On a walk around the leafy 85-acre campus of Fordham University in The Bronx, a visitor might not believe they are in New York City. Along the way is a small gothic stone building dedicated to former student William Spain, it's Fordham's Seismic Observatory, the city's oldest, and not really a hangout for most students.  

"They know it's here, but they have never really been in the building," said Stephen Holler, Associate Professor of Physics at Fordham University.

Associate Physics Professor Stephen Holler brought me inside, down a steep stairway to the underground vault. There's historic equipment here once used to measure any seismic activity and earthquakes, that has changed.  

"This is where we are at right now. All the instruments that we have on the slabs out here are basically inside this can," said Holler.

Tapped into the bedrock of the Bronx, earthquakes around the world can be detected here, sent directly to the Lamont -Doherty Earth Observatory in Rockland County and the United States Geological Survey.

Across campus in a different vault, inside the Walsh Family Library, Fordham houses a collection of rare books, manuscripts, and letters including the log book of George Washington. The entry from July 4th, 1776, the day the thirteen colonies declared independence from Great Britain, may surprise you.   

"Washington himself had no idea of what was going on that day in Philadelphia. He had a sense of going on, but didn't know what had actually been decided," said Linda LoSchiavo, Director of Libraries at Fordham.

The nation's first President was here in New York, and would eventually write about what happened July 4th on July 9th. Also in the vault, this church bell, inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe to write one of his famous works. Poe lived nearby in The Bronx and would visit the campus, then known as St. John's College.

"He heard that bell that we now keep safely in the vault, and that is the bell of The Bells, The Bells, The Bells poem," said LoSchiavo.

St. John's College became Fordham University in 1907. Fordham, for the village of Fordham, which was part of Westchester County, but then it became part of the Bronx. The neighborhood became Fordham, just like the university.

Ford Ham is olde English for a settlement near a shallow part of water, in this case, a shallow portion of the Bronx River.