Hartley Hall

1124 Amsterdam Avenue | also 1100 Amsterdam Avenue | Morningside Heights | built 1912

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The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1903

    A $300,000 gift from the Hartley family pays for Columbia's first dormitory

    In 1903 Columbia announced it would buy South Field, and at the same time Helen Hartley Jenkins and her nephew Marcellus Hartley Dodge, head of the class of 1903, gave $300,000 for a dormitory in honor of her father and his grandfather, the munitions dealer Marcellus Hartley. The university promised a companion dormitory, Livingston Hall, now Wallach Hall. The gift and the promise meant two large residence halls would rise on South Field.

    Source: Internet Archive

  2. 1905

    The first students move into Hartley Hall

    When Hartley and Livingston opened in fall 1905, the first students walked into lobbies with oak panels, marble floors and big fireplaces. Rooms of various sizes opened off central corridors and housed about 200 students. The lounges hosted dances and teas with professors, but there was no dining hall. Rooms averaged $3.30 a week, which came to $129 over the academic year.

    Source: Internet Archive

  3. 1911

    Two hundred students are turned away from Hartley and Livingston halls

    Hartley and Livingston were Columbia's only dormitories until Furnald Hall opened in 1912-13, and by 1911 they were popular enough that 200 students were turned away for lack of space. Early on, most undergraduates still lived at home or in boarding houses, apartments or fraternities that were cheaper and freer. Critics of dorms argued that rules such as set lights-out times babied students, and the dorms drew many graduate and professional students.

    Source: Internet Archive

  4. 1921

    Langston Hughes settles into Hartley Hall as a Columbia student

    Langston Hughes enrolled at Columbia in September 1921, agreeing to study engineering to satisfy his father. He was denied a campus room because he was Black and eventually settled in Hartley Hall, where he faced hostility from classmates. He published poems in the Spectator under a pen name and kept a B+ average, but he left in 1922, preferring Broadway shows, Rand School lectures and Harlem to his coursework.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 1958

    February

    A water-filled wastebasket prank on Hartley's tenth floor ends in a soaking

    In February 1958 Stanley Futterman of the Class of 1961 got a bed in a three-bed attic room on Hartley's tenth floor, ending a long commute from East Flatbush. One night he saw two track athletes tilting a water-filled wastebasket against a neighbor's door and moved it to theirs. The wastebasket made a small noise that gave him away, and the athletes carried him to the showers and soaked him fully clothed.

    Source: Internet Archive

  6. 1963

    Spring

    Columbia College allows Sunday female visitors in dorm rooms, with the door propped open by a book

    In spring 1963 the historian Eric Foner, then a student who remembered being in Hartley's Class of 1924 Prize Room, saw the College begin a new regime. Students could receive a woman visitor in their rooms on Sunday afternoons, which he recalled as 2 to 4, as long as a book kept the door propped open. It was one of several liberalizations of dormitory rules in the 1960s.

    Source: Internet Archive

  7. 1968

    Soapy-floor 'surfing' in a Hartley hallway ends with stitches

    In 1968 a group of friends in Hartley Hall soaked the long, uncarpeted tile hallway with soapy water and took turns running and gliding down it like surfers. One of them slid so far that his arm went through the glass door at the hallway's end. They spent the rest of the night at St. Luke's Hospital while he got stitches.

    Source: Internet Archive

Further reading

Nearby

All 49 buildings with stories in Morningside Heights