London, GB | Formerly of New York, Buenos Aires, Fife, and the Western Cape. | Saoránach d’Éirinn.

NYU – Old & New

As we all know, New York University is a slighlty scattered urban institution based around Washington Square. It likes to bill itself as “having the city as your campus” which , of course, is a cheap cop-out for not having a real campus. Being ever-progressive, NYU has torn down all their historic buildings such as University Hall (seen above) on Washington Square.

What is not very well known is that New York University, founded as a bourgeois alternative to the then-aristocratic Columbia, decided to build a new university campus in the late 1890’s designed by McKim, Mead, and White. Columbia had just done the same thing, moving from Midtown around St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Morningside Heights, and NYU apparently felt the need to keep up with the Joneses.

NYU sort of foundered mid-century, and by the 1970’s didnt have the money to pay for the upkeep of the monumental campus in the Bronx. It sold it to the City, which maintains it today as Bronx Community College. The campus is still occasionally used in films, most significantly as Princeton in A Beautiful Mind (which used the nearby Manhattan College – my father’s alma mater – as Harvard).

Colour photos from Lee Sandstead.

And a map to illustrate the moves to and fro.

Published at 5:52 pm on Monday 13 September 2004. Categories: Architecture.
Leave a comment

NAME (required)

EMAIL (required)

WEBSITE (not required)

COMMENT

Home | About | Contact | Paginated Index | Twitter | Facebook | RSS/Atom Feed
andrewcusack.com | © Andrew Cusack 2004-present (Unless otherwise stated)