Founder's Hall (Rockefeller University) Founder's Hall (Rockefeller University) Founder's Hall was the first building built on the campus of The Rockefeller University (formerly The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research ) at 66th Street and York Avenue, in Manhattan, New York City. Built between 1903 and 1906, it represents an instance of one of John D. Rockefeller's largest scale efforts at philanthropy, and housed the nation's first major biomedical research laboratory. Construction costs for Founders, which included an Animal housing facility and a powerhouse were $276,000. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974. The building is now mainly used for school offices. Founder's
John Sterling Rockefeller Yale University, where he was a member of the Scroll and Key Society. He graduated from Yale in 1928. In July 1928 Rockefeller, his Yale classmate Charles B. G. Murphy, and the Canadian collector and taxidermist Allan Moses went to Africa on an ornithological expedition to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. The survey was funded by a grant of approximately $150,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation. The main goal of the expedition was to find and collect the rare Grauer's broadbill, which was known only by one 1908 specimen in the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in England,