Sakura Park

International House New York, also known as I-House, is a private, independent, non-profit residence and program center for postgraduate students, research scholars, trainees, and interns, located at 500 Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. The I-House residential community typically consists of 700+ students and scholars from over 100 countries annually, with about one-third of those coming from the United States. The residential experience includes programming designed to promote mutual respect, friendship, and leadership skills across cultures and fields of study. International House has attracted prominent guest speakers through the years, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Isaac Stern to Sandra Day O'Connor, Valerie Jarrett, George Takei, and Nelson Mandela. Students attend various universities and schools throughout the city, which include Columbia University, Juilliard School, Actors' Studio Drama School, New York University, the Manhattan School of Music, the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the City University of New York.The original entrance to International House is inscribed with the motto written by John D. Rockefeller Jr.: "That Brotherhood May Prevail"; the piazza (The Abby O'Neill Patio) of its entrance opens onto Sakura Park, the site of Japan's original gift of cherry trees to New York City in 1912. The 500 Riverside Drive building, designed in the Italianite style by architects Louis E. Jallade and Marc Eidlitz and Sons, was built in 1924 and was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places as International House in 1999.

Claremont Avenue is a short avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It begins at 116th Street and runs north for a length of eleven blocks until it ends at Tiemann Place (the western segment of 127th Street).

Grant's Tomb, officially the General Grant National Memorial, is the final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States, and his wife, Julia Grant. It is a classical domed mausoleum in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City. The structure is in the middle of Riverside Drive at 122nd Street, across from Riverside Church to the southeast and Riverside Park to the west. Upon Grant's death in 1885, his widow declared he had wished to be buried in New York, and a new committee, the Grant Monument Association, appealed for funds. Progress was slow at first, since many believed the tomb should be in Washington, D.C., and because there was no architectural design to show. Eventually they selected a proposal by John Hemenway Duncan for a tomb of "unmistakably military character," modeled after the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus with twin sarcophagi. The tomb was completed in 1897, and the National Park Service has managed it since 1958. After a period of neglect, it has been restored and rededicated. The mausoleum is a prominent architectural land feature visible from the Hudson River. Grant's Tomb is generally open to the public from Wednesdays through Saturdays. In addition to being a national memorial since 1958, Grant's Tomb was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966 and was designated an official New York City landmark in 1975.

The Manhattan School of Music (MSM) is a private music conservatory in New York City. The school offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in the areas of classical and jazz performance and composition, as well as a bachelor's in musical theatre.Founded in 1917, the school is located on Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, adjacent to Broadway and West 122nd Street (Seminary Row). The MSM campus was originally the home to The Institute of Musical Art (which later became Juilliard) until Juilliard migrated to the Lincoln Center area of Midtown Manhattan. The property was originally owned by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum until The Institute of Musical Art purchased it in 1910. The campus of Columbia University is close by, where it has been since 1895. Many of the students live in the school's residence hall, Andersen Hall.

Riverside Church is an interdenominational church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on the block bounded by Riverside Drive, Claremont Avenue, 120th Street and 122nd Street near Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus and across from Grant's Tomb. It is associated with the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ. The church was conceived by philanthropist businessman and Baptist John D. Rockefeller Jr. in conjunction with Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick as a large, interdenominational church in Morningside Heights, which is surrounded by academic institutions. The original building opened in 1930; it was designed by Henry C. Pelton and Allen & Collens in the Neo-Gothic style. It contains a nave consisting of five architectural bays; a chancel at the front of the nave; a 22-story, 392-foot (119 m) tower above the nave; a narthex and chapel; and a cloistered passageway that connects to the eastern entrance on Claremont Avenue. Near the top of the tower is the church's main feature, a 74-bell carillon—the heaviest in the world—dedicated to Rockefeller Jr.'s mother Laura Spelman Rockefeller. A seven-story wing was built to the south of the original building in 1959 to a design by Collens, Willis & Beckonert, and was renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. in 1985. The Stone Gym to the southeast, built in 1915 as a dormitory, was designed by Louis E. Jallade and was converted to a gymnasium in 1962. Riverside Church has been a focal point of global and national activism since its inception, and it has a long history of social justice in adherence to Fosdick's original vision of an "interdenominational, interracial, and international" church. Its congregation includes members of more than forty ethnic groups. The church was designated as a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2000 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

The Rabbinical Assembly (RA) is the international association of Conservative rabbis. The RA was founded in 1901 to shape the ideology, programs, and practices of the Conservative movement. It publishes prayerbooks and books of Jewish interest, and oversees the work of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards for the Conservative movement. It organizes conferences and coordinates the Joint Placement Commission of the Conservative movement. Members of the RA serve as rabbis, educators, community workers and military and hospital chaplains around the world. Rabbis ordained by Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York, New York), the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University (Los Angeles, California), The Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano (Buenos Aires, Argentina), The Zacharias Frankel College (Berlin, Germany) and The Schechter Rabbinical Seminary (Jerusalem, Israel) automatically become members of the RA upon their ordination. Rabbis whose ordination is from other seminaries and yeshivas may also be admitted to the RA. As of 2010, there were 1,648 members of the RA.The majority of RA members serve in the United States and Canada, while more than ten percent of its rabbis serve in Israel and many of its rabbis serve in Latin America, in the countries of Europe, Australia, and Africa.

The Battle of Harlem Heights was fought during the New York and New Jersey campaign of the American Revolutionary War. The action took place on September 16, 1776, in what is now the Morningside Heights area and east into the future Harlem neighborhoods of northwestern Manhattan Island in what is now part of New York City. The Continental Army, under Commander-in-chief General George Washington, Major General Nathanael Greene, and Major General Israel Putnam, totaling around 9,000 men, held a series of high ground positions in upper Manhattan. Immediately opposite was the vanguard of the British Army totaling around 5,000 men under the command of Major General Henry Clinton. An early morning skirmish between a patrol of Knowlton's Rangers and British light infantry pickets developed into a running fight as the British pursued the Americans back through woods towards Washington's position on Harlem Heights. The overconfident British light troops, having advanced too far from their lines without support, had exposed themselves to counter-attack. Seeing this, Washington ordered a flanking maneuver which failed to cut off the British force but, in the face of this attack and pressure from troops arriving from the Harlem Heights position, the outnumbered British retreated. Meeting reinforcements coming from the south and with the added support of a pair of field pieces, the British light infantry turned and made a stand in open fields on Morningside Heights. The Americans, also reinforced, came on in strength and there followed a lengthy exchange of fire. After two hours, with ammunition running short, the British force began to pull back to their lines. Washington cut short the pursuit, unwilling to risk a general engagement with the British main force, and withdrew to his own lines. The battle helped restore the confidence of the Continental Army after suffering several defeats. It was Washington's first battlefield success of the war. After a month without any major fighting between the armies, Washington was forced to withdraw his army north to the town of White Plains in southeastern New York when the British moved west into Westchester County and threatened to flank Washington further south on Manhattan. After two defeats Washington retreated west across the Hudson River.

Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies, known simply as List College, is the undergraduate school of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS). It was founded by Solomon Schechter in 1909 as the Teachers Institute with the original goal of training American Jewish educators. List College is closely affiliated with Columbia University; almost all List College students are enrolled in dual-degree programs with either Columbia University’s School of General Studies or Barnard College.

The Jewish Theological Seminary library fire was discovered on Monday, April 18, 1966, at 10:15 AM when smoke was seen pouring from one of the small upper windows of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library tower at Broadway and 122nd Street at the in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. The tower, with only few small windows, was the perfect environment for a major conflagration. There were no floors separating one level from another, only steel library stacks surrounded by catwalks. The tower was like an oven and the fire spread quickly. Extinguishing it was extremely difficult, with only one entrance and stairwell from the bottom and limited window access. Fire Chief Alfred Eckert dispatched masked firefighters to the highest floor that could be safely reached. The firefighters spread canvas tarpaulins over as many shelves of books as they could, while hook and ladder trucks sprayed water through the highest openings in the tower, cascading down to the fire below. The fire was declared under control at about 7:00 PM, nine hours after it was discovered. Menahem Schmelzer, the librarian at the time, joined Gerson Cohen, the future chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the fire chief, for the initial foray into the damp, charred stacks. The fire had been confined primarily to the upper stacks, which housed mostly second and third copies of books, although some important recent acquisitions had also been kept there. But the water had caused enormous damage and the growth of mold threatened to do more. After rejecting several methods for drying the water-soaked books, the suggestion was brought to Rabbi David Kogen, then-vice chancellor of the Seminary, to place paper towels between the pages of every book to absorb the moisture. Volunteers of all ages were recruited from around the neighborhood and Jewish day school students were brought in to help. The paper toweling was supplied by local retailers and manufacturers. Some 70,000 volumes were destroyed in the fire and many more were damaged. The library's rare books and manuscripts, which were stored elsewhere, were spared.The library's book collection was rebuilt with the help of donations from private and institutional libraries. The books were moved to a prefabricated building in the JTS courtyard that remained until a new library building was completed in 1984. The library now exceeds 380,000 volumes. With the assistance of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, 35,000 books that were saved from the fire and placed in high-density storage are being restored and catalogued.

The Amiable Child Monument is a monument located in New York City's Riverside Park. It stands west of the southbound lanes of Riverside Drive north of 122nd Street in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.It is a monument to a small boy who died in what was then an area of country homes near New York City. One side of the monument reads: “Erected to the Memory of an Amiable Child, St. Claire Pollock, Died 15 July 1797 in the Fifth Year of His Age.” The monument is composed of a granite urn on a granite pedestal inside a wrought iron fence. It is across the street from Grant's Tomb. The monument, originally erected by George Pollock, who was either the boy's father or his uncle, has been replaced twice due to deterioration. The present marker was placed on the site in 1967 to replace a marble marker installed by the city in 1897.During Morningside Heights’s Golden Age, when the nearby Claremont Inn served luminaries that included George M. Cohan, Cole Porter, Lillian Russell and Mayor Jimmy Walker, the site inspired pilgrimages and poetry. Of the many verses written about the memorial is Herman George Scheffauer’s “An Amiable Child,” which describes the grave as being “like a song of peace in iron frays.” An identically named poem by Anna Markham, wife of proletarian author and critic Edwin Markham, opens with the lines that defined the monument for her contemporaries: “At Riverside, on the slow hill-slant / Two memoried graves are seen / A granite dome is over Grant / and over a child the green.” The monument is also the inspiration for Irene Marcuse's novel Death of an Amiable Child. By one late nineteenth-century account, as related by Donald Reynolds, an attempt to relocate the grave in order to clear space for General Grant’s tomb, which was quickly abandoned by the city after a groundswell of public opposition, transformed the “tribute to the gentleness that underlies the apparent brutality of the great city” into “almost a national institution”. The monument is thought to be the only single-person private grave on city-owned land in New York City.

Burke Library of the Union Theological Seminary is located at 3041 Broadway, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1838, since 2004 it has been a part of the Columbia University Libraries. Holding over 700,000 items, it is one of the largest theological libraries in North America.Burke Library began with the purchase of the Leander van Ess collection in 1838, described by Cornell University professor Thomas Frederick Crane as "the most valuable library which has ever been brought into the country.": 352  The van Ess collection can be traced back to the library of the Benedictine abbey at Marienmünster, where van Ess was a member. Following the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville, the monastery's library was split among its members in preparation for its dissolution under Napoleon; van Ess' portion would eventually be sold to the Union Theological Seminary. The collection consisted of around 13,000 volumes, especially rich in pre-1500 incunabula; original editions of patristic literature; Roman Catholic theology, liturgies, and canon law; early Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and polyglot editions of the Bible; as well as a significant group of pamphlets written by Martin Luther written during the 1520s.: 353  Early librarians included professors Edward Robinson, Henry Boynton Smith, and Charles Augustus Briggs.: 353–354 The library would continue to grow, reaching a size of 115,000 volumes by 1899, making it the largest American theological seminary library and tenth-largest college library in general at the time.: 352  Notable acquisitions during the time include the McAlpin collection, donated by David Hunter McAlpin;: 355  donations from Ezra Hall Gillett, Samuel Hanson Cox, William Buell Sprague, and John Marsh; as well as a 7,000 volume gift from Edwin Francis Hatfield.: 356  In 1880, New York Governor Edwin D. Morgan donated $100,000 to the library, which went toward the construction of a new building for the library and the establishment of a permanent fund.Due to increasing costs, Burke Library was acquired by the library of Columbia University, which the Union Theological Seminary is affiliated with, in 2004. Its collections were fully integrated into those of the Columbia Libraries, while allowing Union Theological Seminary and Columbia students and faculty full access to either institution's libraries.

The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) is a Conservative Jewish education organization in New York City, New York. It is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism and a major center for academic scholarship in Jewish studies. The Jewish Theological Seminary Library is one of the most significant collections of Judaica in the world.In addition to a number of research and training institutes, JTS operates five schools: Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies (affiliated with Columbia University; offers joint/double bachelor's degree programs with both Columbia and Barnard College) Gershon Kekst Graduate School William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education H. L. Miller Cantorial School and College of Jewish Music The Rabbinical School