Accessible Elitism

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Columbia University boasts one of the finest urban campuses in America. It is certainly the finest in a classical style. Charles Follen McKim designed the master plan, as well as the principal early buildings. In a city that lacks a heritage of large-scale urban design, McKim’s plan stands out. By any measure, it’s brilliant. In a way that is very rare for New York, McKim’s plan worked with the varied topography of the site to create a multidimensional architectural experience.

Morningside Heights, the present site, is the third Manhattan location of Columbia’s campus. Like other old city institutions — New York Hospital, Brooks Brothers — Columbia kept moving uptown. The school began in the 1750s as King’s College, an Anglican institution that held its first classes in the vestry room of Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street. Shortly thereafter, King’s College moved to a campus along Park Place, west of Broadway. From that campus King’s College turned out its first stellar alumni, including two of the three authors of the “Federalist Papers” (Alexander Hamilton and John Jay), the author of the United States Constitution (Gouverneur Morris), and the author of the Erie Canal (DeWitt Clinton). After the Revolution, King’s College changed its name to Columbia College. While at the downtown campus, Columbia received from New York State a deed of remote land that had been occupied by Dr. David Hosack’s experimental, and failed, botanical garden. Columbia never built a campus on that site, however, choosing instead to be landlord first to a neighborhood of row houses, and eventually to Rockefeller Center.

Columbia did nonetheless move to Midtown. In the 1850s the school moved to the block bounded by 49th and 50th streets and Madison and Fourth avenues. It was a tight solution offering little opportunity for expansion. Seth Low became president of Columbia late in its Midtown tenure. The onetime mayor of Brooklyn, and future mayor of New York City, Low helped reconceive the institution as Columbia University. He also led the way to Morningside Heights in the 1890s, after acquiring the grounds of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum and hiring McKim, Mead & White to design a new campus at 116th Street.

Between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, 116th Street is now a cross-campus mall, “College Walk.” To its north stands the splendid Low Memorial Library, designed by McKim. Low built the library from his own funds, and dedicated it to his father, the China trade tycoon Abiel Low. One reaches the library via a broad, monumental stairway. Set into it is Daniel Chester French’s famous “Alma Mater.” Fountains, urns, and bronze lamp standards adorn the stairs and terraces. (Remember my dictum: A city can’t have too many urns.) The stairway leads not only to the doors of the colonnaded and domed library, but also to the campus behind and to the sides of the library. Here we see how McKim worked with the natural topography. Instead of fighting it, he used it to place the library on an Olympian pedestal, and to make the northern campus, which is not visible from down below, seem like an otherworldly preserve that reveals itself at first hesitatingly, as one ascends the stairs, then in the fullness of its classical glory. The effect is magical, especially in New York, where the grid works against scenic effects and controlled sequences, which we go to Central Park or Grand Central Terminal to experience.

In part, it’s just as McKim wanted it. The buildings perform like dancers at a quadrille. To the west of the library is McKim’s Earl Hall, formed like a Roman temple. It’s perfectly mated to St. Paul’s Chapel, on the opposite side of the library. McKim didn’t design the chapel, but the architect, I.N. Phelps Stokes, followed McKim’s guidelines while adding grace notes that make it one of the loveliest buildings in New York. McKim’s guidelines involved buildings of red brick accented and outlined with white limestone. The latter appears often in the form of rich window enframements and in rustication, or the cutting of stone with channels that create rhythm and texture on a façade. The major exception to the basic scheme is Low Library, which is all stone, as befits its pride of place in the plan. We see the guidelines at work in Mathematics Hall (north of Earl Hall), Havemeyer Hall (north of Mathematics), Avery Hall (north of the chapel), Fayerweather Hall (east of Avery), and so on. Then comes Uris Hall (home of the Business School), straight behind Low Library. Built in 1962, this galumphing modernist pile was a slap in the face of tradition. Other modernist buildings in other parts of the campus, the most egregious perhaps being the School of Law at the northeast corner of Amsterdam and 116th, are so awful they cast doubt on the value of an Ivy League education.

South of Low Library is an extension of the campus in which Butler Library (1931–34), designed by James Gamble Rogers, faces Low Library. Butler is a fine building, strong in itself but carefully designed so as not to compete with Low. But note that when Low Library and the north campus were built, there was no south campus, and 116th Street was not “College Walk” but a through city street. In an excellent essay on Columbia’s campus, the architectural historian Hilary Ballon noted “the considerable openness of the original campus to the city.” McKim wished for his campus to be a monumental civic space, not like the enclosed cloisters of the University of Chicago, designed to hold the city at bay. Nonetheless McKim was responsible for one of the unfortunate aspects of the campus design, namely the way his elevating the north campus creates the “fortress wall” effect along Broadway and Amsterdam, which serves to make the campus aloof from its surroundings. Later additions have made Columbia more, not less, insular.

Columbia, like New York University and other large city institutions, has a history of controversial relations with its surrounding neighborhood. New Yorkers dislike the way universities continually require more space, often displacing neighborhood functions and imposing inappropriately scaled buildings in neighborhood settings. Columbia, home for 250 years to greats from Alexander Hamilton to Lionel Trilling, should be an institution in which all New Yorkers take pride. Indeed, the city needs, and needs to grow closer to, its great research institutions. At least McKim’s campus bespoke openness to the city, an accessible elitism as opposed to the unfortunate arrogance too often expressed by the institutional buildings we at some point lost the knack of designing well.


The New York Sun

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