NEW YORK -- New York City hosts its fair share of art exhibits, fashion shows and Fifth Avenue parades. But when it's an art exhibit at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations in New York City (ILR-NYC), Cornell Design League's New York City debut show or the Big Red Band marching down Fifth Avenue after a Columbia football game, Big Red in the city takes note.

Cornell and Cornellians are all over the city, on and off the New York City "campus." The Cornell University-New York City (CU-NYC) campus stretches from the southern tip of Manhattan, up the island to Lenox Hill on the Upper East Side. 

This urban campus mirrors many of the features of the more bucolic Ithaca campus and is composed of Cornell Theory Center (CTC), Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), ILR, the Cornell Club, Alumni Affairs and Development, and Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC). This large Cornell medical complex now also boasts the new Jay Monahan Center and, under construction, the 13-story Ambulatory Care and Medical Education Building.

CTC, which offers services in computational finance, maintains a complex of offices at 55 Broad St. Walking into CTC's reception area, the visitor is greeted by a sleek cluster of 16 dual node Intel Xeon processors that blink and flash as impressively as the console of a spacecraft. 

CCE is at 16 E. 34th St., but reaches into all five boroughs and beyond. Just a few of its programs: nutrition education for families in all boroughs provided by 30 community educators; assisting faculty at WCMC in an obesity study, and participating in an environmental impact study for New York City's bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

A couple of floors below CCE can be found ILR's classrooms, which are filled year-round with workplace-related curricula in union, labor and management. In addition to several institutes and programs, ILR also hosts workshops, breakfast series, guest speakers and the occasional art exhibit. 

The Cornell Club (6 E. 44th St.) and Alumni Affairs and Development (708 Third Ave.) provide a variety of Cornell connections. Whether you're visiting from the Ithaca campus or are a local alumnus, they offer an oasis in an often hectic and isolating city.

WCMC is the oldest and largest part of the CU-NYC campus. This biomedical center extends along York Avenue between 66th and 72nd streets and is among the top-ranked clinical and medical research centers in the country. The WCMC campus offers degrees in medicine and Ph.D.s in biomedical research, and it has major affiliations with New York Presbyterian Healthcare Network, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery. 

Also dispersed throughout New York City are Cornell's Ithaca students. Both undergraduates and graduate students can be found in countless internships in the city, many of them placed by the Urban Semester and the Cornell Urban Scholars Program (CUSP). These programs run year-round and serve close to 100 students. 

Alumni, of course, are everywhere in the city. From Westminster Dog Show parties to private tours of local museums and New York City campus Slope Day festivities, alumni activities abound. 

Ithaca faculty are involved in collaborations on and off the CU-NYC campus, from the biomedical labs of WCMC to the professional dance theater.

Indeed, the CU-NYC campus is as well-established as its Ithaca counterpart, and the two campuses are increasingly collaborative. And just as on the Ithaca campus, change is always afoot. Currently, the College of Architecture, Art and Planning is investigating renting space to assist students in pursuing their studies in New York City. 

As alumnus E.B. White '21 noted, "New York provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing."

Brenda Tobias is director of Cornell-New York City relations. The "CU in the City" column will appear monthly in the Cornell Chronicle. To suggest an item for coverage, e-mail bnp1@cornell.edu.