Robert Jastrow founded GISS in May 1961, establishing it as a New York outpost of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The institute was named for Robert H. Goddard, the physicist who built the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. From its earliest years, GISS punched far above its modest square footage. In 1964, astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu introduced the term "quasar" while working there. Three years later, John Wheeler popularized the phrase "black hole" at a GISS workshop. And in November 1966, a symposium at the institute produced what has been called the meeting that gave birth to the idea of plate tectonics -- the foundational theory of modern geology. WQED captured the intellectual ferment of this era in a documentary titled "The Universe on a Scratch Pad," a phrase that neatly described the kind of thinking happening in those cramped offices above Broadway.

GISS scientists contributed to some of the most storied missions in NASA's history: Mariner 5 to Venus, Pioneer 10 and 11 to Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyager program, and Cassini-Huygens to Saturn. In September 1974, a seminal meeting led by Patrick Thaddeus brought together researchers including postdoc John Mather to discuss building a satellite that could measure fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. That conversation led directly to the COBE satellite, and Mather would eventually receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006. But the institute's most visible legacy lies in climate science. Under director James Hansen, who led GISS from 1981 to 2013, the institute became a global center for climate change research, combining paleoclimate records with satellite observations and atmospheric models to project how the Earth's climate would shift in the coming century.

The list of people who passed through GISS reads like a who's who of twentieth-century science. Cynthia Rosenzweig, who joined in 1985, won the World Food Prize in 2022 for her work on climate impacts. Drew Shindell and Gavin Schmidt were named among Scientific American's top 50 scientists in 2004. Even John McAfee -- later famous for his antivirus software and eccentric life -- worked at GISS as a programmer from 1968 to 1970. Schmidt became the institute's third director in 2014, carrying forward a tradition of scientific leadership that shaped how governments and the public understand global warming. The institute attracted Turkish astrophysicist Dilhan Eryurt, who studied stellar evolution there in the 1960s and early 1970s, and Michael Ghil, who pioneered climate dynamics research during his time at GISS in the mid-1970s.

GISS originally occupied space in the Interchurch Center before moving in April 1966 to Armstrong Hall, a converted apartment building named for radio pioneer Edwin Howard Armstrong. The building had previously been known as the Ostend Apartments and then the Oxford Residence Hotel. Its location on the Columbia University campus placed NASA researchers in daily proximity to one of the world's great research universities -- an arrangement that fostered decades of collaboration. The pop-culture resonance of the address was inescapable: Suzanne Vega wrote her 1987 song "Tom's Diner" about the restaurant on the ground floor, and Jerry Seinfeld's fictional crew made the same storefront one of television's most recognizable settings. Climate scientists and sitcom fans shared an entrance.

On April 25, 2025, NASA announced it was canceling the Armstrong Hall lease as part of a federal review of government properties. By June 1, GISS personnel were working remotely, ending nearly six decades of continuous scientific work at the Broadway address. The closure scattered a research community that had, from a single building in upper Manhattan, helped name the phenomena of the cosmos, tracked the warming of the planet, and contributed to missions that reached the outer edges of the solar system. Whether GISS reconvenes under a single roof remains uncertain, but the work produced at that improbable corner -- above the coffee counter, between the university and the subway -- reshaped humanity's understanding of both the universe and its own fragile atmosphere.