Columbia University

Columbia University

The intellectual pulse of New York beats here, in this small, somewhat sheltered intellectual colony on the northernmost stretches of the Upper West Side, a scholarly Valhalla. One of the finest research institutions (and liberal arts colleges) in the United States, Columbia was founded in 1754 as King's College (Queen's College, across the Hudson, became Rutgers) and moved to the present location in 1897, hoping to escape the crowded urban tumult that characterized the lower Manhattan of the nineteenth century. Today, Columbia is less an outpost of civilization in the countryside, and more the last outpost of an idyllic academic ideal in an ever-expanding, ever-transforming cityscape. The campus is, indeed, gorgeous, a true model of what urban college life could be. The architecture is a diverse but coherent mix of Beaux-Arts, Neo-classical, Italian Renaissance, and Modern, with buildings arranged intuitively around the large open plaza that sweeps through campus from Broadway to Amsterdam. (Though the school has spilled, over the decades, well beyond the central blocks, most University life centers around the area between 114th and 120th streets, between Broadway and Amsterdam). Within these quads, Lowe Library is indubitably the most impressive edifice, and now houses mostly administrative and academic offices. The school boasts 20,000 graduate and undergraduate students, and many of the most prestigious programs of study in the country. The surrounding neighborhood, once a kind of No Man's Land between Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and the northern Upper West Side, has in recent years taken on its own, distinctively collegiate atmosphere--plenty of good, affordable grub, bars on every block, some of the best bookstores, record stores and cafes in the city, and just blocks from the unrefined northern swaths of Riverside Park.