At the time of North Hall’s construction, another building on campus already bore that name. Opened in the 1860s and not demolished until 1949, the previous structure was used as a science facility and library and was located on the Pentacrest. The present North Hall was built to house University High School, an experimental school founded in 1916. Until it closed in 1972, the school’s core faculty of graduate students provided an evolving, progressive curriculum to children from Iowa City and its nearby environs. Now home to the School of Social Work, North Hall has a small café, Wild Bill’s, that employs and benefits persons with disabilities. The story of Bill Sackter, after whom the café is named, was the subject of a television movie, Bill, starring Mickey Rooney.
An unpretentious and relatively utilitarian building, North Hall continues Main Campus North’s string of red-brick buildings designed by Proudfoot, Bird and Rawson. With its modest entrance bay and the restriction of detailing to limestone quoins, it is also one of the least ornamented. Both the upper and lower entrances are crowned by plaques announcing the building’s former life as a school, and North Hall as a whole has a reticence in keeping with that history. One whimsical and enigmatic touch, a pair of doubled X’s, is executed in brickwork on the east façade.