Casa Hispánica

612 West 116th Street | Morningside Heights | built 1906

Open on the map5 entries

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. 1906

    Thomas Nash designs a limestone chapter house for Columbia's Delta Phi fraternity

    Nash filed plans in 1905 for a five-story house only 25 feet wide, finished early in 1906. Its limestone front is organized around a Palladian-style second floor, where French doors open onto a balcony, and the top two floors sit inside a slate-shingled mansard. That February the chapter handed title to its alumni association, so rooms above the clubrooms went to unmarried graduates.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1916

    December 19

    Delta Phi members write to city officials opposing railroad plans along Riverside Park

    The undergraduates at 612 West 116th Street wrote to the city's Board of Estimate and Apportionment about the New York Central Railroad's West Side Improvement scheme. They said they opposed anything that would harm Riverside Park. The letter shows a fraternity that took up neighborhood issues as well as holding its social life in the clubrooms.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1945

    IBM opens the Thomas J. Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory in the former fraternity house

    Thomas J. Watson, head of IBM, put his new lab at Columbia so its scientists could work alongside faculty. He hired astronomer Wallace John Eckert to lead it, and the Watson Lab grew into IBM's research division. The old fraternity house offered space for computing equipment, a library, a reception lounge, a small machine shop and a few dozen professionals.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1947

    July

    The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, designed in part at the Watson Lab, is completed

    Among the lab's early projects was the design of the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, built to Eckert's specifications at IBM's plant in Endicott, New York. It was finished in July 1947. Running it took 27 programmers, at least eight of them women, plus a full crew of operators.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1957

    The Watson Lab moves out and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies moves in

    IBM relocated the Watson Lab to Yorktown Heights, New York, in 1957. The building then housed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and as late as 1965 people still called it the Watson Building. Today it is Casa Hispánica, home of Columbia's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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All 49 buildings with stories in Morningside Heights