Watson Hall
612 West 115th Street | Morningside Heights | built 1906
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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.
- 1905
Neville & Bagge design an eight-story Beaux Arts apartment house for Frank Woytisek
Neville & Bagge designed the building at 612-614 West 115th Street for owner Frank Woytisek, completing it in 1905-06. The Beaux Arts apartment house rises from a rusticated base two floors high and has a limestone stoop, an arched main entrance, a stone balcony carried on big consoles and a tall attic story. The Landmarks Preservation Commission counts it as a contributing building in the Morningside Heights Historic District.
- 1921
The Parnassus Club opens a boarding house for young women on West 115th Street
From 1921 the club, which operated until 1955, housed young women who studied at the Juilliard School of Music, then a couple of blocks away, or at Barnard, or who were semi-professional performers. It used this building and the one at 605 West 115th Street. Nothing of the club's interior survives inside, according to Columbia's computing history site.
Source: columbia.edu
- 1953
IBM guts the former women's residence and moves the Watson Laboratory into it
IBM bought the building in 1952-53 because building the NORC had filled its small laboratory on West 116th Street and a new physics program needed more space. The company gutted and renovated it, fitted it with physics laboratories, and moved in during September 1953, calling it Watson Lab number two. Management installed a time clock, but the professional staff, known for nonconformity, never used it.
Source: columbia.edu
- 1954
The NORC, then the world's most powerful computer, goes into operation here
The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator, designed at Columbia's Watson Lab from 1950 and built in this building, became operational in December 1954. It was the most powerful computer in existence and kept that standing for about ten years. NORC had 200,000 electronic components, 3,600 words of memory and eight magnetic tape drives, and it performed 15,000 operations a second.
Source: columbia.edu
- 1970
IBM closes its Watson Laboratory at Columbia and the Computer Center moves in
IBM closed its Watson Laboratory at Columbia in September 1970, after 25 years of operation. The Columbia Computer Center offices and the university's Purchasing Department moved into 612 West 115th Street, where IBM left a raised-floor machine room and a classroom. During its years at Columbia the lab's staff had received 67 patents and published 359 articles in scientific journals.
Source: columbia.edu
- 1996
Film crews take over West 115th Street and the building for The Mirror Has Two Faces
Columbia's computing history site says the Watson Lab building is featured in the 1996 movie The Mirror Has Two Faces. For several weeks, production crews, equipment and actors occupied West 115th Street and the building itself. The film's last shot zooms in on one of the building's windows.
Source: columbia.edu
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