Pace University
One Pace Plaza
Pace University
Founded in 1906 as a small private accounting school – its first class including just 13 students, meeting in a rented room – Pace has grown into a major university that prepares students for a wide range of professions. Although it boasts a law school in White Plains, an environmental center in Pleasantville, and international programs on four continents, Pace has never lost sight of its roots: a school offering innovation and opportunity to a student body drawn from the strivers among each new generation of New Yorkers.
On “Newspaper Row”
Pace University has been located near Park Row – once known as “Newspaper Row” because of the many newspaper headquarters there – since the Pace brothers rented their first classroom at 154 Nassau Street, home of the old New York Tribune.
The Pace Brothers
Homer St. Clair Pace, preparing for a certified public accountant exam, found “very little and very poor instruction along these lines” – an extraordinary lack here in the country’s financial center. Seeing and opportunity, Homer and his brother Charles borrowed $600 to open a one-classroom business school. Pace University – that classroom’s descendant, now expanded into multiple campuses, not to mention Pace global centers in China, Brazil and Italy – recently celebrated its hundredth anniversary.
Student Body
Pace’s student body has been effortlessly diverse from its beginnings. The first class of 13 included three women – 17 years before the constitutional amendment granted women the vote in 1920 – and students of color joined the Pace community early in its history. Over the decades, countless Pace students – including newcomers from across the country and around the world – have been the first in their family to attend college.
Marker is at the intersection of Spruce Street and Park Row, on the left when traveling south on Spruce Street.
Courtesy hmdb.org
