Description of Wein Stadium aka Baker Field, taken from the Columbia University web site:
Beyond the west stands is a panoramic view of Spuyten Duyvil, the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson rivers, and the New Jersey Palisades. The view is one reason that Wien Stadium was featured in Sports Illustrated as one of the most beautiful places in the country to watch a football game.
When you take Metro North into NYC on the Hudson line, you get a great view of Spuyten Duyvil (one of the coolest names around; no relation to James Dumervil) and just past that, the first thing you see at the northernmost point of Manhattan is Wein Stadium, home of the Columbia University Lions.
It has to be a great view from that stadium and at some point, I have to watch a game there. Even if not for the uber cool location and view, there is an historical reason for visiting this stadium.
Syracuse once had major rivalry with Columbia in football. They played each other in NYC (we were New York's team some 80 years before Dr Gross began his initiative) every season from 1924 to 1948 excepting 1939 and 1941-1943, with most of the games being held at the end of the season. The first four were played at the old Polo Grounds but I believe the rest were played at Wein (it opened in 1924).
Colgate was our biggest rival at the time but Columbia wasn't far behind.
Lastly, here is a excerpt from an article published in the New York Times in 1936, talking about founding a new athletic league in the East that is kind of interesting given SU playing at Columbia's stadium and all the recent activity regarding conference affiliation.
^ Kieran, John (1936), "Sports of the Times", The New York Times, December 4, 1936, p. 36. "There will now be a little test of the "the power of the press" in intercollegiate circles since the student editors at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth and Penn are coming out in a group for the formation of an Ivy League in football. The idea isn't new... It would be well for the proponents of the Ivy League to make it clear (to themselves especially) that the proposed group would be inclusive but not "exclusive" as this term is used with a slight up-tilting of the tip of the nose." He recommended the consideration of "plenty of institutions covered with home-grown ivy that are not included in the proposed group. [such as ] Army and Navy and Georgetown and Fordham and Syracuse and Brown and Pitt, just to offer a few examples that come to mind" and noted that "Pitt and Georgetown and Brown and Bowdoin and Rutgers were old when Cornell was shining new, and Fordham and Holy Cross had some building draped in ivy before the plaster was dry in the walls that now tower high about Cayuga's waters."
