Columbia undergraduates living in Harmony have extended the range of the Department of Public Safety.
The shift of Harmony Hall, located on the south side of West 110th Street, from graduate to undergraduate student housing this academic year has necessitated changes to the University’s campus security procedures. The dorm is further south than undergraduate residences have ever been before, extending the route of Public Safety patrols down to the surrounding area.
A key change to the building is the assignment of contracted Summit Security guards to regulate access for its 88 residents. While graduate students and faculty use their apartment keys to move in and out of the building at will, Joseph Ienuso, executive vice president for Columbia University Facilities, said that undergraduate housing demands “portal” security.
“With the portal entry, there’s a barrier between anyone who’s not welcome and should not have free access to the building,” Ienuso explained. “That’s the primary change that you’ll see, and that’s consistent across all undergraduate buildings—the process of signing guests in.”
Benjamin Fogarty, CC ’11 and a Harmony Hall resident, said he hadn’t noticed any unusual procedures implemented there.
“They have the guard checking IDs at the door,” Fogarty said. “We haven’t had any special meetings or anything about safety, and there hasn’t been anything else that I’ve seen.”
Spencer Liu, SEAS ’10 and a resident advisor in Harmony, said he was not informed of any special procedures or warnings given to students barring an initial warning about the entry system. “At the beginning of the year, the school ID swipe access system wasn’t working,” Liu said. “People had to sign in all of their guests that didn’t have a Harmony Hall sticker.”
He added that the system has since come online and is working normally.
When it comes to security from the outside, Ienuso noted that vehicle, bicycle, and foot patrols have been extended to include the new dorm. “I won’t get into too many specifics about the way the vehicle patrols happen, except to say that it is happening already,” he said.
Columbia’s free escort service, which provides students with escorts by vehicle or on foot seven days a week during designated evening and early-morning hours, already includes Harmony and areas south of it.
The Columbia Evening Shuttle, a Monday-through-Friday service that provides free transportation in the Morningside Heights area to riders with a University ID, has a stop at 110th Street and Broadway.
Harmony’s location on 110th Street places it on the border between the New York Police Department’s 26th Precinct—which patrols from West 133rd Street to West 110th Street, including the Columbia campus—and the 24th Precinct—which patrols from West 110th Street to West 86th Street.
An officer from the NYPD’s 26th Precinct confirmed that Harmony Hall is outside its patrol area, which extends to the north side of 110th Street. Buildings on the south side of 110th Street lie in the 24th Precinct’s response area, but all “responses are coordinated on a case-by-case basis,” he said.
Both the officer and Ienuso expressed confidence in Public Safety’s capacity to coordinate with both NYPD precincts in the event of an emergency.
“We have a close relationship with both the 26th and the 24th precincts,” Ienuso said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d get a vehicle from the 24th and the 26th in addition to the University folks that would be present as well [in an emergency].”
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