Columbia University Campus Expansion - Upper West Side

[Stroika]

As the NY Times reports today, most of this battle is being pitched by a sleazy storage-facility kingpin. So much for "neighborhood" opposition. I'll take education over cheap warehouses, thanks.

Pushing Back as Columbia Moves to Spread Out
New York Times
By ROBIN FINN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/robin_finn/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: January 11, 2008
NICHOLAS SPRAYREGEN, the Upper Manhattan property owner who has dueled to a standoff with an acquisition-minded Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in the real estate version of a “whoever has the most toys, wins” competition, knows better than to ask for a sympathy vote.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he says, crouched behind a desk in his windowless office at 3261 Broadway. Photographs of Bruce Springsteen (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/bruce_springsteen/index.html?inline=nyt-per), whom the lean and hirsute Mr. Sprayregen marginally resembles, dominate the decorating scheme. Don’t worry, Mr. Sprayregen, no pity for you.
This is true even before you mention that you have scored seventh-row seats to the Boss’s summer concert at Giants Stadium, sat next to Mr. Springsteen’s mom at one of his Seeger sessions gigs, and attended six shows during his 10-night stand at Madison Square Garden for “The Rising” tour. Do you really have to drag out that photograph of you and the Boss posing at a Bridgehampton ice cream shop, the shot used as a screen saver on all your electronic gadgets? Did you really name two of your companies, Rising Development Company and Rising Publications, in honor of Mr. Springsteen? Does the final line on your one-page résumé read: “Number one Bruce Springsteen fan in Harlem,” even though you and your wife, Jaynee, live on the Upper East Side? Yes, yes and yes.
“I am very obsessive in general, and I tend to do things to an extreme,” he admits. In him, this somehow manages to be an endearing quality.
Mr. Sprayregen, 44, is a multimillionaire thanks to Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage, the family business he took over in 1990. What was once a hulking orange-and-black brick building on an unattractive stretch of Broadway at 131st Street (it now bears a banner with the message “Stop Eminent Domain Abuse”) has morphed into five storage warehouses. It’s hard to work up a tear for a fellow who owns one million square feet of commercial properties in New York and New Jersey, has acquired 18 choice parcels in the heart of Yonkers, and last year diversified himself further by purchasing Westchester’s largest chain of weekly newspapers.
Hard to proffer condolences to a guy who drives, proudly, “a gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban,” an act of political incorrectness he attributes to being the father of four busy children from his first marriage. Conveniently, he has his own oversize parking spot in this hulking warehouse, the building that was the genesis of his family’s self-storage business in 1980 and that Columbia is now bent on bulldozing to make room for a complex designed by Renzo Piano (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/renzo_piano/index.html?inline=nyt-per).
GIRDED by the recent City Council-stamped rezoning of the Manhattanville neighborhood, and contingent upon the result of a blight study conducted by the Empire State Development Corporation, Columbia is poised to acquire four properties owned by Mr. Sprayregen that are in the path and plans of the university’s 17-acre expansion.
Mr. Sprayregen, a businessman so obsessed with fitness that he has raced and finished 20 marathons and so obsessive about gaining a pound that he has not weighed himself since college (no need to), is relishing the tangle with his Ivy League (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/ivy_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org) neighbor over the precious asset that constitutes, he says, “ the bread and butter for 15 members of my family.”
Columbia may covet his property, but surrender is not in his repertoire. He’s given up running marathons to devote himself to winning, or at least finishing, what will inevitably be a bruising and expensive legal marathon. (He estimates he will spend more than $2 million in court fees.)
“I’m a mere mortal and they’re an institution,” he says, “but when they started buying up this neighborhood three years ago, it bothered me, and now it infuriates me.” He is likely to stay mad for years.
“I would have never thought four years ago that I would get involved in a civil rights issue; I had never before considered myself as part of a minority that was being stamped upon.” He does now. “This is about the powerful growing more powerful at the expense of those who have less. Columbia is not a public university; what they’re doing by threatening to use eminent domain is as unethical from a business perspective as anything I’ve ever come across. Property rights abuse is running rampant, but what’s unique in this instance is that eminent domain always seems to be used against the down-and-out, people who can’t afford to fight back in a meaningful way. I can. But I think it’s anti-American that I’m probably on the losing side.”
Mr. Sprayregen, with help from the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/norman_siegel/index.html?inline=nyt-per), vows to take Columbia all the way to the Supreme Court (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org) to prevent it from seizing his property.
Mr. Sprayregen, who grew up in New Rochelle and has an M.B.A. from New York University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org), actually applied to and was accepted by Columbia’s Graduate School of International Studies while working in management and acquisitions for a Chase Manhattan subsidiary from 1987 to 1989. He wound up running the family business instead.
“People like to say this is just about money, that Columbia is the future and me and my business are so yesterday, but this is about right and wrong. Why should Columbia get to take my property? And why, now that there has been a change of zoning, shouldn’t I be able to stay here side-by-side with Columbia and develop my own properties?”
So one way or another, Tuck-It-Away is history? Mr. Sprayregen nods. No tears here.

[lofter1]

I'll take education over cheap warehouses, thanks.


Then pay the gentleman the price that makes him want to sell the property he owns.

Or perhaps you'd like to donate your property at a cut -rate price for for the cause of higher education?

[Stroika]

he's been offered the market rate, hasn't he? a guy like that would be more than happy to extort $200 million from columbia for his crappy storage facility.

[lofter1]

But it's his. If he doesn't want to sell he shouldn't have to. It's the American way.

And it's not as if his properties are right in the middle of the Columbia plan and thereby make it completely unworkable ...

He owns two parcels for his Storage business in the Columbia area:

1) 3261 Broadway (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%223261+broadway%22&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7RNWE&um=1&sa=N&tab=wl) (at 131st Street) is on the western edge of Phase 2

2) 655 West 125th Street (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%223261+broadway%22&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7RNWE&um=1&sa=N&tab=wl) (north side of 125th west of St. Clair) is on the southern edge of of Phase 1

[investordude]

Columbia should build the parts it owns. They won't finish this project until 2030. If the guy really hasn't sold by then, I think the city should contemplate eminent domain as I think its pretty obvious the founding fathers considered universities one of the more obvious uses for which eminent domain was allowed - and there is clearly a public benefit to building an contiguous college campus especially if they are willing to swap space with him across the street.

I'm skeptical they won't reach a settlement.

[pianoman11686]

Investordude: strongly disagree. This is the last thing the founding fathers would have had in mind. Eminent domain is pretty much unconstitutional per se. Not at all appropriate for the expansion of another private institution.

It's interesting how, in cases like this, certain people's perceptions about property rights become completely reversed. Doesn't matter if you're for or against Columbia.

[lofter1]

RE: " ... a public benefit to building an contiguous college campus ..."

Please look at the map of the area.

These storage buildings would not break up the college campus. They are little pockets that abut the edges.

Columbia is a private university. If the founding fathers could make heads or tails of the society that we've become then they would (for the most part) roll over in their graves at the thought of taking private property and giving it to a private corporate entity.

btw: Isn't there lots of available open public land just a bit west of the expansion site right along the Hudson? There are also blocks of available pulbic land right along on the east edge of the existing Columbia campus. Perhaps the government should take some of that public land and give it to Columbia University to facilitate their expansion.

[investordude]

Look, it's ridiculous to compare a private taking to give land from one company to another to the concept of comparing taking land to build a university. A university is a public purpose, plain and simple.

Let me ask you guys - if the university was SUNY and thus a public university, would that make the eminent domain OK? What about a hospital that is a non profit corporation rather than actually government owned?

It seems pretty obvious on any practical reading that hospitals, military bases, and schools are pretty clearly endorsed by the founding fathers as non-controversial examples of constitutional takings.

Now as to whether circumstances here really warrant using eminent domain, as I stated previously, I don't think they do. Columbia should build the land they own and continue to work with the owner on a settlement involving swapping land with him across the street.

[ZippyTheChimp]

^
I agree with pianoman, not that Eminent Domain is per se, but about the nature of the private property.

The sleazy warehouse owner has the same constitutional rights as Columbia.

[investordude]

And that means he will be compensated at market value if there is a taking. Columbia rezoned the land before seeking eminent domain, so he's clearly not going to get screwed on what the land is worth, and Columbia will need to convince the legislature and the courts that the taking is needed to fulfill the public purporse of building a university.

Which means they're better off negotiating with him. My only point is education, hospitals and roads are public purposes and are different than the issue in Kelo, which is that economic development is NOT a public purpose. You should read O'Connor's dissent - it's illuminating, although I didn't realize stadiums are historically regarded to be a public purpose - that's something I don't agree with even though the precedent is very long.

[ZippyTheChimp]

^
First of all, the Supreme Court case left it up to the states to define their own Eminent Domain laws.

Columbia didn't rezone the land; the city government did.

The only time the question of how much compensation the owner gets is AFTER Eminent Domain is used. Before that, it doesn't matter if he's offered 100x the value. He shouldn't be forced to sell it.

There is no question that Columbia serves the public good, as well as its expansion plans. But whether the public good is adversely affected by the exclusion of the warehouse is not a simple matter that can be easily dispensed in this forum.

[lofter1]

Vanished City Industry Uncovered in Land Fight

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/13/realestate/13scap-600.jpg
Office for Metropolitan History
SERVED BY THE MILK TRAINS
McDermott-Bunger’s dairy at 527 West 125th Street in 1937

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/realestate/13scap.html?_r=1&ref=realestate&oref=slogin)
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
January 13, 2008

Streetscapes | Former Dairies

Got eminent domain? That’s what has upset some people who are concerned about Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org)’s expansion plans for an area between far West 125th and 133rd Streets. The university has said that acquiring the land by eminent domain is a possibility.

Foes of the expansion lost their battle, as the New York City (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo) Council approved Columbia’s plans in December. Likewise, Mary Habstritt, an industrial archaeologist with a unique vision, failed to persuade the Landmarks Preservation Commission to confer landmark designation on an unusual dairy stable that Columbia would like to remove. But in the process of trying, Ms. Habstritt has succeeded in tracing the history of the milk industry of this tiny area.

Beginning in the 1860s, factories producing lumber, paint, beer, dye and other materials cropped up on the far western end of Manhattan Valley, around what is now West 125th Street, with its direct connections to the rail line along the Hudson River and the ferry.

Ms. Habstritt says that in 1903 two major dairies established themselves in the area: Sheffield Farms-Slawson-Decker, in a modest building at 3229 Broadway, near 130th Street, and McDermott-Bunger, in a new dairy at 527 West 125th Street.

For the latter, the architects Sass & Smallheiser, known otherwise for Lower East Side tenements, designed an ambitious three-story building of buff brick, with the initials MB carved into the limestone trim. The new dairy was in the modern French style; its intricate ironwork, ceremonial flagpoles and suave stonework evoked the fresh-from-Paris work of Ernest Flagg and other high-style designers.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/11/realestate/13scap-4-650.jpg
John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
McDermott-Bunger’s dairy at 527 West 125th Street today.

The dairies were served by milk trains coming down the Hudson River rail line, and in 1909 Sheffield Farms-Slawson-Decker enlarged its initial building on Broadway to an imposing six-story structure that housed horses. Stables were the vein system of the milk industry, sending out wagons to drop off thousands of bottles every morning to individual customers.

The building was another in the modern French style, with a huge projecting eave of tile. (In 1909, according to articles in The Times, more than 60 Sheffield horses died during an epidemic of arsenic poisoning, apparently by extortionists or disgruntled employees.)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/11/realestate/13scap-3-450.jpg
John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
3229 Broadway near 130th Street, once
the Sheffield Farms-Slawson- Decker stable.

Sheffield soon added a new hub for its operations, its great dairy plant at 632 West 125th Street, finished in 1911. Like the 1909 stable, this was designed by Frank A. Rooke — a specialist in stable and industrial architecture — with a pure, gleaming front of white glazed tile, and trimmed with copper windows and other details, oxidized to green.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/11/realestate/13scap-2-650.jpg
Architecture and Building, Library of Congress
The Sheffield dairy plant at 632 West 125th Street, designed by Frank A. Rooke, shown in the 1910s.


The Sheffield dairy had a copper and glass overhang over the central section, shielding delivery wagons from the elements. The milk cans were emptied on the top floor in a dust-free room: the windows were double-glazed, and air pressure was kept higher than that outside, so air was constantly flowing out.

Inside, the walls were pure white-painted plaster, meeting in curves to avoid dirt-catching corners. The ceilings were a green glass tile, ribbed and translucent. Milk flowed down through filters and pasteurizing equipment until bottled and sealed at the ground-floor level. Ice was dumped into the screen-bottom milk crates, which were transferred to delivery wagons moving through a half-oval path on the interior, entering on the right side of the building and exiting on the left.

The new plant could process and pasteurize 15,000 bottles an hour and, according to a 1911 article in the magazine Architecture and Building, was the brainchild of Loton Horton, head of Sheffield, “whose long life has been devoted to the study of pure milk.”

Mr. Horton had bitterly opposed the 1912 city law that required all milk to be pasteurized, but nevertheless designed his plant with pasteurizing capacity.

Borden’s occupied a third major building in the area, the huge red brick Studebaker factory, built in 1924 at 615 West 131st Street. In 1937 Borden’s rebuilt it for its own use, as the headquarters of 366 routes, 110 of which were still traveled by horse and wagon.

By the 1930s the dairies had begun building milk-processing plants beyond Manhattan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo). Gradually, they moved out of Manhattanville; Columbia bought Sheffield’s old 125th Street plant in 1949 for its engineering school.

These days, Columbia is planning a new science campus, mostly west of Broadway from 125th to 133rd Street. In addition to the 125th Street Sheffield site, it owns the Borden one, and says it plans to keep them intact. But it plans to demolish the 1909 Sheffield stable on Broadway, and does not rule out invoking the right of eminent domain to get it.

Ms. Habstritt was hired to research the area by Anne Whitman, who owns the 1909 stable and runs a moving and storage business there, with the idea that landmark designation for the stable would forestall Columbia’s demolition plans. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has said no, but Ms. Habstritt’s report on its dairy aspects, to be posted at archiveofindustry.com (http://archiveofindustry.com/) is unusual in the way it traces the evolution and decline of a specialized industry in a small area.

Even if successful, Ms. Habstritt’s work would have created only a minor obstacle to Columbia’s plan; at most it would have had to build around the stable. But her research knits together an otherwise disparate collection of buildings, casting light on a vanished industry of New York.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

Nice buildings. Keepers. Put back the cornice. Columbia can build around them. There's plenty of crap to demolish.

[investordude]

I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound historic or significant to me. Given any particular old building, something must have happenned there a long time ago. I don't see anything impressive about the history of these buildings.

[lofter1]

Thank goodness certain folks weren't around when the Tribeca Historic District was up for designation ... nothing there but a bunch of old brick and masonry warehouses.

[BPC]

My alma mater is really embarassing me here. Threatening eminent domain to seize and demolish an historic structure? How could an institution of higher learning contemplate doing something like that?

[antinimby]

investordude, it isn't necessarily about those building's history. It's just better to have some old but attractive buildings around to balance out the most likely bland modern ones that is to come.

Las Vegas and Dubai can never have what we have no matter how hard they might try to put up modern imitations. Let's not be in a hurry to get rid of it all, okay?

[ablarc]

^ What he said.

[lizbeth li]

If schools built as interestingly as Dubai or Las Vegas, that would be great, but they really seem to horde their money and so much of it goes into the labs that the building hardly counts, it mostly looks institutionally awful. Or even if they build residences, there is the sense of students as jail bait, so even check out those horrendous newer Business School dorms on Storrow Drive in Allston. Anything around here that Brown has built is terrible. And if they are bigger at all, they are usually big and fat.

[Optimus Prime]

Anyone thinking Columbia can build something better than these buildings, go up to the Morningside campus and take a look at Alfred Lerner Hall. It's the architectural equivalent of vomit.

I know they have retained Piano for the Manhattanville Project, and his record probably has more good than bad (unlike Bernard Tschumi, who designed Lerner Hall), but even if he designs some great buildings, they're going to be mostly glass and steel. You can predict that pretty easily. It's what he does, it's what everyone is doing now, and I'm pretty sure it's what Columbia is going for. Having some older (not exemplary but at least handsome) masonry type buildings around would do a lot of good.

[investordude]

Its a university. I don't think they should be gratuitiously ugly, and they've hired Piano, so I don't think they will. But if we lose a few ugly building and gain thousands of Columbia graduates who are able to make groundbreaking discoveries in their fields because of this, then we should endorse that over some buildings that are not historical in nature.

[antinimby]

So beauty and utility can't ever co-exist? It's got to be either one or the other, but not both.

Yeah, okay...I guess the folks over at Hearst didn't prove a darn thing.

[investordude]

I just think its very hard - academic buildings will need wide floor plates. How would you integrate these buildings into them. And I still think the buildings themselves are relatively unremarkable.

[Optimus Prime]

The new campus will be built with or without these buildings. They are all on 125th or Broadway, which are the southern and eastern borders of the site.

Actually, after re-reading the article, the only one they're considering taking and demolishing is the stable on Broadway. Personally I think that building would look nice if it was flanked by other buildings, instead of by a gas station and an empty lot. My $0.02.

[antinimby]

Speaking of bad, new educational facilities, check out NYU's new dorm on the former site of St. Ann's church in the East Village.


http://curbed.com/uploads/2008_1_stann1.jpg

http://curbed.com/uploads/2008_1_stann2.jpg

http://curbed.com/uploads/2008_1_stann4.jpg
curbed.com (http://curbed.com/archives/2008/01/16/gods_dorm_update_nyu_nearly_reaches_the_heavens.ph p#more)

[MidtownGuy]

NYU is a cancer on the Village.
Look at that massive pile of ugly. They could do so much better, all the money that school has. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

[Fabrizio]

Note that NYU has the following blurb on it's web site:

"The center of NYU is its Washington Square campus in the heart of Greenwich Village. One of the city's most creative and energetic communities, the Village is a historic neighborhood that has attracted generations of writers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals. Beyond the Village, New York City becomes an extension of the University's campus."

NYU leeches off the history of the Village, using it's history and character as a selling point... while simultaneously eroding that very history and character by tearing down and building ugly. There should be laws.

From Curbed (listen to this spin/damage control):

"The sad story of the East Village's historic St. Ann's Church, demolished to make way for a controversial 26-story NYU dorm—which left St. Ann's facade in tact like a decapitated head on an invader's planted spear—just got slightly more tragic. The school's student paper spoke with one of NYU's community affairs officials about various new projects, and the discussion turned to the 12th Street dorm. Warning: those who hate this building should prepare themselves for a sucker punch:

"We were disappointed with our own performance and our own inability to lower the height of the building, at the end of the day," she said. "But we learned a lot of lessons from the dialogue around the Twelfth Street dorm that we think we are now reflected in our planning process and, in general, how and when we engage the community."

"There you have it, East Villagers: the university is disappointed that they couldn't get the height lowered on their own building (to be fair, it was developed by the Hudson Companies and leased by NYU). But hey, at least it was a learning experience."

---

Of course the point here is about over-all ugliness, not so much the height... although big&ugly usually IS more damaging than small&ugly.


--

[Derek2k3]

This building is awful.
From my friend's room...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2245/2204247536_379d102163_o.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2309/2204247526_553a74d50b_o.jpg

[MidtownGuy]

It's as ugly as any ghetto housing project.

[Stroika]

NYU/the city should be ashamed of themselves for defiling the city and destroying a beautiful old church with this housing project. I wish there was some way to make them pay, and shaming them seems to be the best way to do it.

I suggest this dorm be known henceforth as "Cabrini Green." I encourage anyone at NYU to spread the word: Cabrini Green.

[BrooklynRider]

Look at that tower and steeple at Grace. I think this Renwick design beat St. Pat's by miles.

[ablarc]

Another Renwick gem in New York:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/kahnfdr/0140.jpg

[BrooklynRider]

Wow! I wasn't aware of that. I wish there was a way to preserve that shell and create a garden that incorporates it into the design.

[ablarc]

Leave the ivy. Clear a bit of the brush.

And let it be.

[Stroika]

Won't the ivy have a pernicious effect on the stone here?

Ivy doesn't affect well-mortared, well-maintained walls, but loose mortar generally becomes a place for ivy to root in, causing mortar to further crumble and dislodge stone. Pre-1930, most mortar was quite basic, and these walls could fall apart due to the ivy...

[lofter1]

One of the old stone walls there collapsed (http://curbed.com/archives/2008/01/04/friday_decay_roosevelt_island_smallpox_hospital_mo re.php) just a couple of weeks ago.

A nightime tour: Some stoners tripping out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6G9F6bX5Fg) at the Renwick ruins on Roosevelt Island ...

[antinimby]

Great move. Taking a nondescript, one-story, taxpayer lot and building apartments over groundfloor retail (presumably) is precisely what they should be doing.

Le's hope it looks at least decent.



Columbia buys $20M lot


http://s3.amazonaws.com/trd_three/images/11545/columbia_frontbox.jpg

3581 Broadway


Feb 12, 2008 (http://ny.therealdeal.com/articles/9098) 04:20 PM

Columbia University has purchased a one-story Manhattanville commercial building at 3581 Broadway for $20 million. Columbia plans to build a 42-unit rent-to-own residential project there for residents who will be displaced by its 17-acre expansion into Harlem, the Observer reported. Cornerstone Group represented Columbia University in the sale of the 25,000 square foot lot, while Vickers Realty represented the seller, Blockentire Associates. Vickers Realty also represented the seller of a neighboring commercial building at 555 West 125th Street, which Columbia recently bought for $6.25 million.

© 2008 The Real Deal

[Optimus Prime]

That blurb is a little misleading. The building they're talking about, assuming the address and the picture are correct, is up at 147th St.

Which means it is neither in Manhattanville nor a neighbor to any building on 125th St.

That being said, if that is the building, they picked a good one. One story buildings gotta go, especially on corner lots.

[ablarc]

From the alumni mag:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/hz/02.jpg
The community.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/hz/03.jpg
The same view, after.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/hz/01.jpg
The mandatory outdoor cafe seating.

[NoyokA]

I wish architects would stop showing us invisible buildings. Who's that gullible?

[ablarc]

They're not designed.

[NoyokA]

I'd rather they show realistic placeholders (with walls) or for them to not be shown at all.

[ablarc]

That's also how the community would like them shown: NOT AT ALL.

[Optimus Prime]

CU, City Sued Over M'ville "Bathtub" Plan

By Betsy Morais


Created 03/27/2008 - 3:00am
Nick Sprayregen, the largest private property owner in Columbia’s Manhattanville campus footprint, is picking another battle with the University—he filed a lawsuit today against Columbia and the city over the University’s planned underground construction.
The “bathtub,” as it is commonly called, is designed to be a contiguous space, running from 125th Street to 133rd Street and from Broadway to 12th Avenue, that extends seven stories below ground level. If built, it will house a swimming and diving center, business school programs, scientific research laboratories, storage facilities, and a below-grade MTA bus depot.
But controversy has surrounded the project because of its placement along an earthquake fault line and near a flood plane, which poses various environmental concerns, particularly in combination with the potentially hazardous chemicals used in the campus laboratories.
“If there were a storm surge, you could have water coming out and going into the Harlem community—with possible toxic materials,” said Sprayregen’s lawyer Norman Siegel, who is a candidate for Public Advocate in 2009.
The space was the subject of much scrutiny as Columbia’s land use plan went through the city’s standard zoning review procedure last year. Community Board 9 members and other local activists submitted testimony to the city throughout the process that questioned the practicality and safety of the bathtub’s construction. Director of City Planning for Manhattan Ray Gastil, who evaluated the environmental impact of Columbia’s proposal for the planning commission’s assessment, presented an alternate proposal in which the University built only a partial bathtub.
But Sprayregen doesn’t think the city addressed the potential implications of bathtub construction thoroughly enough. “The main contention in the suit is that New York City, in its approval of the Columbia rezoning request, failed to carry out its duties as required by law to fully evaluate the serious environmental impacts of the construction and the on-going operation of the proposed ‘bathtub,’” he said in a press release.
It wasn’t until last Friday that Sprayregen decided to file his suit against the University and the city. He said it took him a long time to decide to take action on this issue, with which he had not previously concerned himself.
“The more I read, the more alarmed I really became that not enough independent thought and analysis went into the bathtub approval,” he explained.
Over the past week, Sprayregen and Siegel collaborated with CB9 consultant Ron Schiffman, who is the director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, and spoke with Klaus Jacob, senior researcher at the University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, to better understand the environmental implications of bathtub construction.
Despite his University affiliation, Jacob has voiced apprehensions about the rising sea levels around the bathtub that create flooding risks. Last fall, he met with administrators to recommend the hiring of an outside risk-assessment firm to analyze the possible negative implications of the below ground construction.
But the Environmental Impact Statement for Columbia’s campus development explains how the bathtub “would be designed to resist pressure from both the permanent groundwater levels and temporary flood conditions,” and outlines plans for flood risk analysis, including during potential hurricane flooding.
The University released a statement explaining that, although administrators do not comment on pending litigation: “We are confident that the extended public land use and environmental review processes were rigorous and comprehensive. They underscored that thriving universities are essential for New York City to remain a leader in attracting the talent that pursues new knowledge and creating the good, middle-income jobs for people who seek to improve their lives here.”
CB9 Chair Pat Jones said she had not heard about Sprayregen’s lawsuit, and said that Columbia’s subterranean construction plans have not come up at any recent board meetings. Still, she called attention to “questions raised by the Community Board and its consultants with regard to the feasibility of Columbia’s proposed bathtub” during the city review process as to whether or not City Planning took “the appropriate steps, procedures, and due diligence” in assessing the impact of bathtub construction.
Four months after the city approved the University’s campus plan, Siegel said that this lawsuit comes as the window to challenge the Manhattanville rezoning is set to end. He expects to hear back from the city’s lawyers by April 29.
As for Columbia, Siegel said, “I think it is a good university, just wrong on this issue.” But, as he added, that will be up to a judge to decide.
betsy.morais@columbiaspectator.com

Source URL:
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/30060 (http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/30060)

[antinimby]

You would think that a venerable, old institution of higher education such as Columbia would realize the benefits of keeping buildings like this (instead of razing them) is what will give the neighborhood around their campus a touch of class and character but I guess not.

Sterile and shiny glass will not set them apart from the tons of other lowly, state college campuses across the country. No vision. Dumb.


Harlem biz owner wants building relocated

http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2008-04/37444028.jpg
The City Planning Commission recently approved a
Columbia University proposal to construct a 17-acre arts
and science campus in West Harlem displacing hundreds
of longtime residents and businesses. The former
Sheffield Farms Stable on Broadway, included on the
National Registry of Historic Places, is slated for demolition
if the project moves forward.



By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
April 3, 2008 (http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-building0403,0,77010.story)
http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/817-grey.gif (http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v8/3698/0/0/%2a/t;44306;0-0;0;12924786;21-88/31;0/0/0;;~okv=;ptype=s;slug=am-building0403;rg=ur;ref=therealdealcom;pos=1;sz=88x 31;tile=2;~sscs=%3f)

The owner of a building in the footprint of Columbia University's planned expansion is giving new meaning to the phrase "standing firm."

Anne Whitman, whose family has operated an antiques moving and storage company in a 1903 former dairy stable, is negotiating to get Columbia to move the building four blocks to the south instead of being forced to sell the structure to the university.

"When we started out we at least wanted to save the façade," Mary Habstritt, an industrial archeologist who has researched the history of the area, said of the ornate, beaux-arts and Mansard roof front of the structure.

"Then we thought, why not see if we can move the whole thing," she said. "It's not easy, but it could be done."

Because negotiations with Whitman on the sale of the building are ongoing, university representative refused to comment. But a university official familiar with the planned expansion dismissed the idea, saying, "This is dream land stuff."

It is unclear how much such a move would cost.

The seven-story masonry structure would not be alone among old structures searching for new digs.

In 2001, the National Park Service moved the 208-foot Cape Hatteras Lighthouse nearly 3,000 feet inland. Closer to home, Hamilton Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton is being moved to nearby St. Nicholas Park, and both the Parachute Jump and Empire Theater have been uprooted from their birthplaces.

"Nothing is attached to the soil, it's all built on it, so if you can figure out the weight, and get the necessary steel or rollers, and coordinate with the utilities to get past the wires, it can be done," said Gene Brymer, editor of Structural Movers Magazine.

Sheffield Farms Stable was originally built to serve the burgeoning milk processing plants in the area 100 years ago and to deliver fresh milk to New Yorker's homes before the era of refrigeration.

"Moving the building would let Columbia have the land and let me keep on using the architecturally beautiful and historic building which I love," Whitman said.

The space Whitman is eyeing -- at 125th Street and Broadway -- is a piece of Columbia-owned land where the university is planning to build a school to benefit local residents.

The stable is currently on the state register of historic places, and moving it would cancel that designation.

A spokeswoman for the New York State Historic Preservation Office said that it would be eligible to go through the application process again, and advocates of the move believe that keeping the building near its historical context is critical to regaining the designation.

Uprooted

Structures in New York City that have been moved include:

- Hamilton Grange will be moved across 141st Street in Hamilton Heights later this spring to place it in a park setting.

- The Parachute Jump displayed at the 1939-40 World's Fair in Queens was moved to Coney Island in 1940 to preserve the spirit of the fair.

- The Empire Theater in Times Square was rolled 170 feet down 42nd Street in 1998 to protect its landmarked façade and lobby from a developer that wanted to turn it into a multiplex.


Copyright © 2008, AM New York

[Alonzo-ny]

This is ridiculous, moving buildings to satisfy the University, get outta here.

[Monumental]

Its not that nice a building anyway

[MidtownGuy]

On the contrary, that is a very nice building that should not be destroyed if it can be saved. Beautiful details and in relatively good condition too. Little gems like this obviously give an area class, distinction, and an attractive visual record of our history.

[BPC]

Hooray for the heroic Anne Whitman, who is interested in preserving the city's architectural history, and not merely in cashing out. A rare breed in this town, she is.

[antinimby]

What's the use? Columbia today has no vision so there's no way they would move or even save this building. They'll just demo it and then replace it with a plain box.

[brianac]

Hooray for the heroic Anne Whitman, who is interested in preserving the city's architectural history, and not merely in cashing out. A rare breed in this town, she is.



Landowner Who Balked Gives In to Columbia

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: June 11, 2008

A business owner who had pledged not to sell her property to make way for Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org)’s expansion has reached a deal with the university, Columbia officials said on Tuesday.

The agreement with the owner, Anne Z. Whitman, leaves only two property owners who have not settled with Columbia, which is embarking on a $7 billion expansion, the largest in its history.

The university plans to demolish all but three buildings on 17 acres of waterfront property bounded roughly on the north and south by 133rd and 125th Streets and on the east and west by Broadway and Riverside Drive.

As part of the settlement, Ms. Whitman, the owner of Hudson North American, a moving and storage company on Broadway between 129th and 130th Streets, will exchange her building — which will be among those torn down — for property on Audubon Avenue in Washington Heights, near the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, the university said in a statement.

Columbia said it would pay for the construction of a new building for Ms. Whitman, which she would own. Her company will be relocated to temporary space on Broadway between 131st and 132nd Streets until the new building is completed. The university said the construction would include transferring the old building’s facade to the new site.

The university did not disclose financial terms of the agreement. Ms. Whitman did not return a call seeking comment.

The university, which had previously offered $4 million for the six-story, 35,000-square-foot building, had negotiated sporadically with Ms. Whitman for more than two years.

During an interview in August 2006, Ms. Whitman said she would not agree to a buyout, no matter how lucrative, unless the university was set to use eminent domain to obtain privately owned properties it was unable to buy.

“No way Columbia is going to steal this property right out from underneath me,” Ms. Whitman said at the time. “Remember that man who stood in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square? That’s me.”

Ms. Whitman’s father, Joseph A. Zuhusky, a former F.B.I. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org) agent, bought several buildings in West Harlem in the 1960s and 70’s as part of a moving and storage business he had started.

Several of his children followed him into the business, and Ms. Whitman and two of her brothers bought their father’s buildings.

Ms. Whitman operated Hudson North American, while other family members owned Despatch Moving & Storage, a 10-story building a block or so up Broadway.

Despatch Moving & Storage reached a settlement with Columbia last year.
In all, more than three dozen businesses — including meat wholesale companies, auto body shops and restaurants — have sold their property to Columbia and have either left or have agreed to leave once construction begins.

The university has not announced a construction schedule.
Of the two remaining holdout owners, one is a family that operates a service station, and the other is Nicholas Sprayregen, the area’s largest landowner aside from Columbia.

Mr. Sprayregen owns 300,000 square feet of space in five buildings, most of them used by his Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage business.

On Tuesday, Mr. Sprayregen said that Ms. Whitman’s decision to reach a deal with Columbia would have no bearing on his position.

“It makes it more disappointing, but it also makes my resolve to do the right thing even stronger,” he said.

In an e-mail message, Victoria Benitez, a university spokeswoman, said, “We don’t discuss negotiations, but as our record demonstrates, we work with property owners and want to continue to do so to reach win-win agreements with the remaining two property owners.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/nyregion/11columbia.html?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

“No way Columbia is going to steal this property right out from underneath me,” Ms. Whitman said at the time. “Remember that man who stood in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square? That’s me.”

So that's the way you talk yourself into a better offer.

[ablarc]

What's the use? Columbia today has no vision so there's no way they would move or even save this building.




Landowner Who Balked Gives In to Columbia

A business owner who had pledged not to sell her property to make way for Columbia University’s expansion has reached a deal with the university, Columbia officials said on Tuesday...

Columbia said it would pay for the construction of a new building for Ms. Whitman, which she would own. Her company will be relocated to temporary space on Broadway between 131st and 132nd Streets until the new building is completed. The university said the construction would include transferring the old building’s facade to the new site...

Victoria Benitez, a university spokeswoman, said, “We don’t discuss negotiations, but as our record demonstrates, we work with property owners ... to reach win-win agreements with the remaining two property owners.”
[!]

[BPC]

Hooray for the heroic Anne Whitman, who is interested in preserving the city's architectural history, and not merely in cashing out. A rare breed in this town, she is.

On second thought, screw you, Anne!

[NYC4Life]

From: NY1

State Board To Vote On Columbia's Expansion Plans

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/images/live/144/287444.jpg

July 17, 2008

As state officials prepare to vote today on Columbia University's controversial expansion plan, the school is revising its proposal to offer millions of dollars in community improvements and a promise to hold off on seizing private apartment buildings.

The Empire State Development Corporation is expected to vote today on Columbia's 17-acre, $7-billion plan to expand north of 125th Street. It will then set a schedule for public hearings.

The Daily News reports the school is planning on spending $21 million on a variety of programs for local residents, including scholarships for local high school students and free education classes for senior citizens.

The City Council approved the rezoning plan in December.

Columbia has already promised nearly $100 million toward community needs. In addition, the New York Post says the school is pledging not to use eminent domain to seize residential buildings for at least 10 years.

Critics have complained Columbia is pushing longtime residents and businesses out, and changing the character of the community.

[NYC4Life]

New York Times

Harlem Area Is Blighted, State Agency Declares

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: July 18, 2008

http://s3.amazonaws.com/trd_three/images/43220/columbia_midsize.jpg

The Empire State Development Corporation declared a 17-acre area of Harlem blighted on Thursday, a step toward forcing property owners to sell their land as part of eminent domain proceedings to make way for the expansion of Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org).

The long-awaited finding — that a slice of the west part of Harlem known as Manhattanville is full of deteriorating buildings — was part of the state development agency’s preliminary approval of the university’s $6.28 billion expansion plan.

The plan, which the agency is expected to formally approve in the fall, has been opposed by some Harlem residents, who fear being displaced by the university.

The expansion, which is to take place over 25 years, will transform a section of Upper Manhattan dominated by warehouses and auto-body shops into a campus with high-rise classrooms and laboratories, tree-lined streets and student housing.

All but a handful of the expansion zone’s existing buildings will be torn down to make room for the new campus, which Columbia officials have said will eventually include many of the university’s science and research facilities.

Columbia says it is short of space. On Thursday, Lee C. Bollinger (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/lee_c_bollinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Columbia’s president, lauded the agency’s move.

“We are gratified by the Empire State Development Corporation’s adoption of a general project plan as the next step for a civic project that has moved forward with widespread support from local officials, elected representatives and a wide coalition of public interest groups committed to sustainable growth and vibrant urban neighborhoods,” President Bollinger said in a statement.

Much of the opposition to the expansion plan has been centered on Columbia’s refusal to pledge that it would not seek to have the state take over the privately owned land that the university has been unable to purchase.

Mr. Bollinger has promised not to ask the state to invoke eminent domain for the area’s residential buildings, which are home to about 300 people, but he has refused to make similar promises regarding the few commercial properties that have not been purchased by the university.

On Thursday, Columbia released its most direct statement to date about its intention to pursue eminent domain: “The university has requested that the E.S.D.C. consider exercising its eminent domain authority in order to ensure that commercial development in this old industrial area does not prevent the city and state from achieving the public interest goals in the proposed academic expansion, with all of the long-term economic, educational and civic benefits it will bring to the local economy and all New Yorkers.”

The university has said it owns about 90 percent of the private property in the area bounded roughly by Broadway on the east, Riverside Drive on the west, 133rd Street on the north and 129th Street on the south.

Two commercial property owners, however, have refused to sell. One of them is Nicholas Sprayregen, who owns four buildings in the expansion zone as part of his Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage moving and storage business.

Mr. Sprayregen has been vocal in his opposition to eminent domain and has vowed to fight the university to the Supreme Court (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org) if necessary. For months, his buildings have displayed giant banners that read “Stop Eminent Domain Abuse!”

On Thursday, Mr. Sprayregen, 44, vowed to continue fighting.
“It is clear that the voices of the community have been unsuccessful in dissuading Columbia University or the state from voluntarily backing off the threat of eminent domain,” he said. “We will go full steam ahead in preparing our defense.”

But on Thursday, many city and state lawmakers were aligned against Mr. Sprayregen.

Along with the press release announcing the development agency’s approval of the expansion plan were statements of approval from Gov. David A. Paterson (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/david_a_paterson/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Representative Charles B. Rangel (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/charles_b_rangel/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber and state Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright.

The project has been approved by the City Council and is supported by the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/scott_m_stringer/index.html?inline=nyt-per).

On Thursday, the state development agency said that two separate studies had determined that the part of Harlem under consideration was “mainly characterized by aging, poorly maintained and functionally obsolete industrial buildings, with little indication of recent reinvestment to revive their generally deteriorated conditions.”

Opponents of the expansion, however, have said for months that the study’s findings were a foregone conclusion because the consulting firm that performed the blight analysis on behalf of the state — Allee King Rosen & Fleming Inc. — had previously conducted Columbia University’s environmental impact study for the expansion.

On Thursday, the state agency said that the consulting firm’s analysis had been audited by a second firm, Earth Tech Inc.

This week, a state appellate court upheld a decision ordering the development corporation to release documents regarding the expansion of Columbia University to Mr. Sprayregen because of the conflict of interest.
A public hearing on the project will probably be held in September, said Warner Johnston, an agency spokesman. A final vote will come after the hearing.

After that, businesses facing the possibility of eminent domain would have 30 days to present their arguments, officials said.

Columbia said on Thursday that it was willing to restart negotiations with the holdout businesses before eminent domain proceedings began.
“The university remains committed to reaching mutually beneficial agreements with the two remaining commercial property owners on these blocks,” Columbia said in a statement.

[brianac]

A High Schooler Pleads with Columbia

by Em Whitney | September 3, 2008

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/Columbia%20Broadway_0_2.jpg ESDC.
Rendering of Columbia's West Harlem campus.

On Tuesday, the Empire State Development Corporation held its first public hearing on its outline for Columbia's 17-acre expansion into West Harlem.

One of the first speakers was the daughter, a senior in high school, of the Singh family, owner of a gas station at 129th Street. The gas station is one of two hold-out properties still at odds with Columbia; Nick Sprayregen's storage company is the other (http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/sprayregen-columbia-i-plead-fifth-you-should-too).

"If Columbia has to take [our property] away using eminent domain, I am sad to say, our future is looking very grim," the Singh daughter told the audience at City College. "I think it is very unfair, unjust and racist.

Columbia is a multi-million-dollar private company... Can they not spare two properties that mean so much to us? Columbia just wants to take advantage of the fact that we are Indian people trying to live the American dream."

The family's lawyer spoke next: "Columbia claims that Manhattanville is an area blight--I don't think that businesses like Fairway view this area as a location of blight, and nor do the people that call this area home.

Columbia must not be allowed to steam roll through this area and destroy businesses.

"It is simply a land grab."

Local Assemblyman Daniel O'Donnell was one of the few elected officials--and among those in the room in general--to dissent from Columbia and the ESDC's position.

"Some of this is actually a philosophical discussion," Mr. O'Donnell said outside. "Is it appropriate to take away someone's private property that doesn't want to give it up for another entity? Historically, in our nation, we've done so for government and public uses. So we needed a highway, or a water tunnel built, a variety of other things, electric lines, for example, this government has said, ‘We're going to take this away from you, compensate you appropriately, and the public will benefit.' And, so here, they essentially said that a private entity can use eminent domain power; the government can assist a private entity and shift private property from one party to another party. So, philosophically, I don't agree with that.

"Although I do not represent the Manhattanville community directly, I rep most of the community where Columbia university is and I represent many people who will be profoundly impacted by this decision ... I did not call on the ESDC to turn this down, that would make me very naive."

Columbia emailed a statement regarding eminent domain to acquire the Singh family and Mr. Sprayregen's property.

"Columbia has worked successfully over the past few years to negotiate fair deals with all of the other private landowners in Manhattanville area--many of whom speak enthusiastically of Columbia's good faith and fair dealing in meeting their economic and business needs, and helping them find convenient new locations that will keep jobs in New York. The University remains committed to reaching mutually beneficial agreements with the two remaining commercial property owners on these blocks if they agree to do so.

"This plan affirms that ESDC's eminent domain authority will not be used to acquire the small number of residential buildings that cover less than 4 percent of the proposed project area while they remain occupied."

http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/high-schooler-pleads-columbia

© 2008 Observer Media Group,

[brianac]

Sprayregen to Columbia: I Plead the Fifth, You Should Too

by Tom Acitelli (http://www.observer.com/node/36094) | September 3, 2008

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/sprayregenjameshamilton.jpg James Hamilton.
Nick Sprayregen.


Nick Sprayregen, the landowner leading the final hold-out against Columbia's 17-acre West Harlem expansion, has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122039976866693031.html?mod=googlenews_wsj). In it, Mr. Sprayregen (profiled by The Observer in July) (http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/zero-hour-west-harlem) attacks Columbia's threatened use of eminent domain to take his storage company's property.

In the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government is permitted to take private property only for "public use."


This clause was once limited to true public projects such as the construction of highways, fire houses and public libraries. But over the last 50 years it has been bastardized by the powerful (in collusion with compliant politicians and the acquiescence of the courts) into a weapon used routinely to forcibly take other people's property for nonpublic uses. What is occurring in West Harlem today is a prime example of this abuse.

http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/sprayregen-columbia-i-plead-fifth-you-should-too

© 2008 Observer Media Group,

[Alonzo-ny]

"If Columbia has to take [our property] away using eminent domain, I am sad to say, our future is looking very grim," the Singh daughter told the audience at City College. "I think it is very unfair, unjust and racist.

Columbia is a multi-million-dollar private company... Can they not spare two properties that mean so much to us? Columbia just wants to take advantage of the fact that we are Indian people trying to live the American dream."



What! What is the basis for this statement exactly? A bit low getting a kid to go up and speak isnt it?

[brianac]

They will do and say anything, just as others have done.

I wll die before I will move, they say.

Then the amount of compensation goes up and what do they do.

Move.

[NYC4Life]

New York Sun

Columbia Chief Presses For Expansion

By PETER KIEFER, Staff Reporter of the Sun | September 3, 2008

Facing the prospect of a drawn-out legal battle with at least one private landowner, the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, is seeking conciliation in the final stages of the approval process for Columbia's $6 billion expansion plan.

Citing an explosion in "knowledge" over the past century, Mr. Bollinger in testimony said Columbia could no longer maintain its status as one of the world's pre-eminent universities if it is unable to expand.

"Over the past two to three decades, Columbia has run out of space," he said.

In July, the Empire State Development Corp. adopted the university's general project plan, which calls for new student housing, classrooms, and laboratory space on 17 acres just north of its Morningside Heights campus.

About 150 people were present at the City University of New York for the penultimate public hearing on the matter yesterday; the ESDC board's final vote is scheduled for the fall.

The majority of the testimony delivered early in the day skewed toward those in favor of the plan, but as the evening session drew on, an increasing number of opposition speakers were filing in.

Mr. Bollinger cited the creation of 6,000 permanent jobs, said city and state support was "vital," and said that as president he didn't want "in any way to be at odds with" Columbia's neighbors.

The opposition speakers zeroed in on the possible use of eminent domain.
Columbia owns 80% of the private property within the 17-acre expansion footprint, but four facilities owned by Nick Sprayregen and a gas station on West 125th Street remain within the footprint. University officials have been attempting to negotiate agreements with all property owners within the footprint but have not ruled out the use of eminent domain for nonresidential structures.

A local resident who is a member of Community Board 9, Walter South, said that if Columbia's leadership were to use eminent domain, they should give up their own homes in return. "If they are not going to give up their own homes, then they are absolute hypocrites," he said.

A local district leader, Mark Levine, said it was up to the ESDC to ensure that eminent domain be used only for public projects.
"You are the last best defense we have," he said.

Mr. Sprayregen said yesterday he would challenge the plan in court if it gains final approval. He said he planned to testify at the final hearing being held tomorrow.

Earlier in the day, Mayor Dinkins testified in support of Columbia's plan. He said the opposition to the plan was being fanned by "two or three people, yelling and screaming. That doesn't make it controversy."

[NYC4Life]

New York Observer

Columbia Holdout: Eminent Domain 'Not Necessary or Appropriate'


by Eliot Brown (http://www.observer.com/2007/author/eliot-brown) | September 4, 2008


http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/sprayregenjameshamilton_0.jpg
James Hamilton.


The last remaining major private landowner in the footprint of Columbia University's planned West Harlem expansion issued a lengthy critique of the state's use of eminent domain to acquire his property, laying the groundwork for a legal battle that will likely lie ahead.

Nicholas Sprayregen (http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/zero-hour-west-harlem), owner of Tuck-it-Away Storage, released the critique as the state today holds its second of two hearings (http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/high-schooler-pleads-columbia) on the proposed use of eminent domain. A wealthy landlord and developer who said he expects to fund a lengthy challenge, Mr. Sprayregen owns multiple warehouses in the footprint.

In the documents submitted to the Empire State Development Corporation today--the state agency that uses eminent domain--Mr. Sprayregen takes issue with the general notion that the area in the footprint is "blighted," a necessary condition for eminent domain. Any blight, he wrote is "created by, maintained by, or exacerbated by Columbia University," given that the university owns or controls much of the property.

More generally, Mr. Sprayregen, represented by attorney Norman Siegel, wrote that the process by which eminent domain has been permitted went against the "public use" standard set in the renowned Kelo v. City of New London case, in part because Columbia was the preferred developer from the start--not one selected via a bid.

(More from the document itself here (http://www.observer.com/files/issues.pdf).)

Columbia has long said it is seeking to reach a deal with all the landowners, and needs to use eminent domain in order to create a large, unified campus with a contiguous multi-story underground space.

[NYC4Life]

New York Times

Hearing on Columbia Plan Elicits Emotional Speeches

http://s3.amazonaws.com/trd_three/images/43220/columbia_midsize.jpg

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: September 4, 2008

The Empire State Development Corporation board this week held its only public hearing before it decides whether to use eminent domain to allow for the $6.3 billion expansion of Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) into Manhattanville.

But while the two-day hearing featured testimony from a former mayor, members of the State Legislature and the president of Columbia University, the group that will make the ultimate decision, the development corporation’s board, was not there.

Instead, a lone hearing officer, a lawyer named Edward C. Kramer, listened stoically to more than 13 hours of often emotional testimony.

The public hearing, which was held on Tuesday and Thursday, followed a pattern: Speakers who were employed by, seeking employment with or otherwise had business ties to the university came out in support of the plan. Most other speakers opposed it.

“Columbia University’s expansion plan follows the worst example of Robert Moses (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_moses/index.html?inline=nyt-per),” said one opponent, Mario Mazzoni, a public high school teacher. “This plan makes a mockery of the gravity of eminent domain.”

Expansion supporters typically did not mention eminent domain. Instead, they focused on the fact that the project would create thousands of jobs, on the importance of Columbia’s medical research, and on the school’s efforts to repair its frayed ties with its neighbors in Harlem.

“I have studied the university’s Manhattanville proposal and am convinced it can and will be positive for Columbia and its neighbors,” said former Mayor David N. Dinkins (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/david_n_dinkins/index.html?inline=nyt-per), who teaches public policy at the school. “Columbia University could have no better partner in this undertaking, and it goes the other way around, too.”

If the board approves Columbia’s request for eminent domain rights in 17 acres adjacent to the Hudson River, the area would be transformed from a low-rise, light-industrial neighborhood with century-old buildings to a sleek, glass-walled extension of the university’s campus that will house its business and arts schools and a science building.

All but two of the dozens of buildings in the area — bounded roughly by Broadway and 12th Avenue, and 125th and 133rd Streets — would be bulldozed. Columbia would pay to relocate some 300 residents.

Most of the opposition to the expansion has centered on the university’s intent to use eminent domain to force two holdout businesses to leave. One of the businesses is a large moving and storage company that owns several buildings in the area. The other is a pair of gas stations owned by an immigrant family.

Lee C. Bollinger (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/lee_c_bollinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Columbia’s president, said the university needed to expand in order to keep pace with other Ivy League (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/ivy_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org) institutions and to continue its core missions of teaching and research.

“The reason why a great university needs more space is knowledge,” he said. “As knowledge grows, a university needs more people, more classrooms, more laboratories.”

Opponents, however, repeatedly returned to eminent domain, the taking over of property for private economic development considered beneficial to the public.

“Do you really need every square inch of land to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, Mr. Bollinger?” asked Tom Kappner, a Columbia graduate and a founder of the main opposition group, Coalition to Preserve Community.

Some speakers pointed to the absence of the development corporation’s board members at the public hearing as a sign that the agency had already decided to grant the university eminent domain rights.

But Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the development corporation, said it was the agency’s practice to hire a hearing officer during eminent domain testimony rather than having the board listen to testimony firsthand to ensure that “the process is as judicial and impartial as possible.”

Mr. Johnston said the agency’s board members would be briefed by the development corporation’s staff and would review written testimony before voting at the end of this year or early in 2009.

Nellie Bailey, executive director of the Harlem Tenants Council, linked the university’s expansion and proposed use of eminent domain with gentrification taking place elsewhere in Harlem.

“This is a diabolical plan that is racist in nature and intended to drive us out — and they don’t care where we go,” she said, referring to the area’s working-class, predominantly black and Latino residents.

Aman Kaur, the teenage daughter of the family that owns the two gas stations and has so far refused to sell to Columbia, urged the development corporation not to invoke eminent domain.

“Our livelihood depends solely on the profits of these two properties,” she said. “Can they not spare two properties that mean so much to us? In just one moment, Columbia wants to take our dream and break it.”

[brianac]

Columbia Closes on Warehouse in Expansion Footprint for $14.8 M.

by Eliot Brown (http://www.observer.com/2007/author/eliot-brown)
October 6, 2008

Columbia has paid $14.8 million for a warehouse in the footprint of its planned West Harlem expansion, closing on a deal from 2007 with the owners of Despatch Moving & Storage, according to property records. The sale price equates to about $235 per square foot, based on figures from the real estate tracking service PropertyShark, which puts the size of the building at 62,200 square feet.

The 10-story warehouse at 3247 Broadway was owned by Peter Zuhusky, brother of the longtime holdout Anne Whitman (http://www.observer.com/2007/columbia-expansion-pits-husband-against-wife-brother-against-sister), who agreed to sell her property to Columbia earlier this year (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/nyregion/11columbia.html?fta=y). That leaves two private landowners remaining: Nick Sprayregen (http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/zero-hour-west-harlem), who owns multiple storage buildings, and Gurnam Singh (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/nyregion/21gas.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/W/Williams,%20Timothy), who owns two gas stations

http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/columbia-closes-warehouse-expansion-footprint-14-8-m

© 2008 Observer Media Group,

[Shadly]

The mandatory outdoor cafe seating.

Mandatory! I have heartburn, what if I want to stand?! :eek:

[brianac]

Columbia to Finish Section of Campus, 113 Years Later

By DAVID W. DUNLAP (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/david_w_dunlap/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: December 14, 2008

Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) is finally completing the northwest corner of its six-block main campus in Morningside Heights, 113 years after construction began there.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/15/nyregion/columbia650.jpgMoneo Brock Studio/A. S. Arquitectura
A rendering of Columbia’s science building at Broadway and 120th Street.

It was designed by José Rafael Moneo of Spain.

It is doing so with a 14-story science building at Broadway and 120th Street that has almost nothing in common with its red-brick predecessors.

The aluminum-clad facade will exhibit strong diagonal bracing, not unlike the George Washington Bridge. And, in a sense, the building is a bridge, a 126-foot-long clear span over the gymnasium below.

On Wednesday, the highest structural steel member is to be hoisted into place and the Interdisciplinary Science Building, as it is currently called (naming opportunity alert!), will be ceremonially topped off. It will open to students, scientists and researchers in the fall of 2010. Its cost is about $179 million.

The building was designed by José Rafael Moneo (http://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1996/bio.html) of Spain, one of the most respected figures in contemporary architecture, who has stolen quietly into New York with little of the fanfare that usually greets a “starchitect.”

Mr. Moneo is best known in the United States for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (http://www.olacathedral.org/) in Los Angeles, which was dedicated in 2002.

On the Columbia project he is associated with Davis Brody Bond Aedas (http://www.davisbrody.com/). Engineering is by the Arup (http://www.arup.com/) firm. The construction manager is the Turner Construction Company (http://www.turnerconstruction.com/).

Lee C. Bollinger (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/lee_c_bollinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the president of Columbia, envisions the new science building as the first visible gesture to the Manhattanville campus that the university is planning, in the face of strong opposition. “It will face outward,” Mr. Bollinger said of the building. Outward and uptown.

Unlike most buildings on the main campus, the new science building will have a street entrance, on 120th Street. A cafe just above street level and a gathering space at the top of the building, both enclosed in glass, will look north and serve as a “beacon,” Mr. Bollinger said, for people approaching from western Harlem and Manhattanville.

Mr. Moneo traced the building’s distinctive features to a common root: solving the problem of the basketball court in the Dodge Physical Fitness Center, whose west end is directly beneath the science building.

“To fight and overcome the difficulties of a site is sort of a gift given to you,” he said.

In his first visit to campus three years ago, Mr. Moneo began by saying the gym might have to be moved. He was quickly disabused of the idea by Joe Ienuso, the executive vice president for facilities, who said, “Not only can’t we move the gym, but we need to keep the gym open during construction.”

With that, Mr. Ienuso recalled, the architect took a long, deliberate walk through neighboring Chandler and Pupin Halls and the fitness center. At the end of the day, Mr. Moneo said, “We’re going to be able to work around it.”

The solution was to install three enormous parallel trusses in the lower part of the building. These take the weight of the laboratories, classrooms and offices above and distribute the load — almost as a tabletop would — to columns that flank, but do not penetrate, the basketball court.

This approach has created a column-free space directly under the trusses, which will be occupied by the library. The room will be almost transparent, with window walls overlooking the campus and Broadway.

“For the first time, actual academic life will be visible from the street,” said Mark Wigley, dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Diagonal elements in the truss work and other structural bracing will be expressed clearly on the facade, giving the building its overall character.
In other words, it will not look like the red-brick buildings that have predominated since McKim, Mead & White drew up the master plan in the 1890s. But with so much steel in the science building, any brickwork would merely have been a thin cladding.

“When the brick is only a veneer,” Mr. Moneo said, “I don’t feel comfortable working with it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/nyregion/15columbia.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[ablarc]

“When the brick is only a veneer,” Mr. Moneo said, “I don’t feel comfortable working with it.”
An orthodox Modernist sentiment available only to its superstars (and not even them), because to use brick structurally means to rely on arches. Louis Kahn comes to mind as the only Modernist example (Dacca, Exeter).

[avngingandbright]

This one is really tall in person. It's great for the neighborhood and really completes that canyon on 120th. I wonder if they'd ever consider putting retail in the base, then you'd really bring some life to that corner. The stretch pf Broadway from 116th up to 125th is pretty bland and desolate.

[londonlawyer]

Does anyone know what's on this site now?

[ASchwarz]

The building is almost finished, but before, it was Columbia tennis courts.

[avngingandbright]

It was a modernist 1 story addition, in which I think was housed part of the gymnasium, and on top of which were the tennis courts; but this itself is being somewhat preserved and built on top of. The only thing destroyed would probably be that little sculpted amphora (seen here: http://flickr.com/photos/jschumacher/430898121/) but that's about it.

[brianac]

December 17, 2008, 4:38 pm

Topping Off a Building, Finishing a Campus

By David W. Dunlap (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/david-w-dunlap/)

SLIDE SHOW HERE (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/topping-off-a-building-finishing-a-campus/)


In a modest ceremony on Wednesday afternoon, Columbia University observed the “topping off” of its new 14-story Interdisciplinary Science Building (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/nyregion/15columbia.html) at Broadway and West 120th Street, designed by José Rafael Moneo (http://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1996/index.html) of Spain. This traditional construction milestone marks the point at which the structure reaches its intended height, typically with the raising and installation of the highest steel beam. The building, which is to open in 2011, completes the northwest corner of Columbia’s main campus, 113 years after work began on the six-block complex.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/topping-off-a-building-finishing-a-campus/

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[meesalikeu]

the saddest thing is this scrubby acreage will be a loss of an important buffer zone of lower middle class businesses. when it is built out by columbia the college will butt up against towering housing projects on its north & east. you can bet by that time the campus along those dividers will be walled off with armed guards to protect all those richy-rich kid students.

just remember columbia, when you lose the middle class you get brazil! :mad:

[ASchwarz]

just remember columbia, when you lose the middle class you get brazil! :mad:

What on earth does the Columbia expansion have to do with "the middle class" and Brazil?

Ignoring the silly hyperbole, there is relatively little middle class in Manhattan to begin with. It's mostly people with money or the subsidized poor.

The expansion will not change this one way or the other, because people with money want to live in Manhattan, and the poor are protected by subsidy programs and rent control laws.

As for the Columbia expansion neighborhood, not a single resident is being displaced. There are only two small residential buildings in the entire zone, and the residents of both buildings are staying, in brand-new buildings built courtesy of Columbia.

[ablarc]

FROM WIKI:

The size of the middle class depends on how it is defined, whether by education, wealth, environment of upbringing, genetic relationships, social network, manners or values, etc. These are all related, though far from deterministically dependent. The following factors are often ascribed in modern usage to a "middle class":

* Achievement of tertiary education.

* Holding professional qualifications, including academics, lawyers, engineers, doctors, and clergymen regardless of their leisure or wealth.

* Belief in bourgeois values, such as high rates of house or long-term lease ownership and jobs which are perceived to be "secure."

* Lifestyle. In the United Kingdom, social status has historically been linked less directly to wealth than in the United States, and has also been judged by pointers such as accent, manners, place of education, occupation and the class of a person's family, circle of friends and acquaintances.

* Cultural identification. Often in the United States, the middle class are the most eager participants in pop culture whereas the reverse is true in Britain. The second generation of new immigrants will often enthusiastically forsake their traditional folk culture as a sign of having arrived in the middle class.

[Stroika]

The best solution here is not to prevent Columbia from adding a huge new science campus (thereby creating both the means to create thousands of new middle class jobs in the sciences, as opposed to the, er, storage industry), but to get rid of the projects that campus will come up against.

New York's projects are horrible relic of the 1940s. They don't do their residents or the larger city any good at all. And they represent the most important -- the largest and the most underutilized -- areas for future development that should include mixed-income housing to provide low-income people with a new housing option.

[ablarc]

^ Amen.

[nykid17]

From the 1 train Platform
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3418/3261394593_e553c9e252_b.jpg

[NoyokA]

The best solution here is not to prevent Columbia from adding a huge new science campus (thereby creating both the means to create thousands of new middle class jobs in the sciences, as opposed to the, er, storage industry), but to get rid of the projects that campus will come up against.

New York's projects are horrible relic of the 1940s. They don't do their residents or the larger city any good at all. And they represent the most important -- the largest and the most underutilized -- areas for future development that should include mixed-income housing to provide low-income people with a new housing option.

If Columbia University was a public institution and their tuition wasn't $40,000 a year, you'd have a stronger argument. There's nothing middle class about Columbia.

[KenNYC]

He didn't say Columbia was a middle class university (although I don't see why it would be wrong to say that), he said it created middle class jobs. Which is what science degrees do 99.5% of the time.

As for the first argument, I know a lot of people at Columbia, and pretty much all of them come from middle class backgrounds, so even that argument isn't wrong.

[Tectonic]

Is that the 14 story science building in the distance?

[infoshare]

Is that the 14 story science building .....

Yes (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=265907&postcount=322).

[ASchwarz]

Is that the 14 story science building in the distance?

I was in the area recently, and it seemed at least as tall as a residential 20-25 floor building; which makes sense in that these are research/lab floors.

[nykid17]

Yea, looking from across the street, the floors look tall enough to have a small gym or so on each floor.
Maybe soon some cladding?

[Hamilton]

If Columbia University was a public institution and their tuition wasn't $40,000 a year, you'd have a stronger argument. There's nothing middle class about Columbia.

I won't make the point that Columbia and similar schools could use more socioeconomic diversity, but the argument about tuition just doesn't stand up.

Students whose families make less than $60,000 pay zero tuition, and above that tuition increases with family income. I would have had to pay more to go to state school than I did to go to Columbia.

It's always sad when I find someone who was dissuaded from applying to a good school because they thought it would be too expensive--these schools will do what they can to make sure your family can afford it.

[kz1000ps]

http://www.archpaper.com/images/anp_logos/anplogo.gif

06.03.2009

In Detail: Northwest Corner Building, Columbia

Jose Rafael Moneo with Davis Brody Bond Aedas and Arup

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/COLUMBIA-NW_GCM.jpg
In order to bridge a subterranean gymnasium, the design team
made the entire building one big truss. Courtesy Arup

By 2005, after 120 years of steady growth, Columbia University had filled out every block of its McKim, Mead & White (MM&W)-designed master plan except one—a rectangular allotment on the campus’ northwest corner at the intersection of Broadway and 120th Street. Many proposals had been proffered for the site over the years (including one by James Stirling) but nothing had panned out.

In 1972, construction on the lot was complicated, when the university built a bunker-like subterranean recreation center there after student riots in 1968 halted a proposal for a supposedly segregationist gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park. After that point, any structure to rise at the northwest corner would have to bridge the recreation center’s 120-foot clear span—an engineering feat that carried with it an exorbitant price tag.

The mid 2000s, however, found the institution with free-flowing funds and visions of expansion. While drafting schemes for a new campus in Manhattanville, Columbia hired the celebrated Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo to design a building that would not only complete its century-old plan, but also function as a gateway between its native turf and the new lands to the north. Davis Brody Bond Aedas was brought on as executive architect, and Arup was selected as both mechanical and structural engineer.

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/Exterior-1.jpg
The diagonals of the truss and the loads they support are expressed
in the facade. Courtesy Moneo Brock Studio/AIS ArquitectuRa

The north end of the campus is Columbia’s sciences corridor. The MM&W masterplan leaves 20-foot gaps between each building, but all of the science edifices are connected via upper-floor bridges. The one break in this chain is at the northwest corner, between Pupin Hall (physics) and Chandler Hall (chemistry and engineering). The new structure, known simply as the Northwest Corner Building, was slated to complete the circuit and programmed as an interdisciplinary facility with cutting-edge laboratories for physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering.

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/IMG_0376.jpg
Five-foot-deep castellated beams allow for 40-foot clear spans in the labs.

The convergence of these structural and programmatic demands created a challenge for the design team: To bridge the recreation center, the structure had to be lightweight—using steel was the obvious choice. But to create a stable lab environment the structure also had to be rigid and not prone to the sway associated with most steel structures.

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/Columbia090211Construction.jpg
The beams also allow for 18-foot floor-to-floor heights, which create room
for Office mezzanines. Middle and bottom: Courtesy Davis Brody Bond Aedis

The solution was to design the building as one big truss up and down its elevation by inserting diagonals in the otherwise standard moment frame. This perimeter system stabilizes the structure against vibration, and works in tandem with three heavy-duty trusses running the length of the building to span the recreation center’s roof. The entire assembly ties into eight beefed-up steel columns, three on the south side and five on the north, that transfer the gravity load to a concrete foundation sitting on bedrock.

Unlike Bernard Tschumi’s Alfred J. Lerner Hall, which is partially brick in reference to the campus’ Beaux-Arts vocabulary, Moneo’s building is utterly modern in expression. The street facades, which enclose the lab spaces, articulate the structure. Clear anodized aluminum panels clad the bays with diagonal structural elements, conveying these lines with extruded aluminum fins. While these panels are opaque, the clear bays are outfitted with fenestration. The building’s plaza facade, however, which encloses office space, is an all-glass curtain wall.

Moneo’s building makes some interesting departures from Columbia’s traditional structures in layout as well. In MM&W’s plan, the 65-foot-wide plot would be arranged with a 10-foot-wide corridor running down the middle, leaving 27-foot bays on either side. This is great for classical symmetry, but Columbia wanted to create modern lab space flexible enough to work for any discipline. In answer, the design team skewed the plan, moving the corridor to the east to open up 40-foot clear span spaces for the labs, and leaving narrower bays for the offices. The lab floors are also framed with five-foot-deep castellated beams to allow 18-foot floor-to-ceiling heights, a generous allowance that made room for mezzanine levels for the offices.

The seven lab floors begin five flights above street level, but only a 60-by-60-foot square of the facility reaches Broadway, where there is a lobby. Above the lobby is a café with the same dimensions, and from there escalators lead the student body up to a library, which occupies the building’s full footprint atop the recreation center’s roof. The library is clad entirely in glass on both east and west faces, providing views clear from the campus’ plaza through the building. It is also column free, thanks to the fact that the level above, which holds book stacks and a lecture hall, is home to the structure’s three workhorse trusses, the middle of which shoulders half of the entire load from the floors above.

These trusses were too big and heavy to be shop fabricated and trucked in, and the roof of the recreation center was too weak to act as a staging area; and so the construction team, led by Turner, welded the trusses together on a platform erected above the sidewalk and then slid them into place. Very neatly.

Aaron Seward
Link (http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=3545&PagePosition=1)

[nykid17]

The science labs on September 29th:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3500/3966466529_50925ee29e_b.jpg
From Claremont Ave:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2434/3966467125_f87ec78fc2_b.jpg

[kz1000ps]

The agression!

[londonlawyer]

These pri...cks should have built something that mixes in better with the neighborhood. This area has such stunning, classical architecture, and these schmucks did not respect it.

[Merry]

I was thinking the same thing (in so many words ;)) as I was scrolling down the page looking at those photos.

All those stripes look awful next to that lovely creeper-covered old building.

[Troyeth]

How many people does one have to fool into believing that a building, such as this one, is of high-quality before it is permitted to rise?

[londonlawyer]

I think that the building is fine. It just does not belong in that area. These d..cks should have respected the area. I'm really enraged.

[oquatanginwan]

I agree, the view going down Broadway used to be pretty inspiring with the graceful renaissance revival buildings lining the street. This white radiator just dominates the view now.

What a bad move by the university. They should have respected the architecture of the core of the original campus. Of course when they put up more or less contextual buildings like the Cooper Robertson designed social work building or the Robert Stern dorm they get trashed for being milquetoast and historicism. But those will age well. This won't.

[nykid17]

From the 4th:
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww310/nYkind17/100_1277.jpg?t=1257392797

[RoldanTTLB]

Wow. I'm really shocked at the backlash against this building. I live quite a bit further north, but Manhattan is made up of these classically styled structures from well south of here all the way to the bronx going north. I live in one. Nevertheless, it's nice to see something a little different. This is thankfully not different in the boring, suburban manner that Columbia-Presby builds in much closer to where I live.

If everyone wants to be incensed at something, the new salmon tinted glass building across broadway from this one is far uglier and no more or less contextual. It's built by a much smaller school that no one hates disproportionally the way people don't like Columbia.

[MidtownGuy]

Can you post a photo of that building across the street?

[Gulcrapek]

Do you mean the Diana Center at Barnard?

[MidtownGuy]

the new salmon tinted glass building across broadway from this one is far uglier and no more or less contextual.

^if that's what he was talking about there, yes.
I want to see what's uglier.

[RoldanTTLB]

Do you mean the Diana Center at Barnard?

That would be it, the Nexus as they call it.


^if that's what he was talking about there, yes.
I want to see what's uglier.

Here's the schools website about the building: http://www.barnard.edu/diana/multimedia/index.html

It has lots and lots of material about the building. All of these photos are an overly fair representation of the actual color of the building.

Here's a good one from flickr. The coloring on the glass is a set of gradients printed/painted onto the outside of the glass (like a microwave) http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2476/3706142004_161945e8c9_o.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jschumacher/

[lofter1]

How are the Schools of Architecture at both Columbia (http://www.arch.columbia.edu/) and at Barnard (http://www.barnard.edu/diana/arch/index.html) considered among those in the architecture world?

[ASchwarz]

Columbia's School of Architecture is among the best-known anywhere.

Barnard doesn't have one.

[Fabrizio]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3500/3966466529_50925ee29e_b.jpg

^ Hello handsome!

I can't be the only one here that thinks this looks great.... am I? Ablarc, care to comment?

Fits right in. The size is right. Lots of depth and modern ornamentation... looks solid... looks like it's on speaking terms with it's neighbors. I usually don't care for randomness... those slashes... but it starts making sense.

It just looks fine to me.

[BrooklynRider]

I'm guessing it looks better in the dark.

[RoldanTTLB]

^ Hello handsome!

I can't be the only one here that thinks this looks great.... am I? Ablarc, care to comment?

Fits right in. The size is right. Lots of depth and modern ornamentation... looks solid... looks like it's on speaking terms with it's neighbors. I usually don't care for randomness... those slashes... but it starts making sense.

It just looks fine to me.

You have to know I'm on board. It's a nice change of pace for the neighborhood without being sadly suburban. I still contend the salmon thing across the street discussed above is the truly ugly building.

[lofter1]

... the salmon thing across the street ...


A color that screams 1986.

[BrooklynLove]

The king of salmon:
http://www.emporis.com/images/5/2004/07/278177.jpg

[Fabrizio]

The Piano building is heavily rusticated and that's right in keeping with the neighbors.

The problem for me with the other building, is that it has a slick wrapping-papered facade that strikes a sour note in an area like this. Those panels look like they could fall of at any time. It's not bad bad, but the Piano building is much better.

-

[MidtownGuy]

Different strokes for different folks. The Columbia building isn't so good, IMHO (or the other). What's with all the goofy slashes in different directions...and again with the battleship grey. With Piano it's hit or miss. I think this is more of a miss.

[lofter1]

The king of salmon: http://www.emporis.com/images/5/2004/07/278177.jpg


I was thinking you were going to take me HERE (http://www.isrealli.org/spanish/wp-content/uploads/lipstick-building.jpg)

[lofter1]

Why the Renzo Piano bashing?

This POST (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=286976&postcount=336) from the Architects Newspaper records this metal-faced building as being designed by:

Jose Rafael Moneo with Davis Brody Bond Aedas and Arup


While drafting schemes for a new campus in Manhattanville, Columbia hired the celebrated Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo to design a building that would not only complete its century-old plan, but also function as a gateway between its native turf and the new lands to the north. Davis Brody Bond Aedas was brought on as executive architect, and Arup was selected as both mechanical and structural engineer.

[MidtownGuy]

Why the Renzo Piano bashing?

well, I guess there's some confusion stemming from the title of the thread:

New Columbia Campus - Upper West Side - by Renzo Piano and SOM

[BrooklynRider]

I changed it.

[infoshare]

I am almost certain this building is not part of the Columbia University Campus Expansion: this new "science lab" building (and the Diana Building) across the street are both part of the original main campus. That being said, this new science building is similar to the "Modern Architecture" we will be seeing at the new CU campus further uptown.

The "campus expansion" area starts further uptown in the Manhattanville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanville,_Manhattan) vicinity.

[Fabrizio]

Funny, now that I've heard it's not by Renzo Piano I like it less.

[oquatanginwan]

I'm pretty sure Piano would have done a much better job than Moneo considering his track record of additions to traditional buildings like the Art Institute in Chicago and the Morgan Library. He's an architect who really seems to understand how to bring classicism into a modern vernacular.

[nykid17]

The steel in contrast to it's almost century old brick neighbors:
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww310/nYkind17/100_1303.jpg?t=1258676382
And Barnard's new building across the street:
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww310/nYkind17/100_1302.jpg?t=1258676482

[lofter1]

I like the 3rd floor window with the rods.

Homage to Renzo?

[ASchwarz]

Just to be clear, neither of these buildings are part of Columbia University's Campus Expansion.

The new Columbia science building is on the main campus, and has been planned for many years.

Barnard is independent from Columbia and its new building is on the Barnard campus.

The Columbia Campus Expansion is happening to the north of these buildings, in the Manhattanville sub-neighborhood. The first buildings to rise in this area will be a new business school, new dorms and new arts center.

As for the two new buildings, I think they're pretty good, and both major upgrades. The Barnard building replaces a hideous 50's structure, and the Columbia building replaces blank concrete walls.

[antinimby]

^ ...and tennis courts.

[Hamilton]

Barnard is a liberal arts college so it has no graduate schools. It is an independent institution but it does not grant degrees--all its students get Columbia diplomas. It's a vestige of a time when Columbia College didn't admit women (surprsingly, until 1983). They tried to merge it into Columbia College when it went co-ed (like Brown-Pembroke and Harvard-Radcliffe), but negotiations faltered.

[Fabrizio]

You gotta admit this is beautiful... this to me is what modern architecure in a setting like this should be...
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww310/nYkind17/100_1303.jpg?t=1258676382

[Alonzo-ny]

The scale of it does not mesh at all.

[nykid17]

Don't grade the architecture yet. Theres an entire side I missed:
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww310/nYkind17/100_1327.jpg?t=1259107562
From across the campus:
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww310/nYkind17/100_1330.jpg?t=1259107606

[oquatanginwan]

Terrible. What a blight on the campus. Columbia has had a terrible track record after Mckim Mead & White. At least SIPA has a young friend now.

[BrooklynLove]

WTF were they thinking? The University cannot be happy with how this came out.

[lofter1]

They're to blame. It looks exactly like the renders.

[MidtownGuy]

This is ugly.

[Kris]

December 4, 2009
Court Bars Takeover of Land for Columbia Campus
By CHARLES V. BAGLI

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/04/nyregion/04columbia_CA1/popup.jpg
An appellate ruling sided with Nicholas Sprayregen, who owns four self-storage buildings the state wanted to condemn.

A New York appeals court ruled Thursday that the state could not use eminent domain on behalf of Columbia University to obtain parts of a 17-acre site in Upper Manhattan, setting back plans for a satellite campus at a time of discord over government power to acquire property.

In a 3-to-2 decision, a panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan annulled the state’s 2008 decision to take property for the expansion project, saying that its condemnation procedure was unconstitutional.

The majority opinion was scathing in its appraisal of how the “scheme was hatched,” using terms like “sophistry” and “idiocy” in describing how the state went about declaring the neighborhood blighted, the main prerequisite for eminent domain.

The $6.3 billion expansion plan is not dead; an appeal has been promised, and Columbia still controls most of the land. But at a time when the government’s use of eminent domain on behalf of private interests has become increasingly controversial, the ruling was a boon for opponents.

“I feel unbelievable,” said Nicholas Sprayregen, the owner of several self-storage warehouses in the Manhattanville expansion area and one of two property owners who have refused to sell to the university. “I was always cautiously optimistic. But I was aware we were going against 50 years of unfair cases against property owners.”

A spokesman for Columbia, David M. Stone, referred all questions to state officials.

Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the Empire State Development Corporation, the agency that approved the use of eminent domain, called the decision “wrong and inconsistent with established law, as consistently articulated by the New York State Court of Appeals, most recently with respect to E.S.D.C.’s Atlantic Yards project.” He added, “E.S.D.C. intends to appeal this decision.”

The ruling comes less than two weeks after the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled 6 to 1 that the state could exercise eminent domain in taking businesses, public property and private homes on behalf of a Brooklyn developer who planned a 22-acre residential development and a basketball arena.

Proponents of Columbia’s plan expressed optimism that Thursday’s decision would be overturned by the Court of Appeals. But Norman Siegel, a lawyer for the holdout owners, called the ruling a “major victory” in a state that has been deferential to its power to take private property.

“The decision sets forth a road map for how private property owners in New York and throughout America can fight back when government tries to seize your property in the name of eminent domain,” he said.

Columbia embarked in 2003 on its first major expansion in 75 years, saying it had outgrown its Morningside Heights campus. It planned to replace the low-scale industrial buildings north of 125th Street, in the Manhattanville area, with school buildings, laboratories, restaurants and tree-lined streets.

The court’s decision, if it is upheld, is not fatal to the plan. Columbia already owns or controls 61 of 67 buildings in the 17-acre project area. Presumably, it can build around the holdout owners, or come to agreement with them. But the state and the university have sought the entire site.

Mr. Sprayregen said he never opposed the plan. “The research and education they will perform are very beneficial,” he said. “The fact remains that even if they don’t get the last 5 percent, they can still go ahead and build their campus.”

Amrik Singh, who manages two gas stations involved in the case, said: “I want to thank God and the judges who gave us the decision. We were scared. We were all worried about our jobs.”

Mr. Sprayregen and the family that owns the stations challenged the process the state used in finding that the neighborhood was blighted.

Writing for the majority, Justice James M. Catterson said there was a conflict of interest when the state hired the same real estate consultant, AKRF, that Columbia had hired to make the determination of blight. “We questioned AKRF’s ability to provide ‘objective advice’ to the E.S.D.C., particularly with respect to its preparation of the blight study,” Justice Catterson wrote.

The blight designation, the court said, was “mere sophistry” about a neighborhood that was already undergoing a renaissance. The state’s development corporation committed to rezoning long before the study, “not for the goal of general economic development or to remediate an area that was blighted before Columbia acquired over 50 percent of the property, but rather solely for the expansion itself.”

“Even a cursory examination of the study reveals the idiocy of considering things like unpainted block walls or loose awning supports as evidence of a blighted neighborhood,” Justice Catterson wrote.

A spokesman for the firm said in response to the court’s ruling: “As a firm of planners and analysts, AKRF’s responsibility is the collection and assessment of data in an objective and thorough manner. Our analyses help inform a public decision-making process. They are not advocacy documents.”

The court’s opinion also drew a distinction between the circumstances in Manhattanville and New London, Conn., the subject of a United States Supreme Court decision in 2005. In that case, the court upheld the taking of land, in part, because the city had devised a wide-ranging downtown revitalization plan.

In New York, the Appellate Division said the state and city development agencies “were compelled to engineer a public purpose for a quintessentially private development: eradication of blight,” after “having committed to allow Columbia to annex Manhattanville.”

The court found no civic purpose to this use of eminent domain and criticized state officials for arbitrarily closing the administrative record from further comment by opponents and withholding relevant public documents from the property owners.

In the dissent, Justice Peter Tom wrote that the expansion of an educational institution qualified as a public purpose. He wrote that the property owners’ arguments over blight constituted merely a “difference of opinion” that requires the court to defer to the state’s decision to use eminent domain. Justice Tom wrote that the Court of Appeals had used similar reasoning in the Atlantic Yards case.

Despite the recent Atlantic Yards ruling, the decision Thursday gave hope to property owners battling the use of eminent domain in Brooklyn and Queens. “We feel like we just got thrown a lifeline,” said Matthew Brinckerhoff, a lawyer for the property owners at Atlantic Yards.

A year ago, the City Council authorized the use of eminent domain to take a 62-acre area of mostly salvage yards and auto repair shops known as Willets Point in Queens. “The tide may be turning on the use of eminent domain for private purposes,” said Jake Bono, a spokesman for Willets Point United, a group of property owners opposed to condemnation.

Lisa W. Foderaro contributed reporting.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/20/nyregion/1220-met-sub-webCOLUMBIAmap.gif

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/04/nyregion/04columbiamap/articleInline.jpg
Columbia controls 61 of the 67 buildings in the 17-acre site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/nyregion/04columbia.html

[Merry]

Eminent Defiance

Columbia expansion opponents score surprising win in court

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/image/Columbia131st.jpg
A rendering of Renzo Piano's plans for 131st Street, which is currently occupied by Tuck-It-Away self-storage.

When Columbia University proposed a new $6 billion, 17-acre campus (http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=137) in the Manhattanville section of West Harlem in 2004, the institution considered using eminent domain to acquire land it could not buy. Most owners sold—the university had quietly bought up half the neighborhood starting in 2002, and more followed suit after the announcement—but two local businesses, Tuck-It-Away Self Storage and a pair of gas stations, did not. Instead, they sued the state last year over its use of eminent domain, and today a state court handed down a surprising decision in their favor.

In a stern 3–2 ruling (http://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2009/2009_08976.htm), the First Department of New York’s apellate court determined that the project lacked any true public purpose, with the state exercising eminent domain wholly to the benefit of a private entity, Columbia University. Furthermore, the decision admonishes the state on two counts related to its finding of blight in Manhattanville, which became the pretext for condemning the area. First the blight study was done belatedly—two years after the state had gotten involved on the project—and the study was prepared by the same firm, AKRF, employed by Columbia, creating a blatant conflict of interest.

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/Manhattanville%281%29.jpg
An aerial photo of Manhattanville. One of Sprayregen's storage facilities is plainly visible for its orange paint.
A gas station is nestled on the triangular log at the corner of 125th Street and Broadway, the other at 125th Street and 12th Avenue, next to the viaduct.

“This ultimately became the defining moment for the end game of blight,” Judge James Catterson wrote in his majority opinion. “Having committed to allow Columbia to annex Manhattanville, the EDC and ESDC were compelled to engineer a public purpose for a quintessentially private development: eradication of blight.” Catterson is referring to the city’s Economic Development Corportation and the Empire State Development Corporation, and his writing may have wider impacts on both: “The time has come to categorically reject eminent domain takings solely based on underutilization.”

The move is all the more surprising because this same panel of judges found in favor of the state’s use of eminent domain at Atlantic Yards, a ruling that was affirmed (http://archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=4083) last week and touted by the state in its promise to appeal this decision: “ESDC believes the decision of the Appellate Division, First Department in the matter of the Columbia University Manhattanville Campus to be wrong and inconsistent with established law, as consistently articulated by the New York State Court of Appeals, most recently with respect to ESDC's Atlantic Yards project.”

http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/PianoSketchColumbia%281%29.jpg
A sketch by Renzo Piano shows the service roads that run beneath the project.
The university says it must control the entire 17-acre site to accomodate these facilities.

How Columbia will proceed remains to be seen. Should an appeal fail, the school would have to negotiate with the two holdouts. This could mean a buyout, though both parties have expressed their interest to remain in the neighborhood, suggesting Columbia build around them."It's a good and valuable business and they'd like to keep doing it," said David Smith, attorney for the gas station owners.

The school has called such a scenario impossible, because its new campus, designed by Renzo Piano with planning by SOM, entails a below-grade service core stretching across much of the site. The school argues that this would eliminate truck traffic in the neighborhood, providing for a better pedestrian experience, which could not be achieved without controlling all of the land, of which it currently has 91 percent. A Columbia spokesperson declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Nick Sprayregen, the owner of Tuck-It-Away, called the decision a victory not only for him but for all New Yorkers who fear for their property rights. “Although I’ve always been cautiously optimistic, I knew the weight of prior eminent domain rulings had been against us,” he said. “It’s nice to see the courts, when given actual proof of collusion, will rule in the right way and support the people.”

Matt Chaban

http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=4107

[infoshare]

Thats News! After reading those recent articles, I am left wondering what is different about this project; as opposed to such projects as Atlantic Yards, NY Times building - both of which I believe were granted the right to use eminent domain.

[antinimby]

Columbia controls 61 of the 67 buildings in the 17-acre site.Why can't they just build what they need to build on the 61 lots that they now own? Why do they need those additional 6 lots?

Why does their campus have to be completely contiguous?

It is all right to have a couple of non-Columbia school buildings here and there. Just build around them.

That is what the "real world" is like, thus exposing their students to it might actually be helpful to them.

[infoshare]

Why can't they just build what they need to build on the 61 lots that they now own? Why do they need those additional 6 lots?


I think it has something to do with "privilege (http://gothamist.com/2009/11/10/cops_columbia_prof_punched_woman_in.php)". (LOL)

http://gothamist.com/2009/11/10/cops_columbia_prof_punched_woman_in.php
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/prof_busted_in_columbia_gal_punch_JmsXQ3NzaAt8uG6u UySGTN
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2009/11/10/associate-professor-assaults-arts-school-employee-local-bar

[Wrightfan]

Why can't they just build what they need to build on the 61 lots that they now own? Why do they need those additional 6 lots?

Why does their campus have to be completely contiguous?

It is all right to have a couple of non-Columbia school buildings here and there. Just build around them.

That is what the "real world" is like, thus exposing their students to it might actually be helpful to them.Just look at Piano's sketch. You think that has anything to do with the real world? Columbia's claims to need to control the entire contiguous site are spurious.

[infoshare]

Columbia's claims to need to control the entire contiguous site are spurious.

Is that claim based on the desire to avoid doing to this uptown area what NYU has done downtown: that is having their campus buildings 'sprawl' all over the place without having any semblance of distinct boundries.

Other than that, I can do not know what reasonable 'claim' can be made for wanting to take ownership of the entire Manhattanville neighborhood (http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-05-31/nyc-life/close-up-on-manhattanville/).

[ZippyTheChimp]

Thats News! After reading those recent articles, I am left wondering what is different about this project; as opposed to such projects as Atlantic Yards, NY Times building - both of which I believe were granted the right to use eminent domain.Politics maybe?

Bruce Ratner and George Pataki were college classmates. Some sources state that they were roomies, but I'm not sure if that's true. They did know each other.

Ironically, it was Columbia Law School, class of 1970.

[Merry]

Manhattanville Building That Has Nothing To Do With Columbia

December 9, 2009, by Joey

http://curbed.com/uploads/2009_12_ville1.jpg

Not all is doom and gloom in the industrial patch of West Harlem known as Manhattanville, where the looming Columbia University expansion threatens—minus a hiccup (http://curbed.com/archives/2009/12/03/states_land_seizure_for_columbia_expansion_ruled_u nconstitutional.php)—to level much of the neighborhood and replace it with shiny monuments to academia. Would you believe there's new construction going on right now? Blog Harlem Bespoke (http://harlembespoke.blogspot.com/2009/12/intruducing-manhattanvilles-newest.html) brings word of a small and unique commercial space right under the tracks on West 125th Street, a "modernist cube which has been constructed with various surface textures that incorporate glass, stainless steel panels and retro, 60's fireplace-looking staggered brick (constructed from wood blocks)." So what is it?

Good question! Harlem Bespoke has a theory and one recommended use for the space:
We are assuming this is city owned property since there aren't any building permits in sight and the work has been in progress for over a year now. The interior is completely unfinished dry walls at this point. In our opinion, a river view coffee house would look great here since the west windows face the West Harlem Piers and the the Hudson River.Check out some close-up shots. Interesting!

http://curbed.com/uploads/2009_12_ville2.jpg

http://curbed.com/uploads/2009_12_ville3.jpg

Introducing: Manhattanville's Newest Building (http://harlembespoke.blogspot.com/2009/12/intruducing-manhattanvilles-newest.html) [Harlem Bespoke]

http://curbed.com/archives/2009/12/09/a_manhattanville_building_that_has_nothing_to_do_w ith_columbia.php#more

[londonlawyer]

Supposedly, the Appellate Division's ruling contradicts recent precedents of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals. I hope that Columbia wins on appeal. Their project will spur gentrification in this potentially beautiful area.

[infoshare]

Supposedly, the Appellate Division's ruling contradicts recent precedents of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals. I hope that Columbia wins on appeal.

It was only after reading about other various projects here on Wiredny that the decision seemed inconsistent with what has been done on many other similar projects: go figure (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=307526&postcount=380).

[ZippyTheChimp]

The Court of Appeals ruled specifically on the use of Eminent domain at AY; there are some differences with the Columbia case that went before the Appellate Court, and may or may not make a difference in the appeal.

1. No evidence presented that the Columbia site was blighted before the university initiated the project. At least half the AY site (Vanderbilt Yards) was part of the long existing Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area, and considered blighted before the AY project. The plaintiffs are outside the ATURA area.

2. Denial of requests to the ESDC by the Columbia plaintiffs under the Freedom of Information Act may involve issues of bad faith.

3. The Columbia plaintiffs produced their own Blight Study; the AY plaintiffs didn't.

4. The court found evidence (although contested) of public benefit at AY. Since Colombia already owns most of the project site, the court found no public benefit in using Eminent Domain to take the remaining property. In effect, Ratner can't build his arena without taking the property, but Columbia can build around the remaining property.

This may shape up into quite a court case, with the legislature possibly getting involved.
http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/law-professor-salkin-messy-situation-on.html

[Jasonik]

The ruling (http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/3dseries/2009/2009_08976.htm) is a pleasure to read, as the cynical maneuvering by Columbia is presented with disdain and judged accordingly.


In this case, the record overwhelmingly establishes that the true beneficiary of the scheme to redevelop Manhattanville is not the community that is supposedly blighted, but rather Columbia University, a private elite education institution.

[Stroika]

Who wrote that opinion? Trotsky? A "private elite educational institution." You'd think they were making Dalmatians into coats, not offering a world-class education for people all over the US and world, often with huge amounts of financial aid.

Heck, I live a few blocks from the new campus. That area -- outside of the Fairway (which is on the blocks that won't be developed) and Dinosaur BBQ -- is nothing but a few old chop shops (now owned by Columbia) and factories that spewed noxious gases when they still operated. When I walk through it in the mornings (with highway traffic filling the streets), the main sign of life is the huge amounts of broken glass -- unsuspecting Columbia students and their visitors who don't realize that parking in that dead zone overnight means your car is going to be broken into.

Has Columbia helped or contributed to blight? Well, in the short term, they haven't helped the level of activity there -- but what activity was that? In the long term, a university is certainly better for a society than chop shops and not-particularly-clean light manufacturing. As a private owner, Columbia is as entitled as anyone else to do what they want with their land ... and Columbia's uses are arguably much better than those of most NYC landowners.

Eminent domain is bad, and I'm glad the court didn't allow it here. But let's not pretend that Columbia is the Evil Empire. Stopping the seizure of businesses by the state is one thing; making top educational institutions into objects of populist rage is another. The lab and teaching jobs they'll create will be the best work that neighborhood ever saw -- and future scientists and artists will be educated there. This is one of the recent developments that makes me proud to call the area home.

[ablarc]

^ Well said.

[ZippyTheChimp]

A "private elite educational institution."So what are they?


In the long term, a university is certainly better for a society than chop shops and not-particularly-clean light manufacturing.Is that how we should decide forcibly taking private property? If not, and as you said, "Eminent Domain is bad," what's your point here?


As a private owner, Columbia is as entitled as anyone else to do what they want with their land ... and Columbia's uses are arguably much better than those of most NYC landowners.The issue isn't Columbia's private land, but someone else's. The ruling noted that Columbia holds enough land to expand.


Eminent domain is bad, and I'm glad the court didn't allow it here. But let's not pretend that Columbia is the Evil Empire.

Stopping the seizure of businesses by the state is one thing; making top educational institutions into objects of populist rage is another.The ruling is thousands of words long. Columbia is hardly mentioned until the last third. If Columbia has been painted as the Evil Empire, I would think the document would be littered with inflammatory rhetoric; I skimmed through and found nothing. Could you cite a few?

If anything, the opinion is particularly harsh on the ESDC, not Columbia.

BTW, I disagree about Eminent Domain. I don't think it's bad; it's been distorted and corrupted from it's original intent.

[Merry]

Manhattanville Ho!

Matt Chaban

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4008/4251947985_b5af8d1604.jpg
Demolition of 3229 Broadway is currently underway in Manhattanville,
proof of Columbia's determination to build something in the area, no matter
what the courts say about pieces of its new campus the school does not control.
(Courtesy Google Maps)

Last month’s court victory (http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=4107) for opponents of Columbia University’s new campus in Manhattanville was not necessarily a defeat for the school’s planned 17-acre expansion, and not only because appeals remain. With roughly 94 percent of the area under its control, Columbia has said it plans to continue work on the campus, despite its insistence that it cannot be completed as planned without full control of all buildings therein. Last night, Columbia officials outlined their current approach to Manhattanville for the first time since the ruling at a hearing in Harlem on the future of eminent domain in the state (more on that in Issue 1!).

http://www.wikicu.com/images/8/88/Jeromegreenescience.jpg
An early drawing of the new nueroscience center at Columbia's planned Manhattanville campus.
(Courtesy WikiCU)

After an hour-and-a-half of grilling the ESDC—the state agency responsible for pursuing eminent domain on Columbia’s behalf— State Senator Bill Perkins, in whose district the project lies, set his sights on Marcello Valez, the head of construction for the Manhattanville project at Columbia, and Maxine Griffith, a former planner who is now in-charge of government affairs at the school. The pair were evasive on many issues surrounding eminent domain and the court case—technically, they are responsible for neither—but they outlined their utility, demolition, and construction work that has been ongoing for a few months now.

Most notably, 3229 Broadway continues to come down. It was the former building of Ann Whitman, one of the last remaining hold outs who eventually sold to the school in 2008 because she said she could no longer afford to fight. Her plot and an adjacent gas station will soon become home to the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, a major neuroscience project that, at the corner of 129th Street and Broadway, is supposed to be one of the new campus’ centerpieces. Work will also soon commence on an art building also on the block and, perhaps most importantly, the entry to the subterranean “bathtub,” that, World Trade Center-style, will house most of the campus’ infrastructure.

http://www.wikicu.com/images/thumb/d/d1/Jlgreenectr.jpg/800px-Jlgreenectr.jpg
A more recent rendering of the neurocenter, which is located along Broadway between 129th and 130th streets.
(Courtesy Columbia). (Courtesy Wikimedia)

The bathtub remains a crucial piece of the Manhattanville puzzle because it is part of the justification for seizing the remaining properties. “If the basement can’t connect, it would be difficult to see how the project could move forward,” Griffith said, arguing the campus would be much less pedestrian friendly and community accessible with trucks idling on the street and HVAC spewing into the air. (A member of the Coalition to Preserve Community, a local opposition group, argued it was all a planning ruse, with the school fully able to build around the holdouts.)

As for timing, Valez said that, despite the court case, everything remains on time, which is part of the reason construction work must continue on those properties controlled by Columbia. (That and the donors are old and would like to see something built while they’re still alive, Griffith admitted somewhat cheekily.) As for architecture, Renzo Piano is nearing completion on final designs for these two buildings according to Victoria Benitez, a university spokesperson in attendance last night, though no renderings are yet available. She declined to say whether the Genoan architect would be designing the rest of the buildings on campus or whether some might go to other firms.

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/5837

[antinimby]

How come it always seems like these nice looking buildings always find themselves in the wrong place?


http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4008/4251947985_b5af8d1604.jpg

[londonlawyer]

I agree with your point. It's quite a shame.

[Merry]

Lesson on Limits of Eminent Domain at Columbia

By TERRY PRISTIN

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of officials in New London, Conn., to force the sale of private homes in a waterfront neighborhood to make way for a development project intended to improve the city’s tax base. The decision caused an uproar around the country, spurring 43 states to pass legislation limiting, to one degree or another, the use of eminent domain.

New York, however, was not among them. Some lawmakers tried to revise the state’s condemnation procedures in the wake of the Connecticut case, but their bills died because of strenuous opposition from the Bloomberg administration.

Now, however, attention is again being focused on whether New York has too much power to force the sale of private property for economic development. A recent appellate court decision barred a state agency from condemning businesses occupying land that Columbia University wants for its $6.3 billion expansion. Even if the strongly worded ruling is overturned, as several land-use lawyers expect, it is providing fodder for people who believe the existing system is unfair to property owners.

At a public hearing in Harlem this month, Norman Siegel, a former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union who represents Tuck-It-Away, a self-storage company that says it has spent $2 million battling Columbia’s plans, called eminent domain reform “the civil rights issue of the 21st century.”

The opinion on Dec. 3 by the New York Supreme Court’s appellate division, which found there was no civic or public purpose or blight to justify condemning Tuck-It-Away’s buildings for the university’s new campus, has unnerved public officials and developers.

The Columbia decision “is the first thing that’s happened in New York that suggests the threat of a change in our eminent domain law,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business group. “I think it’s frightening because there are few more important investments in our city’s future than that which Columbia is making.”

The clamor for reform is also being driven by a recent wave of sentiment against development in New York, as demonstrated last month when the City Council defied Mr. Bloomberg and rejected a plan by the Related Companies to convert the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx into a shopping center. Emboldening critics is the sense that Mr. Bloomberg’s influence has waned since his narrow victory in last fall’s mayoral race.

“I think people are really getting a foul smell from what’s been going on,” said Michael Rikon, a lawyer who represents business owners in the Willets Point section of Queens, where the city intends to condemn property to make way for a large redevelopment project.

The appellate division ruling in the Columbia case seemed all the more stunning because in November, the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, had upheld the exercise of eminent domain for the Atlantic Yards development by Forest City Ratner in Brooklyn. (Forest City was The New York Times Company’s partner in the development of its headquarters building on land on Eighth Avenue that was acquired by the state through eminent domain.)

The Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s development arm, can force the sale of property either for a civic purpose or to eradicate blight. In its unusually vitriolic opinion, the court in the Columbia case said that as “a private elite institution” the university could not claim there was a civic purpose to its expansion.

That finding mystified supporters of the Columbia project. “Having great research universities is probably the single most important characteristic of a city that will succeed in the 21st-century world economy,” Ms. Wylde said. At the Harlem hearing, a Columbia executive vice president, Maxine Griffith, said the holdout properties were needed because the 16 new buildings would be connected underground. “If the basement can’t be connected, I don’t see how we can proceed,” she said.

The ruling also labeled the blight designation obtained by the state agency “mere sophistry” that was concocted years after Columbia developed its plans. The court chastised the state agency for commissioning its study of neighborhood conditions from the same consultant, Allee, King, Rosen & Fleming, known as AKRF, that Columbia had hired to help plan the project and prepare the environmental impact statement.

State Senator Bill Perkins, a Harlem Democrat whose district includes the neighborhood where Columbia is seeking to build its new campus, peppered Empire State officials at the hearing with questions about their reliance on AKRF, which has played a prominent role in most of the city’s major development projects. Accusing the consultants of having a “particular agenda in mind,” Mr. Perkins said that “it just doesn’t look good.”

Defending the agency’s choice, Anita Laremont, the development corporation’s general counsel, said: “Our judgment is that AKRF is the most qualified to do this work.” She said Empire State would appeal the court ruling but provided no details.

Lee Silberstein, a spokesman for AKRF, said in a statement: “For more than 25 years, AKRF has built its reputation through the objective gathering and analysis of data. Any suggestion that the firm — widely recognized as a trusted industry leader — would compromise the quality of its work is incorrect.”

Details about AKRF’s role in Columbia’s expansion plans became known because Mr. Siegel, the lawyer for the company fighting Columbia, used the state’s Freedom of Information Law to get 8,000 pages of documents. (The court said Empire State had “unconstitutionally” closed the record in the case before Mr. Siegel received all the documents he had asked for.) He also produced a 500-page report to show that the neighborhood was not blighted.

Mr. Siegel said New York was the only state that did not permit people resisting condemnation to be heard at the trial-court level, where there would be an opportunity for discovery and cross-examination of witnesses.

A provision to require trial-level review could be part of new legislation being drafted by Mr. Perkins, said Amy Lavine, a staff attorney with Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, who is advising the state senator. At the top of her list is substituting a specific definition of blight for the current standard of “substandard and insanitary.”

One model might be Pennsylvania’s law from 2006, which permits a blight finding only when a substantial number of properties meet certain conditions like being “unfit for public habitation” or having been tax delinquent for two years. “It’s about making sure there are objective standards relating to public health and safety,” Ms. Lavine said.

Ms. Lavine said she also supported lengthening the 30-day time limit for mounting a condemnation challenge.

Senator Perkins, who quoted the conservative columnist George Will with approval at the public hearing, said he expected to build a bipartisan coalition to improve the condemnation process. “Eminent domain is like a gun to people’s head,” he said.

Lisa Bova-Hiatt, a deputy chief at the New York City Law Department, said the city would argue in an amicus brief that Columbia’s new campus meets the definition of a civic purpose even though the university is private. But Ms. Bova-Hiatt said the city would not oppose “thoughtful change” in the eminent domain laws.

“What you don’t want to happen,” she said, “is for the hysteria of the moment to force ill-considered action.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/realestate/commercial/20eminent.html?ref=realestate

[nykid17]

From Sakura Park
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2757/4388608223_20b2beaabc_b.jpg

[Merry]

Columbia U. Bringing Starchitecture to ... Inwood?

March 30, 2010, by Joey

http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/4043/4476541378_47d464b5bf_o.jpg

http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2682/4475764503_48c895d1b3_o.jpg

http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2802/4476541456_4e1ec42143_s.jpg (http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2802/4476541456_45822e4d81_o.png) http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2771/4476541522_ed25d043e9_s.jpg (http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2771/4476541522_b41229d55c_o.jpg) http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/4057/4475764645_851ae1a115_s.jpg (http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/4057/4475764645_e335b56ebd_o.jpg) http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2795/4475764585_c6842ef33d_s.jpg (http://cdn0.cstatic.net/cache/gallery/2795/4475764585_7631de5377_o.jpg)
(click to enlarge)

Think Columbia only wants to put West Harlem under the knife? Think again, Uptowners. While most people are nervously chewing their fingernails over the details of NYU's expansion plan, the Ivy Leaguers have been moving on some big plans for Inwood. At the tippy top of Manhattan—separated from weirdo Marble Hill by the Harlem River—lies Columbia's outdoor athletic facilities. A tipster clues us in on the site's planned makeover:
Columbia has released more information on their new sports building that will replace a maintenance shed at W218th and Broadway, on the corner of what used to be known as simply Baker Field (now, ahem, Kraft Field at Wein Stadium at Baker Field Athletics Complex). Anyway, pretty heady stuff for upper Manhattan - Steven Holl is doing the (rather funky looking) building, and Field Operations is designing the park that is proposed to be constructed for the community in lieu of the required waterfront access. (May be some fireworks at CB12 over that trade.) Interesting project all around.
March: In like a lamb, out with the Lions?

Here's what we're dealing with at the Baker Athletic Complex. First up is Steven Holl's five-story Campbell Sports Center, the details of which are right here (http://facilities.columbia.edu/node/1328/1343). Wish we had more renderings, but Holl's a tenured professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, so we trust that he'll probably be bringing his A game. Now for the public benefit, listed on Columbia's website as the Baker Athletic Complex Waterfront Public Access Area but also given the name Boathouse Marsh, designed by the mighty James Corner Field Operations (of High Line and Freshkills Park fame). The summary sure sounds nice, and stresses that there actually will be river access:
The waterfront public access area would create new public access and new amenities on the waterfront at West 218th Street and Indian Hill Road. The project, known as "Boathouse Marsh", consists of a total of approximately 40,000 square feet and is intended to build on the natural history of the site and enrich the biodiversity of the Harlem River valley. The Boathouse Marsh project would also create new public access and new amenities on the Harlem River waterfront. The area features a deck through lushly planted native water gardens, wildlife observation, places to sit and picnic, lawn and trees, shade and a close relationship to the water's edge. A moss and fern covered wall along the southern edge of the site creates a cooler microclimate during summer. Bike racks, entrances from Inwood Hill Park and from West 218th Street, and views into the feature areas of park from the street will make it clear that the space is open to the public.
Renderings above of the fabulous new Baker boys. Now if only Columbia could do something about improving the actual on-the-field performance.

Baker Athletics Complex Sports Center (http://facilities.columbia.edu/node/1328/1343/1348) [facilities.columbia.edu]
Baker Athletic Complex Waterfront Public Access Area (http://facilities.columbia.edu/node/1328/1354) [facilities.columbia.edu]

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/03/30/columbia_u_bringing_starchitecture_to_inwood.php

[Merry]

Stories From the Automat Machines, in a Harlem Basement

By COREY KILGANNON

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/05/nyregion/05automatguy-cityroom/05automatguy-cityroom-blogSpan.jpg
Steve Stollman with his prized possessions: automat vending machines.

They were once gleaming, efficient dispensers of comfort food, all shiny chrome and beveled milky glass. They were the heralded automat vending machines -– drop in some coins and get a piece of pie! -– and now they lie heaped ingloriously in a dank basement at 131st Street and Broadway in Harlem.

They are among the salvaged items from New York City that Steve Stollman has collected for the past 24 years in the commercial building at 600 West 131st Street, which is now owned by Columbia University. Columbia is developing the area as part of its Manhattanville campus expansion (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/nyregion/05holdout.html), and Mr. Stollman has to vacate this month, he said.

So he is busy excavating this cluttered space and moving things into long-term storage.

These would include the tarnished collection of automat machines, Horn & Hardart castoffs — more than 100 four-window units that can be fitted together into long banks. Mr. Stollman believes that the collection, which he acquired in the 1990s from junk dealers, is the largest anywhere.

“I have no idea how I’ll get everything out by then,” Mr. Stollman, 67, said last week, looking around the basement.

Mr. Stollman’s collection also features things like antique train signs from Grand Central Station and lighting fixtures from a long-gone Mott Street grocery.

He also specializes in salvaging grand old wooden bars from shuttered saloons and restaurants, and resells them through his Web site, Abeautifulbar.com. A nice one from Acadia, the Madison Avenue restaurant that closed in 1998, sits next to one from Luchow’s German restaurant (“New York Changes, Luchow’s Does Not”), which operated for a century on East 14th Street until a fire in 1982.

The Horn & Hardart collection, though, is Mr. Stollman’s most cumbersome lot. The machines are faded shadows of their gleaming, efficient selves. In the 1940s and the ’50s, there were dozens of Horn & Hardarts in the city, serving roughly 350,000 customers a day.

From the time the first New York automat opened in Times Square in 1912 until the last one, on East 42nd Street, closed in 1991, the spiffy vending machines captured the imagination. A few coins in the slot, a turn of the chrome-and-porcelain knob, and the glass door opened to a compartment with freshly baked macaroni and cheese or baked beans or turkey and gravy.

Mr. Stollman has cosmetically restored about 20 of the units and has sold some for $2,000 to $4,500. Because of the cost and time required, he has restored only one unit to working condition.

But it seems as if Mr. Stollman prefers being a curator, rather than a seller, of these iconic machines. Every longtime New Yorker has an automat story, he says, and he enjoys collecting them.

A longtime activist with a political science degree from Columbia, he cannot discuss the vending machines without expounding on their “cultural ideology”: the way they epitomized a bygone idealism, their role as great equalizers, pairing rich with poor at the same table. They served celebrities like Walter Winchell and Irving Berlin; they served the homeless; they served struggling artists and songwriters and actors; they served the rat race and the jet set.

“The automat had an enormous effect on what New York City was,” Mr. Stollman said. “You had artists, painters, lawyers, businessmen all sharing the same public space, eating the same food. And it was the best food and there was enough to go around. This was a symbol that we had mastered our material universe. It was a world you wanted to live in.”

“The place was making money, yet everyone was served the same,” he said. “It was capitalism and communism, at once.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/stories-from-the-automat-machines-in-a-harlem-basement/

[infoshare]

Photo of the site where a building was recently demolished in preparation for construction of the new CU Campus: near Broadway / 125th Street.

http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/904/dscn0560y.jpg

http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/904/dscn0560y.th.jpg (http://img714.imageshack.us/i/dscn0560y.jpg/)

The photo marked "Harlem Lane" in this post (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3683&p=102089&viewfull=1#post102089) is what the area at this Broadway/125th Street intersection looked like many (many) years ago when the area was know as Manhattanville. Enjoy the show!

P.S. I wonder if the new campus will come to be referred to as the 'Manhattanville Campus' or the "west harlem campus". I would choose 'manhattanville':has a pastoral ring to it, more appealing.

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3683&p=102089&viewfull=1#post102089

[Merry]

Columbia Puts the Wrecking Ball to Work in Manhattanville

June 22, 2010, by Sara

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/columbiadestructoporn1.jpg

Columbia University's appeal of the December ruling (http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2009/12/03/states_land_seizure_for_columbia_expansion_ruled_u nconstitutional.php) against its use of eminent domain is still on its way (http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/06/01/columbia_vs_locals_live.php) through the courts, but Columbia is not worried. Blog Harlem Bespoke (http://harlembespoke.blogspot.com/2010/06/revive-manhattanville-demolition-phase.html) points out that the university has now cleared most of the land on which it plans to build between 126th and 130th streets. Perhaps not such a daring move: the land under litigation makes up only about 9 percent of Columbia's planned expansion, and administrators have said they have no backup plan if the court doesn't rule in their favor. So, Manhattanville, here comes Columbia!

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/columbiadestructoporn2.jpg

Revive: Manhattanville Demolition Phase I (http://harlembespoke.blogspot.com/2010/06/revive-manhattanville-demolition-phase.html) [Harlem Bespoke]
Columbia Expansion coverage (http://ny.curbed.com/tags/columbia-expansion) [Curbed]

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/06/22/columbia_puts_the_wrecking_ball_to_work_in_manhatt anville.php#more

[infoshare]

Thanks for the article Merry: the photos are of the same site I posted a photograph of - but, from the opposite angle. The CU campus thread is just loaded with interesting news coverage & and information - I 'subscribe' to to this one so I do not lose tract of it among all the other threads. As the number of new threads are increasing I find the subscription function to be very useful in locating the best threads here on WNY.


Some more news here about the Eminent Domain Appeal. It seems, according to the article (http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/05/03/eminent-domain-appeal-nears-no-plan-b-m-ville-admins-say), that CU is fairly confidant that they will be able to clear the development area 100%.
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/05/03/eminent-domain-appeal-nears-no-plan-b-m-ville-admins-say

[BBMW]

Apparently, Columbia's use of eminent domain to clear out the holdouts is back on.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/24/business/AP-US-Columbia-Expansion.html?ref=nyregion

Court Upholds Columbia Campus Expansion Plan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:21 a.m. ET
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- New York's top court has upheld a state redevelopment agency's use of eminent domain so Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) can expand its Ivy League (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/ivy_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org) campus over 17 acres in Manhattan's West Harlem neighborhood.
The Court of Appeals found a rational basis for the Empire State Development Corp.'s findings that the area is blighted and Columbia's expansion is an improvement project.
Columbia's proposed $6.3 billion project includes several new buildings for housing, laboratories and other facilities, two acres of public open space and tree-lined sidewalks.
The university already owns most of the land.
Other land owners claimed collusion between the school and agency and argued findings of blight were based on vermin, garbage and mold in Columbia buildings.
The court released the decision Thursday.

[BiggieSmalls]

The Institute For Justice must be in full freak out mode..

This puts all ED procedures back on the fast track.

[infoshare]

Apparently, Columbia's use of eminent domain to clear out the holdouts is back on.




Just read the article: glad you spotted that - good lookin' out BBMW.

By the way, my brother has a BMW: he parks it on the viaduct (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3683&p=328945&viewfull=1#post328945) here in west harlem (I mean Manhattanville) whenever he comes to visit. The running joke now is BMW stands for "Break My Window". (LOL)

Cheers.

[ablarc]

Other land owners claimed collusion between the school and agency and argued findings of blight were based on vermin, garbage and mold in Columbia buildings.
The court released the decision Thursday.
Rat-infested Columbia vs. spic-and-span Harlem.

[infoshare]

Excerpt -http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/05/31/manhattanville-hearing-approaches-perkins-pushes-eminent-domain-law-reforms

“New York State’s Eminent Domain Procedure Law lacks transparency, accountability, and a set of explicitly defined terms, according to Perkins. He has argued that it is a system rigged in favor of condemnors, who use the system’s ill-defined language and numerous loopholes to unlawfully seize private property.”


I agree the law is not explicit and lacks transparancy wherever decisions regarding blight are concerned, but I am glad to see how the final ruling turned out, a contiguous campus setting was crucial here; and the only way to get the entire parcel was with the use of Eminent Domain.

NEWS FEED from NY1 - http://manhattan.ny1.com/content/top_stories/121005/court-approves-use-of-eminent-domain-in-columbia-expansion

[ShaMegro]

In all honesty, if theres any neighborhood in NYC that can be considered "blighted" its Manhattanville. Granted, Ive never been in some of the outer reaches of the Bronx, but I cant imagine it being any worse than that.

[Merry]

Longer article from the NYT:


Court Upholds Columbia Campus Expansion Plan

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/06/25/nyregion/25columbiamap/25columbiamap-articleInline.jpg

New York’s highest court handed Columbia University a major victory on Thursday for its $6.3 billion plan to build a satellite campus in Harlem, ruling that the state could seize private property for the project.

In a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that prohibited the state from using eminent domain to take property in the 17-acre expansion zone west of Broadway, known as Manhattanville, without the owners’ consent. The ruling held that the courts must give deference to the state’s determination that the area was “blighted” and that condemnation on behalf of a university served a public purpose, two ways that the project could qualify for eminent domain under state law.

“This is an extremely important moment in the history of Columbia,” said Lee C. Bollinger, the university’s president. “We look forward to moving ahead with the long-term revitalization of these blocks in Manhattanville that will create thousands of good jobs for New Yorkers and help our city and state remain a global center for pioneering academic research.”

Eminent domain has been a touchy issue nationwide since a 2005 United States Supreme Court ruling that states could permit private property to be seized and turned over to another private owner for redevelopment. Since then, lawmakers in 43 states have tightened the requirements for eminent domain use, but New York has not.

Columbia hopes to build a series of 16 buildings for science, business and the arts over several decades on the site near the Hudson River, where the streets are lined with warehouses, factories and auto repair shops.

The university has already acquired the bulk of the land it needs, but the owners of four warehouses and two gas stations refused to sell and sued. There are also seven tenements in the area, which are not subject to condemnation, but Columbia hopes to move the tenants to comparable apartments elsewhere.

Norman Siegel, who represented the losing owners, said he was “extremely disappointed” in the decision and would appeal to the Supreme Court. Although state law allows eminent domain to be used for educational purposes, he argued that it did not explicitly permit a private institution to benefit from it.

“The decision sets a terrible precedent regarding the use of eminent domain,” he said.

Still, the decision was not unexpected, said Michael Rikon, a lawyer who specializes in condemnation law and real estate litigation.

“It is virtually impossible to stop a condemnation in New York because of the courts’ deference to agencies’ determination,” Mr. Rikon said. “Even though the courts say they won’t be a rubber stamp, that’s in essence what they’ve become.”

The ruling cited a decision in a similar eminent-domain case last year involving the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, where the state was condemning property on behalf of a developer who planned to build a basketball arena for the Nets and roughly 6,000 apartments. “We ruled for Atlantic Yards, and if we could rule in favor of a basketball arena, surely we could rule for a nonprofit university,” the court said Thursday in its decision, which was written by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick.

One of the most contested issues was whether the area was blighted and in need of redevelopment, which would make it a candidate for eminent domain. The lower court had agreed with the property owners that there was “no evidence whatsoever that Manhattanville was blighted prior to Columbia gaining control over the vast majority of property therein.”

But the Court of Appeals rejected the notion that Columbia had created the blighted conditions out of self-interest, saying the lower courts had ignored a 2003 city study that found “ample evidence of deterioration of the building stock in the study area.” A subsequent study by the state found a dearth of construction and “longstanding lack of investor interest in the neighborhood” and determined that the buildings of one of the property owners in the suit, Nicholas Sprayregen, had three times the average number of building violations compared with those on parcels acquired by Columbia.

Mr. Sprayregen, the owner of the four warehouses who had refused to sell to Columbia, said he intended to carry on the battle. “If not overturned, the ruling now will allow any private school to be the beneficiary of eminent domain to take their neighbor’s property,” he said. “Further, it telegraphs to every large developer that they merely need to purchase a majority of land in an area and then intentionally allow their property to worsen in physical condition, which could then trigger a blight designation which would allow them to forcibly take adjacent property.”

Mr. Sprayregen and the gas station owners can still go to state court for more compensation if they believe they are not being offered a fair price.

The ruling does not bode well for property owners in Willets Point, Queens, a neglected neighborhood near Citi Field, who oppose the city’s effort to take their land for a redevelopment plan, Mr. Rikon said.

Those owners, who are considering a lawsuit against condemnation, contend that the area is blighted only because the city has refused to pave the streets properly and install sewers. But their current lawsuit challenging the city’s plan on environmental grounds is unaffected by the ruling.

“It’s time for the State of New York to do something about this,” Mr. Rikon said. “They should create a commission on eminent domain to revise the law.”

In a statement, the Empire State Development Corporation, the agency that would take the land on behalf of Columbia, said the ruling “confirms that the project complies with New York State law in all respects and that the acquisition of the holdout properties is essential to realizing the vision for the Manhattanville campus as it was approved by the state.”

“The expansion of one of New York’s oldest educational institutions will enhance the vitality of both the university and its neighboring west Harlem community, while meeting the long-term needs of its residents,” the agency added.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Robert S. Smith agreed that the state had the power to decide what constituted blight, although he himself considered the blight designation “strained and pretextual.”

He also wrote that since the court had already approved the blight designation, thereby allowing the seizure of property, the court should not have also brought up the issue of what constitutes a “civic purpose,” because it opened the door to any purported “school,” even a tennis academy, to have land assembled for it through eminent domain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/nyregion/25columbia.html?ref=nyregion

[lofter1]

Next thing you know they'll want us to spend $Gazillions to tear down and bury the elevated roadway to the west -- just like those entitled-feeling folks down at Riverside South.

[BBMW]

^
You mean the people who use the park? Think how much nicer that park would be without the highway looming over it.

Actually, the part of the park west of the highway is fine. The hight just has the effect of forming the eastern barrier. But without it, they park could be extended very nicely to the retaining wall for Trumpville.

[lofter1]

Look a the render (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3432&p=328471&viewfull=1#post328471). A good portion of the northern part of the roadway as planned will be exposed against that retaining wall, looming only 25' above the park. Noisier than now, no doubt.

[Merry]

Columbia Needs More Waterfront Property for Inwood Sports Complex Project

Columbia needs the land to meet city waterfront building laws.

By Carla Zanoni
http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2010_09_R6226_Columbia_Refines_Plan_ for_Inwood_Waterfront.jpg
http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2010_09_R2098_Columbia_Refines_Plan_ for_Inwood_Waterfront.jpg

slide show (http://dnainfo.com/20100902/washington-heights-inwood/columbia-wants-more-waterfront-property-as-it-builds-inwood-sports-complex/slideshow/popup/34692)

INWOOD — Columbia University is already under fire in the Harlem community for its vast campus-expansion plan. Now, the Ivy League school wants to acquire even more land along the Harlem River so that it can legally construct a new sports complex in Inwood.

A city law requires property owners on the Manhattan shoreline to set aside a predetermined percentage of the land for public use when building a new structure along the water. But Columbia officials said it does not have the amount of workable waterfront land it needs at Broadway and 218th Street, the site of the new complex, to meet the city's square footage requirement.

So, instead, it is asking the city to allow it to acquire and develop more of the city’s waterfront land to meet that requirement.

FULL ARTICLE (http://dnainfo.com/20100902/washington-heights-inwood/columbia-wants-more-waterfront-property-as-it-builds-inwood-sports-complex#ixzz0yXAIe3DX)
(http://dnainfo.com/20100902/washington-heights-inwood/columbia-wants-more-waterfront-property-as-it-builds-inwood-sports-complex#ixzz0yXAIe3DX)

[BrooklynLove]

londonlawyer must have penned that first rendering.

[Merry]

Columbia Demolishes Brownstone Block

(click to enlarge)
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_cKXr0I/AAAAAAAALhs/b9fzCd9o6hA/s1600/IMG_1610.JPG) (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_cKXr0I/AAAAAAAALhs/b9fzCd9o6hA/s1600/IMG_1610.JPG)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZbAfzNlQI/AAAAAAAALiE/cmrR1_3gUV0/s400/IMG_0359.JPG (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZbAfzNlQI/AAAAAAAALiE/cmrR1_3gUV0/s1600/IMG_0359.JPG)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_2gPhrI/AAAAAAAALh8/YVjNiJRWIZE/s400/IMG_1608.JPG (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_2gPhrI/AAAAAAAALh8/YVjNiJRWIZE/s1600/IMG_1608.JPG)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_hcXoEI/AAAAAAAALh0/8JKneDP3aYs/s400/IMG_0352_2.JPG (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_hcXoEI/AAAAAAAALh0/8JKneDP3aYs/s1600/IMG_0352_2.JPG)

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/TIZa_EldBlI/AAAAAAAALhk/psHtDmAdKcA/s1600/IMG_1616.JPG)There was a lot of news in the past year on trying to rescue the row of brownstones at 408, 410 and 412 West 115th Street (just east of Amsterdam) from demolition by Columbia University and the follow-up to the story doesn't end well.

FULL ARTICLE (http://harlembespoke.blogspot.com/2010/09/walk-columbia-demolishes-brownstone.html)

[oquatanginwan]

Those brownstones were under netting for a very very long time. I hope Columbia builds something nice and contextual with the beautiful apartments on Morningside Drive or the prewars across the street. I bet it'll end up looking like the hospital building though. It'll be faculty or student housing no doubt. It's a shame, those blocks between Amsterdam and Morningside are real jewels.

[Merry]

Bowing for Columbia: West Harlem Gets the Protection It's Been Waiting For

By Matt Chaban

http://www.observer.com/files/full/West_Harlem.jpg
The goal is to maintain the character of streets like 135th Street.
Ennuipoet/Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ennuipoet/4450870110/)

When Columbia announced its plans to create a new 17-acre campus in the Manhattanville (http://www.observer.com/2007/columbia-s-expansion-enters-endgame) neighborhood of West Harlem, those living just next door were understandably worried. The university has had a fractious relationship with Morningside Heights, from the controversial 1960s gymnasium that sparked riots to its imposing campus that is seen as off-limits to outsiders. While the promise of jobs and development in a moribund industrial neighborhood was appealing, the cost of living with Columbia seemed greater than the reward.

http://www.observer.com/files/uploads/West_Harlem_Map.png

It is not even Columbia per se that had people most worried, but the gentrification a university expansion could stoke when construction gets underway. Developers flocked to Central and East Harlem during the boom, but West Harlem saw less development in part because Manhattanville served as a buffer. With that area redeveloped, new towers and speculative development could run rampant.

Now West Harlem is winning the protections it has long sought, as a rezoning orchestrated by the Department of City Planning and Borough President Scott Stringer is taking shape.

"We had to create a balance between helping a university that will have such a positive impact for New York City, in terms of jobs and economic opportunities; at the same time we have to make sure we return the favor to West Harlem and protect the people who have always been there," Stringer told The Observer.

Back when Columbia got Manhattanville rezoned in 2008—the area was dedicated to manufacturing, historically a hub of meatpacking—the community, including Stringer, hoped more of the neighborhood would be included than just the 17 acres Columbia had its eye on. At the time, the city said it would consider doing so in a later rezoning, which has been quietly in the works ever since. Initially proposed to cover 125th Street to 145th Street, the current plans call for pushing the protections an additional 10 blocks north, to 155th Street. The area is bounded by Riverside Drive on the west and roughly St. Nicholas Avenue on the east.

The rezoning encompasses nearly 100 blocks, making it the largest in northern Manhattan.

The rezoning will not reduce the density of the district so much as ensure it remains consistent with its surroundings vis-a-vis contextual zoning, which places certain height and massing restrictions on buildings. This helps prevent sliver buildings and other out-of-scale development, such as the Aerial towers by Extell that frustrated Upper West Siders a few years ago. There will still be some upzonings, such as along 145th Street and possibly some of the avenues, which, when coupled with the city's inclusionary housing program, are meant to spur affordable housing.

Beyond housing, the plan will help allow for City College's future growth, as well as setting aside some land for manufacturing or other economic development opportunities.

Ground-floor retail will also be encouraged in the district. City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden and Stringer will be on hand at a community board meeting tomorrow night to explain more.

Stringer noted that the university was entirely supportive of the new plan. "The goal for me, as it relates to the Columbia expansion, is to make sure it doesn't overrun West Harlem, but to coexist with West Harlem," he said.

http://www.observer.com/2010/real-estate/bowing-columbia-west-harlem-gets-protection-its-been-waiting

[BiggieSmalls]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-13/columbia-s-expansion-allowed-by-u-s-supreme-court-in-eminent-domain-case.html

Columbia's Expansion Allowed by U.S. Supreme Court in Eminent Domain Case

olumbia University can move ahead with plans for a $6.3 billion expansion of its Manhattan campus after the U.S. Supreme Court (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=1000L:US) rejected an appeal by neighboring businesses whose property may be taken over by eminent domain. The justices today refused to question findings by a state development agency, Empire State Development Corp., that the area is blighted and that the Columbia expansion has a legitimate public purpose. The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld (http://www.courts.state.ny.us/ctapps/decisions/2010/jun10/125opn10.pdf) the plan in June.

[infoshare]

http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/1729/dscn0560p.jpg (http://img713.imageshack.us/i/dscn0560p.jpg/)

[infoshare]

The small white building (inclosed in netting) has been completely raised; so far there have been about three or four of the existing buildings removed from the CU development site (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/proposed_plan/DesignElements.html).

The entire area of 'Manhattanville' is currently undergoing a major alteration (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/), most of the new buildings slated for construction will be going up piecemeal over the next decade, yet their are some major new structures scheduled for immediate construction at the sites that are now being cleared; the first new building being what I think will be some sort of 'science research building'.

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/6500/dscn0569b.jpg (http://img443.imageshack.us/i/dscn0569b.jpg/)

CU links -
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/proposed_plan/DesignElements.html


p.s. - Anyone know who got this 'contract' - looks like a nice job to have (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/pdf-files/bid-opp-manhattanville-construction-photography.pdf).
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/pdf-files/bid-opp-manhattanville-construction-photography.pdf

[Merry]

Diller Scofidio + Renfro Designing Kravis Business Buildings for Columbia

By Matt Chaban

http://www.observer.com/files/article/PianoSketchColumbia%281%29.jpg (http://www.observer.com/files/full/PianoSketchColumbia%281%29.jpg)
One of Renzo Piano's early sketch's for the project.

Chalk another one up for Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Just a week after the firm unveiled its new designs for the Broad Foundation in LA (http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/new-broad-museum-not-unlike-new-lincoln-center-and-thats-good-us), Columbia has just announced that the university has selected DS+R to design two new buildings at its new 17-acre Manhattanville campus. One of the buildings will be an outpost of the business school and named for renowned corporate raider Henry Kravis, who graduated from the school in 1969 and recently donated $100 million toward the new building.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger said in a statement that the choice was in fitting with the aims of the university's new, if controversial, campus:
"They have achieved beautiful, important architectural successes that have been thoughtfully integrated into the surrounding urban fabric. This is the essence of what we are trying to create on Columbia's new, open campus—bringing together different areas of teaching and research, and enhancing the connections between the University and surrounding community."
This sounds not unlike something Charles Renfro, one of the firm's partners, told The Observer in a profile this week (http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/naughty-architect-charles-renfro-mastermind-broad-museum): "We're often in the business of taking institutions, which historically could draw a line between themselves and the place where they exist, and blurring the edges between public and private."

The firm will have its work cut out for it, as the university's Harlem neighbors are still wary of the new campus following an acrimonious takeover fight (http://www.observer.com/2007/columbia-effect-detailed) that involved eminent domain and a legal challenge that nearly made it to the Supreme Court (http://www.observer.com/2010/real-estate/there-goes-manhattanville-supreme-court-turns-down-columbia-expansion-case).

Perhaps Columbia—long a patron of architecture, it should be noted—is hoping to smooth out some of the bumps with some dynamic designs. In addition to DS+R, Renzo Piano and SOM have been at work on the Manhattanville campus from the beginning.

The new building is part of the 30-year project's first phase, which means they will likely be built sometime in the next five to ten years. A timeline for the designs has not yet been set according to a Columbia spokesperson.

http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/more-starchitecture-manhattanville-columbia-taps-diller-scofidio-renfro-design-henr

[lofter1]

Since the article is all about DS+R, then why is the sketch by Renzo Piano?

[Merry]

Columbia's New Manhattanville Science Center

Universities are poised to overtake the church as the city's biggest private landlord, The Observer's Laura Kusisto reports in tomorrow's paper.

While we were tracking down the juicy details for the story, Columbia shared some eye-popping new renderings of the new Jerome L. Greene Science Center at the school's Manhattanville campus—part of its surge in real estate. The new designs are so astounding, we couldn't hold onto them one minute longer. Well done, Renzo.

Enjoy this latest glimpse of the science center, and be sure to check back later to see who is winning the epic collar-and-gown showdown.

http://www.observer.com/files/slideshow_image/Rendering%20JLG%20PV02bis_PLACEdetail_V2d-small-resol.jpg

http://www.observer.com/files/slideshow_image/Rendering%20JLG%20PV01ter_PONT_detail2_V1a-low-resol-cropped.jpg

http://www.observer.com/files/slideshow_image/Rendering%20JLG%20PV01_PONT_V3d_modif-low-resol.jpg

http://www.observer.com/files/slideshow_image/Columbia131st.jpg

http://www.observer.com/files/slideshow_image/Full%20Build%20Site%20Plan.JPG
Columbia's master plan for Manhattanville.

http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/eureka-exclusive-look-columbias-new-manhattanville-science-center

[BStyles]

More glass. Just because it's a science center doesn't mean it has to look like a magnifying glass.

[londonlawyer]

This will enhance this area.

[RoldanTTLB]

If only the MTA could have extracted an MNR station here from Columbia. How clever would that have been?

[ASchwarz]

^
MNR is already planning a station for the area. They plan on adding two new Manhattan stations, and (I think) three new Bronx stations.

Nothing will happen, though, until East Side Access opens at Grand Central. Once that opens, there will be some available capacity created at Penn Station (due to LIRR giving up some slots), and MNR will proceed with the new line.

[RoldanTTLB]

So I am aware of the plans, but there's no reason they couldn't build the station now. Additionally, they could easily build the 66th st station and this station and shuttle the trains now. Going one further, they talk about opening slots at Penn Station, but the fact of the matter is that the platforms used by the trains going north like this are not the same ones that are packed full. In the meantime, they could coopt with Amtrak to stop at these stations on an MNR fare. I work pretty closely with the MTA, and they're not an all around bad organization, but they lack a certain creativity right now.

[BStyles]

But they're also not made of money, either.

MTA, yes, has no creativity when it comes to construction, but with all the construction projects going on(The FSTC, the 7 Extension, the LIRR East Side Access, and the late, long delayed Second Avenue Shuttle) I think they're pretty swamped as it is. Jumping the gun to extend an NYC Transit route to Secaucus, New Jersey, a plan that is maniacal at any rate. Not to mention that the city is still struggling to build one station out of a two-station extension. The MNRR extension would face tons of problems, if not more than the SAS and 7 Extension right now.

I still think that CUNY could have been a bit more creative with the architecture. Some stone, art deco maybe. Is that too much to ask?

[Merry]

A Building Forms a Bridge Between a University’s Past and Future

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/09/arts/JPMONEO/JPMONEO-articleLarge.jpg
Northwest Corner Building Designed by José Rafael Moneo, Columbia University’s new
addition is anticipated as a gateway to a campus planned for West Harlem.

slide show (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/02/09/arts/design/MONEO-slideshow.html)

I’m sure that a few preservationists are already grumbling about the new interdisciplinary science building at Columbia University. It certainly doesn’t fade politely into its brick surroundings. But they’d be wrong to think that it disrespects history.

Designed by the Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo, the new building, at the corner of Broadway and 120th Street, draws on a range of precedents, from the austere Modernism of Adolf Loos to the original McKim, Mead & White master plan for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. Its muscular steel-and-aluminum frame is a vivid example of how to fit into a difficult historical context without slavishly kowtowing to it.

It is also, not incidentally, a work of healing. Seen in the context of Columbia’s often tense relationship with its Harlem neighbors, including recent battles over its plans to build a new 17-acre campus in West Harlem, the building is a gleaming physical expression of the university’s desire to bridge the divide between the insular world of the campus and the community beyond its walls.

Mr. Moneo is well suited to this task. A former chairman of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, he has a modest, thoughtful demeanor. (Colleagues and students often describe him as a priestlike figure.) His best works — like the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain, and an expansion of the 19th-century Atocha railway station in Madrid — are part of a continuing dialogue with his historical predecessors.

Like these earlier projects, the science building, officially the Northwest Corner Building, serves as a hinge between past and present. Framed to the east and south by the austere 1920s-era masonry buildings of the McKim, Mead & White campus, it will eventually serve as the main gateway between that campus and the West Harlem one, which will be located several blocks away to the northwest.

Mr. Moneo’s design is carefully grounded in the original campus plan. The building’s base, which is made of the same rose-colored granite as the buildings that flank it, is conceived as an extension of the existing street wall. Its 14-story height, considerably greater than that of its neighbors, echoes the brick and limestone gothic tower of the Union Theological Seminary, which stands cater-corner across the street. (It is also slightly lower than the tower that McKim, Mead & White originally proposed for the site.)

But it is the tension Mr. Moneo creates between new and old that brings the building to life. The upper floors are clad in what may be the most elegant aluminum siding in America: a taut steel grid filled in with an irregular pattern of diagonal steel braces and aluminum louvers. The braces are not decorative — they reflect the uneven loads and stresses on the building, which is supported on an enormous truss that spans the gym below. But even if you don’t know this, you intuitively sense the tension that is built into them; it is as if the structure were straining to break free of the constraints of the site.

The effect is especially acute at the corner, where the building suddenly seems to crack open from the stress, its upper floors cantilevering 15 feet over the lobby entrance. The lobby interior is clad in richly veined Portuguese marble, the kind of sumptuous material that Loos used to lessen the severity of his spaces. A stair, in the same marble, ascends to a mezzanine-level cafe that overlooks the street through floor-to-ceiling windows: a kind of interstitial zone floating just above the city. From there, more stairs lead up to a campus-level lobby, 35 feet above the street. (All these spaces are open to the public.)
This is superb architecture: clean, compact and perfectly calibrated. And the sequence is even more powerful in reverse: from the campus-level lobby, the climb down the staircase is something like descending into a marble quarry.

But the design is also a means of reinforcing the university’s public mission. By easing you through the transition from one level to the other in just three quick turns along the stair, Mr. Moneo has fused together two disparate worlds — the campus and the street outside — and created places of intense social communion. (A wide exterior staircase, located on the east side of the building, makes this connection even more directly, allowing people to bypass the structure in moving between the campus and 120th Street.)

And a similar spirit of openness and exchange exists on the upper floors, whose big, loftlike spaces were designed so that they could be reconfigured to fit the needs of various researchers. The seventh floor, for example, which houses molecular and nanotechnology laboratories, is a maze of private offices, while the 12th-floor chemistry labs are more open and airy. Enclosed bridges connect these floors to neighboring science buildings as a way to encourage the kind of interdisciplinary exchange that is the building’s core mission.

In short, this is a building conceived in opposition to our contemporary culture, with its constant visual noise and unforgiving pace. Mr. Moneo aims to lift us, if only momentarily, out of our increasingly frenetic lives — to slow us down and force us to look at the world around us, and at one another, more closely. It’s a big, tough building, but it’s tenderhearted too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/arts/design/09moneo.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

[lofter1]

ok, ok ... He likes it. But look at that long expanse of imposing blank wall running along the sidewalk on Broadway. Not sure how that reality ties into this claim:



"... a gleaming physical expression of the university’s desire to bridge the divide between the insular world of the campus and the community beyond its walls."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/09/arts/JPMONEO/JPMONEO-articleLarge.jpg
Northwest Corner Building Designed by José Rafael Moneo, Columbia University’s new
addition is anticipated as a gateway to a campus planned for West Harlem.

[ablarc]

Ouroussoff is a jackass.

Notihng he says about this building is true.

[lofter1]

How did he get that job?

[oquatanginwan]

The marble in the public areas is really sumptuous, but it's a very cold building. Maybe it's too much to expect a little humanism in a modern building devoted to science. The best thing about the place is the view of the great architecture of UTS and TC. Heaven help Columbia and the neighborhood if it's representative of the future campus.

[infoshare]

Perhaps because the newly constructed science building - mentioned in the previous post - is sometimes referred to as the 'Main Gateway' to the new Manhattanville Campus it is commonly mistaken as being part-of the new campus expansion project; actually the new science building is located within the boundaries of the existing Morningside Campus.
I guess that it why (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3683&p=351861&viewfull=1#post351861) it is called the 'Northwest Corner Building' - being that it is located on the north-west corner of the existing campus.

That being said, here are some recent photos of the first phase of construction at the new Manhattanville Campus located several blocks to the north of the existing Morningside Heights Campus.


http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/9634/dscn0747w.jpg (http://img713.imageshack.us/i/dscn0747w.jpg/)

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/6167/dscn0826m.jpg (http://img839.imageshack.us/i/dscn0826m.jpg/)

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9069/dscn0753x.jpg (http://img842.imageshack.us/i/dscn0753x.jpg/)

[Vlasky]

I'm working on a project to restore block between Broadway and 12th Ave and from 131st to 132nd street by rebuilding it in 3d program. Does anyone have some historic images of this area as many buildings were changed and downgraded or completely demolished? Any help would be appreciated.

[infoshare]

Does anyone have some historic images of this area as many buildings were changed and downgraded or completely demolished? Any help would be appreciated.

This little book (http://books.google.com/books?id=_8Rds6AN-fYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Manhattanville+by+Washington&source=bl&ots=rCuU-Gn9O7&sig=Cj9KVzJHKVvpzCvc1g5Yh6-LqSs&hl=en&ei=6dePTejtBsW40QHftOysCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) has plenty of 'historic' photos; and many of the photos are posted in the same book review section. Scroll through the site, there are about 30 viewable pages - many with vintage photos of the streetscape of early 'Manhattanville'.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_8Rds6AN-fYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Manhattanville+by+Washington&source=bl&ots=rCuU-Gn9O7&sig=Cj9KVzJHKVvpzCvc1g5Yh6-LqSs&hl=en&ei=6dePTejtBsW40QHftOysCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[infoshare]

This link (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3683&p=348000&viewfull=1#post348000) to an earlier post make for some good before-and-after comparisons of the demolition area. http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3683&p=348000&viewfull=1#post348000

http://img863.imageshack.us/img863/3426/dscn0831c.jpg (http://img863.imageshack.us/i/dscn0831c.jpg/)


http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/3272/dscn0836i.jpg (http://img831.imageshack.us/i/dscn0836i.jpg/)


http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/230/dscn0755g.jpg (http://img696.imageshack.us/i/dscn0755g.jpg/)

[infoshare]

In terms of "what's going on here": I am wondering what that red circular steel object is, located at the far end of the site.
If that area is the location of the new science building; I am guessing that this may be a small hadron collider. (LOL)
News report - http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2011/04/25/manhattanville-plans-develop-where-buildings-stood


http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/7421/img0386mq.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/38/img0386mq.jpg/)


http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/6082/img0390nf.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/197/img0390nf.jpg/)


http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/9470/img0415g.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/40/img0415g.jpg/)

[infoshare]

I have been looking forward to seeing this project get started - and construction is now in full swing - particularly because we are likely to get some fantastic looking modernist structures rising up in this first phase of the CU campus build-out in Manhattanville.

Diller Scofidio Renfro is one of the best firms around lately; praiseworthy most recently for the great rehab project they did at lincoln center. Then another favorite of mine is Renzo Piano, who is also doing a couple buildings on this new campus; so this is shaping-up to be a great project to keep an eye on for the next few years.

BTW, there are now about four of those large red steel tanks on one of the building sites (pictured below) so if anyone knows what in-store there, please chime in with the news.

[oquatanginwan]

I hear that they're moving SIPA from East Campus into this new campus. Any confirmation on that? Does that mean they'll demolish SIPA's current hideous brutalist crapfest? Let's hope they replace it with something more suitable to the original MM&W campus if it's true.

[ASchwarz]

I hear that they're moving SIPA from East Campus into this new campus. Any confirmation on that? Does that mean they'll demolish SIPA's current hideous brutalist crapfest? Let's hope they replace it with something more suitable to the original MM&W campus if it's true.

Yes, SIPA is moving to the new campus, and no, the building is not being considered for demolition. The law school will supposedly take the space.

SIPA has a big building with big floorplates, and is perfect for classes. The only way they would demolish it is if they could build an even bigger building, with bigger floorplates.

[MidtownGuy]

Unfortunate that the city is pimpled with so many brown brick project buildings. Almost any color would be better than that horrible, suicidal brown!!

[londonlawyer]

Is that crappy storage building not coming down? As I recall, Columbia prevailed in the Court of Appeals on the eminent domain issue. The last time I walked by here, I also noted that the crappy gas station on 125th St is still there. Isn't that POS coming down?

I hope that those hideous projects in the background come down too. Not only do they blight the city, but they're unfit for humans.

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/9470/img0415g.jpg

[RoldanTTLB]

Unfortunately, they're not projects (to my knowledge). They're actually relatively high income homes. They managed to slow the 1 train down for years to keep it more quiet.

Suffice to say, it's still what's inside that counts to most people. McMansions aren't fit for living in from the outside as far as I'm concerned, but people tend to fill them with items of varying quality.

[infoshare]

Unfortunately, they're not projects (to my knowledge). They're actually relatively high income homes.

Actually, those buildings are Housing Projects; yet they look almost identical to another set of Co-op buildings directly across the street- which are the buildings to which I think you are referring. So you have here two sets of Towers-in-a-Park developments that look exactly the same from the outside but will, obviously, be quite different on the inside. The co-op buildings next to these projects are as you said: "relatively high income". If there is any redeeming feature to those Housing Project it is those blue-glazed bricks that were used for the 'core' connector for each of the respective wings of each building; visible, but much muted, in the photos below.

[MidtownGuy]

I was trying to figure out from the photo what was going on in the blue areas. The splash of color does help. Too bad they couldn't somehow add some more pizazz to the wings.

[bigchet]

There are so many old crappy buildings and projects in NYC that have to go. If only the city would take the initiative and start condemning these old pieces of crap and give the developers a chance to build anew, then my how the economy would grow.

[RoldanTTLB]

Not to knock your plan, but the last time the city condemned a bunch of "crappy" buildings large swaths of Harlem were torn down and handed over to private developers for the construction of these very buildings. They're also full, and in this day and age, it would be nearly impossible to get everyone out. On top of that, the space would ideally be replaced with incredibly higher density construction (street wall apartment buildings), and anyone in the area with any money will fight additional density. The necessary mix of structures Jane Jacobs was so correctly fond of would be difficult to maintain if more than one or two of these structures came down. Thankfully, the city has plans to densify by infilling the street wall and restoring some through streets. That's probably the best we can hope for right now. I, personally, would be scared to see what would happen if these were torn down wholesale and replaced. I suspect we'd get something of the quality of Hunters Point South, and many people would whine here about the lack of architectural awesomeness we should be sporting.

[Ed007Toronto]

In Toronto we have a similar 50's housing project called Regent Park. Towers in park, side streets shut down etc. Became major crime and poverty zone. In the last 5 years they have slowly started taking down a couple of towers at a time. Residents are moved to other social housing projects. Land was sold to developers to build condos and to replace city housing units lost. In the end all the social housing units will be replaced. Cost to city nothing as new units paid for by the condos. Density doubles, street grid reintroduced and poverty/crime zone becomes an active mixed use, mixed income neighbourhood. Win win.

[RoldanTTLB]

Residents are moved to other social housing projects.
I think is the biggest problem for a plan like that in NYC and anywhere really. There's just nowhere to move these thousands of people, and even if there were, they wouldn't go. There's so much distrust (not without reason), that would prevent this. Think about how it went the last time they did this? And truthfully, the dense neighborhoods were replaced with much less dense, but now overcrowded ones. The whole thing was a recipe for disaster, but this came from the same group of people who felt everyone could have a car (when simple back of the envelope calculations suggest that the entire surface area of manhattan would be needed for parking alone).

[Merry]

Hamilton Heights: Awaiting a Bounce

By C. J. HUGHES

Slide Show (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/06/10/realestate/20110612_Cover_HamHeights.html?ref=realestate)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom1.jpg

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom2.jpg
The huge rental complex at 3333 Broadway and 135th Street

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom5.jpg
The entrance to City College on Convent Avenue.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom6.jpg
Rafael Viñoly designed the renovations for the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture building at City College.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom7.jpg
Hamilton Grange

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom8.jpg

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom15.jpg
A view of 147th Street between Riverside Drive and Broadway.

ALL it the Columbia effect.

The university is breaking ground on a satellite campus in Manhattanville, the once-industrial area north of 125th Street on the Far West Side, giving Hamilton Heights, the neighborhood next door, an extended turn in the limelight.

As the wrecking ball claims more and more of Manhattanville’s motley collection of warehouses and garages, Hamilton Heights, largely unknown to those who have never cracked the 100s on the No. 1 train, is preparing for an influx of teachers, students and support workers. It is also anticipating the higher real estate prices that usually come with proximity to an Ivy League institution.

“The average person who lives downtown doesn’t know about us,” said Christa Giesecke, an architect who has lived in the Heights for 11 years. “But that’s about to change.” She moved from the West Village in part because of the many handsome row houses, some with wide Romanesque arches over doors and windows, and fanciful terra-cotta details like serpents eating their tails.

Ms. Giesecke is the chairwoman of the land use committee of Community Board 9. (The board rejected the expansion plan in 2007; the more recent agreement includes provisions for community involvement.)

“Once Columbia establishes a presence here,” she said, “more people will know about us.”

The Heights stretches from the Hudson River to Edgecombe Avenue, from West 133rd Street to West 155th. It was named for Alexander Hamilton, whose clapboard-sided country house, Hamilton Grange, was recently moved a short distance to a prominent berth in St. Nicholas Park. The neighborhood’s other claim to fame is the presence of City College and its more than 15,000 students, most of them commuters.

City College’s neo-Gothic quadrangle was recently joined by the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, Rafael Viñoly’s renovation of a late ’50s building. A science research center on the southern end of campus is nearly done.

In addition to four subway stops, the neighborhood’s amenities include two substantial parks. One is St. Nicholas Park, slightly overgrown, with stairs that zigzag through steep outcroppings. The other, Riverbank State Park, is across the Henry Hudson Parkway, and reachable by two footbridges. It takes a kitchen-sink approach to recreation, with a track, a secluded community garden, and a new restaurant with a patio on which to enjoy a beer while taking in views of the Hudson.

The high ground, relatively low density and low-slung housing stock, coupled with angled streets that break up the grid, often give the area a sunnier, airier feel than other parts of Manhattan.

The 80,000 residents live in a mix of five- and six-story tenements, many rent-stabilized; brownstones along Convent Avenue in the Sugar Hill area in the northeast corner and the West 140s near Riverside Drive; and a scattering of midrise co-ops. What is missing is new construction — the exception being a six-story midblock condo on West 135th Street, near Broadway, that was completed in 2002.

But condos exist as conversions, like the eight-unit Bradhurst Carriage House lofts, on West 146th. There are also condos in a string of 11 prewar buildings on Riverside Drive, starting at West 143rd Street. These were converted starting in 2006 by the Pinnacle Group, which in the process became embroiled in disputes with rent-regulated tenants over evictions.

Last week, according to Streeteasy.com, 94 homes were for sale in Hamilton Heights. At the low end was an income-restricted four-bedroom co-op for $139,000. At the high end was a three-family town house with a mansard roof, marketed as a one-family, in Sugar Hill, for $3.2 million.

“You can get the square footage that you can’t get downtown along with the finishes, at the same time,” said Ikahn El, a broker with Keller Williams, adding that Hamilton Heights town houses routinely sell for less than half the price of comparable buildings in the West Village or Chelsea.

Mr. El sees housing developers following close behind the opening of the new campus. He said he had been talking to a “hotelier who will remain nameless” about buying the site of an old theater at Amsterdam Avenue and 149th Street to build a condo.

“He said, ‘How much do you think you can sell condos for up here?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ve sold condos for $1 million,’ ” Mr. El said.

Nancy Cabrera, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, says her own experience living near a Columbia property convinces her that prices will rise.

In the 1980s she lived on West 103rd Street in a one-bedroom co-op that she sold for $335,000 in 2002. Then, she said, Columbia built off-campus housing on her corner — and in 2005 an identical apartment then sold for $500,000, which strikes Ms. Cabrera as a steep jump even in a hot housing market. She is now listing a four-bedroom 1901 town house at 470 West 148th Street for $975,000.

When the new Columbia campus is finished in 2050, Manhattanville will have a striking new look. Glass towers housing the business school, labs and classrooms will replace workaday brick structures, meatpacking warehouses and even a Studebaker plant. Sidewalks will be broadened and planted with trees. The $7 billion project — designed by the architectural heavyweights Renzo Piano; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; and Diller Scofidio & Renfro — will create 6,000 permanent jobs, the university says.

The first phase, including the business school and a science center designed by Mr. Piano, is to be completed by 2015. Columbia has promised to put stores on the ground levels of some of the buildings.

Residents of Hamilton Heights look forward to those stores, especially those who moved to the area in recent years and were used to far greater shopping options downtown. Even franchises are few: The closest Starbucks is at West 145th Street and Bradhurst Avenue, just outside the neighborhood. The produce selection at the groceries can be limited. “There are a lot of mangoes,” Ms. Giesecke said, “but not a lot of berries.”

Many hope the university’s arrival inspires entrepreneurs to open more restaurants along Broadway, the area’s main retail strip.

Some early efforts failed. A trio of side-by-side restaurants on Broadway around 137th Street, Tres Pasos Mexican Kitchen, Vinegar Hill Bread Market and Café Largo, opened in 2007 but are now sitting dark.

There has been more success recently, say residents, who point to two popular new Italian restaurants from the same owner: Trufa, at West 139th Street, with a striped awning and exposed brick walls, opened in April; and Tonalli Cafe Bar, at West 149th, in 2009.

Gabriela Serrano, an assistant manager at Tonalli, said the business had originally operated a Mexican restaurant in the Trufa space. “The neighborhood is changing, so we wanted to, too,” Ms. Serrano said.

Laurie Lock moved to Hamilton Heights in 2005 after hopscotching northward on the Upper West Side — first to West 79th, then West 96th, then West 105th, and finally West 149th, where she owns a three-bedroom condo in a four-unit brownstone, with multiple decks. She said she paid less than $1 million for the place.

Ms. Lock, who works for a not-for-profit organization, started a kind of welcome wagon, a parents group to help organize holiday parties. Membership is now at 170 families.
She bemoans the lack of a good stationery store or clothing boutique, despite a critical mass of people who seem to desire such shops.

If any kind of new stores “were to open here right now,” she said, “and they were good, they would be booming.” She added that Columbia could be the spark that finally lit the fire for retail. “I think it is a positive development,” she said.

Tom Smith, a professional clown who has lived in a three-bedroom co-op on Riverside Drive in Hamilton Heights for seven years, is torn about the new campus. He said he did not like the institution’s use of eminent domain to get its hands on some key parcels. “I’m not really an eminent-domain kind of guy,” he said.

Yet he thinks Columbia will help curb street crime, which in turn may make the area a more pleasant place to walk. “There will be a lot less chicanery and hustling going around,” he said.

Of course, one person’s cool new cafe is another’s sign that the neighborhood is about to be ruined by gentrification. And there is no shortage of people in Hamilton Heights who fear Columbia’s arrival. Many renters live in income-restricted or rent-regulated housing and would be pinched by higher prices for goods and services.

Others, like Alicia Barksdale, who has spent her entire life at 3333 Broadway, a hulking 1,200-unit rental complex that practically sits atop the new campus, are more concerned about the short-term problems, like construction noise and dust.

In April, residents of the building, where Ms. Barksdale is president of a tenants group, demanded that their landlord, Urban American, install air-conditioners in all the windows to filter the dust, she said. Urban American did not return a call for comment.

There are also concerns that tenants will be pushed out once landlords realize they can make more from students, professors and staff members. But others say rent stabilization will make many residents difficult to dislodge.

“I’m all for making a better community,” Ms. Barksdale said. “But it has to be a better community in terms of affordable housing and jobs, and education for children and seniors.”

Robin Prescod, a broker with Harlem Homes Real Estate, says the new campus may concentrate students in Manhattanville, rather than disperse them throughout Hamilton Heights, where many live now.

The students might think, “If I can live on campus for $800, why would I pay $1,400 for a one-bedroom?” she said.

Mr. Smith, who grew up in the area, recalled gazing down on Manhattanville during jogs across the Riverside Drive viaduct, which spans it.
“You knew something was going to happen,” he said. “You just knew sooner or later it would be developed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/realestate/hamilton-heights-awaiting-a-bounce.html

[londonlawyer]

This area has ENORMOUS potential. There are many stunning buildings. I believe that Columbia's new campus will gentrify this area further.

[londonlawyer]

Is this POS for poor people and therefore, sacrosanct? I'd love to see it torn down. It's disgusting.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/12/realestate/20110612_Cover/20110612_Cover-custom2.jpg

[oquatanginwan]

That building is huge and hideous, but I don't see it going anywhere soon. It houses way too many people and has at least two schools in the complex. Hamilton Heights will be pretty resistant to gentrification because it's practically half public housing. It'll be interesting to see if the neighborhoods to the east of St. Nicholas park will be affected though. Those are truly wonderful brownstone neighborhoods.

Sidenote: Vinoly sucks.

[infoshare]

There are now four of those large red tank-like structures completed, but I have not been able to ascertain whether or not they are actually tanks.

I can't say exactly just what they are really: that area is what I thought was going to be the campus park - so we will have to wait and see what develops.

The general clearing of the area for phase one of the project is substantially completed; and much of foundation related work is beginning take shape. This project is easy to get a view of because it effectively had two terrific elevated vantage points for viewing the site, one from the elevated train station, the other from the roadway viaduct.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/1089/img0462nn.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/339/img0462nn.jpg/)

[RoldanTTLB]

They look like sewage treatment. That said, it's possible they're holding tanks for ground water. Not sure if they're having to pump out while digging foundations. This area is a real local low point. They don't appear at all permanent, or they would have poured the whole slab before putting them there. The other side of the street is packing some SERIOUS crane action, which I saw on the way to Dino Saturday. I'll have to start riding the 1/2/3 home occasionally to get shots.

[GordonGecko]

If it's a building for engineering classrooms/labs they could be for a number of purposes

[infoshare]

They don't appear at all permanent, or they would have poured the whole slab before putting them there. ........... I'll have to start riding the 1/2/3 home occasionally to get shots.

Under each of the red cylinders is a very deep poured-concrete & rebar slab/footing; a complete foundation was put in place for each of the four units. Also, they had spent several days 'welding' those individual red panels that make up the circumference of each cylinder.

So, I have go to disagree: they sure do seem permanent. That being said, some of this 'so called' temporary decks, platforms over at the WTC site are also composed of some very substantial concrete & steel components - so, we may just have to wait and see what develops after all.

I am guessing permanent structures: but what they are is anybody's guess at this point.
The odd thing is that looking at the 'site plans' published on the website, I identify that area as being a 'park area'.

On your way home you can get off at the 125th street station, there is a passage bridge that will get you to the West Side platform - for there you will get some terrific commanding views directly over the eastern section of the site. Enjoy.

[Gulcrapek]

Londonlawyer: 3333 Bway is partially public housing, partially market rate.

[infoshare]

This presentation (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/presentations/presentation-3333-broadway.pdf) was prepared for a Tenant Meeting held at 3333 Broadway: this PDF is contains both photographic and architectural graphics which provide an overview of the proposed project.

The graphics in this PDF are beautifully rendered and detailed, and the scale of the drawing are larger than all other I have yet seen. This was quite a find, and I was pleasantly surprised when I opened the file; I highly recommend view this presentation.

Also: Great book on architectural graphics, and process here, BIM and Integrated Design http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470572515.html


http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/presentations/presentation-3333-broadway.pdf

[RoldanTTLB]

(click each for full size graphic)
Phase 1:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/RenderedSitePlan-Phase1_080924.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/RenderedSitePlan-Phase1_080924.jpg)

Phase 2:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/RenderedSitePlan_080924.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/RenderedSitePlan_080924.jpg)

Westward Elevation:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/slide%2050_075%20-BROADWAY-ELEVATION-081011.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/slide%2050_075%20-BROADWAY-ELEVATION-081011.jpg)

Eastward Elevation:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/slide%2054_084%20-12th-avenue-east_080111.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/slide%2054_084%20-12th-avenue-east_080111.jpg)

Northward Elevation:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/Slide%2047_ELEV-125th%20-%20129th_20080107.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/Slide%2047_ELEV-125th%20-%20129th_20080107.jpg)

Eastward on the East of Broadway Buildings:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/slide%2052_058bis-broadway%20elevation_080111.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/slides/slide%2052_058bis-broadway%20elevation_080111.jpg)

Oddball wooden model of the whole thing:
http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/slide_95_029_-Photo_model.jpg (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/slide_95_029_-Photo_model.jpg)

Also, from past construction updates (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/proposed_plan/updates_previous0.html) the red tanks, etc, are in fact temporary slurry mixing, holding, and desanding equipment.

Hope that helps everyone visualize a little. Once I get a chance to take photos, I'll put together which buildings are under construction where on the site plan.

[infoshare]

Fantastic Roldan: I looked at that large site map today and have finally determined that those 'tanks' are not - thankfully - located in the park. There is a new building at that particular site location, so they will will be housed, and concealed, within that new structure. I am looking for some renderings of the proposed building; but none yet - probably still in the design development stage.

[RoldanTTLB]

Like I said, the tanks are only temporary. Anyway, this is the rendering for the first building (Jerome L. Greene Science Center).

[img]http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/piano_manhattanville_new_01.jpg[img]
It's the building being founded at the corner of 129th and Broadway.

There do not appear to be renderings for the Kravis Buildings being designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro yet.

[GordonGecko]

So they're getting rid of the bus depot?

[infoshare]

So they're getting rid of the bus depot?

No, the MTA bus depot is not moving: I am not sure what the story is on that on matter. I do however, recall hearing that they either would no, or could not, relocate that facility.

BTW: Since those tanks are only temporary - and are in fact tanks - that large machine (pump) will be removed as well. This is all quite a 'site' to see. (LOL)

[Hamilton]

The idea is to put the bus depot in the six-story underground 'bathtub.'

[infoshare]

The CU campus expansion project is well underway with lots of building demolition still taking place this week: while actual 'construction' on the foundation at one site starting to take place. The amount of changes that have taken place on landscape since my last photo update a few weeks ago are incredible - I will be uploading a new set sometime soon, so stay tuned......

Here is an update report (http://www.neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/pdf-files/growing_together_sept_2011.pdf) from the Columbia University Website.

http://www.neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/pdf-files/growing_together_sept_2011.pdf

[infoshare]

The idea is to put the bus depot in the six-story underground 'bathtub.'

Where can I get news on this: does not seem correct. Simply because that bus depot occupies an entire city block an is at least 5 stories high - putting that underground would be an engineering/construction feat on par with Hoover dam.

Please post a link if possible - I will be amazed if this is actually the case.

ps. I was wrong about those huge "temporary" steel tanks on the site - so I am ready for the 'surprise'. (LOL)

[GordonGecko]

thanks infoshare, great stuff. much appreciated

[Merry]

VIDEO: First Look Inside Columbia's Expansion

By Jeff Mays

video (http://bcove.me/7fddqxbl)

http://assets.dnainfo.com/generated/photo/2012/01/1326292217.JPG/image640x480.jpg

One day, Columbia University hopes its 17-acre Manhattanville campus expansion site will become the place where scientists unlock the secrets of Alzheimer's.

But for now, the most important scientific protocol taking place at the future site of Jerome L. Greene Science Center, involves keeping dust levels down to prevent adding construction debris to the list of pollutants in an area with higher-than-average rates of asthma.

Each truck rolling out of the construction site and onto the streets of West Harlem, has to stop at a wheel cleaning station where a massive spray of recycled water blasts up from the ground, knocking off excess dust and wet concrete stuck to the wheels and undercarriage.

It's part of Columbia's clean construction program designed to limit the amount of air pollution, dust, noise and even rodent issues facing the surrounding neighborhood.

"Five years ago we got some peculiar looks before bidding this project out," said Ramesh Raman, executive director of environmental field compliance for Manhattanville development, slated to open in 2016. "Now good contractors realize this is the wave of the future."

An Environmental Protection Agency grant was used to retrofit almost every diesel engine used on the site with a particulate filter to prevent the black smoke usually seen spewing from the top of the gigantic trucks. Ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel is required and much of the site has been electrified to prevent the use of machines running on diesel fuel where possible.

The construction fences are 11 feet tall with angled banana tops and noise blankets to baffle the racket that emanates from construction sites.

A mesh cover is used to smother the dust that could leak from every load of dirt or rubble that leaves the site, while more than 90 percent of the wood, metal, brick and concrete used in the 33 one and two story buildings that were taken down to clear the site were recycled.

"You don't smell any odors or have that diesel taste in your mouth," said Philip Pitruzzello, vice president Manhattanville Construction for Columbia University. "For dense, urban projects we are proving that you can construct responsibly."

With thepotential for more than three new university campuses to be built in the city, including Cornell's $2 billion, 2.1 million-square-foot engineering and applied science school on Roosevelt Island, and New York University's expansion in the Village and their Center for Urban Science and Progress program in downtown Brooklyn, Columbia University officials are hoping that the construction of their new campus can be seen as a role model.

"Columbia's clean construction project should serve as a model for other construction projects. I hope when NYU does their expansion they will use the same strategies and methods and make the same efforts to keep the air as cleans as possible," said Isabelle Silverman, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund which helped develop the clean construction plan.

In Harlem, where children already suffer from disproportionately high asthma rates, a massive construction project without such environmental abatement tactics could pose a threat to neighborhood health, said Patrick Kinney, professor of environmental health sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Some estimates say one in four children in Central Harlem suffer from asthma.

"You have such a high concentration of people that would be vulnerable to air pollution. And West Harlem, with their prevalence of asthma, doesn't need another trigger," said Kinney. "This sets a standard that other construction projects could follow."

Kinney credited group's such as WE ACT for Environmental Justice, which has 30 years of experience of fighting for cleaner air for Northern Manhattan, for pushing for the higher standards.

"They were mobilized to act about air quality because it's not a new problem or an issue. When Columbia announced their plans the community was ready to engage. There was no learning curve. They got the issue on the table so Columbia took it really seriously and was able to plan community engagement and pressure that helped to guide Columbia in that direction," said Kinney.

The university's efforts still have their critics.

Alicia Barksdale, president of the 3333 Tenants Association, a complex of five buildings ranging from 10 to 35 stories on Broadway between 133rd and 135th streets, said residents believe there is evidence of more air pollution than normal, as a result of the construction.

Some still blame Columbia for higher rodent infestation and fault a plan to give out air conditioners to some tenants to muffle construction noise as not going far enough.

""Our buildings are filthy, you can see the grit on the window sill," said Barksdale.

Silverman said there are other factors for pollution in the area such as the type of heating oil burned by buildings and the nearby North River Wastewater Treatment Plant. The university also says it has taken steps to exterminate buildings before demolition as well as installing sealable trash cans with lids on the site to prevent an influx of rodents.

"They've gone far in the direction of ensuring the impact on the community is as minimal as possible," added Kinney.

Pitruzzello said the university is proud of its environmental efforts which may evolve even further as the full campus construction project evolves over the next three decades. There is a plan to collect and examine air quality data to see if the construction methods made a difference, said Kinney.

When it's finished, the new Manhattanville campus will stretch from 125th to 133rd streets and be completely open to the surrounding neighborhood. It will bring useful stores to the area and even have hidden environmental perks such as a new combined sewer overflow system that should help reduce the amount of untreated sewage that flows into the Hudson RIver, Pitruzzello added.

"Hopefully, this is something that can be replicated," said Silverman.

http://www.dnainfo.com/20120111/harlem/video-first-look-inside-columbias-expansion#ixzz1jDBbMnpW

[infoshare]

Recent photo of the the site of the new Science Building (http://http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/3132/img0692oj.jpg) at the Manhattan Campus expansion project.

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/3132/img0692oj.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/69/img0692oj.jpg/)

[londonlawyer]

Is the crappy gas station on 125th St gone yet?

[JCMAN320]

Is the crappy gas station on 125th St gone yet?

That little BP? Nah so far still there.

[londonlawyer]

Thanks. I can't wait until it's gone.

[JCMAN320]

Thanks. I can't wait until it's gone.

Yea that whole triangle would make a nice little open plaza.

[Hamilton]

Where can I get news on this: does not seem correct. Simply because that bus depot occupies an entire city block an is at least 5 stories high - putting that underground would be an engineering/construction feat on par with Hoover dam.

Please post a link if possible - I will be amazed if this is actually the case.

ps. I was wrong about those huge "temporary" steel tanks on the site - so I am ready for the 'surprise'. (LOL)

Sorry for the belated reply.

Check out the Final Scope of Work. On pages 19 and 26 it discusses the below-grade option. 2 million square feet would be underground at buildout in 2030. The 'default' option under study for the bus depot is to put it below-grade, but the FSOW also mentions the possibility that Columbia would build above the depot.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/env_review/manhattanville/final_scope.pdf

[londonlawyer]

Yea that whole triangle would make a nice little open plaza.

I agree.

[infoshare]

Thanks Hamilton, just read your comment. Also, Inregard to the other general questions about that little triangle street: not sure, but my guess is that whatever is going there is already planned - and can most likely be seen in any number of the architectural drawings posted on this very thread.

[GordonGecko]

Construction Worker Killed in Building Collapse in Manhattan
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/03/23/nyregion/22-cityroom-collapse/22-cityroom-collapse-blog480.jpg

A construction worker was killed on Thursday when a building in Manhattan owned by Columbia University collapsed.
A construction worker was killed and two others were injured on Thursday morning in the collapse of a partly demolished two-story building in Upper Manhattan that was owned by Columbia University, the authorities said.The building, at 604-606 West 131st Street, collapsed shortly before 8 a.m. The cause was unclear.A city official said the site was part of Columbia University’s expansion project, which involves building a 17-acre satellite campus in West Harlem. Columbia, which acquired the building in 2009, said the site would become “publicly accessible open space” between buildings used by its business school. The building had been an outpost of a company that sold supplies for contracting and building maintenance work.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/construction-worker-killed-in-building-collapse-in-manhattan (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/construction-worker-killed-in-building-collapse-in-manhattan/?hp)

[infoshare]

More news on; the building collapse, safety violations, protests, a mob connected contractor and the Columbia University Campus expansion in Manhattanville.

BTW...This area is not exactly 'the upper west side' as stated in the thread title: West Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Manhattanville would be more accurate. The 'Upper West Side' designation may need to get changed at some point.

http://www.dnainfo.com/20120323/harlem/columbia-expansion-site-has-history-of-safety-violations

[Fimiak]

A construction worker was killed on Thursday when a building in Manhattan owned by Columbia University collapsed.
A construction worker was killed and two others were injured on Thursday morning in the collapse of a partly demolished two-story building in Upper Manhattan that was owned by Columbia University, the authorities said. The building had been an outpost of a company that sold supplies for contracting and building maintenance work.



Does anybody else see the irony in this? The building that collapsed had been used to sell supplies for building maintenance work...