Columbia University dominates the area known as Morningside Heights, which is the hilly area from Cathedral Parkway (West 110th Street) to 125th Street. The university’s main campus extends from 114th to 120th Streets and was designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1897.

Many of the apartment buildings in this neighborhood are pre-war and are generally, in co-op buildings. The residents in this area are either local students who come and go with school semesters or the original New Yorkers who have lived in this neighborhood for most of their lives and don’t have any intentions of leaving it. The area is peaceful and serene and very close to mass transit and midtown. An express subway will take you no more than 20 min. to get to the other end of the city.

In recent years this neighborhood has also grown into a somewhat more vibrant and lively community. Many restaurants, bars, and coffee shops have brought their businesses here, drawing crowds on any given day and motivating other business owners to consider this newest extension of the Upper West Side. As a result the rents in the area have also increased and finding oversized apartments for a much less cost than 20 blocks down the road has become a rarity.

Several of the city’s most impressive landmarks, such as the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Columbia University and the Riverside Church, are in this district, which also has many fine buildings along Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. Columbia University dominates the area known as Morningside Heights, which is the hilly area from Cathedral Parkway (West 110th Street) to 125th Street. The university’s main campus extends from 114th to 120th Streets and was designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1897 with a large, terraced plaza to the south of the impressive, domed Low Memorial Library, named for Seth Low, a former mayor of Brooklyn and New York and president of the university.

The original campus was designed in Italian Renaissance style with limestone and red brick facades and cooper roofs. The university, however, has continually expanded and most subsequent additions, by many different architects, have not maintained as high a standard of design.

The university, the scene of famous student riots in 1968, originally was located close to City Hall downtown and then on a site close to Rockefeller Center, much of whose land was owned by the university until 1987.

Morningside Heights was the site of a Revolutionary War battle in 1776 and became the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in 1818 and the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum in 1838. Morningside Park was completed in 1887 and Riverside Park opened three years later. The second great landmark in this district is the Cathedral Church of St. John The Divine, which is on the east side of Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street and on which construction began in 1892 and is continuing. The architectural firm of Heins & LaFarge won a competition and the building’s apse, choir and crossing were completed in the architectural firm’s Byzantine-Romanesque design. In 1911, Ralph Adams Cram was brought in to revise the plan and his design was in the French Gothic style, but by the time of his death in 1942 only the nave and west front were completed although the west front entrance did not have the towers he designed. World War II halted construction, which was not resumed until 1979.

When completed, it will be the world’s largest cathedral, since St. Peter’s in Rome is not officially a cathedral. As it is, it is enormous and impressive and the site of many interesting services.

Nearby is another interesting church, the Iglise de Notre Dame Roman Catholic Church on the northwest corner of Morningside Drive and 114th Street. Designed by Daus & Otto in 1910, it has a rough stone replica of the grotto at Lourdes, France, behind its altar.

Very impressive is the fine building designed by Ernest Flagg for St. Luke’s Hospital on Morningside Drive between 113th and 114th Streets. Morningside Drive sits high on a bluff overlooking the very steep and not always secure Morningside Park where Columbia University once set off a major community controversy when it wanted to build a gymnasium in the park, a plan it ultimately abandoned. Across from Columbia University’s main entrance on Broadway, on the north side of 116th Street, is Barnard College, which was established as the undergraduate women’s college of the university by Frederick A. P. Barnard, a president of the university who died in 1899. Further north is Teacher’s College of Columbia University at 525 West 120th Street, whose early buildings from the 1890’s were designed by William A. Potter.

Institutions abound here such as the Jewish Theological Seminary at 3080 Broadway between 122nd and 123rd Streets, designed in 1930 by Gehron, Ross, Alley, and 1985 by Gruzen & Partners, and the Union Theological Seminary between Broadway and Claremont Avenues and 120th and 122nd Street, started in 1920, designed by Allen & Collens, and altered in 1952 by Collens, Willis & Beckonert, the Interchurch Center at 475 Riverside Drive between 119th and 120th Streets, built in 1958 and designed by Voorhees, Walker, Smith, Smith & Haines, the Manhattan School of Music (originally Juilliard) at 120 Claremont Avenue, which was completed in 1920 and designed by Donn Barber, with additions designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in 1931, and International House at 500 Riverside Drive north of 122nd Street, designed by Lindsay & Warren and completed in 1924. The area’s most visible landmark is the Riverside (Baptist) Church at 490 Riverside Drive between 120th and 122nd Streets, completed in 1930 and designed by Allen & Collens and Henry C. Pelton. Founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the building has a 392-foot-high tower with offices and the 74-bell Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon with a 20-ton tuned bass bell, both the largest in the world. The tower also has an observatory that overlooks the region and Grant’s Tomb directly across Riverside Drive. Grant’s Tomb was erected in 1897 and designed by John H. Duncan, who modeled it after Mausoleus’ tomb at Halicarnassus. In 1973, Pedro Silva and the CityArts Workshop created colorful mosaic benches around the memorial’s plaza.

A four-block stretch of very attractive apartment buildings line Riverside Drive from 120th to 116th Street where two superb, curved apartment buildings, designed by Schwartz & Gross and two of the most attractive on all of Riverside Drive, face each other, the Paterno at 440 Riverside Drive, which has a very large portico and driveway, and the Colosseum at 385 Riverside Drive. Together, they form an impressive approach from the drive to the main entrance to Columbia University as well as a handsome terminus to Claremont Avenue, one of the most attractive residential streets in the city, which runs north for several blocks from 116th Street. Other important buildings near Columbia include Public School 36 at 123 Morningside Drive at Amsterdam Avenue which was completed in 1967 and has a nice modern design by Frederick G. Frost Jr., and an attractive modern sculpture by William Tarr, and the Bank Street College of Education at 610 West 112th Street, completed in 1970 and designed by Harry Weese & Associates. The school began in Greenwich Village and this is one of the more attractive modern buildings in the neighborhood.

Perhaps the most interesting residential building in this area is the Hendrik Hudson apartment house at 380 Riverside Drive at 110th Street that was once one of the most distinguished on Riverside Drive with its great twin towers and entrance flanked by caryatids. The building, however, fell on hard times and became a rooming house before being converted to a cooperative.

The southern section of this district deteriorated considerably during the Depression, which curtailed the development of many sites on Broadway but not on West End Avenue, which extends northwards only to 107th Street where it meets Broadway, and Riverside Drive. In 1984, however, developer William Zeckendorf Jr., perhaps the most enlightened major real estate developer in the city of his era who pioneered major projects in many "borderline" areas, built the Columbia apartment house at 275 West 96th Street at Broadway. Designed by Liebman, Williams & Ellis, this very large and quite bold modern building was built on a site that had been considered by Alexander’s for a department store. The residential tower was such a dramatic vote of confidence in the area that many new handsome residential buildings were soon developed just to the south along Broadway leading to a major revival of interest in the area. (The West Side Urban Renewal Area, which stretched from 87th to 97th Streets along Columbus Avenue, had done much to improve the nearby area a decade before.)

Other important structures in the area include the very handsome First Church of Christ, Scientist, at 1 West 96th Street, completed in 1903 and designed by Carr?re & Hastings, Park West Village, a large red-brick apartment complex along Central Park West between 97th and 100th Streets, the former Towers Nursing Home at 2 West 106th Street, designed by Charles C. Haight and completed in 1887, the Manhasset Apartments at 301 West 108th Street and 300 West 109th Street, designed by Joseph Wolf and Janes & Leo and completed in 1905, and Towers on the Park, twin apartment buildings at the northwest corner of Central Park at the intersection of Central Park West and Cathedral Parkway, and the very modern and nice, red-brick towers of the Cathedral Parkway Houses at 125 West 109th Street, completed in 1975 and designed by Davis, Brody & Associates and Roger Glasgow. The 105th Street block between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue has been declared a historic district because its limestone, Beaux-Arts townhouses, by four different architectural firms, are of such uniform high quality.

Just to the north at 107th Street is the fabulous Morris and Laurette Schinasi House at 351 Riverside Drive, completed in 1909 and designed by William B. Tuthill, that is one of only two freestanding mansions still surviving on the avenue.

At 103rd Street and Riverside Drive is the Master Building, a 29-story mixed-use building, completed in 1929 and designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett of Helmle, Corbett & Harrison with Sugarman & Berger, that is one of the city’s best Art Deco towers.

Despite being flanked by great and major parks and its large inventory of good architecture, this area never fully recovered from the Depression until the mid-1980’s when the gentrification of the Upper West Side south of it began in full. The key to its future lies mostly on Broadway, which has numerous underdeveloped sites north of 99th Street that would seem likely to be developed given the very tight housing market of the late 1990’s.