Gossip Girl Mixes Up the Ivies

Cities like Toronto have often served as not-entirely-convincing locations for movies and TV shows set in New York.

But New York as a substitute for New Haven?

OMFG!

The cast and crew of Gossip Girl took over part of the campus of Columbia University in upper Manhattan on Tuesday.

Two black stretch limos were part of the props. Tres chic. Very meta, even, given that the girls have overtaken American culture.

But here is the rub: The scene is supposed to take place on the campus of Yale. Anyone who knows anything about academia knows that the neogothic architecture at the New Haven campus of Yale looks nothing at all like the neoclassical campus at Columbia.

Still, Columbia onlookers did not seem to mind that they were being used as cover for Yale. "It's convenient, I guess," said one woman student.

And word of Gossip Girl filming travels fast: A gaggle of pubescent females, heavy on the eye makeup, were cooing over Chase Crawford, the actor who plays Nate. Dressed in a blue and green rugby shirt and jeans, the man looked more Boston College (my alma mater) than Ivy League to my eye.

Crawford was happy to have photos taken with his adoring fans, some Columbia co-eds ---- the campus is buzzing with fall orientations of all kinds --- and some not.

Surely, Columbia got paid a nice piece of change from the folks at the CW Television network for renting itself out to be portrayed as the campus of an Ivy League rival.

And speaking of rent, Columbia, which is the second-largest landowner in New York, after the Roman Catholic Church, may not be such a great landlord.

Across the street on Broadway, the owner of Morningside Bookshop is $30,000 behind in rent owed to Columbia University. He had to go to court to fend off eviction, and but the fight was recently resolved: The bookstore will open a coffee bar, but the university has increased his rent for that portion of the shop that will serve java.

The guy sells books. The university cares about books, no?

You can see Columbia fobbed off as Yale when episode 206 airs during
the first week of October. Crawford, for his part, would not discuss the plot.

"We're just visiting," he told me, and shrugged.

Karen Donovan

(Above, Chase Crawford, but you knew that already. Photograph by Getty Images)