History of student housing
Housing at Columbia has had a rather interesting history.
Contents
College Hall
The first mention of dormitories happened during the King's College days. The second home of King's College after the Trinity Church schoolhouse, College Hall, was a building that outshone its colonial counterparts in every respect when it was erected in 1760. Student quarters were no exception. The layout of the original College Hall (demolished in 1857) was a row of rooms, of dimensions 18" x 21". Attached to this giant room were two smaller anterooms, measuring 9" x 9", next to each other. The total size of these rooms was 540 square feet. When these rooms were assigned to students, the 378-s.f. room was designated as a 'sleeping area' while each 81-s.f. anteroom was a personal study. Yes, Columbia University once boasted 540-s.f. doubles.
Another reason for the size of these rooms was that the professors and the President also lived within College Hall. In this case, the two 81-s.f. anterooms served as a bedchamber and as a study, and the 378-s.f. main room served as a classroom by day and a living room by night. Yet, they were still 540-s.f. rooms. Small wonder then, that a few years after King's College was reconstituted as Columbia College, the faculty and President took over College Hall entirely. In fact, the first thing Columbia's ninth President, Charles King, did was to move his rather sizable family into College Hall. When King presided over the move to the Midtown campus, the first thing he did then was order the construction of a 25-room President's House. Undergraduate student housing at Columbia, on the other hand, was not looking so good.
Midtown campus
By the time the Midtown campus reached full-build during the end of Frederick A. P. Barnard's presidency, student housing had made something of a comeback. Hamilton Hall, a dormitory, had been erected, but provided nowhere near enough space to hold Columbia's exploding student population. The statue of Alexander Hamilton in front of our present Hamilton Hall once stood in front of the other Hamilton Hall. Moreover, Barnard (and his two successors, Low, and Butler) were at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to undergraduates, proposing more than a few times to transform the undergraduate college into a 'fast-track' into the graduate and professional faculties, moving it out to Westchester County, or disbanding it altogether.
Seth Low
By the time Seth Low assumed the Presidency, undergraduate life had taken a different turn. Paraphrasing the popular Biblical passage, Low declared "A university that is set upon a hill cannot be hid." His new Columbia University, moved to spacious and grand quarters on the hill of Morningside Heights, would be a university dedicated solely to the prosperity of the city and its education of its inhabitants. Low wanted no dormitories. Rather, he envisioned that students would come to Columbia for a day of classes, and then return home to their lives in the city. Where Butler Library now stands was once a vista where one could view the rise of New York City all the way to the tip of lower Manhattan. Low envisioned that students would, upon graduation, exit from the campus through that opening, back into the city from whence they came. By the 1930s, that view was hideously obstructed by row houses that clashed rather egregiously with the rest of Columbia's neoclassical architecture, and thus provided the logical place to build Columbia's new research library.
During Low's presidency plans were made to erect Hamilton Court, a private 10 story dormitory on Amsterdam Avenue. When these plans fell through, the trustees pressured Low into commissioning dorms on campus. However, the McKim, Mead, and White designed dormitories were never built on the Grove since Low never put the effort into raising the money, and neither did the alumni.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Nicholas Murray Butler, once assuming the Presidency in 1902, threw out Low's intention to focus exclusively on the city, and set about trying to make Columbia more of a national university. In doing so, he put forth the first major effort to house undergraduates at any leading American university. The Harvard we know today, with its Houses fronting the Charles River, was not built until the 1920s. The same is also true for Yale's residential colleges. Yet a full two decades before, Columbia had already taken the step of housing its undergraduates. Hartley Hall was the first dormitory built on the Morningside Heights campus. It is to Butler that we can attribute the return of student housing to Columbia since the Midtown campus, and indeed, the first serious commitment to house students since the days of King's College.
Modern-day residence halls
The history of each modern-day residence hall can be found on its individual page.
