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Included are architectural drawings, surveys, maps, and site proposals, for Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, designed primarily by McKim, Mead & White. Other architects represented include Adams & Woodbridge; Arnold Brunner (who designed the School of Mines); Eggers & Higgins; the Columbia University Buildings and Grounds Department; Howells and Stokes (designed St. Paul's Chapel); Reinhard, Hofmeister and Wahlquist; and James Gamble Rogers. Drawings for buildings no longer in existence or never constructed and drawings for later alterations, are included. Architectural drawings of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, and surveys of the asylum site prepared for Columbia, 1888-1894. Also included are site plans and proposals, surveys, and maps, circa 1890s-1910s, showing the surrounding area, including such institutions as the Jewish Theological Seminary, St. Luke's Home, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Grant's Tomb, and others. Drawings for the Womans's Hospital in the State of New York (designed by Allen & Collens, erected 1903, demolished in the 1970s), circa 1903-1914, are also included. This building was used to house the Columbia School of the Arts in the 1960s since it was located near the campus.

Included are 19 original architectural drawings and photographs and prints of drawings by Withers. Among these are designs for the Van Schaick Free Reading Room (now the Huntington Free Library and Reading Room), Bronx, N.Y.; reredos proposed for the Church of the Transfiguration, New York City; Chapel of the Good Shepherd on Blackwells Island (now Roosevelt Island), N.Y.; a competition design for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City; St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, N.H.); and drawings by others, including Sullivan Jones and Rowland Plumbe. This collection also includes manuscript copies of three letters from Withers to his mother written at sea in 1852 and describing his trip to America.