Why Columbia University matters.
Columbia University is a historic academic campus where Morningside Heights' intellectual character meets formal quadrangles, terraced lawns and a dense concentration of architecture devoted to teaching, research and scholarship.
Set along Broadway near West 116th Street and just steps from Barnard College, the Morningside campus occupies a high Manhattan plateau between Riverside Park and Morningside Park, with College Walk forming its principal east-west pedestrian axis. Broad stairways, granite terraces, lawns and brick-and-limestone academic buildings organize the central grounds around a sequence of elevated courts, giving the university a spatial order distinct from the surrounding street grid. South Lawn opens a long central vista through parallel academic ranges, with pedestrian paths crossing its green panels and converging on the elevated center of campus. College Walk carries the former line of West 116th Street through the grounds, preserving a direct urban passage across a campus whose interior courts otherwise separate themselves strongly from Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. The result is an unusually coherent Manhattan academic precinct where topography, axial planning, terraces, lawns and dense institutional architecture create a campus legible as both an enclosed university setting and a substantial piece of the surrounding neighborhood.
What defines Columbia University.
Columbia University is best known for evolving from the colonial King's College into one of the oldest universities in the United States through more than 270 years of institutional change across New York City. King George II granted its royal charter in 1754, and first president Samuel Johnson began instruction with eight students in a schoolhouse connected to Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Early students included John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and Robert R. Livingston, placing the young college within the generation that subsequently shaped the American republic. The institution opened a medical school under Samuel Bard in 1767, and three years later it awarded the first M.D. degree in the American colonies. Instruction stopped in 1776 during the Revolutionary War, and College Hall subsequently functioned as a military hospital as British forces occupied New York. The institution reopened in 1784 under the new name Columbia College, followed in 1787 by a revised charter creating the private board of trustees under which the university still operates. Columbia moved from Lower Manhattan to 49th Street and Madison Avenue in 1857 as its academic scope widened, adding the School of Law in 1858 and the School of Mines in 1864. President Seth Low led another relocation in 1896, moving Columbia 60 blocks north to Morningside Heights as the trustees formally authorized the Columbia University name. McKim, Mead & White planned the new campus, making the move one of the decisive physical and institutional expansions in Columbia's history.
Twentieth-century Columbia expanded its influence through professional education and scientific research that produced major institutions and discoveries far beyond its undergraduate college. Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer proposed a journalism school in 1903, and his financial gift supported the Columbia Journalism School, which admitted its first class of 79 students in 1912 under director Talcott Williams; the first Pulitzer Prizes followed in 1917. Physics developed another consequential strand when John R. Dunning began constructing a cyclotron in Pupin Hall in 1936, followed by nuclear-fission research involving Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, George Pegram, Harold Urey and other Columbia scientists. Federal support arrived after Albert Einstein sent President Franklin D. Roosevelt a letter prompted by Szilard and fellow physicists, and Columbia received a $6,000 federal contract for atomic-energy research. Fermi and Szilard pursued neutron-chain-reaction work using graphite, and Dunning's group developed gaseous diffusion for uranium separation, placing Columbia within the scientific origins of the Manhattan Project. Postwar physics produced another sequence of advances: Columbia researchers developed the maser, investigated quantum electrodynamics and demonstrated in 1964 that the muon neutrino differed from the electron neutrino, work for which Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics. Across all fields, 88 people associated with Columbia as alumni, faculty, researchers or administrators have received Nobel Prizes during their careers. The university entered another physical chapter in 2016 with the dedication of its 17-acre Manhattanville campus, master planned by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and conceived as Columbia's largest expansion since the Morningside move.
How Columbia University fits.
Columbia University works as the anchor for a Morningside Heights outing connecting an unfinished American cathedral, twentieth-century religious activism and the national memorial built for Ulysses S. Grant.
Begin at Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where an 11.5-acre site was acquired in 1887 before George Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge won the architectural competition in 1891 with a scheme combining Romanesque, Byzantine and Gothic forms. Bishop Henry Codman Potter laid the cornerstone on December 27, 1892, and the first services took place in the crypt in 1899. Eight immense granite columns arrived from Maine in 1903 to support the eastern end, followed in 1909 by Rafael Guastavino's tiled dome above the Crossing. Ralph Adams Cram assumed architectural leadership in 1911, shifting later construction toward Gothic design, and the full length of the cathedral was consecrated in 1941 one week before the attack on Pearl Harbor again halted construction. Continue to Riverside Church, conceived by John D. Rockefeller Jr. for minister Harry Emerson Fosdick after Fosdick's theological conflict with Protestant fundamentalism and his departure from First Presbyterian Church. Construction began in 1927, and the first service took place on October 5, 1930 inside a complex modeled on Chartres Cathedral. Its 392-foot, 20-story tower contains the 74-bell Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon, whose bourdon weighs 20 tons. Riverside subsequently became a major platform for religious and civic speech: Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” address from its pulpit, and Nelson Mandela spoke there during an interfaith celebration following his arrival in the United States. Conclude at General Grant National Memorial, created after Ulysses S. Grant's death in 1885 and the Grant family's selection of Riverside Park as his burial site. The Grant Monument Association organized an international fundraising campaign that drew 90,000 contributors and raised more than $600,000, then selected John H. Duncan through an architectural competition. His granite-and-marble mausoleum was completed in 1897, and more than one million people attended the April 27 dedication and parade. Two red Wisconsin-granite sarcophagi hold Ulysses and Julia Dent Grant beneath the rotunda, and Allyn Cox's mosaics depicting Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Appomattox were installed during 1965 and 1966. The progression moves from more than a century of cathedral construction through Rockefeller and Fosdick's institution of religious activism and culminates at Duncan's immense memorial to Grant, connecting architecture, faith, national conflict and public commemoration across Morningside Heights.
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