Photo of the Day: Julia Gabriel People’s Garden, Morningside Heights, NYC

Late this past summer, after meeting for lunch old friends from Columbia University, I walked around the Morningside Heights neighborhood and came across this small garden at the intersection of West 111^th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

(With temperatures dropping in the Northeast these last few days, I experience vicarious warmth just looking at this picture I took then.)

The volunteer-run Julia Gabriel People’s Garden is named for an area resident who saved the garden and its adjacent apartment buildings in the 1960s and 1970s—a victory over redevelopment by no means assured in that era.

Photo of the Day: Late Summer, Riverside Park, NYC

Stretching four miles from 72^nd Street to 158^th Street, Riverside Park is a welcome oasis from the worst of New York’s heat and humidity. But I have to admit that, when I first encountered it more than four decades ago, much of its verdant loveliness was lost on me.

What I felt, when I took a jogging course called “Fitness and You” as a Columbia University undergrad freshman, was misery.

It was the third class, when we ran a 2½-mile loop in the park, that nearly did me in. More specifically, it was the hills leading from Riverside Drive to the Hudson River shoreline below.

It didn’t help to hear our instructor scream “Charge up that hill!” to me and a couple of other laggards.

So three weeks ago, when I found myself back on Morningside Heights to meet school friends, I basked in the sun and breathed in the fresh air of the park. But I was far more inclined to join the couple on the bench in this photo I took than the fellow maintaining his conditioning.

Photo of the Day: Grotto, Church of Notre Dame, Morningside Heights, NYC

A couple of weeks ago, at lunch with three college friends, I heard about the Church of Notre Dame. With most of my activities confined to the cluster of buildings around the central quadrangle of Columbia University in my college days decades ago, I never had occasion to see what this Roman Catholic Church just off the campus was like.

So, 46 years after coming to Morningside Heights, I decided to rectify the omission. At the time of the day when I passed by, the church was closed, but I was able to take this photo of its picturesque grotto.

The grotto began life as a chapel in 1910. The architectural firm Dans and Otto developed both the chapel and a replica of the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette of Lourdes in France in 1858.

Soon, a larger church needed to be built—an expansion carried out by another architectural firm, Cross and Cross. But the grotto remains standing behind the church’s main altar, a continuing reminder of the first altar and chapel at the Church of Notre Dame.

Photo of the Day: Late Summer, Morningside Drive, NYC

This past weekend, I met with three great friends from my days at Columbia University for a wonderful afternoon of catching up.

With an incoming class only two weeks from Freshman Orientation (or, as some of us came to think of it, Disorientation), our thoughts drifted back to our experience with that same process 46 years ago, when the school—still dealing with the fallout of the ’68 demonstrations, amid a city still in long-term deterioration—was hardly the most fashionable of the Ivies.

At one point, we recalled, students speaking at one session gave us what sounded like an ironclad tip about survival in the neighborhood: “If the IRT gets diverted from the Broadway and 116^th Street station, do not get off by Morningside Park. Go to the next stop and walk back to Broadway.”

Forewarned meant forearmed about the potential for crime in the area. I made countless trips as a commuting student to the campus, but in the handful of times that the #1 train didn’t make its regular stop, I followed the above advice—and so did other students I knew then.

Fast forward decades later. New York City has stepped back from the fiscal brink, and “Seinfeld” and “Friends” have even made it fun and even hip. Columbia has benefited from this change in the atmosphere, and so has Morningside Drive and Park.

Back in 2006, New York City began a $390,000 renovation project for two ballfields in the park—part of a larger long-term reclamation that also saw new sidewalks from West 116^th Street to West 122^nd Street, an upgraded security booth at 116th Street, bush and growth removal projects along the upper paths, and perimeter lighting upgrades. More improvements have followed since then.

Volunteers associated with The Friends of Morningside Park have done their part, too, with monthly cleanups.

Five years ago, a Barnard student was murdered in the park, briefly reviving fears from decades ago. Even so, a columnist for The Fordham Ram felt confident enough in the surroundings to write last October that the park was “the perfect place to grab a coffee and read a book. You won’t be distracted and will only be inspired by the tranquility of the park.”

This past Sunday, after getting together with my friends, I felt curious enough to venture over to Morningside Drive. It was late in the afternoon and I had to get home, and yes, old concerns about safety still prevented me from walking farther into the park.

But, as you can see from this accompanying photo I took, the vista was pleasant enough to make me think that this stretch was closer to what Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had in mind when they designed what they hoped would be another urban oasis north of their Central Park in the late 19^th century.

Photo of the Day: Manhattan School of Music, NYC

I took the attached photo in mid-November, when I met a friend for lunch just off the Columbia University campus. Afterward, I walked around the Morningside Heights neighborhood.

Eventually I saw a sign for Manhattan School of Music (MSM). Curious, at least partly because my high school friend Mike went on to graduate from there, I ambled over to the school’s location at 122^nd Street and Claremont Avenue in New York.

Mike was, and remains, a highly talented musician, and this private music conservatory sounds just like the place for him. It offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in classical and jazz performance and composition, as well as a bachelor's in musical theater.

Besides Mike, MSM graduates have included jazz/pop musicians or singers Harry Connick Jr., Herbie Hancock, Max Roach, Jane Monheit, Rupert Holmes, and Nellie McKay, and classical music professionals such as John Corigliano and Dawn Upshaw.

Oh, yes—and how can I forget my favorite, the peerless Yankee outfielder and ace guitarist, Bernie Williams?

MSM has changed its name, location, and size in a bit more than a century of existence. It was founded by pianist-philanthropist Janet Daniels Schenck in 1918 as an outgrowth of her work volunteering at the Union Settlement at East 104^th Street, with young musicians offering music lessons to the immigrant population of the neighborhood. It became known by its current name in 1938, and around the same time moved to a new building and concert hall on 105^th Street.

With the Julliard School going to Lincoln Center, MSM purchased and moved into its Morningside Heights building in 1969. Its growth has not stopped since then, however. A residence hall adjacent to the school opened in 2001, and MSM has continued to add programs.

Today, it numbers more than 950 college students from over 50 countries, and each academic year it offers nearly 800 performances by students and faculty, many of which are free and open to the public. Anyone interested in catching these can click on this performance calendar.

Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on the Creation of ‘Tom’s Diner’)

“I had just been in Tom's, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a song called 'Tom's Diner' about alienation, where you're not connected to anything you see. Lately on the Internet I've been reading people saying this song is really random and it's about nothing. It’s not about nothing! It’s about something! Every single scene has been set up to show that this person is alienated from life in general.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in David Honigman, “The Life of a Song: ‘Tom’s Diner,’” The Financial Times, Feb. 1-2, 2020

Vega and I were on Morningside Heights—she at Barnard, me across Broadway at Columbia—in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and were both even English majors (or to be exact, in my case, English-History double-major). 

But we never bumped into each other, in no small part because I was a commuter. Only seldom did I venture down to the corner of 112^th Street and Broadway where Tom’s was located.

Since then, of course, this eatery has become a worldwide landmark, in no small part due to its exterior being featured in numerous episodes of Seinfeld. Maybe for that reason, it occurs to me, some listeners might feel that, as the sitcom is “a show about nothing,” everything associated with its locales might be, too. 

I’m glad to see that Vega is trying to put that notion to rest.