“It’s a nice base of operations,” says Trevor Christensen, a CSHL graduate student living in Knight House. “You have almost all the first-year students in Knight and across the street at Cutting. It makes it pretty easy to get together for things like working on projects, reviewing for tests, or discussing papers.”
Knight House was originally built by the Jones family. Regular readers may recognize the name. It adorns CSHL’s oldest lab—and also Jones Beach. By 1998, it was home to former CSHL Trustee Townsend J. Knight. CSHL purchased the historic three-story mansion that same year. Despite some experience in the fine art of transporting buildings across the harbor, CSHL decided against uprooting the historic home. Knight House was instead renovated where it stood to welcome the CSHL School of Biological Sciences (SBS) inaugural class of 1999. And what a welcome it provides! Current first-year resident Pablo Mantilla says:
“The house itself is beautiful. But the view is definitely my favorite thing. Every single morning you get to see it. Sunrise, sunset—gorgeous. You never get used to it. Every time you walk in, especially when it snows, it looks like a painting. It almost doesn’t look real.”
In 2005, the Laboratory expanded its housing options across the harbor by purchasing and renovating a nearby home previously owned by former CSHL Association President George Cutting. Named in his honor, Cutting House was initially occupied by postdoctoral fellows. Today, SBS graduate students call it home.
As part of their graduate research, SBS students work directly alongside CSHL scientists in a variety of fields. Workdays often start early and can extend into the night. That’s on top of the papers, projects, and tests they expect to work on throughout the semester. The availability of affordable student housing at CSHL means one less thing to worry about for Christensen and Mantilla.
“It’d be a lot harder to attend classes and work on projects if I didn’t live so close,” Christensen says. “Having this kind of close-by, affordable housing really gives you a solid foundation to build off of, and it comes with a built-in community. You’re living with people in similar situations. So, you can rely on each other to help out with things.”
CSHL has announced plans to expand housing availability for postdocs and visiting scientists through the Foundations for the Future campaign. Once complete, the effort will allow more scientists than ever before to share in the joy of discovery at CSHL. It’s an experience Knight and Cutting residents already know well.
“It really feels like a different world,” Mantilla says. “It’s like if somebody wrote a book about this place where people go to become scientists, and they house you, feed you, give you all this cool stuff, take your problems away, and let you focus on just being a scientist. It’s as close as you can get to that.”