Few New York streets match the drama of Morningside Drive, which runs along the west side of Morningside Park. The park, unlike any other in the city, slopes steeply downward to the east, providing Morningside Drive with a mountaintop like view out over the Harlem plain.

The drive is lined by some distinguished buildings. One laments the infelicitous alterations of St. Luke’s Hospital over the years, though enough of Ernest Flagg’s first great building, at 113th Street, remains to leave no doubt that this was one of the turn-of-the-century’s most exciting buildings in New York. At 114th Street stands one of the stateliest churches in the city, the Roman Catholic Eglise de Notre-Dame, built in 1914 to the designs of Cross & Cross. Like the nearby Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Notre Dame was never completed. So although we admire the majestic Corinthian columns of the portico, we miss the dome and the figure sculpture in the pediment that, had they been executed, could have made this the most beautiful church in Manhattan.

To the north of the church stands a palisade of exuberantly ornamented apartment houses designed by Schwartz & Gross, a firm notable for its speculative apartment buildings. Such buildings often were the handiwork of Jewish and Italian-American architects who had not had the resources to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and never fit into the social network of architects who enjoyed prize commissions for civic buildings or tycoons’ mansions. Instead, such architects slathered the facades of their buildings with unschooled imitations of Beaux-Arts ornamentation that, though condemned by period critics, formed the sprightly fabric of Manhattan neighborhoods, and seek their recognition as a superior form of “background” architecture that lends to neighborhoods like Morningside Heights the urban magic that masterpieces like Columbia University alone would not provide. The apartments from 114th to 116th streets – Cathedral Court, La Touraine, and Mont Ceris – date from 1904-5.

Across the drive at 116th Street is the monument to Carl Schurz, from 1913. The sculptor Karl Bitter and the architect Henry Bacon created this impressive ensemble, comprising a bronze statue of Schurz, a granite exedra, and a group of bronze reliefs facing onto a small plaza. From here one also enjoys the best lookout to the east across the city.

Columbia contributes to the drive at 116th Street, where we find the university president’s house, built in 1912. This was designed by William Kendall, the partner in McKim, Mead & White who took over the Columbia job following the death in 1909 of Charles McKim. For decades the house was that of Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia’s president-for life from 1902 to 1945. Later, Dwight Eisenhower served as the school’s president before moving to another presidential residence, in Washington, D.C.

One glance at Morningside Park’s dramatic descent, and you know why this neighborhood is called the Heights. We visit the Heights to see Columbia and St. John the Divine. Though they are wonderful, the rest of the Heights – Manhattan’s quintessential Beaux-Arts neighborhood – is wonderful, too, as Morningside Drive amply testifies.