The photos above feature the oldest buidling at Columbia, though as comparing the photos shows, the building, Buehl Hall, is not in precisely the same spot it was when in the 1890's Columbia moved to this neighborhood. (To see the photos without the labelling but accompanied by virtually this same running commentarry, click on either image above.) This 1885 red brick building was constructed for, and used as, one of the residential buildings in the Bloomindale Insane Asylum, the institution that then occupied the northern half of what is now this main campus of Columbia. (The few buildings of that asylum were scattered across the still rural land which ran west to east between what are now Broadway and Amsterdam, and south to north between 114th Street and 120th Street.) As noted elsewhere in this site, the effort to displace the asylum so that Columbia could move up to this neighborhood apparently began not long after this old house was completed, though it took a bit more than a decade to actually bring about the move. Powerful New York figures were interested in getting rid of the Asylum because they had acquired numerous plots of land in the as yet undeveloped parts of the heights and believed that, with the institutional moves, the construction of extensive residential buildings on the undeveloped land they had purchased could be very profitable. Had they been told of some of the things that would happen in the neightborhood and the world in the decades ahead, they would no doubt have refused to believe them. The birth of the subway, the invention of the airplane and immense air traffic, and the development of the basis for first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, did come about, but little in that era at the end of the 19th Century would have made it seem plausible. For example, how could they have imagined that humans, in their research and energy development efforts, would create radioactive substances that would be very dangerous to the bio-sphere for centuries to come?

Subject to further development