On a recent Saturday last month, the temperatures soared into the 50s, giving New Yorkers an uncomfortably common opportunity to shed their jackets and go outside in the dead of winter. Inside a sprawling Manhattan park, a martial arts class sparred in slow-motion at the base of a staircase. Down several flights, along the eastern edge, a group of girls in sweats rehearsed dance moves on a patch of grass. On a nearby bench, a pair of women, legs crossed and coffees in hand, sat deep in conversation. Two separate playgrounds were filled with ambling toddlers followed by their bleary-eyed parents.
All along the winding paths, there were joggers, dog walkers, stroller-pushing parents, and the occasional cluster of map-reading tourists. Racially, it was diverse, with people that looked black, brown, white, Asian, and everything in between.
It was inside this very same park where, several weeks prior, a white Barnard student named Tessa Majors was fatally stabbed around in what police have said was an attempted mugging. Immediately afterwards, three black teenage suspects were sought by investigators, only one of whom has since been charged.
The December 11th killing in Morningside Park came seemingly out of nowhere, shattering the bliss of a 30-acre oasis often used as a cut-through between two neighborhoods. While there had been an increase in robberies—an 89 percent increase between 2015 and 2019—the park was still popular, as more Columbia students, faculty and staff move to Harlem, and as more high rises sprout up along the park's boundaries. Every Saturday, a popular farmers market operates on the corner of 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue. During the summer of 2018 there were zero reported crimes in the park, a statistic that seemed to astonish even park officials.
"This was an uptick but from what we’ve been told, they seemed to have a handle on it." said Brad Taylor, the president of Friends of Morningside Park, a volunteer group. "To hear these reports about a terrible crime wave doesn’t square with our understanding at all."
Listen to Elizabeth Kim discuss her story with Richard Hake on WNYC’s Morning Edition.
Still, Majors's death has touched a nerve, and as evidenced at a town hall meeting about the park last month that opened a flood of concerns—about safety, maintenance and social services in an under-served community. It has also resurfaced the longstanding racial and class tensions between Columbia University and the fast-gentrifying neighborhood of Harlem, where longtime black residents are deeply attuned to the disparities in income, housing, and, in the wake of the high-profile homicide, policing.
"Every night I see police lights shining," said Mikel Washington, 45, who grew up in Harlem and now raises his young son across the street from the park. "The NYPD wants to make a point. I get it. I'm just not sure it's the right point."
On the night of the stabbing, Michael Jackson, 63, another longtime black resident who lives on the top floor of a seven-story building along the Harlem side of the park, recalled seeing police cars with flashing lights positioned inside the park and at entrances closer to where he lived. The locations struck him as odd.
"It was almost as if they were protecting the Morningside Heights neighborhood from us," he said. Whatever the circumstances, he added, "That really is not a good optic right there."
Back on the unseasonably warm Saturday last month, a young black girl who looked no older than six was playing on the grass when she suddenly noticed two police cars parked nearby.
"Oh, the cops are watching us!" she exclaimed to no one in particular. As one of the police cars swept by, it was hard to tell if her concerned tone was pretend or real.
The neighborhood's relationship with Columbia has often been uneasy, going back to the 1968 protests over its plans to build a gym inside Morningside Park and more recently, over the ongoing $6 billion campus expansion into West Harlem. In late January, Columbia's Black Student Organization published an Op-ed in the student newspaper Columbia Spectator, titled, "Actions speak louder than words: Columbia’s deeply rooted anti-Blackness problem." In the essay, the group warned that the enhanced police presence in the wake of Major's death "will only further perpetuate a longstanding culture of anti-Black violence on campus."
Members of the Black Student Organization declined to comment on the issue, and instead referred to their Op-ed.
For some, the murder of Majors underscored a historic neglect from area institutions: parks officials, local police, Columbia, St. John's the Divine, and St. Luke's Hospital (now part of Mount Sinai), the other often-forgotten entities that line the park. It was true that the park had come a long way since the 1970s when it was dominated by drug users. Muggings as well as several well-publicized murders in and around the park contributed to an outsized and, some might say, irrational terror. "To venture in was to die, plain and simple," wrote the late journalist David Rakoff about his memory of the park during the 1980s.
But it is also true that area around the western cliffside, which hugs the border of Columbia's campus, is notoriously secluded. Brad Taylor, the president of Friends of Morningside Park, said he had over the years repeatedly talked about the need for someone, be it a police or parks officer or one of Columbia's security guards, to regularly patrol the park's upper path, where the stabbing occurred. Visibility worsens in the spring and summer because of trees and shrubs. Taylor had asked if it was possible to cut them down but said he got nowhere. Poor or broken lighting has also been a perennial problem.
In the past, there have been promising bursts of community activism. In 2011, a shooting in the park, which left no one seriously hurt, roused the community into action. Among those who spearheaded the effort was Melissa Chu, who lived in the area at the time and had been in the park's playground with her husband and 15-month-old daughter when the shooting occurred. "At first, I was like 'I’m never going back to the park,'" she recalled. After getting over the fear, she decided, "Let’s all call people and figure out what can be done."
She posted an account of the shooting on a website for Upper West Side moms along with the numbers of elected officials. It eventually reached Harlem4Kids, a parenting group with a large listserv. The outreach worked, resulting in community forums and regular meetings with parks department officials. Out of those community conversations, Friends of Morningside Park donated the park's first video camera, which is still in operation today.
Chu, who had been a regular participant, moved away two years ago. On hearing on the news of the fatal stabbing, she said that while it was first and foremost a personal tragedy, she also felt that it was "tragic for the park itself," and for those who had fought so hard to rid the park of crime.
Some locals fear Majors's murder will once again stigmatize the park. During a community board 9 meeting last month, Jonathan Thomas, a co-chair of the landmarks preservation and parks committee, said he was worried about how the university was presenting the park. "We need to take this park and speak about it in a positive light," he said.
Within Columbia, there have been varying reports on what exactly university officials tell students about the park. Several current and former students said that walking through the park at night felt particularly taboo, although not everyone could attribute it to the university. Maybe friends had talked about it, or a resident adviser.
Columbia did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
At the beginning of its semester in January, Columbia sent out an email to students informing them of increased security measures and additional operating hours for its evening shuttles, which include service to Harlem.
"Too much is expected of city parks," famed urbanist Jane Jacobs once wrote. And in many ways, Morningside Park has been long been burdened with expectation—of being a catalyst for revitalization and gentrification, and less cynically, of being a common ground for a neighborhood divided along race and income lines. For many residents, including Taylor, there is the longing for the park to serve as a bridge. He remembered years ago meeting with Maxine Griffith, then head of Columbia's office of government and community affairs. "We walked through the park together," he said. "She said, 'This park is the gateway to Columbia University from the Harlem community.'"
Ultimately, Jacobs argued that neighborhood parks are "directly and drastically affected by the way the neighborhood acts upon them." The best example of this might be Friends of Morningside Park itself. The group was originally formed in the early 1980s by Tom Kiel, a Columbia undergraduate who organized a group of friends to do park cleanups. Black Harlem residents eyed the group of white students suspiciously, accusing them of arrogance and overreach. But they carried on until Kiel died in a trail biking accident in 1996.
In 1998, the group started back up, and over the years, it has shed its elitist reputation. Taylor, who is white, estimated that today the organization's board of roughly a dozen members is half black and more skewed toward Harlem than Morningside Heights. In addition to serving as a steward for the park, the members organize open events throughout the year, including a tree lighting ceremony, Easter egg hunts and a Father's Day basketball tournament. One of its oldest advisors is Suki Ports, an 85-year-old Japanese-American woman who has lived in Morningside Heights nearly all her life and who in 1968 joined other protesters by stepping in front of a bulldozer at Morningside Park during Columbia's failed attempt to build the gym.
Last month's town hall, which was organized by the Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer at the request of Friends of Morningside Park, drew a packed crowd. City officials vowed to make changes, from adding social workers and after-school activities to police patrols and parks staffing. Still, as of two weeks ago, Taylor said he had not yet witnessed anyone patrolling the upper path where Majors had been killed.
Still, he sounded more hopeful than he did prior to the event. In the coming weeks, he was planning to set up more meetings, with Columbia, with city parks officials as well as other interested groups.
"It’s a tragedy that more attention hasn’t been paid," he reflected. "It really needs to be stepped up to the next level. The Harlem community deserves that. We all deserve that."
