After 56 years of housing various ISU services, it’s time to say goodbye to the quaint Fisher-Nickell Hall.

The small building is situated across the street from the Oak-Elm residence hall and stands in stark contrast to the towering Hixson-Lied Student Success Center built next to it. Fisher-Nickell is scheduled for demolition Thursday, to make room for landscaping and a service area, consisting of a parking lot, delivery zone and a Dumpster, University Architect Dean Morton said.

“That was always in the design from the beginning – we knew it would be removed,” Morton said. “It would have been removed at the beginning of construction, if the Alumni Association hadn’t needed it.”

The building was constructed in 1952, and was originally built to house home management courses, said Charles Frederiksen, former director of the Department of Residence.

“It was for women, to teach them how to manage a home. They were required to buy all of their groceries and to make all of their meals,” Frederiksen said.

He said the course even brought babies into the home for the women to care for. The home management course lasted for a quarter of the school year, during which women would live in one of several home management houses, including Fisher-Nickell. At the end of the six-week course, the women would return to the residence halls or wherever they had been living before.

“It was really an applied laboratory of home living. And they had an adviser, usually a grad student, who lived in as kind of the house mother of the building,” Frederiksen said.

Warren Madden, vice president for business and finance, lived in the basement of one of these home management houses in 1960. His wife, Beverly, was one of the teachers for the home management course. He said there were usually about 12 women in each house who were graded on how well they were able to run the house. The women took turns making meals for everyone in the house, and Madden said he got to taste a wide variety of different dishes while he lived there.

“Nobody wanted to serve the same thing someone else had served, so we had some interesting meals,” he said.

At that time, Madden said all of the women at Iowa State had a curfew and had to be back in their houses or residence halls by 10 p.m. weeknights. They were given a few extra hours on the weekends, but Madden said it serves as a reminder of the sweeping cultural changes that have occurred since then.

“At that period, the expectations were they would be wives of corporate executives. Part of the program was to teach them the management social skills to support a husband,” Madden said. “The world’s changed a great deal in the 50 years since then. That was a different time and place.”

Frederiksen said when the home management course was eventually eliminated, Fisher-Nickell was turned into temporary office space for the dean of education while Lagomarcino Hall was being renovated. It was then used for student housing for a number of years, until it became the temporary home of the ISU Alumni Association a couple of years ago.

In July, the ISU Alumni Association moved into the newly constructed Alumni Center, on Beach Avenue and near the Iowa State Center. The official dedication for the new building is scheduled for Oct. 25.