When Kieron Cindric, CC ’08, got his diploma, he felt the need to graduate to a new neighborhood too.
“At first, I felt liked I needed to distance myself,” he said. Cindric found a place in the West Village, which he soon realized was out of his price range. Then he tried Washington Heights, and found that living along the 1 train route made it easy to visit friends still in school.
But the fit was not perfect. So this past summer, Cindric and his friend Kate Ruskin, CC ’08, agreed to look for an apartment even closer to the home turf of his undergraduate days.
“It’s not about trying to reclaim the college experience,” said Cindric, who now resides at Columbus Avenue and 106th Street. “It’s about retaining a sense of familiarity.” For Cindric, an actor who performs in theaters across the country, living in Morningside Heights grounds him.
And he is hardly alone. Driven by homesickness for alma mater and high housing costs elsewhere in New York, many recent Columbia graduates choose to stay in the neighborhood.
Some of these alumni, reflecting on a new life in the same location, said that the local scene seems much different now that they are working adults.
“The neighborhood still feels sort of homey to me,” Jennifer Schloss, BC ’09, who currently lives at West End Avenue and 92nd Street, said in an e-mail. “Whenever I’ve visited it does hit home that I’m in a totally different phase of my life,” she said.
“Also the freshmen seem a lot smaller than they did even last year,” she added.
More elbow room is what brought Sarah Besnoff, BC ’09, and Stephanie Davidson, CC ’08, back to campus. They originally looked for apartments in SoHo, Hell’s Kitchen, and around the Upper West Side before settling on an apartment on 102nd Street off of Central Park West.
“We were looking for a comfortable neighborhood,” Davidson said. “We really cared about common space.”
Speaking of the close quarters of their Hell’s Kitchen option, Besnoff said, “We would have literally had a fridge in the hallway.”
The pair met while coordinating the Columbia Urban Experience during the summer of 2007 and both now work at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office where, they said, many young Columbia and Barnard graduates end up finding jobs. Employment in the public sector limits where they can afford to live, but they agreed that they have come to enjoy their apartment’s proximity to the B and C trains. Their address allows them to explore different parts of the Upper West Side, and now, they rarely go up to campus—only occasionally for brunch at Sip.
Poonam Pai, BC ’08, has also stayed close—but not too close, she said. Last year she lived with Davidson at 102nd Street before moving in with her boyfriend and two others on 137th
Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue halfway between the Morningside campus of her undergraduate years and the Columbia University Medical Center where she now works.
And even after only two years, Pai said Morningside feels very different to her.
“It’s so young, there are so many young people running around,” she said. “Everywhere else in the city I feel like you see a range of ages. At Columbia, you get this huge number of people between the ages of 17 at the youngest and to 22.”
Cindric agreed, adding about the Columbia neighborhood, “I realized how unique it is among New York neighborhoods.”
Although these alumni frequented places like the Heights Bar and Grilland 1020 Bar as undergraduates, many said they avoid these campus haunts today, and opt for bars downtown.
For Pai, it is not the local bars that keep her close, but rather a feeling that she is still connected.
“I don’t feel very removed from it, but I feel like I have the opportunity to come and go as I please,” Pai said. “Around finals I’ll avoid it,” she added.
For Cindric, at least, who said he feels like he “came of age” in New York, staying in Morningside helps make the city seem less daunting as an adult. He said, “It makes New York seem a bit smaller than it really is.”
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