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: Morningside Heights
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 […]
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.” […]
Now available | Photo album collections ready for researchers
The University Archives is working hard to bring more and more of its collections out of hiding and make them available to researchers. As part of that effort we recently published finding aids for three Columbia photograph album collections: two featuring scenes of the Morningside campus from the 1930s and 1940s and one from President […]