The West Side of My Youth

I was born in 1920 in the old Women’s Hospital of St. Luke’s at 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Two-thirds of a wretched century later, I reside one block west and five blocks north on Broadway and 115th Street, overlooking the Columbia University campus and the two buildings that engaged my youthful energies as a member of the Columbia College class of 1942—Hamilton Hall, where most undergraduate humanities and social science classes met, and Butler Library, named inevitably...