Last Look - Bishop Lehr
For 63 years, the corner of 20th Street and 11th Avenue on the University of Northern Colorado campus has been the home to Bishop-Lehr Hall. Built in the early 1960s, the facility was home to the university’s Laboratory School — schools that popped up in the early 1900s as places where teachers and researchers developed instructional innovation. Generations of Greeley residents attended UNC’s Lab School and teacher education students trained to become classroom teachers.
With the university separating from the Laboratory School in 2002, the previously bustling classroom activity in the two-story, 124,000-square-foot building has long since faded. The hall has been underutilized for two decades and is no longer suitable as a teaching or learning environment. But its spirit will live on. The grounds Bishop-Lehr sits upon will be the new home for UNC’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. Teaching and learning will continue once again.
With the passage and signing of House Bill 1231, which provided the remaining funding necessary for the proposed College of Osteopathic Medicine, UNC will begin demolishing Bishop-Lehr Hall this summer. In its place will stand a new 101,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility that will house the university’s new college for medical education.
The absence of Bishop-Lehr Hall will certainly change the landscape of UNC’s West Campus and no doubt tug on the memories of the thousands of students, alumni, teachers and staff who walked its halls, immersed in teaching and learning. But what isn’t changing is the university’s deep commitment to providing innovative education and its promise to rise to a new challenge, this time to meet the community’s health care education and workforce needs.
