You had to be there.
Alice Tecotzky
Two floors above 108th Street and Broadway lives a gray-blue couch, shaped like an L, adorned with a few square pillows and one round pillow that I hold on my lap whenever I sit down. Though I don’t own this couch—it belongs to four of my dearest friends, in their shared apartment—I love it very much. Its fibers are woven from my tears (joyous and painful), my whispered secrets, my spilled wine and beads of sweat. In the fabric live my most benign college moments, the ones that have stitched me, forever, to the women sitting on the adjacent cushions.
My friends’ lease ends in July. I don’t know what they’re doing with the couch, or where and to whom it will go. Like college, it will disappear abruptly and almost cruelly, pulled out from under our crowded butts and suddenly a figment of memory alone.
Annie Poole
On the corner of 7th and Avenue C is a bar with the tagline “Bring your parents, get right in.” It seems fitting that I first got into Joyface because of my dad and his partner Kevin. “Make friends with the bouncer, the bartenders, and the owner, so we don’t have to help you next time,” they said.
Following their advice, my college friends and I returned to Joyface, again and again. Despite constantly saying we needed to try somewhere new, we returned to Joyface for Halloween parties, finals celebrations, two of my birthdays, and the 21st night of September (yes, we remember). Donna Summer, Whitney Houston, ABBA, and Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” (played when the clock strikes midnight and the disco ball turns on) became our frat party anthems.
My favorite Joyface night took place the weekend of our senior year homecoming. Four friends and I brought all of our parents and got right in. After taking tequila shots and dancing on tables, our parents still beg us to bring them back for graduation. Part of becoming an adult is realizing your parents may have had more fun back in “their day.”
Joyface, my homecoming on a night out in college.
Becky Miller
It’s a dungeon, really, but with the wall decor of a SoHo gallery, the music taste of your dad’s weekly poker game, and the mellow charm of a pub somewhere mellow and charming, like London’s outskirts, maybe. In the underground domain of Arts and Crafts, we have feasted on many a mustard pretzel when the L-shaped tater tots run out. We have nursed many a Cigar City (#22), and ogled many a female portrait’s exposed breasts—you know the one, tucked in the corner, drawing eyes from across the bar with a magnetic pull. I ache to remember the rainy nights I spent writing down there, or the afternoons spent interviewing hopeful bartenders, or the pregame pints that went too fast. Safely subterranean, entering A&C feels like following a trail of memory crumbs, where we laughed until we peed.
Anouk Jouffret
I spent a gloomy week in late January aching to see the ocean. When I told my friends, “I think I’m going to go to Coney Island on Friday,” they were amused: “What are you doing there?” I didn’t really know.
The boardwalk was empty when I arrived save for a few runners, parents pushing strollers, and groups of men gathered around boomboxes who waved to me as I walked past them. I waved back. I put my fingers in the cold ocean water. I sat on the pier railing. I listened to “Coney Island Baby” a couple times and took pictures of the stone chess tables. I thought of the scene in Paper Moon where Ryan O’Neal tells his daughter Tatum to “drink your Nehi and eat your Coney Island” and thought of my own dad and when I watched that movie with him.
My freshman year, 2020, was marked by isolation. Solo excursions were a chore. That had changed. I could savor my time alone.
Texts rolled in as I made my way up and down the promenade: “did you make it to your misty pier?” and “how’s it going love?” I smiled as I read them, feeling no urgency in replying just then.
Henry Astor
It took me two years at Columbia before I finally visited the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I was on a tour with my history seminar, an eclectic course called The History of the End of the World, taught by Cold War scholar Matthew Connelly. Given my un-Christian upbringing, I had no idea that St. John the Divine was actually the author of the biblical Book of Revelation and that the whole church is a monument to the Eschaton. Beyond the obvious, like the seven-pointed windows for the seven seals of the rapture, Connelly pointed out something on the church’s exterior that I never would have noticed. Over the central portal is a carving of the Twin Towers with a looming mushroom cloud in the rear. Adjacent is a Final Destination–like scene of the Brooklyn Bridge mid-collapse, with cars and school buses flying every which way. Across the way is a rendition of Bohr’s atomic model, seemingly in reference to nuclear apocalypse. The spirit of an elderly Met docent now takes over me whenever I pass by St. John the Divine with a group of friends as I rush ahead of them, beckoning at the faux-Gothic facade with a “Get a load of this shit, guys!” The world has ended so many times since we’ve matriculated at this school. It can’t hurt to have a good laugh every once in a while.
Madison Hu
At the entrance of my apartment is a badly drawn donkey that sprawls across the backs of five sheets of old, freshman-year handouts.
I drew it last fall and it took probably 30 seconds—a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, my roommate and I decided, would be a great addition to our housewarming party. Upon arrival, all our friends, from freshman-year dormmates to recent class buddies, were welcomed by him, and even if they didn’t play his game, they remarked on his uncanniness, which was enough for my roommate and I to keep him on the wall.
A few months after its conception, he found a home: a too-small ornate gold frame that my roommate found on the street. Since then, we have accumulated a small gnome balancing on top, courtesy of my roommate’s white elephant gift exchange; numerous birthday cards from our birthdays and friends’ birthdays we’ve hosted alike; and a red envelope from our Lunar New Year dinner, where I cooked two Peking ducks and only set off the fire alarm twice.
Everyone who comes into the house sees the frame upon entrance and has to be careful not to move too quickly past it, for risk of the gnome, birthday cards, and red envelope flying off (we are too lazy to secure them). When they do, I’m happy to put them back on, and appreciate what has become a shrine to my last year of college.
Miska Lewis
I watched the sun rise over the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the morning of April 17. Having arrived on the lawn and set up tents at a speed only camp counselors can achieve, over 80 of us sighed with relief as we watched the navy blue sky turn purple and pink over Low Library. For 32 hours, the cluster of green tents became our home while our voices grew hoarse demanding our university disclose financial investments and divest from genocide. For 32 hours, I watched dozens of my friends and classmates gather at the picket line, chanting in solidarity to protect those of us on the inside.
Watching Palestinian flags wave in the blustery night, I stepped back to look at the crowd singing “Your people are my people, our struggles align.” I looked up at Butler Library, feeling sure that we would either force the University to divest or raise hell until we graduate and beyond. As I write this, hundreds of fellow students have occupied the West Lawn, making sure our message rings loud in the ears of administrators and on college campuses across the country. I can hear the chanting from my dorm on 116th and Riverside. Opening a tent door to light rain and call-and-response on Butler Lawn wasn’t an expected addition to my senior year, but it’s one that I welcome.
Victor Omojola
If you venture to Lerner’s fifth floor and head for the lounge at the end of the western side, you’ll find what is officially a suite of Undergraduate Student Life. Encircled by administrative offices that take all the windows (and natural light) for themselves, the area is officially a suite of USL, but my friends and I have taken to simply referring to it as Lerner 5.
For the past three years, we have used the lounge as a default space when we have nothing better to do—or when we have a lot of better things to do. Spare time between classes: Go to Lerner 5. Need a place to eat a Ferris quesadilla? Head to Lerner 5. Exam, final project, or thesis deadline rapidly approaching: Get your ass to Lerner 5. The lounge, which we also refer to as the third bunker (there are two similar suites one must pass to access it), has been a makeshift cafe, library, dance studio, game room, book club, movie theater—in short, a sort of modern-day Black salon (minus the intellectualism).
As I write this from Lerner 5, it dawns on me that there is going to be a final time that I sit here, surrounded by pals, drowning in laughter, and devoid of vitamin D. Within a few years, Lerner 5 will only exist in the minds and memories of my friends and I (and perhaps the USL staff who occasionally have had to ask us to bring down our noise levels). Like Rome and Linsanity, all great things must come to an end.
Muni Suleiman
In October 2020, my New York City was bound by the dimensions of a John Jay single. I was once surrounded by fields and gardens for miles, and I yearned to experience some semblance of my Southern life. The Conservatory Gardens inadvertently became a second home.
Whether I perched myself within the flourishing floral pergola of the central Italian garden, lounged by the waterlily pond in the south English garden, or shared whimsy with the Three Dancing Maidens in the north French garden, I’ve felt a sense of peace unreplicated anywhere else in the city. I know that I’m not alone in cherishing the gardens. I’ve had the accidental honor of witnessing engagements and feeling the secondhand revelry of birthday picnics. However, my reasons for visiting were always comparatively mundane: writing essays, occasionally tying myself up in another thought experiment, and people-watching.
With home-making often comes relationship-building. So, I’d wake up a friend on a Saturday morning, summon them to Hungarian for a coffee and an almond croissant each, and let our conversation meander like our feet en route to the gardens. Friends and family have walked through these perennial-lined paths with me many times: This doesn’t feel like New York, they’d say.
Recently, I returned to the Conservatory Gardens alone. Since the winter of 2022, different parts have been undergoing restoration, and each trip has come with a sigh: It just doesn’t look how it used to. The Three Dancing Maidens’ dance floor is now dirt. The Italian pergola is stripped to its tall, steel bones. The serenity of the waterlily pond is often interrupted by irrigation replacements. I stayed for three hours anyway. Much like seasons of life, I could finally accept that the Gardens have, naturally and necessarily, changed since my first visit almost four years ago. And I had too.
Sam Hosmer
If you or anyone you know is an architecture major, there’s a good chance you’ve spent time on the fourth floor of Barnard’s Diana Center. That’s where we take our first studio classes, exhibit our work at the end of the semester, and trim and extrude our digital models until our eyeballs smolder and our frontal lobes melt out our noses.
At any given hour of the afternoon, night, and morning, Diana 404, home of the intro studios, wheezes with exasperation and fatigue, students cursing uncooperative tools, broken models, opaque concepts, unhelpful truisms, dollars burned at Janoff’s, assignments perceived as insufficiently specific, too specific, or both. The intro professors, many of whose reputations far precede them, guide students through the same famous and infamous syllabi in their own famous and infamous ways—and though courses may share the same names, no two are ever alike. Bonds between peers at this point are cast in Rockite. Overhead, at 2 a.m., the lights turn themselves off; somebody grunts and turns them back on again. A few short hours later, the sun starts to rise over campus to the east. These toughening introductory rites bond our thin but mighty ranks.
At one point or another, though it happens differently and at different times for everyone, an anomaly strikes: at someone’s studio desk, the fog has cleared, an idea has caught fire, and the hours have turned into days. When this happens, work output multiplies. The student’s desk crowds with models and sketches and scrawl, and the studio around them fills with the smell of freshly cut basswood. Those in this phase appear clinically insane.
And then, come the crit, a jury of our professors and their (often strange) colleagues, in front of everyone, judges our work. Some of us, understandably, find this to be confrontational and discouraging—but by this point, most have stuck around, because, usually in some inexplicable and vaguely pathological way, we’ve realized we adore it. In here, where everyone has just found something big and beautiful to love, how could we not?
Claire Shang
Just about two years ago, I managed to pack only half an egg salad for lunch, and my phone was lagging quite substantially from the 90-page Google Doc containing this very magazine’s May issue, and because I was somewhere underground on my three-train commute to work I looked up from my phone, defunct as it already was, and it hit me, then, just how lucky I was. From exigency, revelation. One semester into my year-long term as Blue and White editor-in-chief, I realized I had to savor what was left. I would have to know when to dive in and, also, when to look up. Editing my peers and friends taught me the beauty and challenge of volunteering to do anonymous work bearing no byline, of having had to be there, of believing in the potential of an idea, of seeing something through.
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