, wood and seeds from juniper and pine trees, and diverse insects. UC Berkeley has the first fossil record of McKittrick tar pit materials from the end of the Ice Age; the Los Angeles County Museum follows.
Summer 1923: Margaret Murdock, a UC staff member, begins her 60-year-long career playing the bells in the Campanile. Hers is the longest service among the many employees, students and volunteers who perform in the bell tower over the decades. In 1978, Murdock receives the first Berkeley Citation given to a woman for her extraordinary service to the campus.
Of those who hear the bells ring, Murdock says, “Some of them very much take it for granted and others, I think, really do stop to listen and wonder.”
1940-41: Famed blind jazz pianist Alec Templeton gives a concert on the bells two years in a row at the invitation of UC Berkeley chimesmaster John Noyes. The Welsh musician’s numbers include “Oh Johnny Oh,” “Body and Soul,” “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More” and “Sweet Sue.”
In 1938, Noyes had rejected student pleas for swing songs to be played on the bells, and he was quoted in the Daily Cal saying jazz was “no more suited to bells than to church organs.” At the time, the paper added that Noyes felt listeners preferred “melodies that strike some patriotic note.”
1943-45: During World War II, a banner is hung from the Campanile with a number indicating the more than 17,000 members of the UC community in military service. (A similar flag, with the number 2,200, flew during World War I.) In 1943, the chimes fall silent for the first time due to wartime UC budget cuts. After students complain, alumni raise funds to resume the daily performances. On May 8, 1945, the chimes are played two continuous hours to celebrate the end of World War II in Europe.
During most of the war, economic constraints also force closure of the tower’s observation deck. It reopens to visitors in late summer 1944.
Oct. 6, 1947: A stylized blue and gold Campanile, and UC President Robert Gordon Sproul, make the cover of Time magazine for a story on Sproul and the unprecedented size and administrative complexity of the postwar UC system. At the time, UC, with 41,451 students, is the largest university in the country. It not only has the Berkeley campus, but UCLA and research/ teaching sites that later will become UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside.
1950-1957: Ongoing cracks in the tower’s façade, first noticed in the late 1920s, produce loose pieces of granite and marble, including a large slab of marble that falls from the west side in 1950. Repairs are made, and to protect passersby from future falling fragments, a planting bed is placed around the tower base, and a steel canopy is added at the entrance. The Class of 1920 memorial bench is moved from the west façade to beneath the new canopy.
1951: The Campanile is a backdrop for the movie Night into Morning, which stars the future Nancy Reagan. Nancy Davis plays an understanding widow and UC Berkeley departmental secretary who helps an English professor cope after his family dies in a house fire. The movie is filmed, in part, on campus. The grieving professor contemplates his situation from the observation deck. The Campanile also was the centerpiece of a 1933 murder mystery novel, The Campanile Murders
1959: The first suicide occurs at the tower; another takes place in 1961 (suicide stories). Over the years, the campus will experiment with a variety of barriers including glass panels (from 1961-1979) and today’s open metal grill, installed in 1981.
April 19, 1968: During UC Jazz Festival week, Herbie Hancock, pianist with the Miles Davis Quintet, gives a 10-minute-long concert on the chimes. The administration funds Hancock’s performance at the student-run festival, with a group of campus deans recalling “how the campus went wild one afternoon years ago when Alec Templeton played ‘Sweet Sue’ in the Campanile tower,” according to the Daily Cal.
Two Berkeley students who became famous minimalist musicians – Terry Riley and La Monte Young – also performed on the chimes, together, during the 1960s. The 1961 event, during a carillon festival, “was an amazing experience for both La Monte and me,” said Riley, whose masterpiece “In C” consists of 53 short musical phrases repeated an arbitrary number of times.
1978-1979: In 1978, as a 50th anniversary gift to UC Berkeley, the Class of 1928 raises funds to add 36 bells to the tower, transforming the chime into a 48-bell concert carillon. The new bells for what will be “The Class of 1928 Carillon” are cast by the Paccard Bell Foundry in France. A dedication ceremony and concert is held April 5, 1979, to honor the donor class, which, as a group, gets a Berkeley Citation. Nearby, protesters hold an unrelated “die-in,” lying quietly on the lawns around the esplanade.
March 12, 1978: The Campanile and two male students walking toward it holding hands are pictured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine for a story called “Homosexuality on Campus.” Two writers who visited six American colleges and universities over four months report that a growing openness toward gays is not helping students feel more at ease. Chancellor Albert Bowker tries to dissuade reporters from Berkeley’s inclusion in the article, certain the cover story would bring negative publicity.
Sept. 13-21, 1980: An International Festival of the Bells, subsidized by 1928 alumnus Jerry Chambers, draws to the Campanile the world’s top carillonists, who arrive from Canada, Holland, Belgium, France, Washington, D.C. and New York City. Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman holds a banquet for them and presents each with a newly created bronze Berkeley Carillon Medal, emblazoned with the Campanile. The following year, the medal becomes the Berkeley Medal, the university’s top honor. To this day, the chancellor chooses recipients for the silver version of the medal; the University Carillonist gives out the bronze.
“Receiving the Berkeley Medal in the carillon field is the greatest honor worldwide,” says Jeff Davis, University Carillonist from July 2000 - July 2024 and a Berkeley Medal recipient. “There is nothing like it.”
1981: Metal bars were installed in the open-air windows on the observation deck to promote safety for visitors. Two suicides are known to have happened in 1959 and 1961, so glass panes were installed in 1961 to enclose the viewing platform. The panes were removed in 1979 due to complaints that they were muffling the sound of the carillon with its newly added bells.
March 25, 1982: The Campanile was added to the National Register of Historic Places, along with 16 other structures at UC Berkeley including the Sather Gate and Bridge, Hearst Greek Theatre, and South Hall.
1983: The carillon becomes a 61-bell grand carillon thanks to a multi-million-dollar gift from Jerry Chambers and his wife, Evelyn. Thirteen new bells are cast and installed, allowing the instrument’s range to span five octaves, and the bells’ weight to range from 20 pounds to 5.25 tons. Sculptor Ruth Asawa creates bas-relief images of young bears for the Great Bear Bell, the largest and heaviest of all. The Campanile closes for the five-month-long installation.
The Chamberses’ endowment also provides for a permanent, full-time University Carillonist in the Department of Music – there is no position like it today at any other North American university – as well as a campanology library, practice rooms and keyboards, and a carillon festival every five years.
1983-1995: UC Berkeley moves to the international forefront of modern carillon music through the achievements of Ronald Barnes, one of the most important figures in the instrument’s history. The financial security provided by the Chamberses’ 1983 endowment of the carillon program allows Barnes – UC Berkeley’s first University Carillonist – time to write dozens of original carillon compositions and many arrangements.
Carillonists previously had adapted music for the piano, organ and other instruments to the carillon, but Barnes created music based solely on the sonorities, the unique sounds, of the carillon. He dies in 1997.
April 5, 1984: A Mickey Mouse prank is played on the tower. The scene of many escapades, the Campanile gets its south clock festooned with the Disney character’s face and white-gloved hands; two students are arrested. One is injured slightly when he falls some 40 feet from a rope to the ground. Previous Campanile mischief included a similar Mickey Mouse-related prank in 1970 and a stuffed pink and yellow Easter bunny placed on the lantern in 1955. In 2000, a fake pumpkin is stuck on the spire.
1990-1993: Relatively untouched in the tower for nearly 50 years, the Rancho La Brea fossil collection is reorganized and inventoried by Berkeley graduate student Robert Dundas and a team of undergrads. The mammalian fossils are moved from open wooden bins and trays and placed into metal storage cabinets, then arranged by locality, taxon and skeletal element.
Dundas, now the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Cal State Fresno, continues to work on – and bring his students to – the Berkeley collections.
1993-2016: Lilyanne Clark is the beloved UC Berkeley staff employee who worked in the tower for 23 years. She split her time between the elevator and tiny one-person office on the ground level. On the Campanile's 100th birthday in 1915, a Berkeleyside article was written about her.
1997: “The Campanile Movie,” a short film by alumnus Paul Debevec, premieres at a Los Angeles computer graphics convention, and its novel virtual-cinematography techniques are used for the 1999 major motion picture The Matrix. Debevec’s 1996 Ph.D. thesis demonstrated Façade, a new image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photorealistic architectural models from photographs. His film used 20 still photos of the tower and campus taken from different angles.
1998: An animal-rights protester scales the Campanile and hangs on a platform off the south face for eight days. His climb is made with a rope dropped by his allies on the observation deck. Five of them, barricaded in the tower, are arrested. The object of the protests is the use of animals in campus experiments.
Early 2000s:New research tools, such as stable isotope analysis, are used on the Rancho La Brea and McKittrick fossils to learn about topics including the diet of fossil species and tooth growth rates. Among the researchers from campus and beyond is Robert Feranec, a Berkeley graduate student who today is a curator at the New York State Museum.
2002-2004: The Campanile closes for renovations, including an elevator upgrade, on March 2, 2002. It reopens for weekday visits in early 2003, but stays closed weekends until Big Game 2004. Carillon music continues to be played three times daily.
As part of the renovation, the west clock gets an overhaul. Steeplejack Jim Phelan, whose father, sister and nephew also have scaled the tower to carry out repairs, removes the clock’s heavy minute hand and shaft so that a repairman can dismantle the inside mechanism. The tower’s four 17-foot-diameter clocks remain among the largest and oldest timepieces in Northern California.
Aug. 23, 2003: At the 6th Berkeley Carillon Festival, the world premiere of “Alignments” helps launch an increasing number of new compositions that will debut at UC Berkeley for carillon and live, amplified instruments. Written by David Wessel, then-director of the campus’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, and performed with University Carillonist Jeff Davis, the piece features combined carillon and computer-generated sounds. Wessel died in 2014.
2006: The tower’s La Brea fossils are introduced to the world when the University of California Museum of Paleontology database goes online. As a result, interest in the museum collections, including the tower fossils, experiences a big jump. Researchers from many universities, including Occidental College, UCLA and the University of Iowa, begin visiting the campus to work with the fossils, and many publish their findings.
Fall 2006:The first student-led course on playing the carillon is introduced. “Learning to Play the Sather Tower Carillon” remains a popular part of the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program. For University Carillonist Jeff Davis, training a new generation of carillonists has been a top priority, along with composing. Davis taught 15 to 20 students each semester, and 10 to 15 more students are in the DeCal classes. His teaching program is the most extensive at a U.S. university with a bell tower.
2009: The tower, showing signs of weathering, is closed for several months for a major deferred-maintenance project. Scaffolding goes up, and a giant crane is employed; projects include waterproofing and repairs to the lantern, spire, and cracked and worn exterior tiles.
2010-2011: In the lab of integrative biology professor Leslea Hlusko, a team of undergraduates led by Ph.D. candidate Oliver Rizk improves the Campanile’s La Brea tar pit collection by organizing, cleaning and studying a large subset of the remains of the dire wolf, an extinct carnivorous mammal. For Rizk, whose dissertation research was on cranial variation in domestic dog breeds, working with the fossils and mentoring six undergrads helps prepare him to be a biology instructor at the University of Southern California. The team’s work is presented at a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting.
Currently, Hlusko is part of a research project led by Sabrina Sholts, curator at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. They are exploring the microscopic anatomy of tissue in the dire wolf fossils, some from the tower’s La Brea tar seep collection.
2013: The cost to go to the top of the Campanile increases from $2 to $3 (general admission for people ages 18-64) and $1 to $2 (Cal alumni, visitors age 3-17, seniors age 65 and over). UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff as well as children ages 2 and under continue to enjoy free admission.
Summer 2014: In time for the Campanile’s 100th birthday in 2015, its esplanade – the terraces, trees, lawns and staircases surrounding the tower – gets an overhaul. Few repairs had ever been done to the outdoor space, also designed by John Galen Howard. The aging decorative brick paving is pulled up and replaced, granite strips are put where redwood headers had deteriorated, the 54 London plane trees get check-ups, a missing piece of the Mitchell Fountain – a decorative sea creature fountainhead – is recreated at a Berkeley foundry and installed, and Lincoln’s tarnished bust is cleaned.
Sept. 17, 2014: At the suggestion of the Black Staff and Faculty Organization, the inspirational song “Lift Ev’ry Voice” by James Weldon Johnson is played on the massive carillon at noon by University Carillonist Jeff Davis as an ad hoc chorus sings it beneath the tower. The group chose the activity in response to results of a campus climate survey that indicated a feeling of exclusion running among the campus’s African American community. “To have pride in your culture is very important,” observes participant Todd McFerren, a campus electrician who first learned the anthem in preschool.
2015: As the Campanile’s centennial year began, special banners flew, a website for the 100th launched, commemorative merchandise arrived in the student store, and a series of special events kicked off with a Jan. 25 carillon concert and a Feb. 3 new media light show and musical performance based on seismic movements occurring below the campus on the Hayward Fault.
April 20, 2015: On Cal Day, UC Berkeley's open house for 40,000 visitors, members of the Bay Area-based vertical dance group BANDALOOP turn the high, granite walls of the Campanile into their dance floor. At 2 p.m. and again at 4, with the hands of the Sather Tower clock set to 6:30, out of the way of rigging lines, the colorfully costumed aerial artists descended from the top of the 307-foot-high structure, performing graceful choreography on its north and west faces.
Dec. 2016: Two Peregrine Falcons were observed setting up a territory on top of the Campanile. After finding a makeshift nest on a sandbag in March 2017, a temporary nest box was installed to encourage a successful nesting effort. A group of scientists formed Cal Falcons to continually monitor and take care of the falcons, complete with a live webcam!
2018: The cost to go to the top of the Campanile increases from $3 to $4 (general admission for people ages 18-64) and $2 to $3 (Cal alumni, visitors age 3-17, seniors age 65 and over). UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff as well as children ages 2 and under continue to enjoy free admission.
2019: Credit cards are finally accepted at the Campanile, after a decades-old cash-only policy.
2021: The cost to go to the top of the Campanile increases from $4 to $5 (general admission for people ages 18-64) and $3 to $4 (Cal alumni, visitors age 3-17, seniors age 65 and over). UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff as well as children ages 2 and under continue to enjoy free admission.