Seinfeld and Gina's Domain

Gina's current office doesn't rival that of Donald Trump when it comes to size and luxury, but she focuses so intently on the task at hand that she easily can be in an airport, office or a coffee shop and still get her work done.
She loves enjoying the stroll to work across Broadway and past the most beautiful parts of Columbia's Morningside Campus. Gina has the added convenience of being a short walk away from city streets lined with stores and restaurants. One of the most easily recognizable is Tom's Restaurant, although most of us know it as Monk's Diner from “Seinfeld.”

We took some photos, but we decided to have lunch near Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights, so we caught the train.
Before leaving the main campus, however, let me at least touch on more of Columbia's history.

As previously mentioned, the college has figured prominently in our history from the time of our country's origin. Columbia re-located to its current Morningside Heights site in 1897, where its uptown New York location attracted many of the greatest minds to study and do research, a tradition continued to this day.


Some theoretical research in physics headed by Columbia faculty including Enrico Fermi lead to the atomic bombs which ended World War II. The Manhattan Project was so-named for Columbia's location.


In the 1960s, protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War became prominent at Columbia, exploding in 1968 with a shutdown of the campus by 1000 protesters. As a result, the government pulled some classified research from the campus, seen as a seat of unrest, and the general tenor of the campus moved politically left.


After the temporary disruption, morale and funding for research returned, albeit with different emphasis, to this university located in the heart of one of the world's greatest cities. The Pulitzer's School of Journalism at Columbia remains extremely influential on the way news is reported, and the medical and health research, of which Gina is a proud participant, is among the best in the world.

Columbia University

Without question, Columbia University is one of the most prestigious,revered and influential institutes of higher learning in the world, so obviously it is with great pride that I say my oldest daughter Gina has been doing research there as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and will soon be working directly for the university itself.

Gina lives a half block away from the main campus, so we re-created her easy morning commute. By doing so, we also walked in the footsteps of one of my favorite actors, Bill Murray. No, he wasn't a student there, but his character Dr. Peter Venkman did research at Columbia, just like Dr. Gina. Well.... not “just like.” Gina's research doesn't involve playing mind games with her subjects in order to get dates rather than data, and she walks or takes the subway rather than riding around in a converted ambulance.

In any case, I did recognize the Morningside Heights campus where she has worked for for the past three years. Located in the middle of the city, the hallowed halls of academia contrast with the surrounding area.

It looks appropriately aged and distinguished to be the oldest college in New York and fifth oldest college in the United States, so I was surprised when Gina's husband Laszlo said that the campus had been moved there a little more than a hundred years ago.

The original name of Columbia was King's College, so-named because it was created by royal charter from King George II of England in 1754, with the first “campus” being a schoolhouse next to Trinity Church in Manhattan attended by eight students. By 1767, it had become the first American medical school to grant the M.D. Degree, setting the stage for a long history of leading the way in health education and research.

In 1776, the colonies had a bit of a disagreement with the King of England, and the school closed for a few years. However, the college had fulfilled its initial promise to "enlarge the Mind, improve the Understanding, polish the whole Man, and qualify them to support the brightest Characters in all the elevated stations in life." Among the students and trustees of King's College were the first Chief Justice (John Jay), the first Secretary of the Treasury (Alexander Hamilton), author of the final draft of the U.S. Constitution (GouverneurMorris), and one of five men assigned to write the Declaration of Independence (Robert Livingston). That's probably not exactly what King George had in mind.

In 1784, the college re-opened as Columbia University, a name affirming the institution's independence from England just as her country had.