1927, due to the pressures of a growing post-war student body, NYU ejected commercial tenants to use the space for academic purposes. Samuel Colt developed the revolver and Samuel Morse invented the telegraph; John William Draper in 1840 took the first photograph in the United States in the original Main Building that the present structure replaced. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman lived and taught and privately lectured there, Winslow Homer painted there, and architects Alexander Jackson Davis and Richard Morris Hunt had offices there. New York University