Heritage · University
New York University: History and Overview
Founded in 1831 by Albert Gallatin and a council of New York merchants, New York University was conceived as a university in and of the city, open to the ambitious of every class. Its campus is Greenwich Village itself, with the Washington Square Arch as its front gate and a history that runs from Morse's telegraph to the Triangle fire.Written to last.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-08-24 · 8-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
New York University was founded in 1831 by a council of merchants, bankers and civic men led by Albert Gallatin, who had served as Secretary of the Treasury under Thomas Jefferson. Their idea was pointed. The city already had a college, Columbia, an old Anglican foundation that educated the sons of the established families. The new institution would be different: nonsectarian, practical as well as classical, and open, in Gallatin's phrase, to the ambitious of every class. It was to be a university in and of the city, and that founding formula has never stopped describing it. NYU has no gates and no quad of its own. Its campus is a neighborhood in the middle of the largest city in the United States, and its front gate, so far as it has one, is the marble arch on Washington Square.
The history that follows is unusually concentrated. Within a few blocks of the square, a professor of painting worked out the electric telegraph, the first photographic portraits in America were made on a rooftop, the moon was photographed in detail for the first time, and, in 1911, a factory fire killed 146 garment workers in a building the university now owns and teaches in. Invention and grief sit side by side in the same short streets, and the university keeps the memory of both.
The founders met in 1830 and obtained a charter the following year for what was then called the University of the City of New York; the name New York University, long in casual use, became official in 1896. Gallatin, by then in his seventies, wanted a system of rational and practical education fitted to a commercial city, teaching modern languages, science and commerce alongside Greek and Latin, and admitting students on merit rather than on membership of any church. The first classes were held in rented rooms near City Hall in 1832, and in 1835 the university opened its own home, a marble Gothic Revival pile on the east side of Washington Square known simply as the University Building.
That building, demolished in 1894, housed an improbable share of the century's firsts. Samuel F. B. Morse joined the faculty in 1832 as professor of the literature of the arts of design, among the earliest professorships of art in America, and in his rooms there he developed the electromagnetic telegraph and the code that bears his name. His colleague John William Draper, a professor of chemistry, worked with him in a glass studio on the roof, where in the winter of 1839 and 1840 they made some of the first daguerreotype portraits taken in America. In March 1840 Draper produced a detailed photograph of the moon, among the first ever made. It is a striking inheritance for one address: the place where the recorded image and the transmitted message were both domesticated.
The university grew in the pattern of the city, unevenly and ambitiously. In 1894 it moved its undergraduate college to a new campus at University Heights in the Bronx, keeping its professional schools at the square. The Bronx campus was sold in 1973 during New York's fiscal crisis, and the university regathered itself around Washington Square, a retrenchment that in time became its identity. Through the twentieth century NYU educated generations of the city's strivers, many of them the children of immigrants who had landed at Ellis Island a few miles to the south, and its character as an open, urban, working institution hardened into a tradition.
NYU's campus is Greenwich Village. Washington Square Park serves as the quad, and the Washington Square Arch, designed by Stanford White and completed in 1892 to commemorate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration, stands as the ceremonial entrance. University buildings, most of them flying a small violet flag, are threaded through the ordinary streets among apartment houses, cafes and shops. The Bobst Library, a red sandstone cube by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, anchors the south side of the square. Students cross a public park between classes, and the Village, with its long history of writers, painters and dissenters, functions as the university's living room.
Academically the university is a federation of strong schools. The Tisch School of the Arts, founded in 1965, houses one of the most influential film programs anywhere; the Institute of Fine Arts, in the former Duke mansion on Fifth Avenue, trains art historians, curators and conservators; the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, built around the mathematician Richard Courant after he fled Göttingen in the 1930s, is a leading center of applied mathematics; and the Stern School of Business, descended from the School of Commerce of 1900, faces the square it grew up on. Schools of law, medicine, engineering and social work round out a full research university.
Since 2010 NYU has also operated degree-granting campuses abroad: NYU Abu Dhabi, opened in 2010, and NYU Shanghai, opened in 2013 in partnership with East China Normal University, together with a dozen smaller study-away sites. The network has drawn debate as well as students, including scrutiny of labor conditions during construction in Abu Dhabi and questions about academic freedom abroad, and the university has had to answer for the model it pioneered. The campuses remain, and degrees earned at all three carry the same name.
Two buildings, a block apart, carry the weight of NYU's memory. The first is gone: the old University Building where Morse tapped out messages on coils of wire and Draper coaxed faint images onto silvered plates. When it was demolished in 1894, some of its stones went north to the Bronx campus, and the site on Washington Square East is now occupied by the university's Silver Center, where a plaque records what happened there. The modern world's habit of sending words through wires and fixing faces in pictures has a traceable address, and it is a university building on a public square.
The second building stands. On 25 March 1911, fire broke out on the upper floors of the Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company employed hundreds of garment workers, most of them young immigrant women. Exits were locked or inadequate, the single fire escape collapsed, and 146 people died, many of them jumping from the ninth floor as the city watched. The fire became a turning point in American labor history, driving the New York Factory Investigating Commission and a generation of workplace safety law. The building was later given to NYU and renamed the Brown Building; it now holds science laboratories and classrooms. Plaques on its facade name the dead, the building is a National Historic Landmark, and each year on the anniversary a fire ladder is raised and the names are read aloud. The university teaches chemistry and biology in the rooms where they died, and it does not let the fact go unremarked. Labor history is kept here the way other universities keep manuscripts, in place and in plain sight.
The roll of NYU's people follows the shape of its schools. From the film program came Martin Scorsese, and from Tisch after him Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Joel Coen and Chloé Zhao, a lineage that has shaped American cinema for half a century. The Courant Institute produced and housed mathematicians of the first rank, among them Peter Lax, awarded the Abel Prize in 2005 for his work on partial differential equations. The economics faculty has included the Nobel laureates Thomas Sargent and Paul Romer, and the university counts dozens of Nobel winners among its alumni and faculty across medicine, physics and letters. At the very beginning stand Morse and Draper, whose work at the square belongs to the history of technology itself.
NYU today enrolls tens of thousands of students across its three degree-granting campuses, the great majority in New York, and it is often described as the largest private university in the United States, a claim that depends on how enrolment is counted. It draws one of the largest international student bodies in the country and sustains research spanning medicine at NYU Langone Health, mathematics, data science, the arts and the humanities. The institution Gallatin imagined for the ambitious of every class now admits them from every country.
There is no campus to tour in the usual sense, which is itself the point. Visitors can walk Washington Square Park freely, stand under the arch, and find the university around them: Bobst Library and the Silver Center at the square's edges, and the Brown Building a block east at Washington Place and Greene Street, where the memorial plaques can be read from the sidewalk. The university offers admissions tours from its Welcome Center, and the Village rewards unhurried walking. Most university buildings require ID to enter, but the neighborhood, like the institution, belongs to the city.