Sam Melvin
When Sam Melvin was an undergraduate in Michigan, she hung a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on her wall. Now as a graduate student living in its namesake borough, she sees the iconic span every day from her ninth-floor window.
The 23-year-old is a resident of Educational Housing Services’ St. George Towers in Brooklyn Heights. It’s the latest iteration of the famed Hotel St. George, once the largest hotel in New York City with sections that date back to the 1800s. The building on Hicks Street now houses some 1,400 students and interns enrolled in schools across the city, from John Jay College — where Melvin is pursuing a master’s in criminal justice — to the Parsons School of Design.
Living at St. George Towers runs residents between $6,300 and $10,000 during this fall’s semester depending on room size. The fees include access to a series of poshly designed common spaces, including a communal kitchen, a lounge with a pool table and a study room.
But only a few of the students living in the building have rooms that look out to an iconic city landmark. “I didn’t know you could live in student housing and have this kind of view,” she says. “I thought it was going to be more like a regular dorm, where I looked onto the back of a building.”
But her view is far from that — Melvin’s window overlooks the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and the Manhattan skyline from the Lower East Side clear to Midtown. Sometimes she sits at her desk and watches Brooklynites dine al fresco on their Dumbo rooftops. “I don’t even have to leave my room to feel like I’m in the midst of the city,” Melvin says.