Guttman is four blocks south, Berkeley three, and the park they both front is one block from this door.

Two campuses and a park inside the same few blocks — a private furnished studio close enough that the commute stops being a thing you plan your day around.

Most student housing pages open by explaining why their commute is acceptable. This one does not have that problem, so it will spend its words on a different question: what actually changes when there is no journey to campus at all.

Two campuses, a park and a terminal station, all from the same front door

Those campus figures are measured in a straight line rather than walked, so take them as proximity rather than as a commute — Manhattan's grid always adds something. At two-tenths of a mile, though, the gap between the two measurements is small enough not to matter. Both colleges front onto Bryant Park; the building looks at it from one block north.

The two timings are the ones worth having precisely: the subway entrance is two minutes from the door, and Grand Central is a six-minute walk east. The building scores Walk 100, Transit 100 and Bike 80 — and a hundred on Walk Score here means most days need no subway either.

Nothing on this page implies any relationship with CUNY, with Guttman or with Berkeley College. Being a short walk from a campus is geography, not affiliation.

What a commute costs, and what disappears when you do not have one

A commute is not mainly a cost in dollars, although it is that too. It is a cost in decisions.

An hour each way is roughly ten hours a week, which over an academic year is the better part of a month of waking life. But the sharper loss is the choices the journey removes. You stop going back between a morning class and an evening one, so the gap becomes dead time in a café instead of an hour at your own desk. You stop eating at home, and buying lunch five days a week is a line in a budget that nobody writes down. You start deciding whether a two-hour round trip is worth one seminar, a late shift, a group meeting, an office-hours appointment. In February, in weather, you decide it is not.

At this distance none of those decisions exist. You go back between classes because going back costs nothing. You eat in your own room. A single evening commitment is a short walk rather than a scheme. Someone working a job alongside a programme gets this most sharply, because the thing that breaks a work-and-study week is almost never the hours themselves — it is the travel wedged between them.

And it is weatherproof in a way a transit commute is not. Two-tenths of a mile is a distance that survives rain, snow, a signal problem and an overslept alarm.

Guttman and Berkeley are different institutions, and the block suits them for different reasons

They are two hundred yards apart and they are not the same place.

Guttman is a CUNY community college granting associate degrees, with a structure built around getting students through a two-year programme and onward into a senior college. Much of its student body is local to New York and commuting from the outer boroughs, and for many of them the trip is the hardest logistical fact of the degree. For that student, the relevant comparison is not a cheaper room somewhere else — it is their current journey, priced honestly, with the transit pass and the lost hours in it.

Berkeley College runs career-focused associate and bachelor's programmes with a professional slant, which tends to mean students holding internships or jobs while they study. For that student the value of the block is schedule tolerance: a campus, a park, a subway hub and a terminal station all inside a short walk of the same front door, so a day with a class, a shift and a commitment across town is actually possible.

Both institutions should be your first email before this page is. Ask what housing they operate or refer to, and what the deadlines are — only they can answer that, and whatever they offer is likely to be the cheapest thing on the table.

Nine months is the minimum, against programmes measured in years

Leases here start at nine months. Not a term, not a month.

For a two-year associate programme or a bachelor's, that is comfortably inside what you need, and the practical effect is that you settle the housing question once rather than each September. For a single semester, a bridging term or a summer course, nine months does not bend, and the right answer is an extended-stay let or a co-living operator rather than this building. That is worth hearing before you enquire rather than after.

Being this close has a price, and the price is the rent

The argument above is real, and it is not free.

Private studios are quoted from $625 a week, and that is a Midtown rate for a private room with its own bathroom. A shared room an hour out on the subway will be cheaper per week than this, sometimes substantially — and the wider guide to student housing in New York runs that comparison properly, with the broker fee, the guarantor service, the furniture and the utilities added back in, because those are the items that make a cheap room less cheap than it looks.

What this page asks you to put on the other side of the scale is the thing a spreadsheet leaves out: ten hours a week, a transit pass, five bought lunches, and the evenings you would otherwise decide against. Weigh it properly in both directions. For some readers the cheap room an hour away is plainly the right call, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What the rate does include, once you are comparing like with like: furniture, electricity, gas, heat, water, air conditioning, trash, sewer and Wi-Fi, with no separate utility bill and no broker fee. Every studio is private — its own ensuite bathroom, its own entrance off the hallway, nothing inside the room shared with anyone. At booking you pay a deposit of four weeks' rent plus the first week, which is more cash in hand than a room-share typically asks and is the line to check first if August is your constraint. No studio has an oven or a stove; the eat-in kitchen downstairs covers anything needing a hob. The building is a 1902 landmark, non-smoking and pet-free, without exceptions.

What to ask before you commit

What we require at signing — credit history, a guarantor, proof of income or funding — is not something this page will state, because it is not confirmed on paper and a guessed answer would be worse than none.

Ask that first. Then ask whether a parent, employer or funding body can be invoiced, what happens if you leave between years, and — if you are working shifts — how the entrance works late at night.

Tell us when term starts

Say roughly when you would arrive and which studio interests you, and we will come back with what is free and what it costs within one business day. Nothing is charged until you have seen the terms.

[Enquire about a room →](/contact)

See the three studios: Studio Basic · Studio Plus · Studio King

*Rates are quoted weekly and billed every two weeks. Availability changes; please confirm before you book travel.*