A Tribute to Geraldine Winifred Visco (1955–2023)

Lots of people live in New York. Not many of them live like it.

(Image credit: Gerry Visco, 2010)

In the summer of 2008, I climbed a number of stairs up to the sixth floor of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, where I had agreed to start the following fall. I was feeling pretty ambivalent still: it would be my third school in as many years, and I felt like I might be making a terrible mistake by not putting down roots at my previous school. But I also thought I had to give it a chance, so I found myself in a meeting with the soft-spoken and extraordinarily kind Gareth Williams, who was serving as chair of the Classics department at the time, about what I could expect as a major in Classics. As we were reaching the end of our meeting, a woman with platinum blonde hair and cat-eye glasses opened the door and began yelling at Gareth in the the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard.

That was my introduction to Gerry Visco, who was the Classics department administrator during my undergrad years and who died yesterday. Gerry was the sort of person you dream of meeting when you move to New York. Her hair was usually a variety of colors, with light blues and pinks mixed in with the blonde. She came in to work late because she seemed to spend every night at some party or another, sometimes photographing them for her nightlife column in a now-defunct alt weekly but sometimes just for the sake of going out. She kept vodka and gin in her office, and if the office was relatively empty and you looked like you were having a bad day, she’d offer you a drink.

Gerry seemed to regard graduate and undergraduate students and department staff as the rightful inhabitants of the university: faculty were strange creatures who were tolerated as long as they kept out of the way. She was especially protective of undergrads, particularly the enthusiastic weirdos who regularly showed up to department talks. In the fall of my junior year, I took my first advanced Greek class on tragedy, and because of difficulties with book orders, we ended up reading the more difficult play first. When the midterm exam rolled around, the whole class found it difficult, and we were told that we could finish it in the department library. I found it difficult enough that I had a minor panic attack, and instead of going to the library I went to cry in a bathroom stall for an hour or so. Eventually I collected myself, wrote out a passable exam in the library, and gave it to Gerry. I learned later that one of my classmates, an older man studying Greek in retirement, had accused me of cheating. In Gerry’s own words, “I told him to mind his own fucking business. You needed time, you took some time. If he bothers you, you just come to me.”

In my senior year, I was trying to book a university event space that I knew the Classics department had used before. My student club was planning a pretty big event with lots of alumni and guests, so we wanted the really nice space in the School of International and Public Affairs where you could see out the massive windows onto the cityscape. The university couldn’t charge a student org for space, but they did make it extremely difficult to book by not telling anybody who to contact. Fortunately for me, I had Gerry on my side, and she gave me the number of the person she would call to book the space. I called it, and once they heard I was with a student org, they started giving me the usual runaround. A day or two later I was in the department office and Gerry asked if I’d been able to get the space. I said they’d continued to make it pretty difficult, and she put down her coffee, picked up the phone, and as soon as she got someone on the line said “What the fuck do you think you’re doing??” In about five minutes I had the space booked.

That was Gerry as I knew her: fearsome, deeply unprofessional, and totally unconcerned with what a good Columbia administrator ought to have been doing. She probably created a great deal of liability for the department. I’m sure lots of people had difficult working relationships with her. But she cared about the people that a university is supposed to care about, the people that Columbia repeatedly failed to care for. She was a real person in an institution designed to produce false faces, false relationships, and (increasingly) false learning. I’m sure she knew how many Columbia students went on to take jobs as investment bankers or consultants, and I’m sure she thought they were missing the point. It takes a lot of person to humanize an inhuman institution, and Gerry Visco was a whole lot of person. Requiescat in pace.