Besides the cows grazing there, “the heights” – at the time, the place had no particular name – was home to just two small institutions: an orphanage and an asylum.

The only remaining building from that era is the charming redbrick house next to St. Paul's Chapel called Buell Hall, which is home to the Maison Française. As Columbia’s oldest building on its Morningside campus, it is a marker at the seam between the University’s two principal historical epochs. The first runs 143 years long, from Columbia’s founding as King’s College in the vestry of Trinity Church on Wall Street in 1754 until, after two moves north to stay ahead of the swelling city, it convened its first classes on the present campus in 1897. The second epoch is, of course, the century on Morningside Heights.

What is of paramount importance to Columbia’s campus in this second, or 20th-century, epoch is its design and realization by the period’s leading firm of architects, McKim, Mead & White. The firm has since established itself in the pantheon of American architecture, with the Morningside campus among its crowning achievements. Columbia is the largest collection of McKim, Mead & White buildings standing, several of which, including the neoclassical Low Memorial Library and the Renaissance-inspired St. Paul’s Chapel, are classified historical landmarks. Because the Morning- side campus was designed as a whole, rather than developed building by building over the years as were most universities, it is immediately apparent to visitors that Columbia has a distinct architectural character. GS’s Lewisohn Hall is just one among many examples of the Italian Renaissance styling that predominates on the symmetrically laid out central campus, which runs from 114th to 120th Streets between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

Even as Columbia was springing up on Morningside Heights, so too were Teachers College and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, both of which broke ground soon after Columbia did in the late 1890s. The area became a magnet for other institutions. As St. Luke’s Hospital, Barnard College, and Union Theological Seminary followed suit, turn-of-the-century newspaper reports hailed Morningside Heights as “America’s Acropolis” and the “Acropolis of the New World.”

Today, besides those institutions just mentioned, Morningside Heights is home to the Manhattan School of Music, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Riverside Church, International House, the InterChurch Center, Bank Street College of Education, St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School, and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to name only the neighborhood’s most visible residents. These institutions brought with them increasing numbers of people who, with the extension of the IRT subway line along Broadway in 1904, ignited residential development on Morningside Heights. This coincided with the period in the early 20th century when architects and contractors, pressured by the city’s booming population, were perfecting the design and construction of ever larger apartment buildings.

Morningside Heights consequently became Manhattan’s first neighborhood whose original residential dwelling was not the single-family home but the multi-family apartment house. Built to last, with spacious apartments and handsome entrances, these buildings imbue Morningside Heights with an understated pre-war grandeur that few other neighborhoods in Manhattan can match.

Once considered remote, Morningside Heights is now accessible by no less than five bus lines (M4, M5, M11, M60, and M104), a subway line (IRT 1/9), and of course New York’s ubiquitous yellow cabs. Lincoln Center and midtown Manhattan are now just 10 to 20 minutes from College Walk, Columbia’s central thoroughfare. Wall Street, on the island’s southern tip overlooking New York’s harbor, is a mere 30 minutes away by subway.