Throughout the year, we have celebrated Columbia’s 125 years in Morningside Heights, since classes started on the new campus in October 1897. But Columbia actually has a slightly longer history on this site: Columbia built its very first structure on the new grounds in 1892 while the Bloomingdale Asylum was still operational. Welcome to the […]
Tag: Columbia University
Before Morningside Heights: Columbia’s Second Home
Before moving to Morningside Heights in 1897, Columbia spent 40 years on a one-square block campus: from 49th to 50th Street and from Madison Avenue to Fourth (now Park) Avenue. While there are no traces of the old campus in midtown anymore, you can find a few artifacts from Columbia’s previous home that made the […]
The Benjamin Franklin Chair’s Big Day Out
Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger recently announced that he will be stepping down as Columbia University’s President on June 30, 2023. While most of us took the time after his announcement to look back on the past two decades of Bollinger’s administration, there is one “member” of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library who […]
A Dorm for Crew on “Cathedral Heights”
The first students to reside on the Columbia campus on Morningside Heights were members of the 1895 Varsity Crew Team. Just months after acquiring the land and two years before classes even started on the new site, the crew team was granted permission to use a house on the Bloomingdale Asylum grounds as training quarters. […]
Remembering the College Tavern
As Columbia marks 125 years in Morningside Heights, we look back to the early days in the neighborhood, before the subway reached this part of the island and when Broadway was known as “The Boulevard” (and was still unpaved). Back “when everything was new and bare, Mike’s tavern furnished a cozy retreat.” […]