Weinberg Lens: Athletic Atlas
“Jim” has stood guard outside Patten Gymnasium for 100 years, all eight feet of his swaggering musculature in bronze, holding his winged helmet like a trophy.
Jim and his partner “Pat” are the creations of Hermon Atkins MacNeil, a Paris-trained sculptor who worked in the Beaux Arts style and contributed to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. MacNeil completed the sculptures for the original Patten Gym, which was built in 1909 (and then razed and rebuilt in 1940). When the works first appeared in 1916, students quickly replaced the not-so-catchy names “Physical Development” and “Intellectual Development” with the punny “Pat and Jim.”