Bre Taylor
Pace University’s upperclassmen dorm at 33 Beekman St. doesn’t even make a dent in the Financial District skyline when compared with its neighboring tall towers — but the 34-story dorm is the tallest student residential building in the country. And it comes with the coveted views to prove it.
Senior and resident assistant Bre Taylor lives in a single on the building’s 33rd floor that overlooks the South Street Seaport, the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, and the built-up Brooklyn waterfront. “I’m very lucky. I don’t know if I’ll ever be this lucky again,” Taylor, a 21-year-old communications major from Virginia, says. She’s spent hours watching traffic crawl over the bridges into King’s County, and once saw a marquee on the East River float by emblazoned with a marriage proposal.
The 760 students who live in the building pay between $8,850 and $10,500 per semester depending on room size, though most students live in doubles that run $9,380 per semester. When it comes to which story the students get to inhabit, those with seniority and higher grade point averages get to pick their rooms first.
“I think it’s really funny that people pay millions of dollars to live over here,” Taylor says of the Financial District, where she has resided since freshman year because it’s home to Pace’s campus. After graduation, when she hunts for her own apartment, Taylor says she’ll prioritize some of the amenities she’s become used to at 33 Beekman — like laundry — over a postcardworthy vista. “As long as I can come home and enjoy myself, it really doesn’t matter to me,” she adds. Even so, Taylor says, “I try to soak it up.”