Stephany Levi
Incoming NYU freshmen have long coveted an assignment in Lipton Hall, the recently renamed first-year dorm that faces Washington Square Park West at Washington Place. It isn’t just the 700-person dorm’s Greenwich Village location — a quick walk from most classes — or its vegetarian- and vegan-focused dining hall that excites the newest coeds: It’s also the pleasure of having a room that peers over the buzzy park or the famed Manhattan skyline.
Stephany Levi and Ishi Gupta, 18-year-old freshman roommates who arrived in the city on Aug. 25, immediately delighted in the view from their ninth-floor accommodations. Their room, one in a three-room suite, faces north to Midtown’s sky-scraping skyline; a window frames the Empire State Building. “I wasn’t expecting much for a dorm, but how much better could it get?” says Levi, a musical theater major from Tampa, Fla. “Some people pay thousands and thousands of dollars every month to get this view.”
To live in the building, which was partially built in the early 1930s as the Holley Chambers Hotel and converted into a dorm by NYU in the 1950s, students pay between $6,694 and $7,532 per semester depending on the assigned room, which ranges from private singles to suites or studios shared by two or more freshmen.
“People come here from all over the world to see the Empire State Building, and that we get to wake up to it every morning is special,” says Gupta, of Old Bridge, NJ, who is studying politics and philosophy. She adds that the view stokes her sense of what she feels is possible now that she’s a New York resident: “Right now, everything feels so alive and exciting and vibrant and new!”