When East Campus opened, students appreciated its expansive suite space, commanding views, and spacious townhouses, which were a relieving contrast to cramped conditions in much of the rest of the university's housing.

Donor George Delacorte, for whom the building's central courtyard is formally named, said of his former room at the university "we had two nails on the wall for a closet...now I've paid for a dormitory where boys loll around in marble bathtubs."

[6] An inspection in 1987 revealed that the tiled exterior which had earned the building accolades had begun to peel off its facade, and a large chunk collapsed into its courtyard in February 1988, prompting the university to order its recladding, a $15 million project handled by the architects Gruzen Samton Steinglass, in the campus' traditional red brick and limestone.

Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of East Campus: "Consider a building that has to be vandal-proof, constructed of maintenance-free materials, with every surface resistant to neglect and abuse, where violation of design and function must be an anticipated fact, along with defacement and petty thievery - a place where surveillance is a necessity and the population is transient.

"[9] East Campus was home to writer and musician Michael Azerrad, US presidential adviser and television news personality George Stephanopoulos, journalist Olivier Knox,[10] actors Matthew Fox, Julia Stiles and Rider Strong, digital media scholar Peter Lunenfeld,[11] former Lionsgate Films president Erik Feig,[12] and Olympic gold medalist Cristina Teuscher.