Brandeis University administration building, Waltham, MA, circa 1948

About this postcard

A two-story building with a steep roof and three dormer windows stands behind a white picket fence, its brick gateposts topped with stone spheres. Bare trees and evergreens surround it in what looks like winter or early spring. The caption names it as the administration building of Brandeis University, which opened in Waltham in 1948 on the grounds of the former Middlesex University, a small veterinary and medical school. The new university was nonsectarian but Jewish-sponsored, named for Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, and in its first years it used the older buildings and grounds it inherited. The formal fence and gateposts come from that earlier campus rather than from the university itself.