Welcome to this housing review, which is largely just a textual shrine to the cultural reset that is Broadway Hall’s elevator system.

Location: 556 West 114th Street, next to the Beta house and Intercultural House. Right across the street from Carman, Lerner, and the like.

Nearby dorms: Hogan (it’s connected to Broadway), Carman, the 114th street brownstones, and Ruggles.

Stores and restaurants: MoWill, Wu & Nuss, Sweetgreen, Starbucks, Pret, Dig Inn, Strokos, HEIGHTSSSS, Community.

Cost: Standardized pricing of Columbia upperclassman housing, $9,872.

Amenities: 

  • Bathrooms:
    • Four communal dormitory-style bathrooms on each floor are cleaned daily Monday-Friday and usually kept relatively neat! Each bathroom has three to four toilet stalls and two shower stalls.
    • Two bathrooms are assigned female and two male, but talk to your RA if you want to set up one as a gender-neutral space.
  • AC/Heating:
    • Broadway has both, and residents can control the fan speed of the A/C and heater. Just a note that the heaters in Broadway get really hot pretty quickly, but you can turn it on and off to your liking.
  • Kitchen:
    • There’s a small, narrow kitchen on each floor of around 100 square feet, with cabinet and counter space. In each kitchen are a microwave, two ovens, and a couple of stovetops.
    • How heavily the kitchen is used and how messy it becomes depends on your floor. Usually, the Broadway kitchens, while useful, can get kind of messy. It’s also difficult for more than two people to use the kitchen at once, due to space reasons.
  • Lounge:
    • One lounge on the first floor, often used by student groups.
    • One floor lounge per floor on floors 3-12, with couches, a TV, and a nice table situation
    • There are also two sky lounges on the top floor with windows of the New York skyline and lots of tables to study from. The east Broadway sky lounge houses a piano, previously held in John Jay.
  • Laundry:
    • One laundry room in the basement has nine dryers and 11 washers. You’d think that this is enough space to do your laundry, but keep in mind that the majority of these dryers/washers are usually broken and that there are over 300 people living in Broadway.
    • Word on the street from some Broadway residents is that you can sneak into Hogan’s cleaner, better, quieter, more functional laundry room as the two dorms are connected.
  • Computers/Printing:
    • The building lobby has one printer.
    • The third floor also houses a computer lab that has eight computers, including one Mac desktop, and a printer!
  • Gym:
    • There’s a gym on the fourth floor, with an elliptical, two treadmills, and a bike. Just a head’s up that everyone walking in the hallway can see you (Broadway said panopticon).
  • Intra-transportation:
    • In my three years of attending Columbia and struggling through buildings like Hamilton and Lewisohn, I cannot emphasize enough the whole, absolute perfection that is the Broadway elevator system. It is, quite truly, all that and a bag of chips. Sure, the buttons are sometimes weirdly different colors and you’ll see the stray sock here and there, but Broadway Hall has single-handedly revived my faith in elevators as a mode of transportation.
    • There are three elevators in Broadway. They’re fast. They’re clean. And they’re spacious. One time, I saw someone bring in a 9-foot tinikling pole into the elevator, and it! FIT!!
    • Note: People living on the lowest floor (floor 3) will likely still take the elevators up, because the stair system is weird and has a disjunction on the second floor.
  • Hardwood/Carpet:
    • Faux hardwood in the floors. Carpet in the lounges and hallways. Tile in the kitchen.

Room variety:

  • Broadway has 300 singles and 36 doubles. Columbia Housing differentiates this into seven different types of rooms: interior singles, singles, large singles, small doubles, interior doubles, doubles, and large doubles.
  • Singles:
    • Most singles are between 101-125 square feet, facing either West Broadway, south near downtown, or north towards campus.
    • Ten large singles are larger than 134 square feet: 305, 405, and singles ending in -07 on floors 6-13.
  • Doubles:
    • Most doubles are small doubles (numbers ending in -39 and -40). These are around 162-165 square feet, near the Broadway side of each floor without the most amazing views.
    • Fourteen doubles (room 340, room 402, room 456, and numbers ending in -22) are a little nicer. They’re between 70-214 square feet, with better views of Broadway.

Numbers:

  • This might not be a good prediction of the numbers for this year, as the fundamental format of room selection has changed and thus people’s preferences have likely changed accordingly.
  • Singles:
    • 11.667/349 for Interior Single
    • 20/2155 for Large Single
    • 10/37 for Single (I realize that this is not specific in any sense of the word, but this is legitimately what Columbia Housing calls it)
  • Doubles:
    • 19/2630 for Small Double (39/40 lines and similar rooms)
    • 10/2231 for Interior Double
    • 10/2189 for Double
    • 10/2189 for Large Double

Bwog recommendation:

  • Broadway has a great location, in that it’s directly across the street from Ferris, Carman, Butler and has easy access to all the shops and things on Broadway.
  • It also has possibly the best elevators on campus and large sky lounges.
  • The social life in Broadway is relatively quiet – there’s a reason why the seniors living there didn’t choose EC, and the structure of upperclassman singles is generally inhibitive towards any kind of rowdy socialization. However, this can also play to your advantage, especially if you like to study in your room or you’re looking for a relatively clean space.

Resident opinions:

  • “Broadway is not very social, but very quaint and nice.”
  • “Bathrooms can be gross over weekends. Room is cozy and warm. Heat occasionally breaks in the winter which sucks.”
  • “Sky lounge is baller. Laundry room is decent, but machines broke near end of term.”