LeBow Opens New Building
Last Thursday, Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business celebrated the official opening of its new home: the Gerri C. LeBow Hall. Standing at 12 stories tall, and with 177,500 square feet of space, the Gerri C. LeBow Hall is one of the largest academic buildings on Drexel’s campus. The first four floors have been open for students since the beginning of the fall semester, and the rest of the building will be open by December. A Starbucks in the nearby Pearlstein building will move into the LeBow building by the end of the fall semester.
The building was made possible by a donation from financier and corporate executive Bennett S. LeBow, an alumnus of Drexel who graduated in 1960. The building was named after his late wife. Bennett S. LeBow gave Drexel $45 million in 2010 toward the $92-million dollar building. That gift stands as the 12th largest gift from a single donor ever given to a business school in the US, and LeBow is the single largest benefactor of Drexel. LeBow believes his business success came as a result of his experience as a student at Drexel, saying: “I know first-hand the passion and hunger in LeBow to provide a superior education to students and I am delighted to do what I can to make its vision a reality.”
The new building contains graduate and undergraduate classrooms, a conference center, a 300-seat auditorium, and a 100-seat lecture hall on the lower floors. The upper floors house faculty offices, group study rooms and seminar rooms. The building will also host a closed executive MBA Alumni Lounge, the Laurence A. Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, and a finance trading lab. The rooms on the lower floors of Gerri C. LeBow Hall are arranged around a central five-story atrium. For the environmentally friendly at Drexel, the building is also Green Globe certifiable and has a green roof.
