Sweet 116

Some time ago, I finally made the Ivy League. I was asked to do a Forgotten New York PowerPoint show and lecture, which turned out to be at Columbia’s Fayerweather Hall just off Amsterdam Ave. I then walked the length of 116^th St/, which cuts across the Columbia campus, from river to river. 116th is singular among NYC’s major wide-numbered streets in that it’s interrupted twice, by the Columbia campus and Morningside Park.

Looking east on Riverside Dr. and W. 116th St., here’s New York City’s “original” Colosseum. The gently curving apartment building was constructed in 1910 and, between 1920 and 1925, was home to US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone (1872-1946).

The west end of W. 116th Street at Riverside Dr. is marked by the Women’s Health Protective Association Fountain, installed in 1909, Bruno Louis Zimm, sculptor. The fountain consists of a stele with a fountain in front, with two marble benches on the side inscribed with the names of WHPA founders and associates. Charlotte Wilbour, whose name is on the bench, helped found the first New York City Woman Suffrage Association in 1870; it was among the first organization to agitate for female voting rights, which came to fruition in 1920.

I thought this fountain looked vaguely familiar, and sure enough, sculptor Zimm also created the poignant Slocum Memorial in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.

The Columbia University campus runs from W. 114th-W. 120th Sts. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave.. As Kings College, founded in the colonial era, it once occupied a site near City Hall (a W. Broadway building sign still says “College Place”) and later moved to the East River site now occupied by Rockefeller University. It’s been here on its magnificent campus with many buildings designed by Charles McKim of the McKim, Mead and White firm since 1897. There was a time when W. 116th ran through the school grounds, but it closed to traffic years ago and is now a walkway (College Walk) through the center of the campus. This land was once occupied by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum (Broadway was called Bloomingdale Rd. at one time, and these sort of institutions were located in out-of-the-way parts of town, or even better, islands). The asylum was in operation from 1821-the mid-1880s. The old Macy Villa is the only surviving building at Columbia from the asylum era. Dodge Hall, seen here, contains the Kathryn Bache Miller Theatre, home of Columbia’s music and arts schools, at Broadway and W. 116th.

At my Columbia presentation, many of the attendees were unaware that the Sundial, a fixture and meeting place on College Walk for over nine decades, once had a 16-ton polished green granite globe positioned on top of it. It was a gift in 1914 from the Columbia College class of 1885. The sphere began to develop cracks in 1944 and was removed in 1946. For a time Columbia didn’t know its whereabouts, but it turned up in a field in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2001; efforts to reclaim it have so far been unsuccessful.

The Low Memorial Library was a charter member of Columbia University, completed in 1897 by Charles McKim. It was named for the father of Brooklyn mayor, then Columbia president, then NYC Mayor Seth Low (1850-1916), merchant A. A. Low. It’s become a ceremonial space in recent decades. Ten Ionic columns to the Butler’s 14. There was a rowing track and canvas tank for Columbia’s crew in the basement. At its entrance steps, Daniel Chester French’s Alma Mater (1903) greets students, faculty and passersby. Currently bronze-colored, she’s been gilded in gold and green with verdigris during the years. Protesters unsuccessfully tried exploding her in 1970.

The Macy Villa, now Maison Française, Columbia University’s center of French culture, is the oldest building on campus and is the only leftover from the asylum days. Officially it’s known as Buell Hall. When built in 1885, it took its name from principal donor, William H. Macy.

The Villa adjoins St. Paul’s Chapel, a gift from the Stokes family of industrialists/philanthropists, and completed in 1907. A member of the Stokes family, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, was a partner in the firm that built it; Stokes also wrote one of the best NYC histories, the massive The Iconography of Manhattan Island.

W. 116th comes to a halt once again at Morningside Dr., overlooking Morningside Park. It would have to descend a steep angle if it were to be run through here, so 19^th-century engineers and surveyors didn’t even try. This dramatic setting is marked by Karl Bitter/Henry Bacon’s 1913 Carl Schurz monument, honoring the mid-19^th-century German immigrant (1829-1906) who became a Civil War general, U.S. Senator from Missouri (1869-1875), President Rutherford Hayes’ Secretary of the Interior (1877-81), and editor of the New York Tribune and Harper’s Weekly.

Early on, developers realized the steep slope in this part of town would be impractical to lay out streets and houses and so, as early as the 1850s, it was thought a better idea to design a public park for the sliver of land from Cathedral Parkway (110th St.) north to W. 123rd and generally between what became Morningside Dr. and Morningside Ave. Central Park’s architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed most of the park. By the 1980s the park had fallen into disrepair and was crime-ridden, before a 1989 redesign. 1998 saw the initiation of the Dr. Thomas Kiel Arboretum, named for the founder of Friends of Morningside Park who was killed in a 1996 accident. The arboretum is located down the steps near W. 116th.

That the park is called “Morningside” is easily discernible from its remarkable eastern views. When O & V’s initial design for the walkway and steps overlooking this view were rejected, their Central Park collaborator, Jacob Wrey Mould (who designed the Terrace overlooking Bethesda Fountain and many of Central Park’s decorative arched roadways) was brought in, and he designed the monumental buttressed masonry wall and massive steps.

First Corinthian Baptist Church, SE corner of Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. and W. 116th, is a shadow of a fantastic past as its old incarnation, as the Regent Theatre. Its terra cotta exterior is still there, though. Thomas W. Lamb, the theater architect, built it from 1912-1913, based, it’s attested, on Venice’s Doge’s Palace. The RKO Regent Theatre closed as a movie house in 1963 and became a church soon after that.

The avenue that falls between 5th Ave. and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. above Central Park has had three names during its history, and all have contained an “x”: 6th Ave., when laid out as part of the Mangin street plan of 1807; in 1887, renamed Lenox Ave. for the Lenox family who established a library now part of the NYPL; and in 1987, Lenox was given a co-title, Malcolm X Blvd., for the civil rights leader slain in Harlem in 1965.

The avenue features some grand apartment buildings. On the southwest corner is the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque No. 7, Sabbath Brown, architect 1965, the year of Malcolm X’s death: he was a preacher at the mosque’s original building. It replaced the old Lenox Casino.

At the northeast corner of 5th and E. 116th appears the faded glory of the Mount Morris Theatre, now called the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, headed by the singularly named Bishop Omega Shelton. The theater opened in 1913 (Hoppin & Koen, arch.). By 1934 the Mount Morris was known as the Campoamor and later as the Cervantes, Hispano, and Radio Teatro Hispano as the area became more and more identified as Spanish Harlem. Notable performers included tango singer/songwriter Carlos Gardel and flautist Alberto Socarrás.

I’ll skip to the east end of E. 116^th. Years ago, before it became Spanish Harlem, this part of town had large pockets of German and Italian immigrant populations, and in the streets east of about 2nd Ave., many Italians are hanging in there to some degree. One of the more important survivors from the Italian era is Rao’s, the Italian restaurant/celebrity hangout on Pleasant Ave. and E. 114th.

Another holdout from the Italian Harlem days was Claudio’s Barbershop, south side of 116th, just west of 1st Ave. I expressed my regrets at not having time for a haircut to Claudio Camponigro, who graciously allowed me to come in and take photos anyway. He told me it was his 80th birthday. Films such as Carlito’s Way and TV shows Law and Order and Third Watch have used the shop, and models in bikinis have posed in barber chairs for Sports Illustrated shoots. Jimmy Durante and Tammany Hall pol Carmine DeSapio have had their locks chopped here, as well as, it is reported, a number of mob figures. Camponigro remained in business until his retirement in 2019, and purportedly never raised his prices during his 60-plus years on 116^th St.

—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)