My Vertical Neighborhood

Living in 1440 Amsterdam

By Audrey Keer

Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal

Getting into Barnard as a transfer student gave me a month to find housing in New York City, and I was frantic. 1440 Amsterdam appeared in my feed on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media akin to Instagram and Pinterest, as a modern building within walking distance of the University. It seemed like the best option available: it was close to campus, rent was reasonable given that the living room would be rented out, and it looked comfortable, luxurious even. My future roommates were strangers, but fellow Columbia students who were also Chinese. I even learned their MBTIs, majors, and sleep schedules from WeChat brokers, so it felt safe. I was finally going to live in New York City. I signed the lease.

After moving in, the disparities between the building and the neighborhood began to register. At first, I felt the beige and light gray kitchen appliances emulating tranquil, Japandi minimalism; I loved having a washer and dryer, and even though the building was still under construction with its chaotically cluttered package room and plastic-covered elevators, you knew it was amounting to something shiny and contemporary. 

Outside, Amsterdam tells a different story. The bodegas are cramped and worn, their once-saturated window signs sun-bleached and faded. The Manhattanville Houses—a public housing complex undergoing privatization—surrounding 1440 Amsterdam are lower, brick, and utilitarian. Children run the perimeter of the courtyard and washed-out playgrounds after school, their noise ringing then disappearing when you step into 1440. 

Discussing 1440’s role in gentrification also necessitates acknowledging the difference in the race and background of the building’s residents. 1440 was advertised extensively on Xiaohongshu, creating a distinctly Asian tower in the middle of historically Black Harlem. 

Before 1440 Amsterdam became a residential building, the site housed a neighborhood staple supermarket and laundromat. Both burned down in November 2013, leaving shoppers without affordable food and employees without jobs. Less than a year later, the landowners, Lefkas Realty, applied for a permit to create a 7-story, 64,000-square-foot grocery store with residential units above it. The project appears to have been abandoned, and the lot remained vacant until 2021, when Grid Group, a luxury real estate development firm, filed permit applications to build a 26-story, 393-unit, largely residential building. The New York City Housing Authority sold the site and its air rights for $28 million as part of its plans to reinvigorate aging public housing through privatization. Somewhere along the way, seven stories became 28, and the supermarket was de-emphasized in favor of residential units. Grid Group received a $210 million construction loan in 2024, and in July of 2025, its first residents moved in. 

The building’s developers are not directly associated with Columbia, but they have made it a goal to attract its students. Advertisements for 1440 Amsterdam highlighting its proximity to the University were posted on student housing websites, Xiaohongshu, and a LED truck parked outside Columbia’s gates. Columbia didn’t build 1440, but it was useful for the people who did: it created demand. The University imported thousands of students, some from affluent international families, who needed somewhere to live that felt commensurate with what they’d paid to be there. Columbia redrew the map; Grid Group simply followed through with capital and architecture.

Because many international students were searching for housing from China, virtual tours and video recordings became central to marketing 1440. The result is an apartment designed to look more appealing on camera than for everyday living, a priority visible in the details. The building’s gym includes a basketball court with hanging lights strung low across the ceiling. They’re pretty on a phone screen, but if you actually tried to play basketball, you’d hit the lights and snuff the bulbs. The building was optimized to be filmed. 

Kimani Edwards is one of the building’s concierges. He is originally from Queens, now resides in the Bronx, and has generations of family from Harlem. He said that his least favorite part of the job is removing wandering strangers from the building, many drawn to its striking otherness. “A homeless man came in and just sat in the middle of the floor talking to himself,” he recalled, “and the residents were kind of scared, so I got him out.” He explained plainly, “They see a big, nice building in this area and they want to see what it’s about, or try to go upstairs.” The building sticks out, but Edwards appreciates this, viewing it as a modernizing upgrade, a move toward diversification, and something generally “good for Harlem” rather than detrimental gentrification: “That’s how time is, that’s just life, things get old, things change.”

But what exactly changed? The neighborhood lost a supermarket and a laundromat to a fire. The people who shopped at that grocery store or carried their laundry there on weekend mornings were not the people the apartments were built for. The $28 million that Grid Group paid NYCHA was intended to fund necessary repairs and upgrades for the Manhattanville Houses, yet residents reported continuous water and gas outages even after 1440 had been constructed. Although the money arrived, the problems it was supposed to solve persisted.

Now it’s time to decide whether to renew my lease. I don’t want to stay, but I don’t really want to move either, partly out of laziness, but also out of something harder to admit, which is immense comfort. The building does fulfill more than the basic needs of a student. Whether 1440 is improprietous or simply what Edwards called it—a marker of evolution, things changing—may depend on whether you were here before it arrived. The lease is a document with my name on it, a start date, an end date, and a price. It does not mention what was here before, who this neighborhood belongs to, or what the building looks like from the courtyard next door. Staying would require leaving the frame that the landlords wanted me to put around my experience and accepting my discomfort with my position here. Leaving would only mean that another Columbia student is charmed by the ads on their screen and fills my place.