108 Waverly Place

From the street, 108 Waverly Place looks like a small stone castle.

In the 1950s, a college professor lived here with a jazz collection that filled the ground floor to the ceiling. Marshall Stearns taught English at Hunter College and wrote about jazz on the side.

Almost no university took jazz seriously then, but Stearns felt it was deserving of serious academic study. In 1952 he turned his apartment into the Institute of Jazz Studies, a library open to researchers by appointment.

Famous musicians sat on his board of advisers and came to his parties. At one party, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie arrived with half his band. Houses had no air conditioning in those days, so the windows were wide open. The music poured onto the street, leading neighbors to call the police. Reportedly, when the officers saw who was playing, they asked for autographs instead of shutting down the party.

By the 1960s the collection had outgrown the apartment. Stearns had just survived a heart attack and wanted the collection to have a permanent home. Rutgers University in New Jersey agreed to take it in 1966, the year Stearns died.

A small plaque beside the ground-floor window marks where the institute began.