The Ivy League campuses

Each Ivy League campus keeps a founding piece: the ground the college started on, or the single building that once held all of it. The five here are those cores, from a Cambridge cow pasture that became a 25-acre green to a New Jersey hall that served as the seat of the United States Congress for four months in 1783. What they share is continuity of use rather than style, and it is worth knowing which are open lawns anyone can cross and which are working administrative buildings.

Places in this collection

• Low Memorial Library — Completed in 1895 at the centre of Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, sited so that the quad's terraces and steps all resolve on its po…
• Arts Quad — Cornell's humanities core, ringed by stone buildings in Collegiate Gothic with pointed arches and worked detail: Goldwin Smith Hall, White…
• Nassau Hall — Built in 1756, the oldest building at Princeton and originally the entire university under one roof: classrooms, dormitory, library and cha…
• Old Campus — The quadrangle Yale grew out of, built through the colonial and early federal periods and listed on the National Register of Historic Place…
• Harvard Yard — Twenty-five acres of lawn and mature trees that began as a seventeenth-century cow pasture and became the college green when New College wa…

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