Cameron Indoor Stadium

A classic venue and the crown jewel of college basketball, Cameron Indoor Stadium originally opened in 1940 as Duke Indoor Stadium. Heading into the 2015–16 season, it has been the site of 832 men's basketball victories. More than a few of those victories have been influenced by the electric atmosphere within its Gothic halls.

Well before $2 million renovations in the 1980s, legend has it that it all began with a book of matches. For a town and a school founded on local tobacco fortunes, that seems a fitting way to start. On the cover of a matchbook, Eddie Cameron and Wallace Wade first sketched out the plan for Duke Indoor Stadium in 1935. The story may be a myth (the matchbook has never been found), but then the Indoor Stadium that emerged from those first scribblings lends itself to the propagation of myths.

For seven decades, spectators, players, and coaches have understood the unique magic of the Indoor Stadium. The building was dedicated to longtime Duke athletic director and basketball coach Eddie Cameron, a legend in his own right, on January 22, 1972. Then an unranked Duke team upset third-ranked North Carolina 76–74 after Robby West drove the length of the court to hit a pull-up jumper to win the game.

It's the intimacy of the arena, the unique seating arrangement that puts the wildest fans right down on the floor with the players. It's the legends that were made there, the feeling of history being made with every game. And it's something indescribable that comes from the building itself. No one who has experienced it will ever forget it.

Whether or not the matchbook story is true, it is a fact that the official architectural plans for the stadium were drawn up by the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, a self-made man, a poor boy who left school at 16 to apprentice himself as a draftsman to a local architect. In 1890, at the age of 21, he opened his own office and quickly rose to prominence in the Northeast. His designs for the mansions and estates of wealthy northeastern magnates brought him to the attention of James Buchanan Duke, the North Carolina tobacco baron. Duke commissioned the architect to design his New York town home during the early part of the century. In 1924 when Duke created the $40 million Duke Endowment that turned Trinity College into Duke University, he called on Trumbauer to design the new university campus. In recent years it has come to light that the plans for the campus, as well as designs for later buildings, including the stadium, were drawn up not by Trumbauer himself (although his name appeared on all the blueprints) but by his chief designer, Julian Abele, one of the nation's first African American architects.

The original design for the Indoor Stadium was significantly less grand than the one from which the building was actually constructed. That first plan called for 5,000 basketball "sittings," and even that number was considered extravagant, at least by Trumbauer, who originally had proposed 4,000 seats. In a letter to Duke president Dr. William P. Few, Trumbauer said: "For your information Yale has in its new gymnasium a basket ball [sic] court with settings for 1,600 ... I think the settings for 8,000 people is rather liberal ... the Palestra at the University of Pennsylvania seats 9,000." The original building was a domed structure with 16-feet steel ceiling spans and a 90-foot by 45-foot playing court.

As important as the size of the stadium was its external appearance. It was vital that the building be aesthetically integrated with the original West Campus buildings. For this reason stone was taken from the Duke quarry in nearby Hillsborough, where all the stone for the original campus had been found. The stone had to be laid in temperate weather. (In extremely cold temperatures, the mortar would freeze.)

Building on the stadium proceeded quickly and finished in nine months before it was officially opened on January 6, 1940. The final cost was $400,000, which Duke finished paying after the football team won the Sugar Bowl in 1945. Touring the building before the evening ceremony and subsequent game, local city officials were "speechless." Said Chamber of Commerce president Col. Marion B. Fowler, "It is so colossal and so wonderful ... This building will not only be an asset to the university but to the entire...