[5] The eight pedestals contain the inscriptions "The Hall of Fame / for Great Americans / by wealth of thought / or else by mighty deed / they served mankind / in noble character / in world-wide good / they live forevermore".

Beneath each bust is a bronze tablet bearing the name of the person commemorated, significant dates, achievements, and quotations.

[18] Next to the Hall of Fame is a bust of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat and military officer who fought in the American Revolutionary War.

[16][22] Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of NYU, proposed the Hall of Fame in the late 1890s to conceal a retaining wall for the Gould Memorial Library, which was exposed because the site sloped steeply downward to the west.

Hence it was agreed that admission to this Hall of Fame should be controlled by a national body of electors, who might, as nearly as possible, represent the wisdom of the American people.

[34][35] When the Hall of Fame was completed, it was so widely known that The New York Times regularly reported on nominations and elections, even detailing how many votes each nominee received.

[54] The next year, writer Robert Underwood Johnson was appointed as the Hall of Fame's second director, following the death of MacCracken, his immediate predecessor.

[50][60][61] The board also enacted stricter inclusion criteria: nominees were only considered if they had been dead for at least 25 years, and three-fifths of electors had to agree on induction.

[61][62] The electors had been concerned that "zealous partisans and relatives" would attempt to nominate individuals of "temporary vogue" shortly after their deaths.

[86] Following Johnson's death later that year, journalist John Huston Finley was appointed as the Hall of Fame's director.

[94][95] The Hall of Fame's electors switched back to a majority vote for the 1945 election, when four men were selected: Booker T. Washington, Sidney Lanier, Walter Reed, and Thomas Paine.

[101] Ralph Washington Sockman, the pastor of Christ Church United Methodist in Manhattan, became the hall's sixth director after Angell died in 1949.

[104] Six people were selected in 1950: Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Graham Bell, Josiah Willard Gibbs, William C. Gorgas, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

[122][123] Ten people, including Orville Wright, failed to get a sufficient number of votes and were automatically re-nominated for the next election.

[130] Orville Wright was finally selected for the Hall of Fame in 1965, along with Jane Addams, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Sylvanus Thayer.

Urban planner Robert Moses wrote in 1971 that the previous election had happened largely without fanfare and that the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission did not even mention the Hall of Fame in its reports.

[21] Four additional honorees (Louis D. Brandeis, George Washington Carver, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John Philip Sousa) were elected in November 1973, bringing the total number of inductees to 99.

[154][155] Funding for the Hall of Fame ceased nearly entirely after the United States Bicentennial in 1976, and the agreement between NYU and CUNY expired around the same time.

[157] That year, officials in New Jersey rejected a plan to relocate the Hall of Fame to Liberty State Park.

[130] DASNY had allocated $2 million to fix the leaking roof and the walkway in 1981, though the National Endowment for the Arts rejected BCC's request for a $37,000 grant to repair the Hall of Fame.

To accommodate additional honorees, Rourke proposed expanding the Hall of Fame into the Gould Library, as well as displaying short video clips instead of busts.

[168] In 2000, Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer offered a matching grant of $500,000 to fund further renovations, as well as the four unexecuted busts.

[172] In August 2017, following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, New York governor Andrew Cuomo ordered that the busts of Confederate States Army generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson be removed.

[61][179][b] In addition, only people who had made a "major contribution to the economic, political, or cultural life of the nation" were considered for nomination.

[182] Electors included "the most respected writers, historians, and educators of their day, along with scores of congressmen, a dozen Supreme Court justices, and six Presidents".

[149][180] Although no elections have taken place since then, the rules were changed in 1979 so that art, business and labor, government, humanities, and science were all split into their own categories.

[26] The following people were among those nominated at least once but not elected:[209] Among nominees who were rejected, some never received any votes, including American Revolution militia officer Paul Revere.

[56] Several nominees have been rejected multiple times, including Roman Catholic saint Elizabeth Seton, poet Joyce Kilmer,[56] and politician Horace Greeley.

[210] Some of the eventual honorees were rejected several times before they were selected, including Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and James Monroe.

As one writer, Richard Rubin, said: It was a truly democratic institution — anyone could nominate a candidate, admission would be free, and although NYU served as a steward, raising funds and running the elections, the whole thing was technically the property of the American people.