It was just after 3 p.m. Friday when scores of curious onlookers, mostly wearing backpacks, began to line the yew hedges around Columbia’s South Lawn, snapping pictures of a sight unfamiliar to these grounds for decades. Before them, only a few feet away, was the football team, long a source of considerable embarrassment for a proud Ivy League fan base. But the team was out in the warm sunshine on this September afternoon.
It is a new Friday tradition that harks back to a more glorious era for Columbia, when the football team (and other sports) played before large crowds right in the middle of everything, before Butler Library was constructed in 1934, cutting off the southern part of the campus at 114th Street.