A Walk Through Morningside

Dispelling fear down the hill. 

By Cecilia Zuniga 

Illustration by Selin Ho

Golden flecks of sunlight danced over Carmen’s smooth gray hair, streaming through the green canopy above us. We found ourselves sharing a bench as a low-hung 7 p.m. sun settled over Morningside Park. Her hands, reminding me of my own grandmother’s, were laced and resting gently across her stomach. With a pink children’s bike parked at her side, she kept a watchful eye over her granddaughter playing in the grassy field ahead. “No te vayas muy lejos, Isabella,” she kept repeating. Don’t go too far. Sluggish from the unforgiving July heat, I plopped down next to her. She smiled warmly, and I turned to ask how her day was going. Her eyebrows furrowed and she chuckled. “No hablo inglés,” she said. 

“Hablo español,” I offered happily, and asked again about her day. 

Carmen and I wound up on that bench for two hours—laughing, crying, and delving into our family histories back and forth. As the sun began to set, we parted ways with a tight embrace. We left with each other’s phone numbers and August dinner plans at her family’s restaurant in Puerto Rico. 

Carmen, a Harlem resident of 40 years in the same apartment, told me how much she used to love visiting Morningside Park with her husband. They’d take long strolls through the park, always in matching outfits. Fernando, as she casually switched to his name, was adamant about saying good morning to everyone who walked by. Tears swelled in the soft crinkle of her eyes as she told me that Fernando had passed away two years ago. These days, she mostly comes to Morningside with their 10-year-old granddaughter Isabella, who loves to ride her bike around the baseball field. 

Carmen said that she’ll often peddle too far, slipping away to fawn over the turtles. “Pero me encanta la tranquilidad, me encanta,” Carmen said. But I love the peace, I love it. 

…

As I enter my final year at Barnard, I am often struck by how little some students venture away from Columbia’s campus, rarely making it down to Brooklyn or Queens, but especially uptown into Harlem and Washington Heights—all of these neighborhoods being socially vibrant, culturally rich, and abundant in any cuisine for a stressed out, home-sick student. Given the single-block radius of Barnard, and what feels like an even more constrained social scene, one might think that exploring New York City—beyond the stretch of Cathedral Parkway to 125th—would be all the more appealing.  

Columbia’s campus is lucky to be surrounded by three New York City parks: Riverside, Central and Morningside. Morningside Park, however, is unlike any other. Entering the park from Morningside Drive, you descend dozens of stairs into a labyrinth of windy paths, wildflowers speckled with bumblebees, and towering trees dotted with robins. You trade Columbia’s Greco-Roman columns for sheer rockface that typifies uptown’s hilly topography, a rejection of College Walk’s vast expanse.

A walk through Morningside Park, lined with cast-iron lampposts and a dizzying amount of stairs, is an exploration of Harlem’s multitudes. Saturday afternoon in the park looks like the smoky haze of cookouts and baby showers; well-attended local baseball games and a matching cacophony of Dominican slang; young professors pushing cooing babies in strollers, dogs leashed to their waist; the squeak of sneakers shuffling on basketball courts and competing basslines of rap and reggaeton; teens and grandmothers sharing a bench, watching the turtles poke their heads above glistening algae blooms. 

It is not uncommon, however, to hear students regurgitate their parents’ anxieties as they exit Columbia’s gates; to hear that they shouldn’t take the subway alone at night; that they should stay away from Morningside Park; that the “surrounding” neighborhood is prone to crime, and they should avoid it altogether. In the doorway of a freshman double, parents will naturally and nervously dole out safety advice, especially when home is nothing like New York City. Most have the best intentions at heart. But when it comes to Harlem specifically, one cannot ignore the racial undertones of such caution. It is a tension that is largely unspoken, hinted at through hushed asides and stutters in conversation. A tension lodged between second-guessing whether to walk through or around Morningside Park, the generous citation of crime rates, and a nebulous hesitancy to say “Black.” 

I’d felt this tension the first time I walked through Morningside Park at night, when I’d realized that something had happened there. I was in a group of at least five people, also Barnard sophomores. We were on our way to Silvana, a restaurant-turned-speakeasy after 8 p.m., right across the park on 116th and Frederick Douglass, when someone had asked if it was a good idea to walk through the park at night. Our lively chatter paused as another person added, “Wasn’t a student killed there?” Silence hung in the air. 

“It was a couple of years ago now,” a third person chimed in. Walking around the park, the group decided, would be much more inconvenient than simply cutting through. So we descended the well-lit stairs toward our destination. 

Anna Sugrue, BC ’20, was a senior trudging toward her fall finals week in December 2019 when she received the news about Tessa Majors’ death. The first public safety alert came around 8:30 p.m., but it wasn’t confirmed until an 11 p.m. email from then-Barnard President Sian Beilock. Its subject line read “Mourning the Tragic Death of a Barnard Student.” Within minutes, shock, disbelief, and horror rippled across Barnard and Columbia’s campuses. 

The details soon flooded in. At around 7 p.m. on Dec. 11, 2019, Tessa Majors, a first-year student at Barnard, was fatally stabbed in Morningside Park. She had been approached by three teenage boys —two of them 14 and the other 13— who attempted to rob her on the staircase leading up to West 116th and Morningside Drive. A struggle ensued, and one of the boys pulled out a knife. Her injuries were fatal, and Majors passed later that night at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital. The heaviness of the tragedy weighed on everyone in Morningside Heights—students, faculty, staff, and community members alike. Sugrue recalled the “tremendous amount of grief” she’d felt, for Tessa and her family, for their peers—including the teen boys—and for the Harlem community as a whole. 

The local press pounced on the tragedy. Headlines dwelled on the spike of crime in Morningside Park leading up to the murder, and inflammatory rhetoric spoke of the teens’ seemingly innate violence. Upon arrest, various outlets plastered their faces on TV and made a spectacle of their legal proceedings—“identifying them in the paper, talking about how severe the charges were going to be, and people celebrating the intensity of the charges,” Sugrue reflected. In the following weeks, Sugrue was quickly disturbed by the racially coded language of retribution surrounding Majors’ death.  

Almost immediately, parallels to the Central Park Five were drawn and hard to ignore. Katherine Franke, James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, harkened back to the shadowy legacy of the 1989 case in an op-ed published five days after Majors was murdered. Franke underscored the cases’ unsettling resemblance, beyond the optics of young Black teens and a white female victim, but also of concerning due process violations in the aftermath, such as detectives nudging a teen towards confession without an attorney or parent present. 

Heightened policing followed in the ethos of retribution. By Dec. 12, the morning after Tessa’s death, the NYPD had lit up Morningside Park with stadium floodlights, stationed patrols at every entrance and exit, and sent officers on horseback traversing the park. That same day, Columbia Public Safety also announced its increased foot and vehicle patrols along Morningside Drive, along with more walking escorts, shuttle services, and expanded local businesses as Safe Haven partners. The security booth at the top of Morningside Park became a 24/7 posting, which it remains to this day. Dozens of anxious parents had also flooded Columbia’s phone lines, demanding greater police presence around Morningside Heights in the long term. Parents, however, were not alone in calling. 

On the evening of Dec. 25, 2019, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic organization called “Road to Power” flooded the phone lines of several Barnard faculty members, blaming Tessa Majors’ death on her proximity to Black people and Harlem. An automated message played with each phone call: “Remember to teach your children: ‘Around blacks, never relax.’” While the University vehemently condemned the violently racist calls, the Columbia University Black Students’ Organization, in an op-ed dated January 2020, noted that this one-off condemnation of glaring white supremacy should not obscure Columbia’s own history of racist exclusion and segregation in Morningside Heights. In the wake of Majors’ death, BSO prompted students to consider how these phone calls can be situated within a larger story—how Columbia’s weaponization of policing has functioned to maintain its “elite, exclusive, and, most importantly, white environment.” 

Morningside Park, a natural break between Morningside Heights and South Central Harlem, is a site of historic struggle and resistance against anti-Black exclusion. In 1961, Columbia proposed the construction of a “Community Gymnasium” in the park with a segregated design: Harlem residents relegated to a basement entrance with access limited to a single floor, whereas University affiliates would have street-level access to the whole facility. Outraged, Students’ Afro-American Society stood in unwavering solidarity with Harlem’s working-class community against Columbia’s racist exclusion and gentrification. Alongside Students for a Democratic Society, SAS led a week-long strike and occupation of campus buildings in the spring of 1968, successfully halting the construction of the gym. Outside of Morningside Park, however, Columbia is New York City’s largest private landowner today, continuously usurping real estate through eminent domain and expanding uptown. The 2008 Manhattanville Campus extension on 125th, for example, cost the University nearly $6.3 billion and cost over 5,000 Harlem residents their homes and businesses. And as the University expands geographically uptown, police presence expands alongside it.

In 2014, BSO writes, the NYPD mobilized hundreds of officers to the nearby Grant and Manhattanville Houses in its largest gang raid to that date. After four years of a targeted surveillance campaign, nearly 400 officers charged into buildings as helicopters hovered in the sky. A total of 40 young men were arrested. Dozens of Harlem residents immediately rejected the framing of their buildings as gang-ridden, and pointed instead to years of pleading with the city for non-carceral interventions to diffuse local tensions. Meanwhile, Columbia’s then-Vice President for Public Safety, James McShane, celebrated the arrests in the name of “making the community safer.” As long as the University’s vision of “safety” hinges upon the sensationalized arrest of its non-white neighbors, what does it actually mean to make the community safer?

And, who is afforded the privilege and amplification to define safety? 

Mary Rocco, a former Urban Studies professor and current Director of Engaged Scholarship, Community Engagement and Inclusion at Barnard, stressed the importance of disentangling the feeling of being unsafe from the material conditions of being unsafe. “We see that in the built environment as well, right?” she suggested.“When you're walking through a vacant, poorly lit, garbage-strewn environment, what is it that's making you feel unsafe? The lack of lighting, perhaps. The lack of care and attention to a space.” Anxiety from walking down a dimly-lit street, however, must be differentiated from a fear of walking amongst strangers. Safety’s definition is dangerously subjective, often susceptible to pre-existing racial and cultural biases. 

But even physical conditions of neglect tell a larger story of racialized geography. It is not uncommon for parents to cite a static image of 1980s Morningside Park as a barometer to gauge its safety today; Rocco cautions against such a comparison. In the 1970s, New York City was in the depths of a fiscal crisis, deindustrialization, and widespread layoffs—a vastly different place than it is today. Emergency responder and social services were slashed alongside the neoliberal restructuring of the city’s economy, resulting in the inequitable abandonment of many Black and brown neighborhoods. Although historic disinvestment compounds into today’s urban landscape, the 1970s conceptualization of Morningside Park should by no means govern perceptions of its safety in a 2025 context. 

Sugrue echoed Rocco’s sentiment. “One of the beginning principles of becoming an abolitionist,” she reflected, “has to do with reconceptualizing in yourself and grappling within yourself what ways you've internalized the politics of public safety that so feed into the culture of punishment, retribution, and the fucked up criminal justice system that we have.” During her junior year at Barnard, Sugrue inherited the Barnard Criminal Justice Initiative from the club’s graduating seniors. Fearing that “Criminal Justice Initiative” sounded “cop-friendly,” the group quickly ditched their name and shifted their approach towards a more radical politic: In 2019, the Barnard-Columbia Abolition Collective was born. Early conversations at BCAC focused on abolitionist praxis of self-reflection, with members dissecting their own ingrained perceptions of safety. “What you have been taught about what it means to feel safe is so racialized. And it's so class based,” Sugrue explained. 

At a women’s college like Barnard, conversations about safety are also inevitably framed by gender. As young women and gender-non conforming people, we quickly develop a heightened feminist consciousness, attuned to the realities of living within a heteropatriarchal society. Yet as Sugrue underscores, a reconceptualization of safety demands an intersectional lens. Gender marginalization does not outweigh racial and class-based privilege, but rather emphasizes the need to contend with it. Barnard remains an institution that is predominantly white and wealthy, underscoring a core tension: Violence against women is real, but so is the racialized violence inflicted in the name of “protecting” women, and white women in particular. After Majors’ death, such anxieties about being a woman in New York City were only legitimized through visible securitization of the campus and through the narrative afterlives of the tragedy. Her story has rippled through the student body like an urban legend of sorts, a cautionary tale capable of reshaping collective imagination. 

As Tessa Majors’ story lives on, we must accept its painful truth, but also understand it as a tragic anomaly. For every time that a first-year chooses to avoid Harlem; refuses to take the subway alone; walks the long way around rather than through Morningside, a small seed of distrust is sown—codifying a mentality of us and them, and normalizing an anxiety which requires unraveling. As long as fear dominates Columbia students’ perceptions towards Morningside Park, the force of police will trail closely behind to fortify the hill upon which Columbia sits. 

Trust, not police, remains our imperative. In Morningside Park, I have found nothing short of peace, abundance, and community. It begins with a free afternoon and a conversation.