Named after 137th Street and the City College of New York nearby.
City College was established in 1847 as the Free Academy of the City of New York by Townsend Harris, president of the Board of Education; it was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. Renamed the College of the City of New York in 1866, it moved to its neo-Gothic upper Manhattan campus, opened between 1906 and 1908.