The Heights

Deadlines are now bearing down on me with such pinpoint precision and blinding intensity, the only thing I can rationally do right now is procrastinate. So here goes.

 The other day a former professor invited me to visit her class next week, as Mark Naison, the author of White Boy, is scheduled to be a guest lecturer. This reminded me of the very short paper I wrote for her a couple of years ago on the 1968 student rebellion at Columbia University, and the fun I had doing that paper, which required some archival research into the papers of a number of Columbia professors and administrators of that time. In any event, the paper also led me to a neat web site, Morningside Heights-net. Though I’m not certain whether or not the site is being actively maintained or updated anymore - the most recent additions seem to be a few years old - I found it to be a good place to go for tidbits of local history and commentary on Morningside Heights.

Having lived and/or worked in and around the neighborhood for quite some time now, I especially enjoyed looking at the photographs and pictures of the neighborhood slowly emerging around Columbia, which had relocated from mid-town Manhattan (near present-day Rockefeller Center, apparently) to the Heights in 1897. I found the pictures of building plans and proposals from the 1960s and 1970s especially interesting: the buildings tower above the landscape. Given that Morningside Heights is already at a naturally elevated point of Manhattan, these buildings would have allowed scholars, students, residents - or whomever they were intended for - to float above the city, way above the fray down below.

Some examples:

This is from a plan for East Campus, where what was eventually built - a 20-story dorm -  was fairly close to what was imagined. The current slab runs north-south; its residents overlook the Hudson River to the west and Morningside Park and Harlem to the east. 

(East Campus - Proposed)

 (East Campus - Built)

I.M. Pei proposed building matching towers across Columbia’s South Field, with an athletic center built underneath the field. This was proposed after the Columbia student rebellion of 1968 forced the cancellation of the notorious Morningside Gym project.  Reading up on the history of Pei’s proposed master plan for the campus, it seems that the only thing that came of it, apparently, was an underground gallery / classroom / lounge area that today connects Columbia’s architecture school, in Avery Hall, with its Sociology and History departments, in Fayerweather Hall. 

(IM Pei’s Plan for South Field - Never Built)

 I love this proposal, which would have placed gargantuan towers right behind the main campus of Teachers College, allowing it to loom over TC, Riverside Church, International House, and Grant’s Tomb. Supposedly, the towers would have housed TC’s students and faculty as well as low-income families, with the building in between housing the College library. I wonder about the kinds of shadows that building would have cast.

(TC Plan - never built) 

Columbia’s the dominant institution on Morningside Heights, and if you follow New York City news it’s been making attempts in recent years to move into Manhattanville - a neighborhood in West Harlem that was once a bustling wharf town but later came to house factories, warehouses, small businesses, and low-income families. Many of these businesses and families have been bought out; but there are a few establishments that are still there and are refusing to leave, impeding Columbia’s intentions to build a new campus there. No more looming towers; the plans seem to say: instead, inviting streets, trees, and open, transparent glass!

The future to come? 

I don’t want to comment on the plan, since in all honesty I’ve not studied with great care. However, along with the recent racial and anti-semitic incidents at Columbia and Teachers College, the university’s plan to move into Manhattanville was one of the points that instigate a recent 10-day hunger strike by Columbia students.

Columbia’s not yet attempted to get New York State to use the power of eminent domain to lay claim to the properties it has yet to acquire in Manhattanville, so that it can proceed with its expansion plan. It’s interesting to note that plans for Manhattanville have been around for quite some time now -there are a number of articles from the 1950s and 1960s detailing Columbia’s intentions to participate in the development of the neighborhood. Perhaps, too, the University is mindful of the fact that in 1968, despite using scrupulous legal arguments to justify and legitimize its efforts to build its gym in Morningside Park, it still wasn’t able to save it from student and community outrage.

(Morningside Gym - never built)