"Peter Cooper had one overriding motivation for making Cooper Union. Namely that he was going to return to the class from which he had come. Basically money and capital that he had made out of the industrial revolution he thought that his own money had been given to him as a trust to return back to the class form which he had emerged and so everything in the building was supposed to help the working class, the mechanics of New York And when he signed the deed of trust he still called himself a mechanic of New York and so there is quite clearly an identification that this was basically a working class college.
A Puck cartoon contrasting Cooper Union against public schools and libraries of the time.
"When the plans for Cooper Union were first announced basically it was a still a shell and over the years that Cooper took to make the building he gathered even more ideas and schemes that he thought should be appropriate to this educational incubator.
"In the 1830s Peter Cooper began to hatch this idea of some grand education mission. Basically it was a building which would house many different kinds of educational ideas that he'd thought about and his friends were recommending to him. It wasn't designed as a college as such but rather just a space in which there would be some kind of educational incubator for all kinds of ideas that, in other cities, might be housed in different buildings. So each floor was going to have different kinds of activities in it.
Frank Leslie's Illustrated on the various educational opportunities offered at Cooper Union.
"The most obvious model for which Peter Cooper hoped to achieve was a mechanics institute in which there would be lectures and other demonstrations of various technological processes but soon it kind of grew beyond what any mechanics institute could offer. He had an idea that there should be and enormous great hall in the basement of this building which would be basically the meeting plan for all political debate in New York city. And indeed as he developed the concept even further and as America was heading for the Civil War he thought that what an obvious first use for the Great Hall would be was to invite every senator from Washington up to New York City and they would sit down and basically stop America from heading towards a civil war. Indeed that's one of the meanings of the word union which was applied, that he really did hope that America could avoid the inevitable conflict he saw rolling towards him."
