Towering Above Harlem : Geographies of Race and the Power of Elite Institutions

Charts racialized and class-based exclusion in Morningside Heights and its surrounding area by elite institutions

New York City’s storied diversity has also been a story of racialized class discrimination. Towering Above Harlem focuses on understudied players in this process: the elite institutions of Morningside Heights―Columbia University, Teachers College and the Riverside Church―to reveal the troubling ways in which they exploited existing geographic features to build a racially and economically exclusive “city on a hill.”

In his final book-length work, Steven Gregory explores the long history of economic and racial discrimination in Morningside Heights, beginning in the late 19th century and extending into the present day. This exclusion of the surrounding racial minorities and working-class population has been enacted physically, through the acquisition of property by Columbia and others, but it has also been enacted through a variety of discourses and practices aimed at setting apart the so-called “civilization-building” mission of the elites overlooking Harlem from the racialized others in the vicinity. The book shows that the major institutions of Morningside Heights have since the beginning tried to physically secede from the Black and Puerto Rican communities geographically below the Morningside plateau, while also symbolically rising above them as beacons of progress.

The volume charts the coordinated effort among elites to use space to naturalize relations of power and prestige, illuminating the past, present, and uncertain future of racial discrimination and exclusivity in Morningside Heights and in New York City at large.