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Finding Furnald
Andrew Fisher, Alum
Columbia College 1965


During my first year at Columbia, my home was 929 Livingston, a double with a view across the John Jay airshaft. If you got really close to the window and moved over to one side, you could see a sliver of Amsterdam Avenue.

The guy next door was a tremendous optimist. When my roommate informed me he wanted to move into a single the next year, Steve suggested sharing a room in Furnald, which had been a graduate dorm but was being opened to College students because of a tremendous gain in the number of out-of-town students. Not just any room, of course, a two-room suite. I was very pessimistic; I didn't think that there would be any the two-room suites left by the time they got to the sophomores, but Steve insisted it could be done.

Our hopes looked pretty bleak when, on the day for room selections, Steve was confined to St. Luke's with scarlet fever! I was beginning to wonder if we would get any room at all, when the dorm council called and informed us that we would be living in 934-35 Furnald, the best room on campus! It seems the original plan had been to open only the lower eight floors of Furnald to undergrads, but even more out-of-towners than expected accepted their admission to the Class of 1966, and they had to open the ninth and tenth floors as well. Guess whose application was on the top of the pile?

The window of 934 Furnald looked across campus to Hamilton Hall, and into the windows of the Journalism building. The first word I saw every morning when I woke up was, "Journalism," so it's no surprise that I wound up writing for a living. The window of 935 looked down on Ferris Booth Hall's terrace.

I lived happily in 934-35 Furnald from 1962 to 1965, and when I worked as an adjunct in the Journalism School in 1989, the room where I taught looked right into the windows of my wonderful old dorm room.

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