Columbia University Campus Expansion - Upper West Side

[Kris]

July 30, 2003

Feeling Squeezed, Columbia Is Amassing Land for a New Campus

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

Columbia University, long starved for land at its campus in Morningside Heights, is buying up a 17-acre swath in West Harlem for its first major expansion in 75 years.

The university's long-range plan calls for removing the battered brick industrial buildings now in the area bounded roughly by Broadway, 125th Street, 12th Avenue and 133rd Street and replacing them with a new tree-lined campus of school buildings, performing arts centers, research labs, a jazz club and dormitories.

The proposed multibillion-dollar project, about half the size of Columbia's 36-acre campus in Morningside Heights, would be built in the coming decades and could become what the university regards as a link to its health sciences complex in Washington Heights. Aside from acquiring the rest of the land, Columbia also needs zoning changes that would allow high-rise development of nonindustrial buildings.

Columbia has crowded new buildings onto campus for years and erected towers on scattered sites in the surrounding area, but officials say it needs to expand if it is to continue to attract top professors, researchers and students.

Columbia is hoping that its plans will fit well with efforts by the state, city and community groups to redevelop the Hudson River waterfront and West Harlem, which the university prefers to call by its historic name, Manhattanville.

"This is an opportunity in Manhattanville to create something of immense vitality and beauty," said Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia's president. "This is not to just go in and throw up some buildings. These would be beautiful, magnificent buildings on the order of what we have in Morningside Heights. Maybe not in mass, but in quality."

Columbia has more than 20,000 students and 9,000 employees, making it the 12th-largest employer in New York City and the largest recipient of research funds in the city. The university has hired the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Skidmore Owings & Merrill to design the project. If it goes ahead, the first phase would include a 500,000-square-foot complex on 125th Street for the School of the Arts, research space, residence halls and retail space.

Columbia hopes to avoid the kind of community opposition and campus rebellions caused by its past attempts to expand, or its effort in 1968 to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park. To that end, the university is focusing on a run-down industrial area of warehouses, auto-repair shops and a meatpacking plant, avoiding a string of apartment buildings along Broadway between 133rd and 132nd Streets, but including an odd-shaped block to the east, bounded by Broadway and Old Broadway.

The area is framed by an elevated subway line along Broadway and a highway viaduct along 12th Avenue; Manhattanville Houses are to the east and another housing complex is to the north.

The university has been meeting quietly in the past two months with United States Representative Charles B. Rangel and state and city officials about plans to redevelop the area. It has also established a task force including representatives of the local community board and various neighborhood groups, a tactic that some residents have found encouraging and a break with what they said was Columbia's past arrogance.

"They're treading lightly," said Peggy Shepard, executive director of West Harlem Environmental Action, who has met with Columbia officials. "They put together a task force to show the community they want to do this in partnership. They have not really presented anything at this point. It's mostly them listening to us. As long as their needs are compatible with how the community sees the use of the manufacturing zone, it could be a good thing."

Over the past 50 years, Columbia has spilled down Broadway from the gates of its main campus at 116th Street. Its attempts to erect new buildings or buy old ones and squeeze out residents have generated one neighborhood battle after another.

Columbia has owned property on the south side of 125th Street since the late 1960's, but few people have been aware of the extent to which the university has been buying or leasing property in West Harlem, particularly for the past year. It rents space, for instance, in the old Studebaker building on 131st Street and has an option to buy the six-story structure as well as the garage next door. The university owns a parking lot on 129th Street and, real estate executives said, is negotiating to buy the land occupied by a U-Haul franchise on Broadway, near 132nd Street.

According to a Columbia document prepared for government officials, it owns or controls more than 40 percent of the 17 acres for the new campus and is in talks to buy 32 percent more.

Next spring, the city and the state expect to begin a $12 million plan to rebuild the Harlem piers on the waterfront between St. Clair Place and 133rd Street for recreational use. The city is also working with the community board, Columbia and others on a plan to rezone the neighborhood and encourage economic development under Henry Hudson Parkway, just to the west.

The university's plans would amount to one of the largest development projects in the city and could fit in with those efforts, although there is clearly potential for friction. School buildings, laboratories and science labs would generate new jobs, university officials said, and there is the possibility that businesses could locate nearby as a result of research work.

In addition, Columbia said it would provide space for retail shops and nonprofit organizations along Broadway and 12th Avenue and would develop partnerships between, say, the School of the Arts and local artists and community organizations.

That approach contrasts sharply with what others have taken as Columbia's view of Harlem in the past. In the 1960's, the university built a tower for faculty apartments at the corner of 12th Avenue and St. Clair Place, it put the front door on Riverside Drive, in effect turning its back on Harlem and 125th Street.

Now the university's plans for high-rise buildings could also run afoul of efforts by community groups to preserve the low-scale character of Harlem. Housing is a pressing issue, and the university's project may require moving a major Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus garage now on 133rd Street. Finally, Columbia would almost certainly need state help to condemn property that it cannot buy.

Jarvis Doctorow, for one, said he was having too much fun to sell. Mr. Doctorow, who is 79, owns the seven-story factory at 3280 Broadway that he converted to an office building, where Columbia is among the renters.

"I cannot prevent people from knocking on my door," he said, "but the building is not for sale."

Columbia has made no secret of what it says is its desperate need for land to expand. A 1998 survey by the office of the university provost found that it had less space per student than other major universities, 194 square feet; in contrast, the report said Princeton had 561 square feet, the University of Pennsylvania 440 and Harvard 368.

Columbia is erecting a 16-story apartment building for law students at Amsterdam Avenue and 122nd Street and an adjacent $50 million academic center. It is finishing a building on 110th Street, starting work on another at 103rd and Broadway, and planning for perhaps two towers on the grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Mr. Bollinger said he saw the land in Manhattanville as an important opportunity.

"Over the long term, upper Manhattan is our home," Mr. Bollinger said. "Columbia will never fully realize its own aspirations unless it accepts that. The question is, how do we weave together this tapestry? Any sense of a gated community or a town-gown line would be a mistake."


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Gulcrapek]

SOM and Piano means probably not brick and probably something different. I'm looking forward to the plans.

[czsz]

There probably won't be any published plans in the forseeable future...Columbia has tried to keep its purchasing spree quiet and was only forced to admit its goals after the Times discovered its buyout scheme. Obviously this is a very long-term project and Columbia wants to be sensitive to holdouts within the projected new campus' area.

Potentially, it could be a half-century project.

[billyblancoNYC]

Can't wait for this to start. *Benefits too numerous to count. *Plus SOM and Piano yielded the Times building, so...

[NoyokA]

Billy; it was Piano and Fox and Fowle, Im sure you had just forgotten.

[billyblancoNYC]

True, sorry about that. *Sometimes in my excitement, I babble.

[billyblancoNYC]

;o)

[Jo]

whoops, looks like html was disabled.

http://www.morningside-heights.net/news2.htm
is a URL for the Stoneworks on the Cathedral grounds.

[NYatKNIGHT]

Jo, use [ ] instead of *< >

and planning for perhaps two towers on the grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
Hm, where would these go? I can't imagine. Where the Stoneworks (http://www.morningside-heights.net/news2.htm) shed is?

You're right, it would be nice to get rid of that shed.

[Jo]

OK, I found the proposed development plans, which include maps.

[http://www.morningside-heights.net/cathedt.htm]

Seems like the intend to get rid of not only the shed, but that whole narrow corridor next to the cathedral. Seems a little crowded for that neighborhood.

The building on the corner of 110 and Morningside Drive makes more sense as it's further away from the landmark cathedral. But I guess landmarks get crowded over time.

[Kris]

September 14, 2003

On the Heights, a Chill Wind Begins to Blow

By DENNY LEE

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/09/13/nyregion/14feat.xlarge.jpg
Columbia will soon break ground on a new dormitory at 103rd Street.

TO hear the veteran activists of Morningside Heights tell it, the defining moment came in 1997, when Columbia University descended from its ivory tower and held an audience with its rambunctious neighbors.

The scandal of the day was a 22-story dormitory tower, called the Broadway Residence Hall, planned for the northeast corner of Broadway and 113th Street. If history offered any guide, local activists had said, Columbia would unleash its proposal as a fait accompli, leaving nothing but scraps for residents to fight over.

Instead, the unthinkable happened. University officials not only entertained complaints about the tower, they also agreed to shrink the dorm to 14 stories, change the color from red to buff gray, and even relocate a public library to the corner spot.

"This memorialized a new climate," said Bob Roistacher, chairman of the Morningside Heights Residents' Association, one of a galaxy of neighborhood groups that have locked horns with Columbia. Indeed, with the project, Columbia slowly began to shed its combativeness and set out on a new, friendlier era of community relations.

Now, the détente may be in danger.

After a period of scattered growth, Columbia is embarking on what may be its biggest expansion in the more than 100 years since it moved to Morningside Heights. In the past year, under its new president, Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia has quietly been snapping up properties in an industrial swath of West Harlem to make way for a satellite campus. Critics are already saying those purchases violate a tacit understanding that the campus stay within 110th and 125th Streets. On another front on Morningside Heights, local preservationists are reeling over Columbia's discussions about building towers on the grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

At the same time, just as Morningside Heights has reached this delicate juncture in town-gown relations, community activists say troubling changes are taking place within the limestone walls of Columbia. Although some people inside and outside the university disagree, the activists say that Emily Lloyd - the person they see as their greatest ally inside Columbia, the administrator of the neighborly approach the university first displayed in the 1997 dorm construction - no longer commands the same influence under Mr. Bollinger's leadership.

Ms. Lloyd has gotten a new position with a new title, but one Columbia official had his own interpretation of her fate. "My sense is that Emily has been demoted,'' said the official, who, like other university officials interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve their relationship with the administration. "She gave significant attention to community concerns. Now her role has been confined to selling the expansion plan to the community."

These two developments have furrowed brows across Morningside Heights, and prompted anxious questions. How will Columbia treat the community as it sets out on its new expansion? And will there be a revival of the frosty relations that prevailed before Ms. Lloyd's arrival?

Some take a wait-and-see attitude, but Mr. Roistacher, for one, is pessimistic. "The past 10 years will constitute the zenith of community relations,'' he said. "Things are starting to go down.''

University on a Hill

High Gothic walls separate Yale students from New Haven, Conn. Harvard largely commands its own province of Cambridge, Mass. But on Morningside Heights, the border between Columbia and its multiethnic neighbors is as convoluted as an Escher drawing, with students and rent-controlled tenants often sharing the same hallways.

This mixing is partly dictated by a confining geography. Morningside Heights sits upon a steep slope bounded on the north and south by 125th and 110th Streets and on the east and west by Morningside and Riverside Parks. Like a castle on a hill, Columbia looks down upon Harlem - and when town-gown tensions erupt, critics of the university make much of that metaphor of dominance.

Such tensions reacheded a boiling point in 1968, when residents and students protested plans by the university to build a gym in Morningside Park with separate entrances for the mostly white students of Columbia and the mostly black residents below.

"If the gym had few champions, it nicely served those intent on dramatizing what they saw as Columbia's rapacity in real estate matters and its systemic racism," wrote Robert McCaughey, chairman of the Barnard College history department, in his forthcoming book, "Stand, Columbia" (Columbia University Press).

During the same era, Columbia acquired more than 100 apartment buildings on Morningside Heights, many of them rundown single-room-occupancy hotels. Some of the rooms were occupied by drug dealers and prostitutes, but many more were homes to working-class black and Puerto Rican families. Columbia undertook an aggressive campaign to demolish or renovate these apartments for students. By one estimate, Columbia displaced more than 7,000 residents in the decade before 1968.

The practice subsided briefly after the 1968 protests, but by 1980, Columbia, citing another housing shortage, embarked on a new series of real estate acquisitions and evictions that created great animosity and brought town-gown relations to a new low.

Those evictions ended by 1990. By then, Columbia had succeeded in amassing thousands of apartments. Not including dormitories, the university now owns about 6,000 local apartments, about 90 percent of which are occupied by people with Columbia affiliations.

Local Heroine

Emily Lloyd, a rail-thin 58-year-old woman with neatly trimmed blond hair, joined Columbia in 1994 as its executive vice president for administration. Nominally, she oversaw the university's facilities and sizable real estate holdings. But in her previous position, as commissioner of the city's Department of Sanitation, she also became experienced at navigating the concerns of neighborhoods.

Local groups took immediately to the affable, no-nonsense Ms. Lloyd as she and her staff opened up Columbia's construction plans. As soon as a project got the green light, Columbia officials presented it to the local community board. When architects were selected, residents were invited to share their objections. If traffic issues arose, a traffic consultant was hired. Angry demonstrations were replaced by well-run meetings.

"This sounds Pollyannaish, but the community frequently has very good ideas," Ms. Lloyd said in an interview this month. "People felt that Columbia was very mysterious, and they didn't know what to expect. We had to keep the community informed so we could build a level of trust and candor."

Local residents returned the favor. "She's just marvelous," said Barbara Hohol, co-chairwoman of the 112th Street Block Association. "Emily is a friend of the community."

Enlightened self-interest was at play in the university's new charm offensive. As in the 80's, Columbia entered the 90's starving for more space. "But most of the campus space had been used up,'' Ms. Lloyd said, "so we had to look off-campus, which meant that we had to establish a dialogue with the community."

Following this hand-in-hand approach, Columbia added more than 1 million square feet of space during the past decade, from Lentfast Hall, a new 16-story residence for law students at 121st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, to a 12-story building with faculty apartments and an elementary school on 110th Street and Broadway.

Work is half-complete on the future 11-story home of the School of Social Work on Amsterdam Avenue, and, last month, Columbia began demolition for a 13-story dormitory at 103rd Street and Broadway.

By and large, construction has proceeded with little fuss, save the usual grumblings from veteran Columbia critics. Indeed, few eyebrows were raised even over the 103rd Street dorm, Columbia's first project south of the historic divide of 110th Street. Local groups praised the university for its openness in the project, and for providing neighbors with air-conditioners to keep out dust from demolition work.

The building at 110th Street and Broadway, on which work crews are now putting the finishing touches, is a case study of Ms. Lloyd's way of doing business. The structure will house a grammar school for children of Columbia employees, as well as 27 large apartments on the upper floors for faculty.

When the project was announced in 2000, the university and residents clashed. The School at Columbia, as it is called, was designed to attract bright, young faculty to Manhattan by offering a top education for their children. But to critics, the school was an elitist affront to the area's underachieving public schools.

In an effort to bridge this gap, the university agreed to set aside half the 650 spots for local children not affiliated with Columbia. Admission would be drawn by lottery, and the university agreed to provide financial aid to those who could not afford the annual $22,000 tuition.

The plan worked. What was once seen as a neighborhood burden became a golden opportunity for local parents. And the person most credited with the turnaround was Ms. Lloyd.

"Things have improved infinitely, thanks to Emily Lloyd," said Marie Runyon, a veteran Morningside Heights activist. "The bulldozer is no longer their favorite weapon."

Acres and Destiny

In his inaugural address one year ago, Mr. Bollinger voiced a new and central goal for the university. "Columbia as the quintessential great urban university is the most constrained for space," he said. "To fulfill our responsibilities and aspirations, Columbia must expand significantly over the next decade."

"Whether we expand on the property we already own in Morningside Heights, Manhattanville or Washington Heights," he continued, "or whether we pursue a design of multiple campuses in the city, or beyond, is one of the most important questions we face."

That question seems to have been answered. Unknown to most, Columbia has been buying up properties north of 125th Street in the hope of creating a 17-acre campus there, about half the size of its main campus on Morningside Heights. The area runs roughly from Broadway to 12th Avenue, and from 125th to 133rd Streets.

The site, Mr. Bollinger said in an interview this month, was chosen because it is near the main campus, and can furnish a link to Columbia's health sciences complex in Washington Heights. Mindful of its past skirmishes, the university picked an industrial area with few residences.

But the ghosts of 1968 still haunt Columbia. This time, however, the issue is not a single gym, but an entire campus abutting the heart of Harlem, and some voices are rising in opposition.

"This expansion is going to cause the displacement of blacks and Hispanics," said Tom DeMott, who is among 40 tenant advocates, preservationists and veteran Columbia opponents who earlier this year formed a new group, Coalition to Preserve Community, to combat the plan.

Neil Smith, director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, agreed. "What happened before is going to look like a series of earlier ripples of gentrification," he said. "This is going to be a much greater magnet for gentrification throughout the western and central areas of Harlem."

On another front, the Manhattanville Area Consortium, a group of businesses that may be affected by the expansion, have announced that they oppose any condemnation of their properties. Others, including Kenny Schaeffer, a Legal Aid lawyer who has represented dozens of tenants facing eviction by Columbia, also expressed concern about the impact of the university's effort to expand north of the traditional boundary of 125th Street.

To deal with such concerns, Mr. Bollinger created an advisory task force, composed of members of neighborhood groups and representatives of Community Board 9. Ms. Lloyd also sits on the task force, but some critics of Columbia say that she has been marginalized. These critics say that Ms. Lloyd, who once oversaw most of Columbia's nonacademic departments, has been reduced to running interference for Mr. Bollinger's vision of a rapidly expanding campus.

At a meeting in June, at which Ms. Lloyd presented Columbia's expansion plan, frustrations with her perceived lack of response provoked an audience member to stand up, turn to her and say, "Sorry, but I don't see you as someone with power anymore."

Among Mr. Bollinger's first acts as president was to appoint Robert Kasdin, a friend and close adviser from the University of Michigan, to the new position of senior vice president. Ms. Lloyd was given the new title of executive vice president for government and community relations. The bulk of her duties, which had included new real estate ventures, were shifted to Mr. Kasdin.

"It doesn't seem that way to me,'' said Ms. Lloyd about the suggestion that she has lost power. "I am co-managing the campus planning process. I still report to the president.''

Mr. Bollinger, who said he places a high premium on community relations and that they are good and still improving, added, "I wanted Emily to stay on, and I wanted her to focus exclusively on community relations." But, he said, "Community relations is much larger than just Emily, and it will go further than just Emily. There are other people as well."

That became evident to neighborhood groups when the private school at 110th Street resurfaced as a hot button issue last December. To seething local parents, the new administration seemed to be backtracking from its pledge to set aside half of the seats for community children.

State Assemblyman Daniel O'Donnell met with Columbia officials at his home. "Emily clearly wanted them to honor their commitment," he said. But it was Mr. Kasdin, who also attended the session, who needed convincing. "He needed to understand the long-term ramifications" of how this could hurt community relations, Mr. O' Donnell said.

And in the end, it was Mr. Kasdin who announced that Columbia would stick by its original pledge.

In other cases, Ms. Lloyd appeared to be out of the loop. For months, residents near the Teachers College on 121st Street have protested plans for a 17-story dormitory in the middle of an architecturally notable block. After claiming it had no involvement with the project - Teachers College is affiliated with Columbia but separate from it - Columbia quietly agreed to purchase 50 apartments for its own students. When confronted by neighborhood activists, Ms. Lloyd pleaded ignorance of the matter.

This troubled those who view Ms. Lloyd as their best hope of influencing Columbia's future projects.

"Columbia's relationship with the community is going downhill," said Carolyn Birden, a member of the 110th Street Block Association. "We see Emily as helpless."

Some groups, however, are reserving judgment on whether Columbia is retreating to its old habits.

"Emily is going to be navigating an ice field that develops larger and larger crevasses," said a veteran activist who spoke on condition of anonymity. "She's going to have to bridge more and more diverse splits between Columbia and the community. Her immediate challenge will be keeping Bollinger on a leash."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Learning From the Past: Expansion Then and Now

I.M. Pei's 1970 Proposal for Columbia's Campus Provides Perspective on Current Manhattanville Plans

By Pooja Mehta
Columbia Daily Spectator

April 02, 2004

High rise towers on South Lawn? A completely subterranean student center below? A café-theatre in the shaft of Ruggles?

Most Columbia students probably don't bother dwelling on the paths not taken in the history of campus planning as they move through the paved spaces of their daily routines. Nevertheless, the history of eminent architect I.M. Pei's forgotten plans for Columbia's campus, featuring these types of changes, provides an illuminating perspective on the current debates over Columbia's impending expansion into Manhattanville.

The quest for new and suitable space is as much a part of Columbia's history as manifest destiny is a part of that of the United States. Columbia's original master plan, proposed by Charles Follen McKim in 1894 in preparation for Columbia's third and final move uptown from 49th and Madison two years later, was the first in a long series of architectural attempts to assert and redefine Columbia's institutional image.

Such a redefinition was sorely needed in the wake of 1968 student and community agitation in response to University plans to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park. In an effort to ameliorate its tarnished image, the University commissioned a 15-month planning study, charging the high-profile architectural firm of I.M. Pei "with the responsibility of preparing 'a master plan under which the campus at Morningside Heights will be arranged and developed in a manner which will not only be in its own interests, but ... [also those of] its neighbors and the City of New York.'"

Pei's daring recommendation that two slender high rise towers be built on either side of South Field, at the same approximate location of McKim, Mead & White's proposed but unrealized inner rank of dormitories, ultimately dominated perceptions of and responses to the resulting plan. Pei designed the towers in the hope that he could "correct the campus' physical shortcomings and fulfill the needs of the University as a whole" by compensating for existing deviations from the original McKim plan.

"Cherished as it is, South Field in aesthetic terms is not a particularly attractive space," Pei wrote in his report. "Wider by 280 feet than McKim had planned, it is awkwardly framed by buildings of disparate scale and style."

However, when the plans were first published in 1969, the immediate student and administrative response was less than enthusiastic. South Lawn's status as the last large, public open space on campus and the jewel in Columbia's neoclassical crown was seen as too valuable to compromise. One comment in Spectator read, "The loss of South Field will undoubtedly be as harmful to Columbia's students as the gym would have been to the Harlem community."

"The towers completely avoided the real issue of the desire and the need for Columbia to grow," reflected Paul Broches, School of Architecture Class of 1970 and a fellow in the American Institute of Architects. "On a political level they avoided the problem that Columbia had faced so often in the past of making moves out into the community and standing at odds with community interests. ... They were also not realistic from a building standpoint and would have made miserable facilities for education."

But in fact, in its entirety, Pei's proposal was a broadly ambitious plan that attempted to reach out to the community in numerous ways. Seeking to counter developments in the 1950s and '60s that, for Pei, represented "an architecture of expediency" characterized by "economic compromises and ad hoc planning," Pei stressed throughout his report the importance of reconciliation with the community. Quoting the 1968 Cox Commission, he warned: "The University cannot prosper spiritually or intellectually as an isolated island surrounded by distrust."

In fact, the very scale of the plan's ambition may have been the cause for its rejection, causing tensions between the architect and an administration deeply in debt and wary of such dramatic changes in the logic of campus spatial planning and commitment to the surrounding residential community. Pei's planning strategy prioritized the maximization of development of existing campus grounds via underground building. Meanwhile, off-campus, Pei advocated for mixed-use zoning, consolidation of community residential buildings and student-faculty housing, more community-conscious traffic regulations, and the building of a new $8.5 million apartment complex at the corner of Amsterdam, Morningside, and 122nd. The stated aim of Pei's broad off-campus proposals was to "demonstrate that the University and the neighborhood can not only survive together, but can effectively accomplish their respective goals through community planning."

Proposed changes on campus included the reclamation of Low Library as a "truly public building," removal of the departments of history and sociology from Fayerweather Hall to the International Affairs Building to create new academic spaces in those buildings, and the development of an Arts Center on campus, "in the heart of campus life." The most important new structure would be a new centrally located chemistry building that would "be elevated on pillars above Uris Library and set across the major North-South axis," and act as the new centerpiece of North Campus, thus completing the full intended North-South axes of the original McKim plan.

In his book Mastering McKim's Plan, Barry Bergdoll describes the administration's ambivalent response to the Pei proposal. This response was subject to intense media scrutiny and was complicated by the simultaneous search for a new University President in the spring of 1970.

Pei finally resigned in June of that year, citing his increasingly awkward interactions with community organizations and neighborhood groups that had contributed to the development of his master plan and were waiting impatiently for some sign of change. Since the beginning of his involvement, Pei had met with hundreds of government agencies, and community, student, and faculty groups. Although he had been granted complete autonomy by the administration, he could not help but be perceived as a representative of the university by the groups he met with, and was finding the lack of administrative support frustrating.

"We desperately need some sign of progress if we are to maintain any communication with the community," Pei complained to the administration immediately prior to his resignation. "Month by month, the goodwill you have built up is dissipating. Columbia's credibility is deteriorating." His warnings went unheeded, and his dramatic vision for Columbia's Morningside campus remained unrealized.

While Pei went on to design the Javits Convention Center, the iconic Pyramide du Louvre, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the last 35 years, a number of individual buildings have been constructed on the campus he left behind in continuing attempts to accommodate a cramped University's needs, including Dodge Fitness Center, East Campus Residential Center, the Havemeyer extension, and Alfred Lerner Hall.

"So many people harp on the student riots on campus and don't go beyond that," reflected Nellie Bailey, current director of the Harlem Tenant's Council and a member of the umbrella Coalition to Preserve Community. "Yes, it was a defining moment in Columbia's relationship with Harlem, but it's the aftermath of that movement and what the University did after it got its wake-up call that is really important."

Indeed, the scale and detail of Pei's proposals illustrates the large potential for change that was opened up by the demonstrations and disaffection of 1968. The failure of Columbia's administration to respond in a way that was seen as satisfactory by the community and the eventual abandonment of the plans reflect upon the delicate nature of town-gown relations and provide a valuable backdrop to understanding the nuances of today's Manhattanville expansion planning process.

"It all doesn't seem so different from what's happening now," commented Nell Geiser, CC '06 and a member of SPEaK and the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification as well as the administration's Student Committee on Expansion. "They have a high-profile architect involved, there are student activists strongly aligned with the community, there's the University-sanctioned token student advisory committee. ... There is a widespread desire to have good relations with the community, and they're taking feedback from both the community and students, but the reality is they're not engaging in really substantive give-and-take."

Some community representatives, including Bailey, emphatically share Geiser's view, citing persistently high unemployment rates, health disparities, and a history of "corporate sponsored institutionalized racism" in Harlem as evidence of Columbia's continued inability to commit to and invest in the welfare of the community it neighbors. Others, such as Barbara Hohol, co-chair of the West 112th Street Block Association, and a member of the Community Advisory Committee convened by the administration last April, take a different position.

"This is not by definition a malevolent incursion," Hohol said. "This administration, and in particular Emily Lloyd, really represent a positive difference for us. ... I think this expansion is the most exciting thing that's happened in New York in many years in terms of the possibility of interweaving communities and creating new opportunities, and I am outraged by the amount of misinformation that is out there. A lot of it is just hangover from the '60s."

Lloyd, Executive Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs, cited specific steps taken by the administration over the course of the last year to ensure that members of the community remain well informed and have access to negotiations on plans for the Manhattanville site. Outreach has included University-sponsored and Community Board-endorsed town hall meetings, presentations at community board meetings, and smaller, more focused "geographic meetings" with people living in and immediately around the development area.

How, then, does this administration compare to that of Kirk, Cordier, and McGill? "Bollinger certainly seems more sophisticated and savvier than some of his predecessors," said Robert Friedman, international editor of Fortune magazine, graduate of CC and GSAS, former Spectator editor, and co-author of Up Against the Ivy Wall, a book about the 1968 student protests. "Columbia has real needs and some of the conflict is inevitable, but as far as seeking opinions and incorporating the community, so far from what I've seen, Bollinger gets pretty good marks."

Others, however, feel that Columbia still runs the risk of repeating past mistakes, albeit in new ways; the fate of the Pei's plan and the end of his involvement with Columbia in particular warn of the consequences of not sustaining consistent community involvement and support.

"You have to put it all in a modern context," said Tom DeMott, a member of West Harlem Coalition to Preserve Community. "The difference between the late sixties and now is 30 years of corporate expertise in handling dissident voices. While you can certainly point to some positive aspects of that change, the key factor is to compare the actual results with the potential results, and it's in making that comparison that the analysis becomes kind of depressing."

www.columbiaspectator.com

[Kris]

April 21, 2004

Columbia Buying Sites and Assuring Its Neighbors

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

Columbia University has aggressively moved to buy the brick warehouses and industrial buildings near the Hudson River in West Harlem where it wants to build a new campus, even as it does a delicate dance with community groups that view the school's real estate ambitions warily.

Never far from anyone's mind at Columbia is the specter of 1968, when the university's plans to expand into Harlem and build a gymnasium in Morningside Park touched off a campus rebellion and opposition among local residents.

Not wanting to stir old embers, Columbia established a 40-member community advisory council a year ago when it embarked on its plan to create a new campus on 18.3 acres bound by 125th Street, Broadway, 12th Avenue and 133rd Street. It has sponsored town hall meetings to solicit comments, and last night, Columbia unveiled its preliminary designs to Community Board 9, whose district includes West Harlem.

So far, the general reception has been cautiously positive, with most people conceding that Columbia needs to expand beyond its cramped 36-acre Morningside Heights campus.

But they do not want the university to build a campus walled off from the surrounding Manhattanville neighborhood. And many community leaders want local residents to benefit from the expansion through job training, construction jobs and professional work at research labs, as well as through opportunities for small businesses and retailers.

Columbia has incorporated many of the items into its plans, but given the history of mistrust between the university and the community, some residents want the promises hammered into stone.

"I think they need to expand," said Altagracia Hiraldo, a member of the advisory council and executive director of the Dominican Sunday Community Service, a group involved in immigration issues. "But we have to be included in the process. We want to have our people working, not just cleaning. We want the promises about jobs and job training to be in writing."

Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia's president, said the project represented a tremendous opportunity for both the university and the community.

"I have done everything I can to put the ghost of the gym behind us," he said. "Columbia is a different neighbor now. It's absolutely critical to Columbia's future that there be areas for the university's expansion. We want to stay here and be a great world university and part of building the community."

Columbia officials frequently use a chart to illustrate their problems: Yale, Princeton and Stanford have much larger campuses, with 800 or more square feet of building space per student, the chart shows, while Columbia's campus provides only 326 square feet. The university, the officials say, is in desperate need of modern research labs, residence halls and academic buildings.

Columbia expects to begin the formal public review process for its five-million-square-foot program in the fall. It hired the architect Renzo Piano and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design the project. Based on suggestions made at community meetings, the school has incorporated a number of design principles. The campus itself would retain the current streets, and building designs would invite pedestrians to move west toward the river.

The boundaries of the area are framed by the highway viaduct along 12th Avenue and the subway viaduct along Broadway. The buildings on those streets would echo the viaducts, while creating a mix of shopping, recreation and community services along 12th Avenue and Broadway.

The school would help to enliven 125th Street as a gateway to the Hudson River waterfront, where next month the city and state are expected to begin work on a $10.4 million project to build three piers for boating, fishing, ferries and recreation.

Mr. Bollinger said the university was committed to job training and to providing both construction and technical job opportunities.

In the first phase, Columbia would build a School of the Arts and research space on Broadway.

"I'd like to see the school expand the ways in which we can provide space for community arts, theater and dance," Mr. Bollinger said.

But Tom DeMott, a leader of the Coalition to Preserve Community, said Columbia was not doing enough to preserve some of the manufacturing jobs in the area or to offset potential rent increases and displacement that will accompany the expansion. Columbia owns or controls about 42 percent of the property within the 18.3 acres it wants in West Harlem, and is negotiating to buy 17 percent more. But some local businesses say Columbia is offering them too little, while others resent it for trying to oust them when a revival is at hand. The university has asked the state to consider bringing condemnation proceedings against any holdouts.

Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chairman of Community Board 9, is optimistic that the problems can be worked out. "The area they're planning to move into certainly needs development," he said.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/04/21/nyregion/columbia.gif
Warehouses and industrial buildings near the Hudson River are being bought by Columbia University as part of a plan for a new campus.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[krulltime]

Columbia's plan makes grade

Published on May 24, 2004

Columbia University wants to invest more than $750 million within the next decade to build a new campus in West Harlem. It is not an exaggeration to say that city agencies' approval of the plan is as crucial for Harlem and the entire city as it is for the university itself.

Ever present in any discussion of Columbia's need to expand its campus are the scars from the 1968 fight over the school's plan to build a gymnasium in Morningside Heights, which led to a titanic struggle with the community and a campus rebellion. Yet so much has changed in 40 years that it is hard to see what relevance that sad chapter has for anyone.

The stakes for Columbia are very high. The school has less than half the space of most of its rivals in the Ivy League, and many of its buildings are too old to accommodate the needs of modern teaching and research. President Lee Bollinger candidly admits that Columbia will never be a great university unless it can expand its campus physically in a dramatic way. In sharp contrast to most other major New York developments, Columbia will pay the cost itself, requiring very little investment help from the city or state.

The people of Harlem, too, are faced with a crucial choice about their future. For years, the neighborhood languished as its leaders adopted the view that only they could control development. Now, a flood of outside investment has led to an economic rebound in which incomes have risen, retailers have brought the area into the mainstream and office space is in great demand. While the gap between Harlem and the rest of the city has narrowed, it is Columbia's plan that will broaden the neighborhood's economic base and could close the gap completely.

The city needs Columbia to thrive because universities represent one of the economy's most promising growth areas. Since 1990, employment at universities has soared by 40%. Many of the best students in the country flock to Columbia and NYU and have continued to do so since Sept. 11. The prospects are unlimited, if the universities can find space to grow.

Specifically, Columbia is asking the city to rezone an 18-acre, underutilized manufacturing area between 125th and 133rd Streets in West Harlem. The first, $750 million phase will bring new arts and life sciences centers, campus offices and retail spaces to the area's southern section. The university pledges steps to accommodate the community's reasonable demands for access to jobs and assistance.

The rezoning plan is the linchpin, and it should be approved expeditiously.

Copyright 2004, Crain Communications, Inc

[billyblancoNYC]

If people are against this delopment, it's just sad. This is what NYC needs to do. Columbia and NYU should be NY's Harvard and MIT.

[krulltime]

I am pretty sure that it will happen since this mayor and governor are all for development. But of course there are peopel like legislative panel assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver who will more likely vote NO. :roll:

[billyblancoNYC]

Good Ol' Shelly. He would probably wait until Pace gets the same deal.

[tmg]

The New York Times
August 24, 2004
Columbia's Expansion Plans Raise Fears of a '68 Rerun
By DAVID GONZALEZ

With a dazzling smile and a grand wave at the men tugging at fishing poles, Maritta Dunn strides through the asphalt park where West 125th Street meets the Hudson River. This strip of Manhattanville is a perfect place for her to sit down and take in the view.

Mind you, her back is to the water.

Ms. Dunn is not so worried about the shorefront as she is about the jumble of buildings tucked between the soaring arches of the viaducts on Broadway and Riverside Drive. Where others see a postindustrial landscape of nearly empty factories and tomb-quiet warehouses, she sees urban survivors and brick testaments to the area's past.

She says this because Columbia University sees this same area as the site of an 18-acre campus expansion that will unfold over the next 30 years. University officials, sensitive to the social upheaval over its 1968 proposal for a gymnasium in Morningside Park, portray the new campus as essential to the future and well-being of both the university and its neighboring community.

Ms. Dunn, who is a member of Community Board 9 and the leader of a local business alliance, is not moved by those promises. She worries about new buildings cutting off the view and light to the housing projects east of Broadway, overburdened subway lines and local landlords raising rents in anticipation of gentrification

"If you don't live here, you might say: 'Columbia is coming to Harlem? That's great! That's marvelous!' " she said with faux excitement. "No, it isn't. Just because it's Columbia? No, it isn't."

After seeing a scale model of the planned campus, she had one word for it: typical. "It's typical Columbia," she explained. "To be kind, the plan is ambitious. It is typical Columbia in that it is also too much. It is too invasive. It's taking up the whole community."

While Harlem has been redeveloped and reinvented in recent years, Manhattanville had been seen as its sleepy, grungy western fringe, best known for its Fairway market. That was one reason why it attracted the attention of university officials who were confronted with resolving Columbia's space crunch. And rather than try to expand one building at a time, they were looking for an area they could use as an urban canvas.

"I very much want something that is a Columbia identity," said Lee C. Bollinger, the university's president. "I just don't want a series of unconnected buildings. Yet I very much want to bring thriving, vital life to the surrounding communities as well."

Columbia already owns or has under contract about half of the property, and officials said they felt confident they could acquire the rest. They are talking about beginning land-use reviews by fall.

Mr. Bollinger said he intended to exorcise once and for all the ghosts of the 1968 Morningside Park conflict. He said the university - which was already committed to expanding jobs as well as helping with health care and other social issues - wanted a partnership with Harlem.

Along the streets of Manhattanville, where cobblestone and trolley tracks still poke through the asphalt in one spot, the reaction is a little more cautious. Peggy Shepard, the executive director of West Harlem Environmental Action, fretted that Columbia was acting as if the deal was done.

"We have got to slow down this process," said Ms. Shepard, who has been meeting with local groups about the plan. "I do not think Columbia has come to an understanding they should be a partner, not simply a group informing others what they intend to do."

Ordinarily, the prospect of Columbia moving north would be welcome news to Anne Zuhusky Whitman, who owns a moving company that counts the university as a client. But she refuses to handle one move - her own.

She said she first learned of the plans during a meeting where she saw the tabletop model of the new campus. A laboratory building stood where her moving company should have been. Her brother's building up the street was also gone, she said. "We were obliterated from the map," she said. "I felt like somebody had given me a body blow."

Business owners said they had been approached in recent years by real estate agents they now suspected were working for Columbia. Once word of the expansion got out last year, the pitches took on an edge that was less than collegial.

"They blackmailed me," said John Busch, the owner of a boiler repair business who sold his West 130th Street building to Columbia last year.

"They said if I did not sell, I would be condemned. They would throw me out. I had no choice. How are you going to fight them? They teach lawyers."

About 14 business owners refuse to move (or are saying they will not). Ms. Zuhusky Whitman, for example, said leaving the area would add travel time to her moving teams, which, in turn, would increase the cost to customers.

While Mr. Bollinger said that he "couldn't imagine" anyone representing the university threatening owners with eviction, he added that he "can't put condemnation completely off the table," either.

Few people would argue that the area does not need a makeover. Plans have come and gone over the years, few getting beyond the sales pitch. Some of the area's most ardent defenders warn, however, of rushing to raze old blocks without thinking about reserving some of the architectural history that remains in the area.

Columbia officials said they planned to preserve three of the area's notable buildings, including the Studebaker Building and Prentice Hall. Preservationists and planners studying the plan, however, urged the university to find new uses for more old buildings while not evicting those who refused to sell.

"I'm not saying Manhattanville should be frozen in time," said Eric Washington, a local historian who has written about the community. "But if everything is shaved away as it gets old or is unused, it pulls us farther away from our history and the evidence of the story that preceded Columbia."

John Smith is ready to leave it behind. He is better known as Smitty - a butcher whose Stetson-topped portrait has adorned a few facades along 12th Avenue. For many years, he was the man behind Smitty's Inner City Meat.

"My name is Smitty," he explained. "We're in the inner city and I was dealing with meat."

Within weeks he will move to a new store, called Amity Meat, in central Harlem, itself an area that is remaking its image. Everything changes, including Manhattanville, which was crammed with meatpackers when he arrived there in the 1960's.

"Columbia is buying up a lot of property, I hear," he said. "I'm not averse to that. I think it will be an improvement. Besides, the area here now is pretty desolate. Whatever Columbia does will be an improvement, as long as it gives an opportunity to the neighborhood."

That is what John Beatty is hoping for, even as he stands firm inside the triangle-shaped building where he runs the Cotton Club (admittedly a latter-day version, since the original was on Lenox Avenue and excluded black patrons). Some real estate types tried to get him to sell, but not lately.

"Why should I move?" he said. "I'm world famous."

So is Columbia, and he has no problem with it being his neighbor. "It'll get me more business," he said. "That would be great for me. A lot of students are into history like the Cotton Club and jazz."

[tmg]

Columbia University's web page on the Manhattanville expansion:

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/campusplanning/campusplanningHome.php

Here's the draft plan for the proposed campus:

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/general/articleDetails.php?ID=4500208.0

[krulltime]

Thanks for the updates, tmg! This is such a cool project. This is going to change this northern part of the west side so much. I don't see any opposition at all... that area up there is just ugly. It sures needs this face lift. I love the renderings. :D

[Gulcrapek]

A couple of designs

http://members.isp.com/brodyrendering@isp.com/Renderings/Exteriors/images/Columbia.jpg

Daniel Brody

[Derek2k3]

That building is already done (1998 I think). It's part of Columbia's Audubon Research Park.

[Kris]

http://194.185.232.3/works/069/

[krulltime]

Getting input on Columbia expansion


By Erik Engquist & Anne Michaud
September 26, 2005

The city planning Department has scheduled a mid-November meeting to discuss the potential environmental effects of Columbia University's expansion into Manhattanville, in West Harlem. In preparation, Community Board 9 will hold five sessions, from Oct. 6 to Nov. 9, for Columbia officials to respond to questions about the 18-acre project.

Crain's reported in April that the Bloomberg administration would delay debate about the controversial expansion until after the Nov. 8 election.

Meanwhile, the 125th Street BID in Harlem plans to expand. It wants to extend the area it covers--now 125th Street from Morningside Avenue to Fifth Avenue--to include 124th and 126th streets from 12th Avenue to Second Avenue. Chief Executive Barbara Askins says the BID is forming steering committees to pursue the plan, which would need City Council and mayoral approval.

The BID was established in 1993, when the area's retail activity and property values did not support a BID beyond a small stretch of 125th Street.


©2005 Crain Communications Inc.

[krulltime]

Columbia's Plan To Expand Campus Raises Neighbors' Ire


By RUSSELL BERMAN - Special to the Sun
November 16, 2005

Scores of West Harlem residents and community leaders responded with skepticism and anger last night to Columbia University's plan to expand its campus by 17 acres into Manhattanville.

As many as 90 people signed up to speak and hundreds more packed a school auditorium at a public hearing before the Department of City Planning to review the university's outline for an environmental impact statement. Most of the speakers asked for more details about Columbia's plan and urged the university to reject the use of eminent domain.

"At a bare minimum, you must replace the housing and the workplaces of these people that you're displacing," a Harlem historian and member of Community Board 9, Michael Adams, said in comments directed at the university. "Otherwise, it will just continue to be a hostile project," he added later.

Columbia representatives did not respond directly to the objections raised last night but repeated that eminent domain would be exercised only "as a last resort." The city will accept written comments about the plan until January 6.

Columbia's $5 billion, 25-year proposal would rezone and overhaul a 35-acre swath of land that stretches from 125th Street to 133th Street and west of Broadway to the Hudson River. The plan, the university says, would accommodate its pressing need for more space and at the same time revitalize West Harlem by adding thousands of new jobs, open space, and retail areas.

Yesterday's hearing, held in the auditorium of Roberto Clemente Middle School on 133rd Street at Broadway, was designed to gather public comments on the planned scope of Columbia's environmental impact statement, a key document in the lengthy city process for approving major land developments. The dozens of speakers included some who passionately denounced the university's plan altogether and others who simply asked city planners to consider alternatives before deciding to go forward.

Community Board 9, which represents the area where Columbia wants to build, has drafted its own proposal to redevelop Manhattanville. The board's plan, known as 197-A, limits the areas on which the university can build, guarantees that residents and businesses won't be forced out, and maintains units of low- and moderate-income housing in the area.

"The 197-A has wide, wide support in this community," the board's chairman, Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, said.

Columbia has agreed to include the 197-A plan as an alternative in its environmental statement, but community board members yesterday demanded that its proposal be given equal weight in the city's deliberations." The 197-A must be compared topic by topic as a full-blown alternative plan," a board member, Mathy Stanislaus, said at the hearing.

In pushing its broad, long-term plan, the university repeatedly has pointed to statistics that show it is lagging behind its chief Ivy League rivals in space. In its 17 acres, Columbia wants to build academic buildings, research laboratories, and housing for graduate students and faculty. Since first offering its proposal in 2004, the university also has promoted aspects of the plan that it says will benefit the community at large. Those include nearly 7,000 new jobs, added tax revenue, 50,000 to 70,000 square feet of open space, and an enhanced waterfront.


© 2005 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.

[czsz]

No one cared a whit about this place until Columbia proposed building upon it.

Now it's become a cause celebre used to rally the left against the displacement of a few dozen people and the potential gentrification of surrounding streets. They would rather Columbia intersperse academic buildings in the neighbourhood, ala NYU, but nevertheless in a neighbourhood which consists, rather than of the townhouses and lively streets of a Greenwich Village, primarily of broken-down industrial complexes, tinpot small businesses, the assorted storefront church and a tenement or two. Does New York really wish to reduce its greatest university to this level of provincially-dictated pettiness?

[ablarc]

Right on, czsz, I couldn't agree more. This kneejerk nimbyism has got to stop; there are limits to political correctness, beyond which it's purest comic opera.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Not exactly a lively neighborhood.

The site, with Columbia properties in red.
http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/8651/columbia01m3so.th.jpg (http://img412.imageshack.us/my.php?image=columbia01m3so.jpg)

[elfgam]

Columbia should offer to buy and replace the public housing complex immediately to the east -- not move th eresidents, just renovate the buildings add more ground floor uses and more buildings to compliment them -- but this will never happen -- around NYC large complexes like these form the wall up against which regneration stops.

[TLOZ Link5]

Does New York really wish to reduce its greatest university to this level of provincially-dictated pettiness?

I didn't know that NYU was planning on expanding in Manhattanville too :p

[czsz]

Which reminds me, they let City College expand nearby. And City College was the only New York institution to produce a Rhodes Scholar last year. So maybe they do award priority based on achievement...

[czsz]

By the way, Zippy, your map is outdated:

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/gallery/ownership.jpg

The big grey blob is a giant bus garage the MTA refuses to move. Damn them.

[czsz]

It would be nice to see Old Broadway restored through the projects and given some kind of streetwall...uptown needs more quirky, wandering streets like that.

[vc10]

In the thread on the Javits center was a statement that bus garage space is at a tremendous premium in Manhattan (there's one a block or so north of the Javits center as well). I don't like bus garages much either, but it's reasonable to ask---where would the buses go if this garage was torn down?

One answer: put them underground (or otherwise integrate them somehow into mixed use developments). Not sure how that would work (though perhaps the Port Authority bus terminal points the way? I.e. a tower on top of a garage?).

The big grey blob is a giant bus garage the MTA refuses to move. Damn them.

[czsz]

Question: do buses need to be stored in Manhattan? Isn't this auxiliary crap what the outer boroughs were annxed for?

[vc10]

Somehow I suspect the outer boroughs would object. In fact, most bus garages in Manhattan are already north of 100th St, a source of angst for those who live in northern Manhattan.

A better solution would be to find a way of integrating bus garages into the rest of the city---e.g. underground or something.

Question: do buses need to be stored in Manhattan? Isn't this auxiliary crap what the outer boroughs were annxed for?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Any plan that removes the bus garage has to consider an alternate site as part of the EIS.

That brings another neighborhood into the conflict, the one getting the garage. The low residential density that makes the site attractive for the development also makes it attractive for the garage.

Unless there is a plan to put it on Sutton Place, the federally mandated Environmental Justice provision would be difficult to satisfy.

Putting the garage underground is a solution, but expensive. I wonder what the ground conditions are in Manhattanville?

[czsz]

Columbia already plans a vast parking / delivery area under the new campus, into which the bus garage may be integrable.

[lofter1]

Question: do buses need to be stored in Manhattan? Isn't this auxiliary crap what the outer boroughs were annxed for?Manhattanophile?? ;)

(or Queensophobe :p ???? )

[ablarc]

Question: do buses need to be stored in Manhattan?
They could store them end to end in the tunnel of the Second Avenue Subway.

[Kris]

May 21, 2006
Dispute
The Manhattanville Project
By DAPHNE EVIATAR

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/magazine/21dispute.450.jpg

One evening in the spring of 2004, the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp attended a presentation at a community board meeting by the celebrated architect Renzo Piano. Unveiling preliminary sketches, Piano laid out his vision for the campus he's designing for Columbia University's president, Lee Bollinger. In contrast to the gated, stone Beaux-Arts-Renaissance campus built more than a century ago in Morningside Heights, the new West Harlem campus would tell a more contemporary story: filling almost 18 acres parallel to the waterfront, it would open Columbia to the surrounding community. Some buildings could reach 25 stories, and the streets would remain publicly accessible. A walkway would extend from 125th to 133rd Streets, cutting through the length of the campus. And in the center of a square of buildings there would be a large, open space. "It is a piazza," Piano said, in his lilting Italian accent. "The people will come, there will be discourse."

Kooperkamp, the Kentucky-born minister of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in West Harlem, was skeptical. "You're talking about being a 21st-century university," he recalls telling Piano. "And this looks like 12th-century Christ Church Oxford. It's a quad. That's not a piazza. That's not open space for a community. If it were, it would be a big lawn on 125th Street or Broadway."

The dispute over Piano's piazza encapsulates a larger conflict Columbia is now having with its neighbors to the north. When Columbia announced its plans to build a much-needed new campus in a corner of Harlem called Manhattanville, it saw a gritty neighborhood of auto-repair shops, tenements and small manufacturers that would probably pose little obstacle to its ambitions. Columbia says that the project will advance a vital public interest and help revitalize parts of Upper Manhattan. Yet the university has met remarkable resistance. One man's urban improvement, it seems, is another man's urban debacle.

The divergent views of the project may arise from the very different situations of its beholders. Since becoming Columbia's president in 2002, Bollinger has committed himself to restoring the international stature the university held half a century ago, when Columbia boasted such luminaries as Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling and almost half the faculty of its physics department either had won or would win a Nobel Prize. To do that, Bollinger's administration has been recruiting hard, hiring, among others, some 10 star economists and 18 science and engineering professors.

"As knowledge grows and fields grow, we need more faculty, you need a certain scale," Bollinger says. "And we need places to put them. Now, a number of young faculty share offices. Our science departments have lab conditions that don't compare to what other top universities have." As Bollinger often points out, Columbia has 194 square feet per student; Harvard boasts 368.

Certainly Columbia's plans are ambitious: across a large swath of Upper Manhattan, the university wants to create an academic enclave that will both nurture intellectual progress and revitalize an urban area. Piano's design aims to accomplish both. The campus will have wide, open streets that offer a broad view of the waterfront. Along the main thoroughfares, the lower floors of the academic buildings will be mostly glass — "they will be floating," as Piano puts it — filled with shops, restaurants and arts spaces serving the broader public of Harlem and the Upper West Side. The designs are still preliminary, and plans for specific buildings have yet to be developed. But Piano, who also designed The New York Times's new headquarters, now under construction, and a well-received addition to the Morgan Library, is committed to designing the space to promote these integrationist aims. "You will feel part of the community," Piano told me when we met at Columbia's Prentis Hall, a white-tiled former milk-bottling plant on Manhattanville's southern edge. Indeed, Piano's drawings, on display in the sunny ground-floor workshop, depict transparent skyscrapers lining ample boulevards with ethereal-looking pedestrians ambling along them.

But in the eyes of many local residents, Piano's optimistic rendering obscures the fact that to fulfill its vision, the university will have to bulldoze almost everything that's already there. About 1,600 people are currently employed in this part of Manhattanville, and some 400 live there. Many residents are disturbed by the placement of the campus between a park being built at the West Harlem Pier and the community that fought for years to have that park created. Meanwhile, most everyone expects that the university's arrival will accelerate the gentrification that is already transforming the historically black neighborhood of Harlem — to the benefit of some residents and the harm of others.

That places Columbia in an awkward position. "If Columbia were like another private developer, most would say it has no responsibility," says Peter Marcuse, a professor of urban planning at Columbia. "Developers are private-sector entities whose purpose is to make money. But Columbia is a nonprofit institution. It gets substantial public benefits and thus has substantial public obligations as a property owner." Of course, those public obligations are hard to define. If a development creates thousands of worthwhile new jobs, mostly for outsiders, while eliminating hundreds of local jobs, has it served the public good?

Bollinger came to Columbia with the respect of many in Harlem who had long regarded the university with suspicion. As president of the University of Michigan, he won renown for defending a challenge to its affirmative-action program all the way to the Supreme Court. And from the start, he presented Columbia's plan as promoting the integration of a public-service-oriented university with its diverse surroundings. "There was a time when Columbia really turned its back on where it was located," Bollinger says. "I wanted to take exactly the opposite approach."

That presented Columbia with a complex architectural challenge. "A university is a place where young people take a step back from the world so that when they re-enter, they do so with great intensity, care and responsibility," says Mark Wigley, dean of Columbia's graduate school of architecture. "So the university must be a defined space. The fascinating challenge is how to make that a space of withdrawal and reflection and at the same time integrate that space in the richest way possible in the very heart of vibrant New York City." In Bollinger's view, that sort of space benefits not only the university but also its neighbors. A hallmark of the new campus will be a center featuring Columbia's impressive array of neuroscientists. Bollinger also wants to bring the School of the Arts to Manhattanville, linking the arts with the physical and the social sciences. "We're looking for a new kind of intellectual paradigm," Bollinger told me, seated in his spacious office in Low Memorial Library, an imposing domed edifice in the center of the Morningside Heights campus. "Now we don't have the facilities to really achieve this intellectual ambition."

Columbia has promised to relocate residents directly displaced by its $7 billion plan, which it expects will create nearly 7,000 new jobs over 25 to 30 years — including academic, technical, maintenance and support positions, plus those at any new restaurants and shops. It has reserved space on the campus for a public school specializing in math, science and engineering. And Bollinger says he's willing to negotiate other benefits, like local hiring preferences. But to Bollinger, who describes his approach to development as "somewhere between the Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses views of the world," the interests of Harlem residents are only one concern among many. "We are not a profit-making institution looking out for our own advantage," he said. "We are trying to do things that help the world more broadly. The community is not everything." Above all, he seems unwilling to compromise on one thing: he wants the entire space. Indeed, Piano's design requires it. Much of the campus is to be built into a sort of bathtub that could reach seven stories underground. "The factory," as Piano calls it, would hide the facility's more noxious needs — like parking, loading docks and energy equipment — allowing the campus itself to be serene.

Columbia has already purchased more than half the property it would need. But some owners have refused to sell, and Columbia says that eminent domain remains an option if negotiations fail. It's a dicey option, however. Throughout the country, public opposition to eminent domain has mounted since last summer, when the Supreme Court ruled that private property can be seized by local governments for private development. Virtually every state has considered changing its eminent-domain laws; at least 13 different bills on the subject have been introduced in Congress. As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his dissent in the recent Kelo case, concerning New London, Conn., an expansive definition of "public use" in the 50's and 60's permitted local governments to eliminate entire minority neighborhoods through eminent domain in the name of "urban renewal" — soon known as "Negro removal" among blacks. Not surprisingly, Columbia's talk of seizing property does not go over well in Harlem. Still, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come out in strong support of eminent domain — which also figures in the developer Bruce Ratner's controversial efforts to construct a basketball stadium and condos in the Atlantic Yards area of Brooklyn. Without it, "every big city would have all construction come to a screeching halt," Bloomberg said recently.

It doesn't help Columbia's reputation in Harlem that it wants to use part of the space for a lab with a security clearance that would allow research on highly dangerous substances like anthrax. (Columbia says that it has no plans to actually do such research on the new campus.) Since Sept. 11, many people have warned that such labs could become terrorist targets. And given that Harlem has long been a depository for the city's unwanted environmental hazards — including a sewage-treatment plant and three-quarters of Manhattan's bus depots — many residents are immediately suspicious of large government-supported projects. "You never know when an accident can happen," says Sarah Martin, president of the residents' association at a housing development in Manhattanville. "Where do a lot of deadly viruses come from? They're airborne sometimes. I heard something about the AIDS virus being made in a dish. So that's a possibility." Indeed, many are quick to mention an outbreak last year of Legionnaire's disease at the Columbia-affiliated NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital or that Columbia has been fined for mishandling hazardous waste. Local residents also repeatedly reminded me that Columbia scientists participated in the original Manhattan Project — leading some to dub Columbia's campus plan "the Manhattanville Project."

Columbia hopes that the benevolent aims of the institution, and its modern campus featuring open spaces that local residents can enjoy, will eventually assuage local concerns. "This is creating a neighborhood," says Bernard Tschumi, a former dean of Columbia's school of architecture. "Students bring street life, they bring safety. Maybe not when universities built themselves as fortresses, like Columbia did a century ago. But the attitude today is very different. Renzo and Lee have exactly the right idea."

Still, other architecture critics are skeptical. "If it's driving out existing businesses and driving up real estate prices, then the specific character of the architecture has very little impact," says Michael Sorkin, director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at City College. "I don't think that glassy facades have much to do with the loss of low-cost housing." In Sorkin's view, Columbia will have to offer the community more than a pleasing design to address that: "What they do to mitigate that disruption is a measure of the conscience and intelligence of the university."

The greatest fear of West Harlem residents is that they'll eventually be driven out. "The central thing to understand is that Harlem is terrified of gentrification, and rightly so," says Herbert Gans, a Columbia sociologist. Columbia's arrival is only intensifying those fears. "Columbia is an important cog in the wheel that is driving gentrification in Harlem," says Nellie Bailey, executive director of the Harlem Tenants' Council. "This is not just a neighborhood struggle. What will happen to the city's mosaic if the working and middle class can no longer afford to live here?" But many, including Gans, think that if the university handles the project well, Columbia could bring much-needed jobs, affordable housing and other improvements to Manhattanville — an area Gans calls "an industrial slum."

At a packed forum last fall at the Municipal Art Society in Midtown Manhattan, it was clear that Columbia's efforts to win over its neighbors were faring poorly. "We welcome Columbia to our neighborhood, but not to bulldoze us," announced Anne Whitman, owner of a moving and storage business situated in the proposed construction site. It was not possible to know how representative those in attendance were of the Manhattanville community. That said, business owners, planning experts and West Harlem residents alternately described Columbia's plan as "abysmal," "criminal," "greedy" and "heartless." At a city hearing a month later, 70 speakers stood up over a period of six and a half hours to denounce "Hurricane Columbia" for a plan many claimed would force out longtime residents, eliminate skilled manufacturing jobs, drive up Harlem housing costs and segregate the racially diverse neighborhood. Columbia has presented its new campus designs to a range of West Harlem community organizations. So far, though, the plans don't seem to have calmed their concerns. "Columbia is going to be between the community and the park," says Peggy Shepard, executive director of We Act for Environmental Justice. "Will people feel comfortable going over there, or will it be only for Columbia students?"

In part, the problem may be that the general public — and particularly the immediately surrounding neighborhood — doesn't always view architectural designs the way architects do. "In theory, a brilliant design can overcome social reservations on the part of the community," says Alex Krieger, professor of urban planning and design at Harvard. "But such conflicts are as much emotional as they are rational. A neighborhood that feels itself disempowered by comparison to the power of a university is always going to have its guard up."

Given Columbia's history, that guard is particularly high here. In 1968, when much of the world was in turmoil, Columbia University had its own reckoning. Although campus protests were common for the day, the uprising at Columbia was striking for its scale and brutality. And the spark had much to do with a university expansion plan: to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park in Harlem. In a concession to the community, the university agreed to provide gym facilities for local residents — with a separate entrance on the Harlem side.

The so-called Gym Crow didn't sit well with Harlem neighbors, or with many students on campus. And it fueled tensions over other expansion efforts, as throughout the 60's Columbia had been purchasing apartment buildings all over Morningside Heights, displacing thousands of poor, mostly black and Puerto Rican residents.

In April 1968, students took over five major campus buildings in protest. A week later, the standoff ended in bloodshed: police stormed the buildings, beating and arresting students. Nearly 200 were injured.

"It was a war, and it had devastating consequences," Bollinger told me recently. "Many faculty left because they were bitter that the university had allowed an anti-intellectual group to take down the university; others left because the response was so brutal."

Community Board 9, composed of about 50 people appointed by the borough president who represent a broad cross-section of West Harlem residents, activists and business owners, does not oppose Columbia's expansion to West Harlem per se. But it wants Columbia to conform to a very different West Harlem plan that the board has developed — after community meetings and consultations with urban-planning experts — over the last decade. In Manhattanville, the board's plan would retain some manufacturing, preserve more historic architecture and allow current property owners to remain. The university would have to build around them. The city, now reviewing both proposals, has asked Columbia and the community board to try to reconcile their differences.

That may be difficult. Although Bollinger acknowledges that Columbia has an obligation to its surrounding community, he says he believes that Columbia's nonprofit status also works the other way around: "We're not here to make money, we're here to discover knowledge. So there's a larger public interest here that's extremely important to keep one's eye on."

Columbia has agreed to negotiate with a development corporation and the community board over providing a broad range of benefits. Across the country, such agreements are increasingly encouraging private designs to encompass the concerns of public planning. If successful, the Manhattanville project could become a model for responsible urban development — balancing the university's global ambitions with some of its neighbors' more immediate concerns.

Back when he was championing affirmative action, Bollinger described diversity as "trying to understand what it is like to be in the mind of another person who has a different life experience." The success of his latest endeavor may depend on whether he can generate that kind of empathy now.

Daphne Eviatar has written widely about economic development. Her last article for the magazine was a profile of Jeffrey Sachs.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[tmg]

Question: do buses need to be stored in Manhattan? Isn't this auxiliary crap what the outer boroughs were annxed for?

Msg from Queens: we love you, too!

But the real issue with bus depots is that they need to be close to the routes they serve. The longer buses need to be driven at the beginnings/ends of their shifts, the less time can be spent actually operating service. In other words, maintaining service at current levels after a depot moves further away requires more buses, more drivers, and a bigger depot.

[SilentPandaesq]

^^ Sounds like something that can be solved with some multi-level infrastructure. :) (like most things in the city)

Does anyone know what impact this plan will have on Dinosaur BBQ, or FairWay for that matter?

[tmg]

Does anyone know what impact this plan will have on Dinosaur BBQ, or FairWay for that matter?

Dinosaur BBQ appears to be in the middle of the site, so it will be affected (although hopefully Columbia will be true to its word that it wants to create ground floor retail/restaurant spaces)

Fairway is west of 12th Avenue, so is not within the boundaries of the planned campus.

[BPC]

I am pretty familiar with the area, as I used to date a girl just south of the site off 125th Street, and I used to get my junky car fixed by some highly skilled Dominican mechanics under the highway there. I must say that Columbia's expansion will be great for the City and for West Harlem. That being said, Columbia should do it WITHOUT eminent domain. It is morally repugnant for a public institution like Columbia to evict small businesses and residents. They should build around the plots they don't own. If Renzo's plan has to be skilled back, so be it.

[SilentPandaesq]

Re: DinosaurBBQ

That is distressing. My girlfriend is quite the fan of the BBQ (owing to her Syracuse upbringing, and the fact that it is damn tasty) I have little hope that it will be untouched since the plot that it sits on is large and comprises a jumble of buildings. Best hope is that it moves to another location, although it that is sad since the community seams to have embraced the place (forget getting a table after church on Sunday :eek:)

[ablarc]

Columbia should do it WITHOUT eminent domain.
Certainly, if it can.

It is morally repugnant for a public institution like Columbia to evict small businesses and residents.
If they've bought the property there's not much morally repugnant about evicting a tenant. You'd want to do that if you'd bought the property. The fact that it's a "public" (really, private?) institution hasn't much to do with it, does it?

They should build around the plots they don't own. If Renzo's plan has to be skilled back, so be it.
Potentially disruptive to orderly growth. Potential for extortionist holdouts.

Mixed feelings about this. You can easily imagine a scenario where there's so much "community" left in place that the redevelopment doesn't work. Possible outcome: nobody benefits.

[BPC]

BTW, one criticism that I find totally bogus is that this new campus will be "between" the community and the new riverfront park. So what? The current Manhattanville is also "between" the two. Unless Columbia will be closing streets (which I sincerely hope not to be the case), the community will still be the same distance for the park. Only the walk will be nicer.

[krulltime]

History Lesson
Three decades after the drama of '68, will Harlem make room for Columbia?


http://images.villagevoice.com/issues/0621/murphy.jpg


by Jarrett Murphy
May 23rd, 2006

Chances are that walking down 131st Street 30 years from now, you will not miss Pedro y José Auto Body, nor, on 130th, mourn the absence of Boiler Repair Maintenance Company. It is unlikely that you ever planned to live in a walk-up like 3289 Broadway or enjoy a "100% brushless car wash" three blocks away. And even if you have patronized the nearby paint store, pharmacy, architect, personal trainer, building-supply store, moving companies, construction firms, U-Haul yard, drug treatment facility, Gérard Duré's salon, or any of the storage facilities, gas stations, or Pentecostal churches in the area, you'll probably learn to live without. You may even appreciate the sprucing up of the tired-looking factory buildings and an end to the stench that rises from the Twelfth Avenue sidewalk after a delivery of meat or poultry to a wholesaler there.

What's more, you could end up working or studying in what will take their place in Manhattanville: nearly 7 million square feet of offices, research space, and housing for Columbia University. With scant wiggle room at its main Morningside Heights campus or uptown medical center, Columbia wants to move onto 18 acres roughly north of 125th Street and just east of Twelfth Avenue. To do it, the state's oldest college is asking the city for a special rezoning, scooping up parcels of land, and preparing to ask the state to invoke eminent domain if necessary.

Needless to say, not everyone in the area is thrilled with the idea. Residents, business owners, and some Columbia students have banded together to oppose the plan. The local community board is pushing an alternative development scheme. Civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel has signed on to resist eminent domain. A sign on a door in the area reads, "Dear Columbia: Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself."

In the constant evolution of New York neighborhoods, this sort of fight isn't anything new. And for Columbia especially, this is not a first. Thirty-eight years ago, the university's bid to expand into Morningside Park—coupled with outrage over the school's military contracts—touched off days off unrest on campus in which students occupied five buildings and, in some cases, clashed violently with cops. After the bloodshed, that expansion plan died. Columbia has pursued projects in the years since, but none were as ambitious as the vision for Manhattanville.

Some opponents of the plan claim the resistance to the new proposal is the stiffest Columbia has faced since the student uprising. Folks caught in the middle think the university is applying lessons learned. "Columbia sees shadows of 1968," says Steve Stollman, a local businessman who says he's been offered a very attractive relocation deal. "They have to be very careful how they treat people when it's conspicuous like this."

But the parallel only goes so far. Last time the battle was over race and war. Now, the debate is about what makes a 21st-century city tick.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Columbia is the quintessential great urban university and the most constrained for space," the school president, Lee Bollinger, said when he took the job in 2002. The school has developed more than 2 million square feet of new space since 1994, but Columbia still has only "one-half the square foot per student as peer institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton," according to planning documents. "The absence of space really had started to affect the university's intellectual agenda. Faculty didn't have space for facilities to pursue research," says Robert Kasdin, Columbia's senior executive vice president. For instance, the neurology department, which is working on autism and Alzheimer's, was feeling squeezed.

That's why Columbia now wants to rezone 35 acres in Manhattanville for an 18-acre campus to include academic buildings, labs, support services, graduate and faculty housing, and perhaps even a hotel and convention center "to support Columbia's educational activities." The development over the next 25 to 30 years, with a projected $7.4 billion in spending, is supposed to create 2,000 construction jobs during the build-out and some 9,000 positions after that. What's more, Columbia's planning documents say, it'll clean up a bleak part of town.

"Once a thriving manufacturing area, today Manhattanville is characterized by automotive uses, storage facilities, and other low job-generating activities," one document reads. "The area's manufacturing zoning has not stimulated the development of lively retail and office uses that are now characteristic of 125th Street east of Broadway."

That's where some local activists differ. "There's this theory of university and institutions being growth machines of the city," says Nellie Bailey, a member of the Coalition to Preserve Community. "We don't believe that. We believe the real growth of the city lies in bringing back its manufacturing base."

This difference characterizes the competing development plan drafted by Community Board 9, which preserves space for the manufacturing firms and other businesses that right now employ about 1,600 people. It could also retain the apartments that an estimated 400 people—the vast majority of them low- to moderate-income—call home.

Faced with competing plans for the same blocks, the City Planning Commission told the community board and university to try to work out a compromise. Columbia had already organized a series of forums on the plan. Now, says Kasdin, the school and community board are talking. But he won't say whether parts of Columbia's proposal have evolved. The chairman of Community Board 9, Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, tells the Voice, "[Columbia's] plans have changed very little so far."

Community activists have several beefs. One is the school's plan for a biological- research lab, which could gain a biosafety rating of up to level 3, meaning it might handle pathogens like anthrax and West Nile. Opponents say that kind of facility is too risky to locate near housing complexes, especially after 9-11 and particularly since the EPA in 2002 cited Columbia for mishandling hazardous waste. Columbia says no one's health or safety was endangered by the EPA violations. Their proposed lab won't handle real horror-show stuff like Marburg and Ebola viruses, like Boston University's planned level 4 lab in Southie. And Columbia already has a level 3 lab, although officials aren't eager to say where.

The chief complaint of activists, though, is the lack on information about just what kind of lab Columbia is planning; the school says it knows roughly where the facility will go, but not what work will be done there. The same goes for what will happen to residents. The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development owns four of the residential buildings in the area. Two are about to be transferred to a nonprofit for rehabilitation. Two others are in the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program, in which residents apply for conversion to a low-income co-op and are allowed to purchase their units for $250. Neil Coleman, a spokesman for HPD, says that there have only been preliminary talks with Columbia and that the city has told the school that it must offer the tenants nothing less than they'd get in their present digs. That could mean coming up with a replacement building for the TIL tenants. "No such offer has been made," Coleman says. Columbia vows that all tenants will get equal or better situations.

When it comes to the 70-odd businesses that could be displaced, however, Columbia is making offers. Stollman, a former Columbia student who for 20 years has used a warehouse in the expansion zone, says the university started out threatening to shut down the building's elevator. Then the school lightened up, hiring a guy to run the elevator and offering relocation deals of better space at the same rent in the same area.

Scott Lacock, for one, isn't fazed by the impending move for his plumbing-supply outfit, which employs about 30 workers hailing from the city and beyond. Heck, Lacock says, he might even gain some business when people in a new neighborhood see his trucks. Either way, he has no complaints: Columbia has been his landlord for years, and he was told early on that his stay would be temporary. "I'm very thankful," he says.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


With its physical size and financial power, Columbia can look like the 800-pound gorilla to its neighbors, and critics see the Manhattanville proposal as a gorilla-sized invasion. But Kasdin says going big was deliberate. In the past, Columbia has acquired properties one by one and battled with neighbors over what to build there. "There were regular clashes over our opportunistic and incremental approach to growth," he says. "The way in which this has been done has not served the university or the community." The Manhattanville proposal is an attempt at a more comprehensive approach, he adds, in which the school and the community understand each other's long-term needs. Columbia is quick to emphasize the friendlier aspects of its push: a community benefits agreement, open streets, and ground-floor retail. The school's steady pace of land acquisition is meant to negate the need for eminent domain.

For skeptics of the plan, however, the problem is bigger than Columbia. It's the development craze that's roiling Harlem block by block, displacing tenants and replacing neighborhood stores with flashy franchises. Similar forces are acting citywide: The small industry that moves out of Manhattanville will compete for space with similar firms uprooted from Williamsburg, and maybe Willets Point. The areas where blue-collar work is welcome are dwindling.

Kasdin says Columbia's development will offer "the full range of jobs, from unskilled to tenured faculty" with good pay and full benefits in an area where employment has plummeted 35 percent in the past two decades. The area's parking lots and wide-open factory floors reflect untapped potential. But Columbia's opponents say the area can prosper without abandoning its industrial roots. "If this were a mixed-use area which still supported the idea that manufacturing was a valuable and beneficial thing as a city, you would see a dramatic increase in local employment opportunities in that same 30-year period," says development opponent Tom DeMott.

Even in boomtown New York, somebody's going to need that 100 percent brushless car wash.


Copyright © 2006 Village Voice Media, Inc.

[ablarc]

The areas where blue-collar work is welcome are dwindling.
Things change. Blue-collar work is moving not just out of Harlem but also out of the U.S.

History isn't static, never has been.

I've been blue-collar, glad I escaped. Vastly overrated, and definitely not the wave of the future.

Columbia used to offer easier admission to alumni's children. Why not a little favor shown in admitting Manhattanville's sons and daughters if they're otherwise qualified?

A Columbia education is worth more to any family than a job in a car-wash.

[elfgam]

From the article:

"That's where some local activists differ. "There's this theory of university and institutions being growth machines of the city," says Nellie Bailey, a member of the Coalition to Preserve Community. "We don't believe that. We believe the real growth of the city lies in bringing back its manufacturing base."

Are they retarded? NY will never bring back its manufacturing base... and certainly not to Harlem, 10 blocks north of million dollar apartments and Columbia campus. Sorry, no way.

This columbia expansion will enable the city to expand its employment base not only directly through Columbia but also indirectly through all the spinoffs these programs generate in the form of start-ups. Also, the improvements in the area (at least in the eyes of outsiders) will expand the ability of the city to attract smaller companies and middle class residents to that sector of the city. For the poorer working class, the opportunity to work for the school in services such as administration, maintenance, cleaning, moving, catering, etc. or in support of the school at local restaurants and stores will also be a source of steady income.

The city is not getting 9000 jobs (and countless more indirect jobs) from a resurgence of manufacturing (which is mostly automated, anyway). It's best it tap this.

In terms of manufacturing, i do concur that NY does need to provide space for it and also help it grow a little bit (mostly in terms of support manufacturing and repair). The way to do this is clearly identify a series of areas such as Hunt's Point, Maspeth, East New York, Staten Island West, etc. that it loudly announces it will NEVER rezone to anything else but industry and then (unlike in billyburg) it should enfore those rules in those few areas and prevent illegal conversions.

[antinimby]

...says Nellie Bailey, a member of the Coalition to Preserve Community. "We don't believe that. We believe the real growth of the city lies in bringing back its manufacturing base."Oh yes, I can see GM coming into Harlem and setting up an assembly plant to build Chevrolet Tahoes. This Bailey douche bag is truly an IDIOT to the Nth degree. Scary to think these people actually have some influence and say in the happenings in this city.

Are they retarded?That would be a, YES.

[ablarc]

It would be nice to think that they were dinosaurs. But they survive to drivel again another day.

[Eugenious]

I think it's just a matter of class warfare. Columbia is an elite ivy league wealthy university. The neighborhood is a lower income blue color mostly uneducated.

[TonyO]

NY Sun
6/1/06

Columbia's Planned Expansion to Manhattanville Draws Fire From Small Businesses, Community Board

By JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN, Special to the Sun

Columbia University's planned expansion northward from its Morningside Heights campus into West Harlem, which it calls Manhattanville, is now quietly being reviewed by the Department of City Planning. But the negotiations will not stay quiet for long. Columbia's expansion is not only opposed by several small business owners in the area who have refused to sell the university their property, it is also at odds with the local community board's official plan.And while many issues are ostensibly technical - current zoning disallows most of what Columbia hopes to do - the substantive disagreements are fundamental.

Columbia wants a virtual blank slate on which to build Renzo Piano's ambitious scheme.The community board basically wants an improved and denser version of what it has now - a mix of industry, warehouses, a few restaurants and bakeries, and several housing projects. "Columbia has an all-encompassing plan that depends on the complete removal of buildings, people, places, and things between 125th and 133rd Street and from Broadway to 12th Avenue," a local resident and member of the Coalition to Preserve Community's steering committee,Tom DeMott, said.

While this is somewhat of an exaggeration, according to the map Columbia has posted on its Web site, Mr. De-Mott is correct that Columbia plans to wipe out most of what is now in its "expansion zone." But to succeed, it must first get the city to change the area's manufacturing zoning, which outlaws nearly all new residential and many new commercial uses. Current zoning also maintains low height restrictions on buildings, thereby prohibiting construction of Columbia's proposed towers. In part because of the zoning restrictions,West Harlem has an old-fashioned industrial look. By Manhattan standards, it holds relatively few businesses, and limited residences other than public housing projects, which are allowed in manufacturing zones. Even as residential and mixed-use developments spring up all around it, West Harlem seems caught in earlier depressed times.

Both Columbia, which is New York's 12th-largest employer, and Community Board 9, one of the city's most active boards, submitted their seemingly con tradictory plans to City Planning, which essentially asked for time out. "We knew Columbia's goals, and we knew the community's goals. We saw that these were two very different approaches to the future of the area," a spokeswoman for City Planning, Rachaele Raynoff, said. "We invoked a rule long on the books that we hadn't cause to use before - a coordinationof-plan rule - that lets us say we would like them to sit down and resolve their differences. It's better to resolve differences from the ground up rather than impose anything."

The community board does not oppose Columbia's expansion as such, but says that it wants the university to adhere to the planning guidelines it has developed over 10 years of work, guided by the Pratt Institute. That means

preserving some historic buildings, retaining a few industrial uses, encouraging affordable housing, and not using eminent domain to coerce property owners into selling.

One such owner, Nicholas Sprayregen, whose father started their company,Tuck-It-Away Self Storage, with one building in 1980, said that his business is thriving and he intends to stay. He now owns five buildings, four of which are desired by Columbia. "I serve this community," he said. "I can't move. I won't move. I have no problem co-existing with Columbia."

Similarly, the owner of Despatch Moving & Storage, Judy Zuhusky, said, "We not only need to be where we are in Manhattan for accessibility to clients, we have to be located on a wide street like Broadway that can handle tractor trailers. We set our roots down here many years ago, and we're willing to live with Columbia. They're a neighbor.They're welcome to be here. But we need to respect each other."

Yet Columbia's goal, Mr. Sprayregen argues, is "to own 100% of everything. They have no desire for nuance, for compromise, for diversity."

Columbia's vice president for government and community affairs, Max ine Griffiths, said that Columbia is making every effort to include diverse shops and businesses in its plan, in part by maintaining 125th Street as well as 12th Avenue as commercial corridors. The immensely popular Dinosaur Restaurant, for example, located in a building recently purchased by Columbia, will surely have a home in the plan, Ms. Griffiths believes. "I can't imagine it could be otherwise," she noted.

In its application to City Planning,Columbia has asked for zoning map and text changes to convert nearly all of the expansion area to C6-2,which would normally allow medium density commercial, community facility, and residential development. Such development is compatible with what most activists, including community board members,want for West Harlem. But Columbia has inserted what zoning lawyer Howard Goldman called a cute trick - proposing half the normal permitted residential density. Mr. Goldman, who represents the West Harlem Business Group,says that asking for low-density residential is very unusual,but that one result would be the maintenance of low property values.

When the time comes for exercising eminent domain, the state agency, the Empire State Development Corporation - acting for Columbia - would have to pay far less. Ms. Griffiths said the university simply doesn't need higher residential zoning since it will house most of its students under community facility zoning, which permits dormitory towers.

The business group also wants rezoning to allow denser residential and commercial development. "Right now," Mr. Sprayregen said,"I'm not allowed to develop my own property to its full commercial potential. This is a blatant example of blight by zoning, blight forced upon the neighborhood by city regulations.Despite zoning,the neighborhood is far better off now than it's ever been, yet Columbia, ironically, is claiming it's so terrible and so blighted."

At the heart of this struggle is the ancient question of who benefits. Manhattan is booming, businesses and enterprises are expanding, and those who invested early in blighted neighborhoods expect to reap the rewards of their foresight. As Ms. Zuhosky pointed out, "This is an island where everyone wants to be. We can all get along as neighbors, so long as everyone is fair."

[MrSpice]

Thos community groups are always protesting. Shouldn't they be happy that Columbia U. is going to invest billions in their community bringing new stores, new opportunities and new energy into a relatively poor and bad neighborhood? It's the same story all over again.

[ablarc]

It's ridiculous. Some people are terminal idiots.

[kurokevin]

Often in these cases it's only a few small birds making a lot of noise. I'd be willing to be the vast majority of the community would either support the development, or could give a rat's ass.

[czsz]

Much of the protesting concerns the potential use of eminent domain to remove some of those people or their businesses, so it's less exaggerated in this instance than you claim. Moreover, locals are also aware of the radiating gentrification which will result from this; whether or not it serves a utilitarian function somewhere else in the city or world, the nearby residents believe it will certainly not help them, and not in the short term. Their biggest problem is not finding work, but paying the already exorbitant rent.

Nevertheless, faced with the radical fringe determined to preserve the "light manufacturing" character on the one hand andaColumbia on the other, CB9 has come up with its own proposal, one which would essentially force Columbia to develop its properties in a piecemiel fashion within the preexisting Manhattanville context, a schema which has been likened to NYU's without reference to the fact that this new "campus" would not be located in Greenwich Village, but in a light industrial district of upper Manhattan. It's hard to imagine Columbia being able to attract the best students and researchers in the world to a place where they will have to scurry between rundown auto repair shops between classroom buildings. Moreover, since most of the local residents are renters, they would probably be evicted by landlords keen to cash in on the Columbia influx. The community has displaced its fears of gentrification driven by any other factor. The future for Manhattanville without Columbia is either a bleak retreat into continued obscurity and wasted potential, or the more haphazard eviction and replacement of the neighbourhoods residents and businesses by the same forces that have been gentrifying Harlem for a decade. For those with small businesses and everything to lose, the mere possibility of survival these two eventualities present, vis-a-vis the lack of such a chance under the Columbia scenario, is, I think, what animates their vehement opposition, and indeed these small business owners have been the most vocal critics so far.

[antinimby]

Interesting.
I believe somewhere in between the radical obstructionists and Columbia's ambitions, there's a satisfactory middle ground.

As for the students that may possibly be dismayed by the sight of auto repair shops, they should realize that this is what the real world is and that's what makes an education one receives in a New York-based university even more valuable and enriching. You are exposed to the living, breathing world instead being cocooned on a sleepy campus.

[ablarc]

As for the students that may possibly be dismayed by the sight of auto repair shops, they should realize that this is what the real world is and that's what makes an education one receives in a New York-based university even more valuable and enriching. You are exposed to the living, breathing world instead being cocooned on a sleepy campus.
Maybe, but I'm not sure skidding around on grease slicks has lasting educational value.

[czsz]

they should realize that this is what the real world is and that's what makes an education one receives in a New York-based university even more valuable and enriching. You are exposed to the living, breathing world instead being cocooned on a sleepy campus

Auto-repair shops are not the quintessence of a "New York-based university education" or of New York in general, where car transportation is not an integral part of most people's (especially students') lives, and where streetscapes are hardly defined by lowrise garages. These are not the elements which make New York a great or attractive city. Nor, I doubt, will the "realisation" of such come swiftly for those with the ability to choose between such a mess of a campus and the bucolic splendour of, say, Princeton. Many find Columbia attractive now because it offers the city just outside the gates of a traditionally "Arcadian" campus.

President Bollinger has repeatedly stated that he's unwilling to compromise on the issue of the adoption of Columbia's comprehensive plans only, and for good reason. The question, though, is whether the university can afford to have the community pull its bluff, as it has few other expansion options. Nevertheless, I think Bollinger and others in the administration are savvy enough to realise that the university, were it to become diffuse, would work better as a diffuse institution in lively, urban Morningside Heights and Manhattan Valley than within a bizarre, alien landscape of light industry surviving in Manhattanville. So while development by fiat via eminent domain is unlikely, Columbia does not necessarily need to compromise with these people either.

[ablarc]

Here's an idea: you can fix cars in a multi-story garage, right? You can accommodate all the other Manhattanville functions, too. Bundle them all in one building. Call it the Manhattanville Building, and let Columbia and the city get on with their progress.

[czsz]

Amazingly, even after Columbia offered to move them practically wherever they wanted, the tenants insist on staying put, the businesses insisting Manhattanville's location is integral to their success and the residents clinging to it as their beloved home. Manhattanville Building? Don't you know that if you so much as move an ounce of dirt there and you've declared a race/class war on all of Harlem?

[BPC]

If you own a successful family business or a home, why should Columbia force you to move? Eminent domain is evil, particularly so that a private university (one I attended, fyi) can make a land grab. Let Columbia purchase the land for its new campus on the free market, just like everyobody else in this City does, and if not everyone wants to move, so much the better. As Jane Jacobs teaches, purely academic college campuses are never very good vehicles for urban development, in the way that campuses integrated with the City are. Robert Moses is dead, but apparently his evil spirit still lives on at COlumbia.

[czsz]

Though most Columbians would argue, conversely, that a university purely integrated with the city is not preferential for academic development- otherwise they would have chosen NYU.

In any case, eminent domain is not "evil," nor is it Columbia's instrument to use. It's the prerogative of a government committed to utilitarian principles. Its legitimacy derives from the fact that it can only be carried out by the popularly elected state government, which prevents potential employment of it from being obstructed by local interest groups with powerful influence within the city government and ensures that it is used only to enhance the broadest possible public interest. Nevermind the planned shops and open streets that are to be included in the new campus- to provide such a benefit Columbia does not have to be friendly to its urban context (which in Manhattanville will, if the plan is fully carried out, consist primarily of rail viaducts and towers-in-the-park projects anyway) but productive as an institute of education, research, and innovation. If an incubative, aesthetically pleasing campus is what serves such ends, then those are the ends the state will embrace, and they trump the right of stubborn propertyholders (especially when many are merely greedy landlords waiting for a better offer or the chance to evict their existing tenants anyway in order to welcome Columbia students- why shed tears for these people when rental tenants in New York have so few rights comparatively?) to maintain their rights to land when more than just compensation has been offered (which is really just the transmission of property from hard to liquid assets). I asked many people I know who were against the expansion if they would have attended Columbia were its campus littered with random auto repair garages or tenements, and they uncomfortably answered in the negative. NYU's expansion is confronted constantly with allegations of institutional imperialism, and it rarely uses eminent domain and certainly embraces an approach that integrates its campus with the city.

Where are New York's universities to go? Will higher education in the city be forever hampered by space concerns?

[czsz]

BTW, do you live in Battery Park City? That's hardly a model of integration with the city itself...

[Citytect]

Exactly how many auto shops are refusing to sell to Columbia, czsz? You make it sound like there are dozens.

This isn't a instance where eminent domain should be used, in my opinion. The campus can be created around the hold outs.

However, I'm not against properly used eminent domain. I don't know the conditions of the hold out properties, but if they are truly deteriorated or creating the physical deterioration of the surrounding properties and city infrastructure, the city should evaluate whether the properties are blight. This should be done on a case by case basis, though. The whole area shouldn't be taken by eminent domain simply because Columbia wants to expand there.

[BPC]

BTW, do you live in Battery Park City? That's hardly a model of integration with the city itself...

BPC was built on landfill. Only the Hudson River, and some rotting piers, pre-existed its creation. Whether you like or dislike the neighborhood, its existence teaches us nothing about the wisdom and justice of Columbia's threatened use of eminent domain in Manhattanville.

BTW, just to be clear, I believe that Columbia's new campus will be a boon to West Harlem and to the City. But I also believe (unlike 5 members of the current Supreme Court) that public takings for private use is unconstitutional, and immoral to boot.

[czsz]

There are quite a few, from what I remember walking down Broadway alone. From a blog by a guy who researches the neighbourhood: "Today, Manhattanville west of Broadway is largely auto repair shops, warehouses, a couple of moving and storage places, the Fairway supermarket, a beer distributor, and a few meat markets on 12th Ave." Note that the Fairway and 12th Ave. are outside the expansion zone.

How many of you have been to/seen Manhattanville? I ought to do a proper photo tour for the forum. Here are some internet images in the meanwhile...

http://www.untitledname.com/archives/upload/2005/10/fairway-manhattanville.jpg
This is actually outside the expansion zone, which is behind the viaduct, but it gives a sense of the area's desolation. The big apartment building in the background is also outside the zone, although residents fear rising rents.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/mville_15.jpg

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/mville_16.jpg
Under the viaduct.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/mville_18.jpg
Under the subway viaduct (the projects in the background will remain untouched).

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/mville_17.jpg
The 125th St. station arch. The background buildings are outside the expansion zone.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_01.jpg
The redbrick building will be preserved for Columbia's administration. The projects in the background will remain as well. Everything else in this shot is targeted for demolition.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_02.jpg
This place has moved to a new location.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_03.jpg
There are some cobblestone streets and old trolley tracks in Manhattanville. I don't know if they're to be retained or not.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_04.jpg
The new Cotton Club is not related to its ancestor, which was deeper into Harlem. It's outside the expansion zone, and its owner is looking forward to Columbia's business.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_05.jpg

[czsz]

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_06.jpg

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_07.jpg
The orangey building at right is the MTA bus depot which has created some thorny problems for the expansion itself.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_08.jpg

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_09.jpg
Abandoned motel.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_10.jpg
This is/was some kind of chemical company. Appears abandoned.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_11.jpg
The Studebaker building to be restored and used by Columbia.

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_12.jpg

http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/images/mville_13.jpg

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/gallery/From_Subway.jpg
Southern end of the expansion zone. Everything here goes.

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/gallery/130-view-corridor.jpg
130th St. Everything you see goes.

[czsz]

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/open_environment/index.html

Through design principles that emphasize safety, access, pedestrian use, architectural transparency, and open space, the proposed campus in Manhattanville would offer an open and welcoming environment that integrates the University with the rest of the community. Several of the design features were developed in response to community feedback and drawn from recommendations made in the 2002 West Harlem Piers Master Plan developed by a collaboration between New York City's Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and a working committee consisting of several city, state, and local community representatives.


Elements of the Campus Design

Enhanced Access

Keep all existing streets open to vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

Design streets and sidewalks to minimize the presence of vehicular traffic and reflect the pedestrian nature of the community.

Set back buildings from the property line on most east-west streets and along Twelfth Avenue to expand views and create wider sidewalks and more open pedestrian space.

Community Services

Plan space for retail stores, restaurants, and other community services on the ground floors of all buildings along West 125th Street, Broadway, and Twelfth Avenue.

Open Space

Create a major north-south midblock passage and a 1.5-acre open space between West 130th and 131st Streets, where people can meet and relax in an outdoor setting.

Use glass as the primary building material at the street level to create a feeling of transparency allowing pedestrians to see into and around the corners of buildings and contributing to a safe and open environment.

Increase tree plantings and provide new lighting and furniture along streets and throughout the campus.

Historic Preservation

Preserve and renovate Prentis Hall at 632 West 125th Street, the Studebaker Building at 615 West 131st Street, and the Nash Building at 3280 Broadway.

Environmental Stewardship

Incorporate conservation principles into the design of the proposed Manhattanville campus, including an underground "energy center" from which the heating and cooling capacity for a major part of the development will be distributed.

Develop parking, central loading / unloading, and utility facilities underground to reduce demand for on-street parking and alleviate street congestion caused by deliveries.

[czsz]

"Columbia owns, is under contract to purchase, or is in long-term lease relationships for over half the land under consideration, including such buildings as Prentis Hall, 560 Riverside Drive, and 615 W 131st Street. Public agencies such as the MTA, Verizon, and Con Edison own an additional 20%. The University is currently negotiating with owners in the area to acquire additional property."

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/gallery/ownership.jpg

[infoshare]

"Columbia owns, is under contract to purchase, or is in long-term lease relationships for over half the land under consideration, including such buildings as Prentis Hall, 560 Riverside Drive, and 615 W 131st Street."

This will be an interesting project to follow: thanks for the photos czcz. I added a Wikimap tag for 'Manhattanville'. http://www.wikimapia.org/#y=40744916&x=-73952579&z=13&l=0&m=s

This is a link (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter04-04.html) to a website with some additional infromation on the area.

Manhattanville: one of ‘old new yorks’ original 19th century villiages.

http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/2161/images1nyplorg5mu.jpg

http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/7687/images2nyplorg2id.jpg

http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/9711/images3nyplorg3zq.jpg

http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/8289/imagesnyplorg1gk.jpg

[antinimby]

Maybe, but I'm not sure skidding around on grease slicks has lasting educational value.Lol. It's not about the auto shops. It's about going to school while also encountering the aspects of life that may or may not be pleasant but they are what one will have to deal with after graduating. They offer more enriching and broader experiences than say, going to a suburban, park-like campus with frat guys talking about the football game.

Schools with the traditional "green" campuses are a dime a dozen. If Columbia is wise, they should use their location within a very urban environment to their advantage instead of looking at it like it's a liability or something to be ashamed of.

Like some others here have said, this is one case, where I don't believe eminent domain should even be considered, much less used. Sure, the area in questions is depressed as czsz's pictures clearly show. There's no argument about that. In fact, what is needed here is a boost, a spark, so to speak. And this is where Columbia can help. But what is not needed is for Columbia to come in and whitewash this whole area and turn it into another dull campus.

I've heard that they have acquired about 60% of the properties in the area. They should just build what they need to on what they've got now. They can go to other nearby neighborhoods to meet their other 40% land requirement. It doesn't all have to be within that plot outlined in their plan. The other plots holding out are either businesses that are successful and if not they could be used for other purposes such as residential and commercial, other than educational. A mixture of purposes in the neighborhood is what will make it and Columbia successful ultimately.

[czsz]

I think Columbia students have sufficient imaginations to understand that, somewhere in the world, someone is repairing a car- without having to have it physically present in front of them on their way from class to class. Beyond this, however, many understand college as an intermediary stage between high school and "reality"- not necessarily a full plunge into every exigency of urban life. If one holds that perspective, there is always, after all, NYU, the New School, and myriad other institutions in New York and other cities. What has made Columbia so successful, from an environmental perspective, at least, is that it can offer the same insular, womblike campus experience within a step of the city outside. In other words, it has what Yale and Princeton have- an aesthetically pleasing, traditional environment- and more. On the other hand, quite a few talented students, including, as I've mentioned, quite a few who oppose the Manhattanville expansion, would have chosen another Ivy League campus in a heartbeat if the Morningside Heights grounds had been littered with auto shops or tenements rather than graced with its verdant lawns.

Give the design some credit as well. Streets through campus, ground floor retail, free pedestrian circulation- this is not exactly a quad, entirely insulated from the city, just as the Morningside Heights campus is not necessarily the fortress its opponents often render it as- go there on a Sunday and witness the number of neighbourhood children who play on the lawns. Above all, Columbia students don't generally come to Manhattan to put all their energy into the football team (which is consequently terrible, and the butt of interminable jokes) or drink it up at frat houses. If the Morningside Heights campus has failed to stifle students' curiosities about New York, the Manhattanville campus will only strengthen such impulses. If, however, it presents the least attractive aspects of the city to students, front and centre, it may instigate more revulsion- and repulsion- than wonder.

Of course, these arguments are unlikely to persuade anyone who continues to consider eminent domain fundamentally unjust. But if the Columbia campus is of unquestionable public merit, how is the expropriation of physical property by the state for Columbia's use any less legitimate than the coercive expropriation of liquid assets (taxes) for the use of private institutions (in the form of subsidies)? Why, in other words, hold physical property more sacrosanct than money, which is seized for such purposes constantly- and uncontroversially?

[ablarc]

^ Well said, Cz.

[Citytect]

I don't think the reality of building a campus around the hold-outs will be a campus "littered with auto shops and tenaments". Youre using your rheteric to inforce your opinion. It was evident when you mentioned asking some Columbia students if they would have attended Columbia were its campus littered with random auto repair garages or tenements. How you ask a question affects the answer you will get.

Anyway, Columbia already has a beautiful "insular, womblike campus" (more rheteric). That campus isn't going anywhere. The Manhattanville addition can compliment the existing campus by providing a different experience. The Manhattanville campus can be more open to the city. Columbia will then have the best of both worlds.

[BPC]

...But if the Columbia campus is of unquestionable public merit, how is the expropriation of physical property by the state for Columbia's use any less legitimate than the coercive expropriation of liquid assets (taxes) for the use of private institutions (in the form of subsidies)? Why, in other words, hold physical property more sacrosanct than money, which is seized for such purposes constantly- and uncontroversially?

You're joking right? You don't honestly believe the two are equivalent, do you? In case you are being serious, and at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, taxation spreads the burden across society as a whole, whereas eminent domain requires that a handful of (in this case, less privileged) persons bear the entire burden for the benefit of another (in this case, a far more privileged, multi-billion dollar) private institution.

[czsz]

taxation spreads the burden across society as a whole

First, this statement is untrue. What of excise taxes? "Vice" taxes on alcohol and cigarettes? Inheritance and luxury taxes? Income taxes that may be just, but certainly unfair from some perspectives? The fact that the state also raises revenue by fines imposed for petty offenses?

Moreover, the majority of the tax burden is spread, overall, among the middle classes. They, in turn, pay to support, via subsidies, corporations such as Boeing or US Airways, and their privileged CEOs and other executives. The situation is not completely unprecedented.

Second, the one fault of the tax analogy is that it makes eminent domain in Manhattanville seem even more insidious than it actually is. Even if there is disproportional expropriation in the case of Manhattanville vis a vis tax collection for the purpose of providing subsidies, this expropriation is not final. It is in fact a transaction; hard assets are traded for liquid ones. There are only two real arguments for the injustice of forcible sale in such a scenario- the first being the inherent necessity of a location for the profitability of a business, the second being sentimentality for home. In the first instance, even if Manhattanville were the sine qua non of a business' profitability, there are only one or two such entities for which this is true. Moreover, with adequate capital provided by Columbia and/or the city, they should be capable of reestablishing themselves elsewhere. In the second instance, the quantification of sentimentality is difficult, and it therefore cannot figure well into a utilitarian calculus. Such an argument opens the precedent of preservation of sentimentalised sightlines, skylines, architectural styles, or what have you- an untenable position for a diverse city, and one which is in flux. More importantly, perhaps, I don't think there is a single homeowner in Manhattanville; no one is protected from losing their home even if Columbia does decide to develop around the holdouts, in fact, they are more or less guaranteed to lose them in the wake of rising rents occasioned by Columbia's presence.

I wonder if, in the end, the business and residents of Manhattanville have truly considered what life would be like in a Manhattanville 60% of which has been developed by Columbia. Rents would skyrocket and many businesses and residents would be forced out anyway. Remaining businesses would find it hard to operate in their light industrial capacities within a campus heavily trafficked by pedestrians and probably enforcing noise rules in order to prevent the disruption of sensitive scientific research (this has been an issue in the MIT expansion into a similar neighborhood). Whoever managed to remain would likely complain that the neighbourhood did not feel like "home" anymore, taken over by people with different lifestyles (not to mention incomes) and the commerce that follows them.

[czsz]

I don't think the reality of building a campus around the hold-outs will be a campus "littered with auto shops and tenaments". Youre using your rheteric to inforce your opinion. It was evident when you mentioned asking some Columbia students if they would have attended Columbia were its campus littered with random auto repair garages or tenements. How you ask a question affects the answer you will get.

True, I could have employed activist euphemisms and asked something along the lines of "would you like to attend a campus nested among a vibrant multicultural community and proud local businesses"...but that would certainly not be descriptive of the reality of Manhattanville, which is composed primarily of shuttered industries, auto body shops, and a couple tenements. Were the campus to develop around these, I'm unsure how it could be other than how I've described.

[Citytect]

True, I could have employed activist euphemisms...

I didn't suggest that you use activist euphemisms. There is a middle ground. Something I think you've missed in this entire debate.

Bottom line, eminent domain should only be used when absolutely necessary, in my opinion. The need hear is glaringly absent. You can search for justification in debates about tax incentives all you want, but the need for eminent domain will not arise. I understand the desire for Columbia to create certain image for itself, but that does not mean it is necessary. It is not necessary for Columbia, and more importantly it is not necessary for NYC.

Compromise. It's not such a terrible thing.

This debate is really sad insight into the value put upon people's lives. It seems like Columbia is saying its students lives are more important that the Manhattanville property owners... Columbia students need a ideal campus so all you lowly auto shop owners need to move aside... Columbia needs its "insular, womblike campus" - it's faculty and students prefer to be in the city but isolated from it and since their lives are more important, you guys can pack up yours and move them elsewhere.
(Obviously, I'm exadurating here to make a point.)

[lofter1]

A bit off topic: what's up with the use of "exadurating" for "exaggerating"?

Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=exadurate+&btnG=Search) search shows 12,000 such uses :confused:

[Citytect]

A commonly misspelled word.

Sorry, I'll be more careful next time. I'm not exactly a spelling bee champ.

[lofter1]

No prob -- I thought it might be a web thing ...

[antinimby]

Other common word usage mistakes:

There - they're - their

Affect - effect

[Citytect]

^Yeah, those are big ones. I'm not a good speller at all, but usually get those right because they're so common. It's the less common, but still fairly common misspellings that I tend to goof on - ie exaggerate.

End of tangent.

[antinimby]

Yes, now back to auto repair shops and oil slicks. :D

[infoshare]

New development in Manhattanville; aka ViVa

NY Times Article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/realestate/commercial/07viva.html)

Photo featured in Curbed.com
http://img107.imageshack.us/img107/1606/200510w135thst2pc.jpg

[czsz]

"This neighborhood has always been very remote, and before, this place was maybe a dead zone," said Mr. Skyllas, who two years ago planned to move his plumbing business into the 20,900-square-foot building.

But then he learned about an $18.7 million reconstruction of two Harlem piers nearby at 125th Street — one intended for recreation and the other for water taxis and excursion boats — and a new 18-acre campus proposed by Columbia University to extend up to 133rd Street.

Mr. Skyllas said he quickly realized his building might flourish as a venue for restaurants and clubs. "Now, this area is going to have a heartbeat," he said.

...

Andrea Rojas, the second restaurant tenant in the former freight house at 135th Street, is creating a duplex pizzeria and bar centered on an Italian brick oven. He said Columbia's proposed expansion, which would reach as far north as 133rd Street, was a boon to the area.

[antinimby]

What are you trying to say?
That Columbia will improve the area?
No one's disagreeing with that.

People just didn't want to see the whole area-each and every single building, every single lot turned over to Columbia and to be used only for their purposes. That's the issue.

I want to see Columbia grow and expand but the way they are doing it right now just isn't the best way for them (eventhough they don't realize it right now) and Manhattanville.

[Citytect]

Don't get me wrong, czsz. I want Columbia to build their Manhattanville campus. I just want them to do it on the properties they bought rightfully, without the use of eminent domain. If they do, I'm sure we will be hearing of more and more developments like the one you posted. And, I'm willing to bet, some of those auto shops you loath so much will eventually be replaced with more campus friendly businesses. It just takes time, but the area will gentrify quickly.

[czsz]

And, I'm willing to bet, some of those auto shops you loath so much will eventually be replaced with more campus friendly businesses. It just takes time, but the area will gentrify quickly.

That's why I'm arguing that seizure of the properties won't necessarily have a more detrimental effect on their ability to stay in business in the area. Why hinder the holistic development of the campus now when those businesses are bound to turn over when embedded in an awkwardly reconfigured campus anyway?

[antinimby]

What you consider as awkward is what makes the neighborhood more interesting.

[Citytect]

Why hinder the holistic development of the campus now when those businesses are bound to turn over when embedded in an awkwardly reconfigured campus anyway?

Because property owners have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their properties and when to do it. It's not up to Columbia to decide for them.

[czsz]

{yawn} we've been at this point before.

Look, I've outlined why eminent domain is justified theoretically. I've noted why it's beneficial in this case. And now I've shown that the harms are not necessarily greater than those that would come about anyway. The only difference is that propertyowners not forced out now will be later- due to the sheer inoperability of an auto repair shop in a campus environment. I don't see why Columbia should have to build around these people when their departure is imminent anyway. President Bollinger is adamant that only the campus in full can solve Columbia's space issues and maintain its attractiveness to top academic talent- why should it be compromised in order to accomodate intransigent stragglers insistent on maintaining the ground that is merely- slowly -slipping out from under them?

[Citytect]

You've outlined why Columbia wants to use eminent domain, but you've yet to make the case that it is justified. The property owners will not be forced out later. They might choose to sell or redevelop, but that is their decision to make. That doesn't show that "the harms are not necessarily greater than those that would come about anyway".

Calling them intransigent stragglers doesn't bolster you case either.

[lofter1]

to follow this logic ...

... I don't see why Columbia should have to build around these people when their departure is imminent anyway.

Eventually we're all going to die (YOUR departure IS imminent, at least in the context of the historical timeline), so let's allow the government to take your property away from you NOW.

[antinimby]

{yawn} we've been at this point before.Lol. That's because you keep bringing us back to point one.

[czsz]

The real problem with this dispute is that, while I continually attempt to introduce new arguments, they continue to come up against the operative logic on your side- that there is a fundamental and inalienable right to property, in any case. The Supreme Court has provided an argument as to why this is not so, as have I, yet you each continue to act as if it's ridiculous to even consider such a concept. I challenge you to justify this rather than merely maintain it as an assumption.

[ablarc]

The real problem with this dispute is that, while I continually attempt to introduce new arguments, they continue to come up against the operative logic on your side- that there is a fundamental and inalienable right to property, in any case. The Supreme Court has provided an argument as to why this is not so, as have I, yet you each continue to act as if it's ridiculous to even consider such a concept. I challenge you to justify this rather than merely maintain it as an assumption.
Cz is right.

[ZippyTheChimp]

They are both right.

The case for Eminent Domain must be viewed from a legal perspective. I don't think the criteria is met here.

However, this area of Manhattanville is not a cohesive neighborhood. Eminent Domain here would not have the same impact as in the case of the Cross Bronx Expwy, and in theory, Eminent Domain would fairly compensate the property owners.

Property rights have never been inalienable.

[lofter1]

The Supreme Court case was specific to a city that had established the intent through its local regulations to re-develop a certain area consisting of private properties for the development of a plan by a private developer that would enrich the local coffers. The SC merely backed the right of that specific locality to allow the "taking" of private property for this purpose.

To make this comparable in NYC you first would have to get the City government to create the situation whereby private property could be taken for the use of private developer (in this case Columbia).

You might want to spend less time talking about it here and instead start lobbying for the changes necessary to make such a "taking" come to pass.

Good luck!!

[BPC]

Apples and oranges. The only thing the Supreme Court ruled (5-4) was that the United States Constitution does not expressly prohibit all public takings of private property for private use, where there is still some demonstrable public benefit. (The language of the document itself would seem to suggest otherwise, but I digress.) That ruling is really not relevant to the discussion here, which is not about Constitutional jurisprudence but about urban planning and public policy. I have no doubt that, if Columbia is able to convince the City of New York to take private properties under eminent domain in Manhattanville, that action will be upheld in the Courts, just like all of Robert Moses' destructive redevelopment projects were upheld. But that does not make it the right thing to do.

[czsz]

But that does not make it the right thing to do.

Are you claiming that the law in this case is immoral? However specific the Supreme Court's ruling is, its underlying presumption was that utilitarian morality- the provision of benefit for the greatest number- trumped the rights of the few. Moreso than the mall or hotel or whatever was built in Connecticut (I forget), Columbia's development will advance such a summam bonum. Are you taking a stance against utilitarianism? What's more, against a utilitarianism the greatest harm of which to the minority parties is that their physical property becomes replaced with cash?

[lofter1]

Are you claiming that the law in this case is immoral?


Some (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._New_London) do think it is immoral:
On January 25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_25), 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006), BB&T Corporation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BB%26T_Corporation), a large bank, announced that it "will not lend to commercial developers that plan to build condominiums, shopping malls and other private projects on land taken from private citizens by government entities using eminent domain," holding that the ruling is morally objectionable and violates "basic rights". On February 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_7), 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006), a compromise was proposed by Mayor Beth Sabilia between the residents of Fort Trumbull and the City of New London under which four of the six residences would remain, and the other two would be relocated within the new proposed complex. Under this proposal, the city would gain the title to the disputed properties, and rent would be imposed in lieu of taxes.[8] (http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/connecticut/ny-bc-ct--seizingproperty0207feb07,0,2804437.story?coll=ny-region-apconnecticut)



However specific the Supreme Court's ruling is, its underlying presumption was that utilitarian morality- the provision of benefit for the greatest number- trumped the rights of the few.


Only in specific instances. A number of localities and states have specific laws which do NOT allow eminent domain to be used in this fashion:The wider effect of Kelo remains to be seen. It will have little effect in the eight states that specifically prohibit the use of eminent domain for economic development except to eliminate blight: Arkansas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas), Florida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida), Illinois (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois), Kentucky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky), Maine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine), Montana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana), South Carolina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina) and Washington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington). As of July 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_4), 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005), The Washington Times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Times) claims that the decision has spurred action by officials in Newark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark%2C_New_Jersey), New Jersey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey) and Arnold, Missouri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold%2C_Missouri).[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London#endnote_WashTimes) As of August 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_4), 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005), Alabama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama) has banned takings like those authorized by Kelo, while such laws have been proposed in sixteen states and are likely to be proposed in seven more. Additionally, Alabama, California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California), Florida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida), Michigan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan), New Jersey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey) and Texas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas) are all considering constitutional amendments for the same purpose. This is expected to be a pivotal issue in the 2006 elections.[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London#endnote_WaTimes) As of March 2006, the town of Scituate, Massachusetts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scituate%2C_Massachusetts), in its annual town meeting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting), voted to limit its own eminent domain power to cases where the property in question is seized only for public ownership and public use.[5] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London#endnote_Scituate)

.. the mall or hotel or whatever was built in Connecticut ...


Nothing has been built in New London, CT as of yet. It was only this week that the New London City Council VOTED (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198303,00.html) to evict the final two hold-out home owners, one of whom addressed the City Council:"You are a disgrace to the city, the state and the nation," one of the residents, Michael Cristofaro (http://javascript<b></b>:siteSearch('Michael Cristofaro');), told council members who voted to evict.


Are you taking a stance against utilitarianism?


This game can be played both ways ...On May 23 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_23), 2006, the city council of Hercules, California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%2C_California) voted unanimously to use the right of eminent domain to sieze 17 acres owned by Walmart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart) corporation. At a hearing preceeding the decision, many dozens of residents spoke against Walmart, complaining that the box stores economically depress an area by driving small shops bankrupt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankrupt), and moving profits out of the local economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy). The council applied the reasoning in the Kelo decision to pre-emptively prevent Walmart from depressing the city's economy.

[infoshare]

Are you taking a stance against utilitarianism? What's more, against a utilitarianism the greatest harm of which to the minority parties is that their physical property becomes replaced with cash?

Lets' face it czcz. The art & science of hedonic calculus just is not what it used to be.;) But I do agree with you here!


Text from William Wade Dated:1846
Manhattanville
Half a mile north of the Asylum, is the village of Manhattanville, having a convenient landing and wharf, and containing about eighty houses, with five hundred inhabitants. A mile and a half east of this is the village of Harlem.
The next object of notice after passing Manhattanville, and the highest point on New York Island is Fort Washington, two hundred and thirty-eight feet above the river.

http://hhr.highlands.com/blooming.htm

[krulltime]

Columbia expansion: Is community deal in store?


By Erik Engquist & Anne Michaud
Published on June 26, 2006

Apparently not all community benefits agreements are created equal. The city's Economic Development Corp., Harlem's Community Board 9 and Councilman Robert Jackson announced last week that a local development corporation has been formed to negotiate a deal on behalf of neighbors of Columbia University's planned second campus in Manhattanville.

Developers typically promise benefits like jobs for local residents in return for community support of big projects. Though the Bloomberg administration originally approved of such pacts, the mayor has become more critical in the past two months. He characterized efforts by Queens politicians to win concessions from the Mets as "ransom.

The members of the LDC will include 13 commercial and residential property owners and representatives of the community board, tenant associations and cultural and church groups. City Hall is providing $350,000 for a conflict resolution expert; negotiations over Columbia's plans are expected to continue through the summer.


©2006 Crain Communications Inc.

[ablarc]

ransom
Right on the money.

[infoshare]

This restoration project is located at 125th Street and Riverside Drive: near the southern border of the new CU campus. There is a lot of cleaning and repair work going on in the area lately.

The original interior walls of the under-pass are composed of glazed brick. The larger stones - together with the glazed brick - form a dentil pattern along the entire length of the interior archway.

All the above mentioned 'details' are currently being removed; the
stone archway and the glazed brick will be covered with metal lath and trawled-on concrete.

Perhaps a 'landmark designation' was needed here to preserve this structure.

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/6913/27eu.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/8871/32zo1.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[czsz]

Changes in the Manhattanville campus plan have been announced.

Old plan:

http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/gallery/fb.jpg

New Plan:

http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper865/stills/eu99b6vo.jpg

Not sure how this represents an increase in open space; instead it seems as if they've both shrunk it and shifted it around. The signature curved entrance to the new School of Arts appears to have been lost in the attempt to appease neighbors' desire for "publically accessible" open space on 125th (as if they couldn't have walked to the new park before), an aspect which will kill the street wall as well. On the plus, the new corridor to Riverside Park is nice. In all, the plan reminds me more of the Penn campus, with its linear emphasis, than the quadrangled Morningside Heights home of Columbia. It would be nice to see/evaluate this in more detail (i.e. the "varying heights of the buildings", which sounds like an attempt to erode the unity of the place).

University Modifies Manhattanville Plans
Columbia Adds, Shifts Open Space; Expansion Critics Applaud Flexibility
By Erin Durkin
Columbia Spectator

Columbia has made some revisions to its plans for a new campus in Manhattanville in response to community concerns over the campus's accessibility.

The new plan will change the location of publicly accessible open space on the proposed campus, add additional open space, and alter the heights of some buildings. University officials said that the changes would bring Columbia's Manhattanville plan closer to the 197-a plan, a different proposal for West Harlem development passed by Community Board 9 that has been supported by many area residents.

University officials hope the recent modifications will change the perception of residents who have complained that the new campus would be a hostile environment to anyone not affiliated with Columbia.

"We want this area to feel like part of Harlem physically," Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin said.

CB9 chair Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, a proponent of 197-a, said that these particular changes are less significant to him than the fact that Columbia had demonstrated flexibility. Asked if the modifications bring Columbia's plan closer to the 197-a, he said, "Not really, but it does show a certain flexibility that Columbia has not shown before, so I consider that a step forward. It's more aligned than it was before, but not quite there yet."

"I personally never asked for such things, [but] I see it as a major thing that they are willing to change the plan," he said.

The new plan will shift a square of "privately owned, publicly accessible" open space farther west, closer to the Hudson River. The space will now occupy the block between Broadway and 12th Avenue between 130th and 131st Streets. The building standing between 12th Avenue and the space will also be split into two segments at ground level, creating a passageway from the sidewalk.

Kasdin said the goal was to draw pedestrians from 12th Avenue. "The open space where it had been previously placed and with a solid building to its west would not feel accessible to members of the community. A fundamental goal of our expansion is to create a space that is perceived as accessible as well as being accessible in fact," he said.

Columbia will also add a plaza in front of the new School of the Arts building. This space is scheduled to open by the conclusion of phase 1 of the expansion, sooner than the 12th Avenue location, which will take about 25 years to complete. In addition, the new plan adds a pedestrian corridor from Prentis Hall on 125th Street to Riverside Park.

The University will also vary the heights of the buildings on its proposed campus, making some buildings taller and others shorter. "The introduction of varied heights to the buildings makes these plans more consistent with the New York skyline across the city. We want these buildings to be part of the urban fabric," Kasdin said. "If our efforts to have buildings of the same height had the effect of making people from the community feel less welcome, we wanted to try to address that problem."

Kasdin said the changes came in response to comments made by members of CB9 and the general public at hundreds of meetings held over the past several years. The changes deal only with the physical makeup of the campus, and do not address other discrepancies with community members and the 197-a plan such as whether light manufacturing will be allowed to continue in the area, or concerns about displacement that many residents consider more significant.

Columbia will present the changes to a public meeting of CB9 on July 31.

[ablarc]

CB9 chair Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, a proponent of 197-a, said that these particular changes are less significant to him than the fact that Columbia had demonstrated flexibility. Asked if the modifications bring Columbia's plan closer to the 197-a, he said, "Not really, but it does show a certain flexibility that Columbia has not shown before, so I consider that a step forward. It's more aligned than it was before, but not quite there yet."

"I personally never asked for such things, [but] I see it as a major thing that they are willing to change the plan," he said.
Watching this process makes me think I'm witnessing a rape, with Columbia as the victim. I can see why the rapist's defense is most often: "Well actually, the sex was consensual."

This Jordi Reyes-Montblanc is particularly repulsive. Brandishing a knife, he praises his victim's reasonableness in going along. "Who me? I'm not even making demands."

No wonder rape victims get despondent.

[infoshare]

This Jordi Reyes-Montblanc is particularly repulsive. Brandishing a knife, he praises his victim's reasonableness in going along. "Who me? I'm not even making demands."No wonder rape victims get despondent.

From: The Villiage Voice
History Lesson
Three decades after the drama of '68, will Harlem make room for Columbia?
by Jarrett Murphy


Columbia's new turf? Across 125th Street
photo: tinazimmer.com
Chances are that walking down 131st Street 30 years from now, you will not miss Pedro y JosÈ Auto Body, nor, on 130th, mourn the absence of Boiler Repair Maintenance Company. It is unlikely that you ever planned to live in a walk-up like 3289 Broadway or enjoy a "100% brushless car wash" three blocks away. And even if you have patronized the nearby paint store, pharmacy, architect, personal trainer, building-supply store, moving companies, construction firms, U-Haul yard, drug treatment facility, GÈrard DurÈ's salon, or any of the storage facilities, gas stations, or Pentecostal churches in the area, you'll probably learn to live without. You may even appreciate the sprucing up of the tired-looking factory buildings and an end to the stench that rises from the Twelfth Avenue sidewalk after a delivery of meat or poultry to a wholesaler there.
What's more, you could end up working or studying in what will take their place in Manhattanville: nearly 7 million square feet of offices, research space, and housing for Columbia University. With scant wiggle room at its main Morningside Heights campus or uptown medical center, Columbia wants to move onto 18 acres roughly north of 125th Street and just east of Twelfth Avenue. To do it, the state's oldest college is asking the city for a special rezoning, scooping up parcels of land, and preparing to ask the state to invoke eminent domain if necessary.

Needless to say, not everyone in the area is thrilled with the idea. Residents, business owners, and some Columbia students have banded together to oppose the plan. The local community board is pushing an alternative development scheme. Civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel has signed on to resist eminent domain. A sign on a door in the area reads, "Dear Columbia: Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself."

In the constant evolution of New York neighborhoods, this sort of fight isn't anything new. And for Columbia especially, this is not a first. Thirty-eight years ago, the university's bid to expand into Morningside Parkócoupled with outrage over the school's military contractsótouched off days off unrest on campus in which students occupied five buildings and, in some cases, clashed violently with cops. After the bloodshed, that expansion plan died. Columbia has pursued projects in the years since, but none were as ambitious as the vision for Manhattanville.

Some opponents of the plan claim the resistance to the new proposal is the stiffest Columbia has faced since the student uprising. Folks caught in the middle think the university is applying lessons learned. "Columbia sees shadows of 1968," says Steve Stollman, a local businessman who says he's been offered a very attractive relocation deal. "They have to be very careful how they treat people when it's conspicuous like this."

But the parallel only goes so far. Last time the battle was over race and war. Now, the debate is about what makes a 21st-century city tick.


Columbia is the quintessential great urban university and the most constrained for space," the school president, Lee Bollinger, said when he took the job in 2002. The school has developed more than 2 million square feet of new space since 1994, but Columbia still has only "one-half the square foot per student as peer institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton," according to planning documents. "The absence of space really had started to affect the university's intellectual agenda. Faculty didn't have space for facilities to pursue research," says Robert Kasdin, Columbia's senior executive vice president. For instance, the neurology department, which is working on autism and Alzheimer's, was feeling squeezed.

That's why Columbia now wants to rezone 35 acres in Manhattanville for an 18-acre campus to include academic buildings, labs, support services, graduate and faculty housing, and perhaps even a hotel and convention center "to support Columbia's educational activities." The development over the next 25 to 30 years, with a projected $7.4 billion in spending, is supposed to create 2,000 construction jobs during the build-out and some 9,000 positions after that. What's more, Columbia's planning documents say, it'll clean up a bleak part of town.

"Once a thriving manufacturing area, today Manhattanville is characterized by automotive uses, storage facilities, and other low job-generating activities," one document reads. "The area's manufacturing zoning has not stimulated the development of lively retail and office uses that are now characteristic of 125th Street east of Broadway."

That's where some local activists differ. "There's this theory of university and institutions being growth machines of the city," says Nellie Bailey, a member of the Coalition to Preserve Community. "We don't believe that. We believe the real growth of the city lies in bringing back its manufacturing base."

This difference characterizes the competing development plan drafted by Community Board 9, which preserves space for the manufacturing firms and other businesses that right now employ about 1,600 people. It could also retain the apartments that an estimated 400 peopleóthe vast majority of them low- to moderate-incomeócall home.


Faced with competing plans for the same blocks, the City Planning Commission told the community board and university to try to work out a compromise. Columbia had already organized a series of forums on the plan. Now, says Kasdin, the school and community board are talking. But he won't say whether parts of Columbia's proposal have evolved. The chairman of Community Board 9, Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, tells the Voice, "[Columbia's] plans have changed very little so far."

Community activists have several beefs. One is the school's plan for a biological- research lab, which could gain a biosafety rating of up to level 3, meaning it might handle pathogens like anthrax and West Nile. Opponents say that kind of facility is too risky to locate near housing complexes, especially after 9-11 and particularly since the EPA in 2002 cited Columbia for mishandling hazardous waste. Columbia says no one's health or safety was endangered by the EPA violations. Their proposed lab won't handle real horror-show stuff like Marburg and Ebola viruses, like Boston University's planned level 4 lab in Southie. And Columbia already has a level 3 lab, although officials aren't eager to say where.

The chief complaint of activists, though, is the lack on information about just what kind of lab Columbia is planning; the school says it knows roughly where the facility will go, but not what work will be done there. The same goes for what will happen to residents. The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development owns four of the residential buildings in the area. Two are about to be transferred to a nonprofit for rehabilitation. Two others are in the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program, in which residents apply for conversion to a low-income co-op and are allowed to purchase their units for $250. Neil Coleman, a spokesman for HPD, says that there have only been preliminary talks with Columbia and that the city has told the school that it must offer the tenants nothing less than they'd get in their present digs. That could mean coming up with a replacement building for the TIL tenants. "No such offer has been made," Coleman says. Columbia vows that all tenants will get equal or better situations.

When it comes to the 70-odd businesses that could be displaced, however, Columbia is making offers. Stollman, a former Columbia student who for 20 years has used a warehouse in the expansion zone, says the university started out threatening to shut down the building's elevator. Then the school lightened up, hiring a guy to run the elevator and offering relocation deals of better space at the same rent in the same area.

Scott Lacock, for one, isn't fazed by the impending move for his plumbing-supply outfit, which employs about 30 workers hailing from the city and beyond. Heck, Lacock says, he might even gain some business when people in a new neighborhood see his trucks. Either way, he has no complaints: Columbia has been his landlord for years, and he was told early on that his stay would be temporary. "I'm very thankful," he says.


With its physical size and financial power, Columbia can look like the 800-pound gorilla to its neighbors, and critics see the Manhattanville proposal as a gorilla-sized invasion. But Kasdin says going big was deliberate. In the past, Columbia has acquired properties one by one and battled with neighbors over what to build there. "There were regular clashes over our opportunistic and incremental approach to growth," he says. "The way in which this has been done has not served the university or the community." The Manhattanville proposal is an attempt at a more comprehensive approach, he adds, in which the school and the community understand each other's long-term needs. Columbia is quick to emphasize the friendlier aspects of its push: a community benefits agreement, open streets, and ground-floor retail. The school's steady pace of land acquisition is meant to negate the need for eminent domain.

For skeptics of the plan, however, the problem is bigger than Columbia. It's the development craze that's roiling Harlem block by block, displacing tenants and replacing neighborhood stores with flashy franchises. Similar forces are acting citywide: The small industry that moves out of Manhattanville will compete for space with similar firms uprooted from Williamsburg, and maybe Willets Point. The areas where blue-collar work is welcome are dwindling.

Kasdin says Columbia's development will offer "the full range of jobs, from unskilled to tenured faculty" with good pay and full benefits in an area where employment has plummeted 35 percent in the past two decades. The area's parking lots and wide-open factory floors reflect untapped potential. But Columbia's opponents say the area can prosper without abandoning its industrial roots. "If this were a mixed-use area which still supported the idea that manufacturing was a valuable and beneficial thing as a city, you would see a dramatic increase in local employment opportunities in that same 30-year period," says development opponent Tom DeMott.

Even in boomtown New York, somebody's going to need that 100 percent brushless car wash.

[tmg]

Business Week
B-School News
November 15, 2006, 8:48PM EST
Columbia's B-School Move Draws Ire

The pending transfer to a West Harlem site is part of the university's expansion plan. But local businesses aren't happy

by Janie Ho

Columbia University's Business School will be among the first of the university's units slated to move to a 17-acre expansion site in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the school announced Nov. 15. But the move—pending city zoning action—is upsetting some area businesses that will be impacted by the school's plans.

The B-school will move to a site in the Manhattanville neighborhood that is currently zoned for manufacturing. Manhattanville is a part of West Harlem. Construction will take place within five to seven years, University spokeswoman La-Verna J. Fountain said. Also moving in the first phase will be a neuroscience center, the School of the Arts, and a Columbia University-assisted public school.

During the construction period, the B-school will remain in its current home in Uris Hall.

Local Opposition

The expansion is opposed by the West Harlem Business Group, which is composed of six family-owned businesses from the West Harlem/Manhattanville area. The second- and third-generation business owners are concerned they will be forced to leave without adequate compensation if the city approves a rezoning proposal and eventually resorts to using eminent domain to displace the businesses.

Also, the local residents living in some 132 existing residential units in the expansion area are worried they may not be able to afford new housing if forced to move, the business group says. Columbia says it would not utilize these residential units until its second phase of the project, after 2015. The school has promised to work with the city to relocate residents to equal or better housing.

Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who is representing the West Harlem Business Group, said that the group is not opposed to Columbia's expansion, but rather the possible use of eminent domain to oust his clients. Siegel maintains that Columbia, as a private entity, cannot claim eminent domain since the land will not be for public use. The business owners want Columbia to guarantee that it will not resort to eminent domain—instead, they want the school to pledge to pursue good-faith negotiations and work with the businesses to reach a fair resolution to this situation.

Zoning Issues

Columbia's Fountain counters that the expansion project—which is slated to be completed by 2030—will meet public-use purposes. New York City is currently considering rezoning the property for the university's project.

"We think it serves great public interest when you have Nobel Prize winners looking for a cure for diabetes. Locals would use this as much as the students," Fountain said. The space would also house arts and culture, open areas, parks, and walkways from West Harlem to the West Harlem piers. If the area is rezoned and allows mixed-use and not just manufacturing, all neighbors will benefit from the ruling, she said.

Since Columbia started talks of this project in 2003, the university has held more than 100 community meetings, many of which yielded mixed reaction. "People are fearful of change," Fountain said.

Siegel said he has been speaking to students and faculty who are opposed to the Columbia project. Referring to the possibility of eminent domain, he said, "If [the University continues] to take that position, there will be strong and visible opposition," he said.

[krulltime]

In West Harlem Land Dispute, It’s Columbia vs. Residents


http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/20/nyregion/600_columbia.jpg
Columbia University is planning to expand its campus on 17 acres of land along the Hudson River, from
125th Street to 133rd Street.


By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
November 20, 2006

When Columbia University announced plans three years ago to expand by building on 17 acres in West Harlem, the university stressed that it would work with its neighbors rather than risk stirring up long-held animosities.

But before the release of an environmental report for the $7 billion project, opponents say Columbia has antagonized Harlem residents by insisting that it has the right to seek eminent domain to force property owners out.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, Columbia is a minus 5 in terms of trust,” said Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chairman of the local community board. “I honestly believe that Columbia has made a tremendous effort to overcome its history, but in the process, they’ve made so many snafus that it hasn’t really helped them.”

In recent months, the misunderstandings have only intensified.

Last week, for example, as Columbia and the city Department of Education worked to complete plans for a new public school in the neighborhood with an emphasis on math and science, parents held a demonstration, saying that the school’s proposed temporary location at an existing public school would be disruptive. Columbia is helping the school establish a curriculum, and the final home of the school will be on Columbia-owned property.

Columbia, however, said it had nothing to do with choosing the temporary site.

And during the past several weeks, some residents have become incensed as inspectors hired by the state have surveyed the neighborhood as part of a study to determine if the area should be considered blighted, a finding that could allow the state to use eminent domain to acquire property for the expansion.

With big demographic and economic changes occurring in Harlem as a backdrop, each side sees the expansion as critical to its future. For Columbia, it would allow an elite but cramped university to build additional academic and residential buildings, including new facilities for its arts and business schools and dozens of modern science research labs it needs to keep pace with other Ivy League universities.

Harvard University, for example, is seeking a new campus on 200 acres in Boston, and the University of Pennsylvania plans to expand on 40 acres in Philadelphia.

But for residents of West Harlem, Columbia’s expansion threatens the survival of their neighborhood. Columbia has already bought 65 percent of the properties in the area, and if the project is approved, all but three buildings in the 17-acre tract would be razed.

The low-rise neighborhood of apartment buildings, warehouses and auto-repair shops would be replaced by a cityscape designed by Renzo Piano and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in which glass-walled buildings would rise as high as 25 stories. (Mr. Piano also designed a new headquarters for The New York Times.) Because of the project’s potential to drive up nearby property values, many in the neighborhood say they fear widespread displacement if the necessary rezoning for the campus is approved, which could happen as early as next summer.

While university officials play down the simmering tension, longtime residents say the relationship between campus and community is at its most fraught since 1968.

That year, violent protests erupted after the university proposed building a university gymnasium in Morningside Park with separate entrances for students and residents of the predominantly poor, African-American neighborhood.

The two sides are at such odds that they cannot even agree on a name for the area: The university calls it Manhattanville, while most residents refer to it as West Harlem.

“I was real hopeful at the beginning of the process, but over the last few years things have really broken down,” said the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, rector at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.

Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia, and a law school student there in 1968, said the university had come a long way since the 1960s. The new campus, he said, would benefit both the university and the neighborhood.

“Everybody who lives there will be better off,” he said last summer. “Everyone is pleased with the way Columbia has dealt with them.”

The new campus, which would be built over 25 years on a narrow strip of land parallel to the Hudson River, from 125th Street to 133rd Street, would be among the largest developments in recent city history. It would also be Columbia’s largest expansion since it moved from Midtown Manhattan to Morningside Heights in 1897.

The first of two construction phases for the campus would be completed by 2015 and include the new science, arts and business buildings.

Plans for the second stage are less clear, but could include new dormitories and academic buildings, as well as swimming and diving pools. In all, the campus would have 17 new buildings.

West Harlem residents say they are not opposed to Columbia’s expansion, but have a competing plan that emphasizes building more affordable housing and retaining the area’s light industry.

Columbia’s proposal does not include affordable housing and would eliminate all of the light industry.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the area has been dominated by industry — in the mid-19th century it had a mill and a brewery, and later, the neighborhood contained dairy and automobile plants, including an old Studebaker factory, which Columbia plans to preserve.

Currently, meat packing plants, car repair shops, moving and storage warehouses, and a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus depot are on the site. About 400 people also live in apartment buildings there.

Columbia has said it intends to pay their relocation costs if the area is rezoned and it is allowed to start its expansion project.

Though the university has been buying property in the area for years, several large commercial landowners have refused to sell. In response, Columbia has said it might seek to have eminent domain invoked.

That prospect has caused alarm in the area, where opposition to eminent domain runs deep among many African-Americans because it was used for urban renewal projects in the 1960s that demolished entire neighborhoods and replaced them with public housing towers.

“Any neighborhood wants to see improvements, but not at the risk of people being driven out,” said Nellie Bailey, executive director of the Harlem Tenants Council.

But Mr. Bollinger said the issue is not negotiable.

“I would be irresponsible as president of Columbia to give up eminent domain,” he said. “We have done nothing to initiate eminent domain, and I hope not to have to use eminent domain.”

However, he added, “We should be prepared to use it.”

To that end, in a 2004 letter to the Empire State Development Corporation, Columbia asked the state agency to “consider the condemnation of portions of the property not under Columbia control.”

The community board has signaled its discontent by voting unanimously to oppose the use of eminent domain, and several members have said they will oppose the project unless Columbia pledges not to seek those powers.

While the board’s role is only advisory, the expansion’s rejection by the panel would probably weigh heavily on the City Planning Commission and the City Council, which must approve the project.

Anne Z. Whitman, the owner of Hudson Moving and Storage, said Columbia had offered $4 million for her six-story, 35,000-square-foot building — though she has repeatedly told the university she has no plans to move.

Ms. Whitman believes the university will eventually try to condemn her building through eminent domain.

In a 2004 letter to Ms. Whitman, the university said it would be “impossible” for her business to remain, given Columbia’s expansion plans.

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

Nicholas Sprayregen, president of Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage, is the largest property owner in the area with five buildings and almost 300,000 square feet of space. He said he has spent several hundred thousand dollars fighting Columbia and is willing to spend more.

He has hired Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer, and has pledged to take the case to the United States Supreme Court if Columbia seeks to use eminent domain.

“No one is saying to Columbia, ‘You can’t have a campus here,’ ” he said. “They say they have to have everything and they won’t give a reason why — because there is no reason.”

Mr. Bollinger said the university is seeking ownership of the entire 17 acres because it wants a contiguous campus.

Other university officials said that once they sign a community benefits agreement with West Harlem, much of the opposition will dissipate.

This fall, the community board organized a local development corporation to conduct negotiations with Columbia for a benefits package.

The eventual agreement could include items like establishing a fund to prevent displacement because of rising rents or building an asthma clinic.

But opponents said a benefits package would not resolve several points of disagreement with Columbia, including the possibility of hazardous chemical and biological research and animal testing at the proposed science laboratories.

While Columbia has said the expansion would create 7,000 jobs, Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, the chairman of the community board, said he was skeptical about the sort of employment that would be offered.

“Most of the people in our community do not come close to the requirements for lab jobs,” he said. “What’s left are less desirable types of work, like janitorial jobs.”

Columbia officials said that the university would do what it could to help meet West Harlem’s needs, but said that there were limits to what it could do.

“We’ve got to make sure we do the right thing,” said Robert Kasdin, a senior executive vice president at the university, who is overseeing the expansion. “And whatever we do, we will be subject to criticism because we can’t fix the underlying problems.”


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/20/nyregion/1120-met-webCOLUMBIAmap.gif


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[JerseyBrett]

"But opponents said a benefits package would not resolve several points of disagreement with Columbia, including the possibility of hazardous chemical and biological research and animal testing at the proposed science laboratories."

...Last time I checked, I was pretty sure that scientists use chemicals when conducting research. You know, that whole cancer research thing. Oh man, it's never easy in NYC. LOL.

[antinimby]

Anne Z. Whitman, the owner of Hudson Moving and Storage, said Columbia had offered $4 million for her six-story, 35,000-square-foot building — though she has repeatedly told the university she has no plans to move.
Ms. Whitman believes the university will eventually try to condemn her building through eminent domain...Mr. Bollinger said the university is seeking ownership of the entire 17 acres because it wants a contiguous campus.I don't get why Columbia needs to take over her property and why they have to have a contiguous campus.

This is a living city, not some wide-open, undeveloped, suburban stretch of land where they can just build from scratch?

What's wrong with letting Ms. Whitman's business stay and building their campus around it?

[BPC]

It seems that Columbia is being the NIMBY here. They would rather not have the small businesses in their future new backyard. A bit presumptuous.

[investordude]

I think if Columbia was in the hip parts of Manhattan, a contiguous campus would not be necessary. But c'mon, this is a beleagered, forlorn manufacturing area in the middle of Harlem. Also, Columbia, like most universities, maintains its own police/security. Again, this makes sense to me, as the policing issues on a college campus really are different - everything from the proper limits on civil disobedience, to women's safety, to alcohol enforcement probably requires different judgements than what might be required elsewhere.

Having said that, I'd rather they commit to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the land, especially given the time horizon for this project is literally on the scale of generations and I think the proprietors have a point they are getting an unfairly low price if Columbia can seize the land decades before they need it.


Alternatively (and perhaps referably), it seems like they could buy the land over the Hudson Rail Yards where they were going to build the Jets Stadium. This would cost more, but you wouldn't need any eminent domain and a college campus would help guarantee the surrounding office district became a 24/7 vibrant place rather than a dead district after 5pm. But I doubt that's going to happen.

[investordude]

My reason continuity would not be needed in the hip parts of Manhattan is that those areas are already walkable and the amenities the neighborhood offers are designed for the college already, and the neighborhoods get enough police attention to address the public safety issues for hosting a college campus style environment.

But I really think the "living city" argument doesn't apply to that area of Harlem very well. Just look at the picture in the article and you can see parking lots and fences, etc and so forth.

[antinimby]

But c'mon, this is a beleagered, forlorn manufacturing area in the middle of Harlem.Replace "Harlem" from your statement and replace it with "Meatpacking District" or "High Line Area" and this would have been just as valid only just ten years ago.

Can you say the same thing now?

Things change.

When Columbia comes in, the area will likely change, albeit more organically instead of one fell swoop, as Columbia would like.

Neighborhoods that grow and change gradually overtime somehow seems more interesting than insta-neighborhoods, ones that seemingly pop up overnight.

But I really think the "living city" argument doesn't apply to that area of Harlem very well. Just look at the picture in the article and you can see parking lots and fences, etc and so forth.There are many people living happily in the outlying areas of Brooklyn and Queens will beg to differ.

Last time I checked, Harlem is still in Manhattan. That alone will ensure that if done correctly, this place will have just as much potential as say, the LES.

[ablarc]

^ It's a dump.

Meatpacking: anyone but a bozo could see the potential ages ago.

Here there's none (in the existing fabric, that is).

[antinimby]

Harlem is currently undergoing a renaissance like never before in its history.

[lofter1]

Except for the first one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance) ;)

[antinimby]

Considering the depths it had to gone down to in the 60's/70's/80's/90's, I would say this current one is the most remarkable.

[Hamilton]

I don't get why Columbia needs to take over her property and why they have to have a contiguous campus.

This is a living city, not some wide-open, undeveloped, suburban stretch of land where they can just build from scratch?

What's wrong with letting Ms. Whitman's business stay and building their campus around it?

Space-strapped Columbia will eventually need all of the land in the area it can get--even that will probably not be enough to fit all the labs and classrooms it needs; they are proceeding with infill developments on their original campus as we speak (SE corner of 120th and Broadway). The Grant Houses are to the east, the River is to the West, the Riverside Apt's are to the north, and Columbia, the Manhattan School of Music, & the seminaries already occupy most of the neighborhood to the south. Therefore they need to make maximum utility of this parcel, the last developable land within walking distance of the old campus. Ms. Whitman's six-story storage place is underutilization of the land in anyone's book--it probably shouldn't remain in Manhattan a quarter mile from a subway stop, regardless of Columbia's interests.

As someone mentioned, there is no "living fabric" in this part of Harlem--all this Jacobs-style rhetoric is misplaced. I don't think she had combo KFC/Taco Bells, chop shops, or fenced-off abandoned weed-strewn lots in mind when talking about the street fabric of the city.

[antinimby]

You're in Manhattan.

Space strap is something you're just going to have to deal with.

Everybody else seems to be, without resorting to eminent domain, why should Columbia be any different?

With that said, my recommendation to them is to build higher if running out of buildable land is their concern.

Most likely, Columbia is going to replace Ms. Whitman's six-story building with another six-story building of their own.

So much for the underutilization argument.

[Hamilton]

With that said, my recommendation to them is to build higher if running out of buildable land is their concern.

LOL--this is the Upper West Side. Might as well tell Columbia to build their classrooms in floating castles in the sky. Just as feasible given the crazy cat ladies on the Community Boards.
They originally had proposed buildings up to 350 feet tall for the area; of course, they got shot down bigtime, even though the Riverside Apartments easily reach that.


Most likely, Columbia is going to replace Ms. Whitman's six-story building with another six-story building of their own.

So much for the underutilization argument.

Where do you get your "predictions" from with which you are so easily able to "dismiss" the underutilization argument? As I said above, they were planning to build up to 300-something feet, and plans still call for up to 25-story buildings, a far stretch from decrepit 6-story industrial blight. Additionally, underutlization isn't just about building hieght, but about the intensity of the economic activity going on--storage is a low-intensity economic activity that doesn't generate very many jobs.

It seems that you are pretty uninformed about this whole situation and haven't cared enough to do some research--why are you commenting so forcefully on something you know so little about?

[antinimby]

LOL--this is the Upper West Side. Might as well tell Columbia to build their classrooms in floating castles in the sky. Just as feasible given the crazy cat ladies on the Community Boards.
They originally had proposed buildings up to 350 feet tall for the area; of course, they got shot down bigtime, even though the Riverside Apartments easily reach that.A tough CB gives them no right to take someone's property by eminent domain. Furthermore, since it looks like they're going to try to get rezoning from the City anyway, the cat ladies' preferences are pretty irrelevant now, aren't they?

Where do you get your "predictions" from with which you are so easily able to "dismiss" the underutilization argument? As I said above, they were planning to build up to 300-something feet, and plans still call for up to 25-story buildings, a far stretch from decrepit 6-story industrial blight.I never made any predictions, just guesses and they are based on experience of seeing how other schools in the city build up to, so it is not at all complete baseless.

Unless you have first hand knowledge of their plans, you aren't in any better position to say either.

Do you honestly think that every building they are proposing to build with be 25 stories each?

How certain are you that none of the 17 proposed buildings will be shorter than six-stories?

And if so, then wouldn't I be right?

It seems that you are pretty uninformed about this whole situation and haven't cared enough to do some research--why are you commenting so forcefully on something you know so little about?First you seem pretty irate that someone has an opinion other than yours.

While I never here claimed to be an expert on this subject, I like many others here follow what's printed and posted here online.

We are only commenting on what we see, hear or read.

That alone should not disallow anyone from posting their comments forcefully or not.

If only insiders can post was the requirement, this forum would be pretty slow.

Many of my comments are on Columbia using eminent domain, that's why I am more passionated here. The height of the buildings and the underutilization argument was brought up only by YOU.

Who's looking uninformed now?

[BPC]

As someone mentioned, there is no "living fabric" in this part of Harlem--all this Jacobs-style rhetoric is misplaced. I don't think she had combo KFC/Taco Bells, chop shops, or fenced-off abandoned weed-strewn lots in mind when talking about the street fabric of the city.

Um, actually JJ had a lot to say about these kinds of uses. Try reading "Life and Death" sometimes. It's actually pretty good! JJ also had a lot to say about the segregated college campus (versus integrated campuses like NYU), and why the edges of such segregated campuses often turn out to be the least desirable parts of the city. (In case you can't be troubled to read the whole book, it is in her chapter on "border vacuums".)

[ablarc]

JJ also had a lot to say about the segregated college campus (versus integrated campuses like NYU), and why the edges of such segregated campuses often turn out to be the least desirable parts of the city.
Into which category does she put Harvard Square/Harvard?

[BPC]

Into which category does she put Harvard Square/Harvard?

JJ never discussed Harvard, as best as I can recall. Even as a Yale man, I must admit that Harvard Square is wonderful. Nothing remotely comparable in New Haven. JJ's basic point was that college campuses create a "border vacuum," because students and residents rarely cross their respective sides of the border, and to JJ, lack of pedestrian traffic = DEATH. Businesses die, crime rises, etc. She was for anything that would integrate community and campus, instead of segregating them. I would think Harvard Square (if not necessarily the rest of Harvard's campus) does that.

Ironically, the one example I recall her writing approvingly of was Columbia's plan to stick their gym in Morningside Park, which of course was scotched by 1960s student activists. The next thirty years saw that park turned into a nasty drug den, so that when I went to law school there in the early 1990s I was repeatedly warned never to dare set foot in the park. Then in the late 1990s it was cleaned up and now is quite beautiful, one of the nicest parks in Manhattan, IMHO. It is an Olmstead design, just like Central Park, although built along the side of a cliff, which makes it quite striking. But I digress.

[pianoman11686]

Don't think she talks about that particular one (Harvard Square)^.

I happen to have read about this issue recently, and had the book handy. Some relevant passages:

Sometimes the main effect is the gradual, progressive spread, from street to street, of simple sidewalk insecurity. Morningside Heights in New York contains a long, narrow strip of neighborhood edged on one side by a campus and on the other side by a long waterfront park. This strip is further interrupted by the barriers of intervening institutions. Every place you go in this strip brings you quickly to a border. The most shunned of these borders by evening, for decades, has been that of the park. But gradually and almost imperceptibly, the common consent that insecurity exists has affected more and more of the territory, until today there is only one side of one street that carries more than solitary footfalls at night. This one-sided street, a stretch of Broadway, is across from the deadened perimeter of the big campus; and even it dies of through much of the strip, where it becomes preempted by another border.

[...]

Universities could make portions, at least, of their campuses more like seams and less like barriers if they placed their uses intended for the public at strategic points on their perimeters, and if they also put at their perimeters, and opened up as scenes, their elements congenial to public view and interest--instead of hiding them.[...]Big universities in cities, so far as I can see, have given no thought or imagination to the unique establishments they are. Typically they either pretend to be cloistered or countrified places, nostalgically denying their transplantation, or else they pretend to be office buildings. (Of course they are neither.)

[...]

Dwellings, whether subsidized or unsubsidized, major halls, auditoriums, government buildings, most schools, most city industry, all city commerce, work congenially in mingled settings, as part and parcel of the intricate mixed city fabric itself. When such elements are withdrawn from the mixture and segregated in the form of massive single uses, they not only result in gratuitous borders but, by being subtracted from other elements of city mixtures, they leave less material for creating counterforces.

[ablarc]

Don't think she talks about that particular one (Harvard Square)^.
Doesn't fit neatly into the theory. Neither does the Sorbonne. And what shall we say of Cambridge and Oxford?

She knew them all.

Doesn't matter, the theory's mostly valid.

[pianoman11686]

Not much theory in there, or so was my impression. Instead, objective observation followed by rational thinking. The book was one of the clearest and easiest-to-understand works I've ever read.

[ablarc]

The theory I was referring to was her campus-fringe theory.

[infoshare]

CU has a bad (http://www.processedworld.com/badcert.html) attitude (http://www.fastcompany.com/online/10/attitude.html)!

COLUMBIA'S BAD ATTITUDE
By JORDI REYES-MONTBLANC

November 27, 2006 -- COLUMBIA University wants to expand its Morningside Heights campus into the adjacent area of West Manhattanville, damn the torpedoes. Well, torpedoes is exactly what the university's trustees will find if they attempt to shove their views down the throats of area residents.
Columbia is a great institution, with a genuine need to expand - but it should have a better understanding of and empathy for the surrounding community.
For almost 20 years, our community - represented by Community Board 9 Manhattan (CB9) - worked, with input from Columbia, among many others, to develop a plan that gives form and substance to our diverse community's desires. This plan would allow Columbia to expand but without displacing other successful elements of the community. The quality of life would be enhanced for the whole of the CB9M district, which runs from West 110th Street to West 155th Street and from roughly St. Nicholas Avenue to the Hudson River, including our three historic neighborhoods of Morningside Heights, Manhattanville and Hamilton Heights.
But now Columbia's seeking to overturn that plan. It has targeted 17 acres for its expansion - but it has not been able to buy every property. So the university has gone to the Empire State Economic Development Corp. and paid $300,000 to produce a blight study. The plain intent is to paint a grim picture that will lead to condemnation, the exercise of eminent domain and the conveying of all properties within the 17-acre area to the university. All but three buildings in the parcel would be torn down. (The university also has requested the rezoning of another 18 acres in the area, a move that residents suspect would lead to even more expansion down the road.)
Within the 17 targeted acres are a number of apartment buildings and many small businesses, which employ more than 1,100 people - mostly district residents now threatened with loss and displacement.
Families that have run businesses in West Manhattanville for generations are now subject to pressure to sell - pressure so strong that many call it harassment. Some have already sold out - fearing that they'd wind up with far less if Columbia does get the state to use eminent domain to force sales.
Yet an impartial study would show that the only blight in West Manhattanville is thanks to Columbia. For years, the university has been acquiring properties, then leaving them to stand vacant or underused. Existing businesses in and near those buildings have closed and moved out.
Columbia's heavy-handed tactics and demand for eminent domain have antagonized the community. Residents' best hope now is that the public-review process will be independent of any political influences Columbia can bring into play. Any possible changes to CB9's original plan will go through the same open, public and participatory deliberations used to create the plan.
Columbia has stated that it wants a "partnership with the community." The community would welcome a partnership of equals. We will not be a minority partner and even less a silent partner. We shall be equal partners or no partners at all.
Jordi Reyes-Montblanc is chairman of Community Board 9 Manhattan.

[ablarc]

Jordi Reyes-Montblanc is chairman of Community Board 9 Manhattan.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
This is all about this jerk's personal aggrandizement.

Talk about a bad attitude!

[Xemu]

From the same interview Kris quoted in the NYT Tower thread:

One of your New York projects involves Columbia University’s expansion in Harlem. So you’ve been exposed to our famously contentious public process. What has your experience been?
Our site office is on Martin Luther King Boulevard and Broadway. It’s an old factory where they used to pasteurize milk at the beginning of last century. When I visit there and go out for lunch, I talk Italian to the Spanish lady. I know the neighborhood reverend. So, generally speaking, the level of understanding of the scheme is quite good. Everybody’s very keen about making it a good one. We are concerned about making a new complex where the university is not separated from the community. It’s not the same kind of campus they designed a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a different story today.

You can’t have a campus on a hill—the way the existing campus, as beautiful as it is, is closed off from the community.
Today it is more about dialogue, more about reciprocal enjoyment. So we’re making a scheme where there is a kind of public layer on the first and second floors. It is more about those functions. None are purely academic. They are about cultural activity, shops, clinics, new little companies. So it’s a scheme of light and the edge between architecture, human design and social being. Especially because Harlem is a place with a very strong DNA, a strong character, and we love that of course. But in this process it is never so easy because sometimes the common interest must be understood in association with local and specific interests.

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2440

I like this quote: He talks to the Spanish ladies in Italian so it's all good, nothing to worry about people of Northeast Harlem. And he knows the neighborhood reverend? Al Sharpton maybe?

[antinimby]

I feel better about this after reading Piano's comments about integrating the campus and community better.

[antinimby]

Columbia Faces Two-Front Opposition to Expansion Plans


By Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 7, 2006 (http://www.nysun.com/article/44730)

Parents fighting a plan to put a Columbia University-affiliated secondary school in the same building as a Harlem elementary school have joined forces with residents battling a university plan to expand its campus farther north.

At a Community Board 9 meeting last night, parents from P.S. 36 were supported by a contingent of community activists fighting Columbia University's proposed expansion into Manhattanville as they fired angry questions at Department of Education officials about the plans to temporarily house the new school inside the elementary school. The department, which will finance and oversee the Columbia Secondary School of Math, Science, and Engineering due to open next year, announced last month it is considering the elementary school, which is next door to the university, as a temporary location. Department officials have emphasized that the decision is not final, but parents were skeptical.

"Stop trying to snowball us and give us a clearly defined answer," one P.S. 36 parent said before storming out of the raucous meeting.

Part of the reason for calling the meeting was to push the department to include parent input and allow the board to learn more about the plan, the chairman of Community Board 9, George Reyes-Montblanc, who has been a leader in opposing the university's Manhattanville expansion, said.

"The fact that the DOE didn't consult us really bothers me," he said. "We're not here to crucify anything, we're just here to find out what's going on."

Parents have said it would be inappropriate to put a secondary school inside P.S. 36, which serves 3- to 8- year-olds. The school is too small, they say, with toilets outfitted for smaller-size people and a low-ceilinged cafeteria that triples as a gym and an auditorium.

The principal of the new school, Jose Maldonado, addressed P.S. 36 parents for the first time, apologizing for not involving the community in earlier planning stages for the secondary school and assuring them that the school would be representative of the community.

Eventually, the school will be housed on land provided by Columbia University. Its expected location at 125th Street and Broadway is currently home of a McDonald's and the corner of a 17-acre area of Manhattanville the university is eyeing for an additional campus.

The zoning change needed to build the school there must first be approved by Community Board 9.

© 2006 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Mr. Bollinger’s Battle

Can Harlem and Columbia Ever Agree on the Benefits of a Bigger Campus?

By: Matthew Schuerman
Date: 2/19/2007

It was more than two years ago, over a couple of beers at the West End in Morningside Heights, that Jordi Reyes-Montblanc first told a Columbia University official that he wanted a community-benefits agreement.

These devices—contracts that force developers to promise jobs or other goodies in exchange for political support for a project—had been circulating in urban-planning circles since 2001. The idea, which has been likened to extortion or to the subversion of democracy by critics, has made recent forays in New York City, appearing at Atlantic Yards and again at the Bronx Terminal Market shopping center.

“Whenever people come to the community to develop something, it is seldom, if ever, resulting in any benefit for the people who have made this place real,” Mr. Reyes-Montblanc told The Observer recently. “We want it in writing, we want it contractual—in a way that it can be fulfilled, that it can be verified.”

Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, a Cuban-born international-shipping consultant who heads the local community board, was holding a relatively strong hand: His board was working on a zoning plan that would compete with the university’s. The Pratt Institute was offering advice, and the Bloomberg administration seemed to view the whole thing as an interesting test case.

Columbia, meanwhile, was eager to heal the wounds that Harlem residents still felt from the university’s attempted takeover of Morningside Park back in 1968.

And so, the Ivy League official sitting across the table from him, senior executive vice president Robert Kasdin, indicated that he would be amenable to “talking with legitimate representatives about how our expansion should benefit the surrounding community,” Mr. Kasdin recalled.

Finally, after months of preparation, the negotiations for the community-benefits agreement began last month. Once completed, the C.B.A. may set a precedent for all other large real-estate projects in New York City, a precedent which, based on the way it has evolved so far, would be much more rigorous than those already established in the Bronx or Brooklyn.

Or it could provide more evidence that negotiations like this, outside the halls of government, come to no good.



PRACTICALLY SPEAKING, THE COMMUNITY-BENEFITS agreement will likely provide the key that Columbia needs to unlock city approval for its 17-acre expansion into West Harlem—an expansion that the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, has pretty much staked his tenure on.

Mr. Bollinger has known of the city-locked university’s desperate need for space since his very first interviews to get the job. His inaugural address in October 2002 even mentioned Manhattanville—the university’s preferred name for the southernmost section of West Harlem—as a possible expansion site well before the school went public with its plans.

“It turns out, at least from my point of view early on, that it was space that was the critical determinant in whether, over time, Columbia would maintain its greatness and achieve its potential,” Mr. Bollinger, a broad-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair, said recently in his office in Low Library. “Because of the crisis of the 1960’s, part of which involved space, Columbia has struggled for several decades to address the issue. While other universities were growing significantly, Columbia was making do with a building here, a space there, and it really had to, in my view, address this in a more comprehensive way.”

Mr. Bollinger considered a site along the Hudson River in the West 50’s, but decided in favor of West Harlem, in part because of its proximity to neighboring Morningside Heights and in part because, he said, “Harlem is a place of great magic, of mystique, of tremendous creativity and accomplishment.”

Ironically, by choosing Manhattanville, the man who became a champion of affirmative action shortly after becoming president of the University of Michigan, whence he came to Columbia, is putting himself in the position of displacing about 132 ethnically diverse households. Columbia has promised to relocate the residents in comparable or superior lodgings, but, according to LaVerna Fountain, Columbia’s assistant vice president for communications, details about how long tenants would enjoy comparable rents haven’t been worked out.

Mr. Bollinger said that he doesn’t see a contradiction between his University of Michigan and Columbia personae, but he does acknowledge that relations between the university and Harlem need to improve.

That’s where the community-benefits agreement comes in.

“The C.B.A., first of all, provides a context to build a relationship with the surrounding communities, and I don’t mean just engaging in a discussion about what Columbia can do and wants to do, but what the communities would like to see, and their aspirations and needs,” Mr. Bollinger said. “Secondly, it provides clarity of those things that we can agree to do for the surrounding communities—so we get that sort of settled. Lastly, it builds a base of trust. Over time, that is equally important, maybe more important, because the limits of what Columbia will do for surrounding communities will not be set by the community-benefits agreements.”



WHEN THE COMMUNITY BOARD STARTED TO FORM an entity that would negotiate on West Harlem’s behalf, one thing was certain: Harlem didn’t think much of the community-benefits agreement for Atlantic Yards, in which developer Forest City Ratner negotiated directly with nonprofits that would end up making money from the agreement.

“Ratner and the city got together with one big, national not-for-profit and a set of local sycophants and put something together which doesn’t seem to have satisfied too many people, except for those who are benefiting directly from it,” Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, the chairman of Community Board 9, said.

The community board wanted to keep out elected officials as well, at least until 2008, when their clout might be important to force Columbia to comply with the agreement. The point was to avoid the conflicts of interest that were apparent when Bronx City Council members negotiated a “community-benefits program” with the Yankees that called for, among other things, a $32 million charitable trust fund that would be indirectly controlled by the same elected officials who negotiated the deal.

Instead, the West Harlem community board began selecting representatives from the different public-housing projects nearby, as well as someone from the local business organization, another to represent the commercial-property owners—in other words, representatives from different constituencies, rather than heads of organizations that might benefit from the agreement.

Then, during the first meeting between the local development corporation and Columbia in August, a string of elected officials, with U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel at the head of the line, walked into the meeting room on 125th Street.

The politicians, who had been invited out of courtesy, argued that if they were going to be asked to enforce an agreement, they should help forge it. And besides, given all the difficulties of selecting true representatives of the community, why not go with some duly elected representatives?

“It was absolutely clear to us, by the time the meeting ended, that if we didn’t include their representatives on the board as voting members, that we would be doing so at our own peril,” said one development-corporation board member.

After several more weeks of give-and-take with the elected officials, the local development corporation went back and revised its by-laws to permit them as voting members to the board—but only after the corporation raised questions about whether or not there would be conflicts of interest with their official roles in the land-use approval process. The corporation asked the elected officials to seek legal counsel on this point.

Susan Russell, the chief of staff for City Councilman Robert Jackson, said that only two of the elected officials now on the development corporation’s board—Mr. Jackson, who represents West Harlem, and Inez Dickens, who represents an adjacent district—would also vote on the land-use application. (The other five elected officials are state legislators, Mr. Rangel, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who only issues recommendations on land-use plans.)

“Elected officials bring experience to the board,” Ms. Russell said. “They bring the power of their office. And they help legitimize and broaden the base of representation of the board.”

The community board is struggling to maintain a united front against the use of eminent domain—the government’s right to take private property, with compensation for the owner, so long as it goes to some sort of public use, with “public use” being variously defined. Tom DeMott, a former post-office employee who is a tenants’ representative on the development corporation’s board, fears that the involvement of elected officials may dilute that resolve, even though they profess solidarity.

“The problem with having elected officials on the local development corporation is that one of the constituents they represent is Columbia University,” Mr. DeMott said. “There is immense potential here, but there is also immense potential to get screwed.”

The views on eminent domain among the current 19 board members of the local development corporation—including representatives from elected officials—is actually diverse and nuanced, according to the corporation’s president, Patricia Jones, a certified public accountant who lives in Hamilton Heights.

“Some believe that eminent domain is a land-use issue, and therefore outside the purview of the C.B.A. Some believe that because the Empire State Development Corporation will make the ultimate decision as to whether or not eminent-domain powers ought to be used, a lot of people say that’s a state issue,” Ms. Jones said. “You’ve got others who say, ‘I don’t care whose issue it is, it needs to come off the table.’”

Right now, Columbia says that it owns 67.5 percent of the 17 acres it wants. Another 20.5 percent is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other public agencies. Just 12 percent is privately held.

“In my view, it would be irresponsible to take eminent domain off the table,” Mr. Bollinger said. “I don’t know if we will ask for it—I hope not—but certainly I think that, when there is an economic interest that is standing in the way of a public purpose, like major work on the brain that may cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, I think we should be in a position to use it or call for its use.”

It may turn out that the community-benefits agreement will become the price that Columbia has to pay for the right to take that final 12 percent of property by eminent domain. Consider: The university softens up the local development-corporation members with enough well-meaning promises that a majority of them would overlook the eminent-domain issue. The City Council takes its cue from the local development corporation and approves the land-use changes that Columbia needs to turn an industrial slum into gleaming scientific laboratories.



IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN that way.

Officially, the city considers C.B.A.’s separate from the zoning changes that the Planning Commission and City Council decide, but in practice they are intertwined. The Related Companies and the Yankees negotiated their community-benefits agreements until just hours before the City Council took its vote on the land-use plan, because the Council was waiting to see that the affected neighborhoods got something for their pain.

And since the state will make the decision on eminent domain, that City Council vote is really the only one where local officials could block Columbia from taking property away against the owners’ will.

Meanwhile, the official city policy on C.B.A.’s is murky. Why, it was just 10 months ago that the Mayor called an attempt at creating a C.B.A. for the new Mets stadium “a ransom.” Yet the Bloomberg administration has sanctioned the Columbia C.B.A. to a greater extent than any others.

It was the Mayor’s office, for example, that drafted Jesse Masyr, a developer’s attorney who represented the Related Companies for Bronx Terminal Market, to work pro bono for the community group.

And the city’s Economic Development Corporation has allocated $350,000 to pay for a mediator and underwrite certain other expenses.

“What we have attempted [is] to play the role of honest broker in discussions between the community and Columbia,” Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff told The Observer in January.

But Mr. Doctoroff added that he didn’t see the use of a C.B.A. in West Harlem as necessarily a model for future large-scale development plans.

“We’ve learned that community input is absolutely essential,” he said. “We’ve also learned that every community is different, so we continue to take a very tailored approach to every situation.”

Mr. Masyr acknowledged that C.B.A.’s raise many beguiling issues, but said they are the wave of the future. One question is how closely related the benefits that a developer promises must be to the project undertaken. Another is whether, by linking votes on the C.B.A. with the ones that the City Council takes on land use, the C.B.A. doesn’t amount to extortion.

“It’s an evolving issue,” Mr. Masyr said. “I can easily anticipate in the future seeing more involvement from government, not less.”

copyright © 2006 the new york observer, llc | all rights reserved

[Eugenious]

Mr. Bollinger’s Battle

Can Harlem and Columbia Ever Agree on the Benefits of a Bigger Campus?

By: Matthew Schuerman
Date: 2/19/2007

It was more than two years ago, over a couple of beers at the West End in Morningside Heights, that Jordi Reyes-Montblanc first told a Columbia University official that he wanted a community-benefits agreement.

These devices—contracts that force developers to promise jobs or other goodies in exchange for political support for a project—had been circulating in urban-planning circles since 2001. The idea, which has been likened to extortion or to the subversion of democracy by critics, has made recent forays in New York City, appearing at Atlantic Yards and again at the Bronx Terminal Market shopping center.


copyright © 2006 the new york observer, llc | all rights reserved

Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime) groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence or a lawsuit which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence or lawsuit is sufficient to commit the offense. The simple four words "pay up or else" are sufficient to constitute the crime of extortion. An extortionate threat made to another in jest is still extortion.

[infoshare]

I recently found this (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/) webpage that has some good news coverage on this Manhattanville (http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/Deck-Slide-67WEB.jpg) project. Inside there are many web-links, one of which has a youtube-type video that is narrated. All-in-all I found this to be an informative and enjoyable webpage.

Enjoy the tour: it may be as close as we may ever get to seeing the actual built project. :D

[ablarc]

Mr. Masyr acknowledged that C.B.A.’s raise many beguiling issues, but said they are the wave of the future. One question is how closely related the benefits that a developer promises must be to the project undertaken. Another is whether, by linking votes on the C.B.A. with the ones that the City Council takes on land use, the C.B.A. doesn’t amount to extortion.

“It’s an evolving issue,” Mr. Masyr said. “I can easily anticipate in the future seeing more involvement from government, not less.”
Building something will take ever longer and cost more and more.

Development by payoff.

[pianoman11686]

From http://cityrealty.com/new_developments

Borough President Stringer calls for rezoning of West Harlem 18-APR-07

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer proposed in an "opinion" article in today's edition of The New York Post a rezoning of West Harlem to deal with the "ripple effects" of a planned major expansion by Columbia University.

"The success of city zoning often depends on whether planners have properly drawn the boundaries of the area to be rezoned. That's why I've proposed that, instead of focusing solely on the eight or so blocks that Columbia University seeks to develop for its new Manhattanville campus, we rezone all of West Harlem - from 125th Street to 145th Street, and from Convent Avenue to the Hudson River - as a new special-purpose zoning district.

"A West Harlem Special District would widen the lens through which we have been viewing the consequences of Columbia's expansion, ensuring that we plan for the needs not just of Columbia, but of the whole community.

Otherwise, the expansion's ripple effects could overwhelm the larger neighborhood.

"Under any circumstances, Columbia's expansion - a $7 billion, 17-acre plan with dozens of modern glass buildings, some reaching 25 stories - will be felt throughout West Harlem. But public debate has so far focused mainly on the direct impact that Columbia's new campus will have on businesses and residents in the expansion zone.

"The area will experience obvious benefits from the new campus, including jobs, investment dollars and new resources for the arts and culture. There are real issues as well: a community-benefits agreement to be hammered out; legitimate outrage over the prospect of Columbia using eminent domain to condemn people's homes, and more."

Mr. Stringer wrote that tenants in "historic tenements" in Hamilton Heights outside the immediate area that the university wants to expand into "have legitimate reason to worry that their homes will be replaced by glass towers in a newly 'hot' college neighborhood."

"Similarly," he continued, "Broadway's thriving commercial corridor north of 135th Street is also outside the expansion zone - but local storeowners fear that they will be pushed out to make way for retail catering to students and visitors. Overall, a quarter to a half of the nearby properties are vulnerable to redevelopment. There's a clear need for broader rezoning and a West Harlem Special District."

Mr. Stringer proposed a housing program to channel development dollars toward construction of new housing "that's truly affordable for current residents" and to adopt anti-harassment and demolition-restriction provisions like those in other special districts; these impose serious penalties on landlords who harass tenants or demolish viable housing."

[pianoman11686]

Columbia's Harlem Lobbying Effort Gets Expensive

Land Use

BY ELIOT BROWN - Special to the Sun
May 24, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/55153

Columbia University is ramping up lobbying efforts for its planned 17-acre campus extension in Harlem, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into an attempt to gain city approval for the contentious project.

Between January and April, the university paid more than $440,000 to lobbying firms, according to data released to the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, a marked increase compared with the approximately $190,000 the institution spent in the first four months of 2006. Since 2004, Columbia is listed as paying more than $1.5 million to lobbyists for land-use or expansion-related subjects, mostly targeting city and local elected officials.

For developers seeking city approval for giant projects, it has become an almost obligatory step to throw fistfuls of money into lobbying in an effort to win needed support of officials. Columbia's plan to expand its campus north has drawn strong resistance from many in the community, and opponents are vowing a fight as the proposal enters the city's public review process in coming months.

Perhaps seeing the storm clouds on the horizon, the university last year hired as a lobbyist the longtime political insider Bill Lynch, who has received about $200,000 so far this year.

A spokeswoman for Columbia, La-Verna Fountain, said the dollar figures in state records also include services other than lobbying, such as community outreach and land-use legal services.

Opponents of the plan have hired a lobbyist as well, though the university's spending easily dwarfs the $28,000 paid to Richard Lipsky, who frequently does lobbying for small businesses.

The owner of rental storage properties in the project's footprint, Nicholas Sprayregen, who hired Mr. Lipsky, said he, like Columbia, is just trying to get officials to hear his position.

"These eminent domain fights are David vs. Goliath and in the case like this, the thing one guy like me can do is try to get his message out," Mr. Sprayregen said.

Particularly for large development projects that require city or state approval, policy analysts say lobbying has grown tremendously in the past decade.

"It just seems that one of the greatest growth industries in the city and state is our lobbying industry," the executive director of the advocacy group Citizens Union, Richard Dadey, said. Regarding the money Columbia is putting into their campaign, Mr. Dadey said: "It is a fair amount of money to spend on a lobbying campaign to influence these decisions, but it is what institutions are increasingly willing to pay to win on their issue."

Columbia's spending on lobbying this year tops that of any major developer in the city, though the developer of Brooklyn's $4 billion Atlantic Yards Project, Forest City Ratner, is listed as spending more than $300,000. In 2006, the Brooklyn-based development company ranked third in the state for lobbying expenses, spending more than $2.1 million leading up to the approval in December of the giant mixed-use project that seeks to build a basketball arena and residential towers near downtown Brooklyn.

Columbia is awaiting the completion of a state-administered blight study for the area, a required step for the use of eminent domain. A spokesman for the state's development agency said the state is hoping to complete the study in June.

© 2007 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.

[ablarc]

For developers seeking city approval for giant projects, it has become an almost obligatory step to throw fistfuls of money into lobbying in an effort to win needed support of officials.
Plato points out "democracy" inevitably degenerates into oligarchy. And oligarchy is based on money.

Sad.

What do you think that money actually goes into to get the message out? Power lunches? Paid vacations in Orlando? Free visits to the Hustler Club?

[pianoman11686]

Does it even matter? The only people who really "win" in this kind of arrangement are the lobbyists.

[pianoman11686]

Columbia expansion plowing ahead

By: Anne Michaud
Published: May 31, 2007 - 3:06 pm
http://www.newyorkbusiness.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070531/FREE/70531008/1102

Columbia University's 17-acre expansion into West Harlem will enter into the city review process on Monday, following three years of delay and controversy.

The review, which takes seven months, would rezone several city blocks near the Hudson River to create a satellite campus for the university. Science labs, an arts building and a business school are planned.

Charges that the university is mishandling community relations have dogged the project -- sometimes triggering student protests -- and local leaders are objecting to the timing, which means that public hearings will be scheduled during the summer vacation months.

"It is the opinion of the West Harlem Local Development Corp. that a summer certification date for this proposal, which has been under review at the Department of City Planning for years, will offend the essence of the [land-use review] process which is designed to seek community comment and involvement," wrote Patricia Jones, president of the LDC, in a letter to City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden.

Ms. Jones' group is responsible for negotiating a package of community benefits with the university to offset any local hardship. Tension surrounds the prospect that Columbia will ask state officials to take the land of unwilling sellers by eminent domain.

The university's rezoning application and environmental impact statement are in final review today by the Department of City Planning, a spokeswoman said. Planners expect to present it Monday to the City Planning Commission for certification, launching the review process known as Ulurp.

City planners say the public will have plenty of time to offer input.

"The Ulurp process extends for seven months and will allow many opportunities along the way for public comment," says Rachaele Raynoff, department spokeswoman.

A representative of Columbia University said there is probably never a good time to start the process.

"We understand the challenges," said a spokeswoman. "This has been a long time coming, and we are simply ready and willing to keep working with everyone."

Entire contents © 2007

[ablarc]

Columbia is being asked to buy the community's approval.

I say let's dispense with the niceties and cut to the nitty-gritty. Columbia should offer to pay $5000 cash to every resident and every full-time employee in the area in question upon their signing of a petition asking the city to hurry up and approve the project. The hundred million or so bucks thus spent would represent a bargain for Columbia and a much coveted windfall for the community.

Win/win.

Then everyone can have a victory parade and appoint Jordi Reyes-Montblanc as Drum Major.

[antinimby]

Columbia University's northward expansion plans presented


http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1184360790_manhattanville130b_s.jpg


13-JUL-07 (http://www.cityrealty.com/new_developments/news.cr?noteid=19322)

Columbia University gave a presentation of the environmental impact statement for its planned expansion north of 125th Street to the Manhattanville community last night at Lerner Hall on Broadway at 114th Street.

Its expansion plans were recently certified into the city's Uniform Land Use Review process and earlier this week Community Board unanimously voted to endorse the board's 197-A plan that sets development standards for the West Harlem area and seeks to protect residents from primary and secondary displacement from new developments. The 197-A plan mandates that 50 percent of all new housing units be affordable for people who live in the community.

The university, which is hoping to develop a major northward expansion of its Morningside Heights campus south of 125th Street and is seeking a change in zoning, announced yesterday it would not seek eminent domain to evict residents in the area into which it wants to expand.

The university's "academic mixed-use development" would occupy about 17 acres in a 35-acre Special District and its development would total about 6.8 million gross square feet above and below grade primarily of "community facility uses serving the university, with street-level retail and other active ground-floor uses."

The remaining 18 acres would include 9 acres between 12th Avenue and Marginal Street and east of Broadway, which are estimated to result in another 329,500 gross square feet of commercial and residential development, and 9 acres between marginal Street and the pier line of which two acres comprises the area of the new West Harlem Waterfront park and 7 acres comprises city-owned land under water that cannot be developed nor generate transferable air rights.

Much of the area proposed to be rezoned is across Broadway from Manhattanville Houses.

The university's proposal limits the floor-to-area ratio in the proposed district to 6, whereas it is now predominately zoned with maximum FARs of 1 to 2, and calls for widening of sidewalks and view corridors leading to the waterfront and seeks to "enliven and activate West 125th Street as the gateway to the West Harlem Waterfront park, now under construction."

Copyright © 1994-2007 CITY REALTY.COM INC.

[ablarc]

"community facility uses serving the university"
WTF is that??




(Doublespeak?)

[Tectonic]

Arch Record Today, July 18th 2007.
For comments visit:http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/070618piano.asp
Piano, SOM’s Columbia Plan Stirs Controversy

June 18, 2007




by Dorian Davis
Renzo Piano is not bashful about his plan to raze century-old, masonry-clad factories and tenements in West Harlem and replace them with big, crisp buildings of steel and glass—a new campus for Columbia University that resembles Metropolis more than it does the existing neighborhood. “Cities are bound to change,” he says, “You have to accept it.”
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/070618piano1.jpg
Images courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop / Skidmore Owings & Merrill
Created by Renzo Piano and SOM, Columbia University’s new 17-acre campus will replace low-rise warehouses and tenements with glass-walled towers.
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/070618piano2.jpg
http://a248.e.akamai.net/6/800/1129/1184089792/oascentral-s.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/Creatives/MHC/sweets_traffic_300x250_ron_stair/ (http://oascentral.construction.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/archrecord.construction.com/news/article/1397381129/Left/MHC/sweets_traffic_300x250_ron_stair/SweetsTrafficDrive_StairsPanels_300x250.html/31386263623830363436396538613430?http://www.construction.com/banner_redirect_stairs.html&clickTAG2=http://oascentral.construction.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/archrecord.construction.com/news/article/1397381129/Left/MHC/sweets_traffic_300x250_ron_stair/SweetsTrafficDrive_StairsPanels_300x250.html/31386263623830363436396538613430?http://www.construction.com/banner_redirect_panels.html&clickTAG3=http://oascentral.construction.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/archrecord.construction.com/news/article/1397381129/Left/MHC/sweets_traffic_300x250_ron_stair/SweetsTrafficDrive_StairsPanels_300x250.html/31386263623830363436396538613430?http://products.construction.com)
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/070618piano3.jpg




Pressed for space at its original campus in Morningside Heights, 10 blocks south, Columbia hired Piano in 2003. He created a sprawling, city-within-a-city that covers 17 acres with 6.8 million square feet of box-shaped towers; Skidmore Owings & Merrill formulated the urban plan. But to make way for this development, Columbia must contend with three privately owned warehouses that refuse to sell, including one that was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. Its plan to demolish them is raising the specter of eminent domain and pitting Columbia against Harlem residents.
Piano says the results will be worth the controversy. Punctuated by tree-lined quads, his buildings are meant to bring a new, open sense to the neighborhood. Their ground floors will host retail stores and restaurants. “We put the dirty functions—garbage, ramps, parking, and loading—underground, because they make a very opaque environment, and we put the research facilities up higher, so that everything on the ground is more transparent and public,” he explains.
Columbia’s plan took a big step forward this summer following the completion of an environmental impact statement and feasibility study by Thornton Tomasetti and AKRF. The city’s Planning Department is scheduled to start the land review process today, giving the local Community Board 60 days to review Columbia’s plans and suggest changes. If approved, construction would be completed in two phases: the first by 2015, the second by 2030. Meanwhile, the Community Board’s own plan, called 197A—which includes more preservation and avoids eminent domain—goes before public hearings in July.
Developing a new campus almost as big as the original one requires extensive dialogue with neighborhood residents, Piano concedes. “Listening is a very tough job, because you have to listen to the right voices, and sometimes the right voices are very little voices.” But residents wonder if, so far, the architect has listened only to Columbia. His plan calls for retaining only a handful of existing buildings: three small, brick structures dating to the early 1900s. They include a terra cotta-faced building where the architect makes his local office. “We saved buildings that will give a sense of the history of this neighborhood. It’s a mix of the past but, at the same time, the courage to go ahead and change,” he says.
Neighborhood residents and others contend that more preservation is warranted. “How can only three or four buildings preserve the character of a neighborhood,” says Eric Washington, author of Manhattanville, a history of the area. “That’s a lot of responsibility for four buildings.” Instead of demolishing some of the older structures, residents want Columbia to build its campus around them. “It has the opportunity to embrace such a rich community,” says Anne Whitman, owner of Hudson Moving and Storage, which could be seized if the state, prodded by Columbia, invokes eminent domain.
For its part, the university contends that an influx of shopping, dining, working, and living opportunities will quiet dissent. “This is an area that is going to change, and should change in significant ways,” says Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. It’s a sentiment that Piano shares: “You can’t embalm a city,” he says.

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/070618piano4.jpg
Photo: © Charles Linn
The owners of a storage facility slated for demolition protest Columbia's plans"

[ablarc]

Columbia hired Piano in 2003. He created a sprawling, city-within-a-city that covers 17 acres
It doesn't "sprawl", and Piano didn't "create" the project boundaries.

This is an article in an architecture magazine? You'd think their reporters would know better (or at least the editors).

[BPC]

Still, I know that area well, and while it could surely stand for some sprucing up, IMHO a little architectural variety instead of top-to-bottom Renzo would really yield a far better result.

[Fabrizio]

"But to make way for this development, Columbia must contend with three privately owned warehouses that refuse to sell, including one that was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. Its plan to demolish them is raising the specter of eminent domain and pitting Columbia against Harlem residents."

WHAT? Demolishing one that was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places? The NATIONAL Register of Historic Places? And they want to raise it?

"Its plan to demolish them is raising the specter of eminent domain and pitting Columbia against Harlem residents."

Like, is that a surprise or something?

And I LOVE this one:

"His plan calls for retaining only a handful of existing buildings: three small, brick structures dating to the early 1900s. They include a terra cotta-faced building where the architect makes his local office."

Of course.

The Pope, The Queen, Castro... they all get the best digs. Eminent domain indeed.

[Scraperfannyc]

It's a joke that this area has resistence to new development. Does the historic signficance have to do with drug dealer turf? This is a pretty scary part of the city as it stands now, except for the fairway market.

I hope for the best regarding Columbia's new Expansion plans.

[Fabrizio]

"It's a joke that this area has resistence to new development."

The joke is that you expect residents to sit around and not make a peep while developers demolish a neighborhood building that is on the National Register of Historic places. C'mon now... isn't that just a little naive?

"Does the historic signficance have to do with drug dealer turf?"

^ would you mind explaining that one?

[ablarc]

The joke is that you expect residents to sit around and not make a peep while developers demolish a neighborhood building that is on the National Register of Historic places. C'mon now... isn't that just a little naive?
Any building listed on the National Register of Historic Places should be preserved automatically and with no discussion. Period.

That said, I think it's naive to think the folks in the nabe care about this as anything but a handy tool for obstructionism.

[Derek2k3]

Since the master plan won't be fully built out until 2030, it's unlikely that the buildings will be done by the same architects. If Columbia keeps the architectural bar high, this will be marvelous.

SOM finally updated that cumbersome site of theirs and uploaded some nice pics of their New York projects, including this one. However, after glancing at their other, more exciting work in other cities, I can't help but feel NY is biting the dust. At least their projects here are corporately classy.

http://www.som.com/content.cfm/columbia_university_manhattanville_campus
Columbia University Manhattanville Campus Master Plan

http://www.som.com/content.cfm/www_projects?region=NANE&pindex=1
Eastern U.S. projects

[ablarc]

Bland.

[DominicanoNYC]

Bland.

I agree, nothing to get excited about...

[infoshare]

I agree, nothing to get excited about...

Here is something to get excited about: the restoration of an old building on the north section of the proposed Columbia University Campus has just been completed; I think this is going to be a resturant.

I should have asked David Dinkins what the plans are for this newly renovated building, he was standing on the sidewalk at 125th street in front of the Columbia Science Building; I walked by him moments before I took these photos. He is currently a professor of public affairs at Columbia, so maybe he was teaching a class nearby - who knows.

I have attached some photos of the newly renovated building and am looking forward to seeing more new developments in this area. This project has been a long time in the making; but I have heard recently that - if all goes well - final approvals for this project could be only few months away.

[Fabrizio]

I hope it is a restaurant

[infoshare]

I am almost (http://theonetrain.blogspot.com/2007/05/dont-fear-columbia.html) certain it will be. :)

[Fabrizio]

BTW: I once saw David Dinkins at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

[BPC]

in Tuscany?

[Fabrizio]

No, not here.

To each his own David.

[infoshare]

BTW: I once saw David Dinkins at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Speaking of Puff Pastry: have you heard about plan 197A (http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/070718rival.asp).

Excerpt below copied from RECORD magazine.
"For Harlem residents, though, the devil is in the details. If the turnout on July 9 is a harbinger of turnout on August 15, when Community Board 9 holds its public hearing on 197-C, then Columbia’s plan could wind up—like the buildings it purports to save—in need of serious retooling."


P.S. - Does anyone know the time/place where the PUBLIC HEARING is being held today. I may go to this event - anyone from WireNY who want's to meet-up with me: send a me a pm so we can arrange to get together.

[lofter1]

... August 15, when Community Board 9 holds its public hearing on 197-C ...

Does anyone know the time/place where the PUBLIC HEARING is being held today. I may go to this event - anyone from WireNY want's to meet-up with me: send a me a pm so we can arrange to get together.



Community Board 9: http://www.cb9m.org/

Calendar: http://www.cb9m.org/show.php?CLm=08&CLd=15&CLy=2007&c_num=CB9M_Calendar

Public Hearing for 197C; ULURP Committee vote on 197C Plan, to be held at:

Manhattanville Community Center,
530 W. 133rd Street
@ 6:30 p.m.

[infoshare]

Community Board 9: http://www.cb9m.org/
Manhattanville Community Center,
530 W. 133rd Street
@ 6:30 p.m.


Thank You. And guess what; It so happens that I had the info in my own photo file. :eek:

[infoshare]

I am glad that I did not go to this event (http://media.www.columbiaspectator.com/media/storage/paper865/news/2007/08/16/News/Cb9-Committee.Votes.Down.Expansion.Plan-2931096.shtml), from what I have read (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/panel-rejects-columbias-expansion-plan/)it was a very contentious meeting.

Link to a Manhattanville vidio tour - http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/

A recent photo taken near 125th Street - http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/Deck-Slide-67WEB.jpg

My favorite post from this thread - http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=73304&postcount=26

FROM NY TIMES ARTICLE - "After a five-hour hearing on Wednesday — a meeting so contentious that at one point, former Mayor David N. Dinkins was heckled — the land-use committee of Community Board 9 in Manhattan voted resoundingly to oppose Columbia University’s expansion plan unless a number of conditions were first met, including the construction of low-income housing and certain environmental measures.
After a five-hour hearing on Wednesday — a meeting so contentious that at one point, former Mayor David N. Dinkins was heckled — the land-use committee of Community Board 9 in Manhattan voted resoundingly to oppose Columbia University’s expansion plan unless a number of conditions were first met, including the construction of low-income housing and certain environmental measures."

[antinimby]

http://www.nydailynews.com/img/2007/03/09/asset60_louissub.jpg Errol Louis


Noisy neighbors wrong to shout down progress


Thursday, August 30th 2007 (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/08/30/2007-08-30_noisy_neighbors_wrong_to_shout_down_prog.html), 4:00 AM

The biggest obstacle to Columbia University's planned $7 billion expansion into West Harlem - a problem that could hobble other worthy, ambitious development plans - is New York's cumbersome, outdated land-use procedures, which reward obstructionists, polarize communities and add years of needless, expensive delay to large-scale projects.

New York can do better.

We have to.

Columbia wants to relocate its business school to Harlem and build a research center, dormitories and green space in a 17-acre area north of 125th St. and west of Broadway.

The shortcomings of the current scheme for public input on such plans were on display at a recent Community Board 9 meeting, where a deafening chorus of chants and boos were hurled at Columbia President Lee Bollinger and ex-Mayor David Dinkins as they made brief statements in support of the expansion proposal.

The ruckus, which was videotaped and proudly posted on YouTube, is a great example of how not to plan New York's next quarter-century of development.

In theory, our city's land-use procedures - a slow trip through the local community board, the borough president's office and the City Council, with public hearings and advisory votes at each step along the way - is supposed to give neighborhoods maximum input into development plans.

That's the theory. In practice, putting development projects through the wringer of local politics, with its endless bickering, gives enormous power to those who want to stop a project cold.

The usual obstructionist tactic is what I call the Gulliver Gambit: pretending to support progress, but only if the developer agrees to attach a thousand tiny strings to a big project.

The real motive of the strategy is to tie down a project and run development costs through the roof until a killing blow can be landed in the form of an adverse court ruling or elections that bring new government players into the mix.

We're seeing hints of that in West Harlem, where Community Board 9 says it favors negotiation with Columbia - but only if 10 "nonnegotiable" demands are met first.

Another favorite anti-development strategy is to cry foul over the makeup of whatever group tries to actually strike a bargain.

This week, six board members of the West Harlem Local Development Corp. - a group created more than a year ago for the purpose of negotiating a community-benefits agreement with Columbia - began circulating a letter castigating Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel for convening a meeting of LDC members and local officials to talk about ways to include subsidized housing in the Columbia plan.

Such complaints are a distraction from the real deal-making that needs to take place. In particular, there's a proposal by Harlem businessman Nick Sprayregen that deserves more attention: The deal would swap Sprayregen's businesses on the west side of Broadway for Columbia's property on the east side of the street, where Sprayregen would build up to 1,000 units of subsidized housing.

Whatever the outcome of such bargaining, New York is long overdue for a new set of land-use regulations. Recent innovations, like the creation of formal community-benefits agreements - negotiated with help from neutral, professional arbitrators and urban planners - should be written into law. And technological support, including Web sites with room for public comments on big projects, should be a given.

Above all, we need to do away with holding late-night shout-fests to figure out how to build our city.

© Copyright 2007 NYDailyNews.com

[infoshare]

http://www.nydailynews.com/img/2007/03/09/asset60_louissub.jpg Errol Louis


Noisy neighbors wrong to shout down progress


The ruckus, which was videotaped and proudly posted on YouTube, is a great example of how not to plan New York's next quarter-century of development.

© Copyright 2007 NYDailyNews.com


This is the youtube vidio mentioned in the article. - http://youtube.com/watch?v=g0JpF07SOo4

[ablarc]

Mob.

[antinimby]

I saw someone in that video holding up a sign that read, "no biotech in our backyards."

Yeah, let's keep the storage warehouses and auto repair shops instead.

Talk about dumb and misinformed.

[DarrylStrawberry]

From the New York Times...I took out the last bit about the President of Iran.


Columbia Announces Deal on Its 17-Acre Expansion Plan

By COLIN MOYNIHAN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/colin_moynihan/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: September 27, 2007

Lee C. Bollinger (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/lee_c_bollinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the president of Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org), and Scott M. Stringer, the borough president of Manhattan, announced yesterday that they had reached an agreement relating to the university’s plans to expand its campus in Harlem.

The university said that in moving forward with its plans it would contribute $20 million to start a fund to build affordable housing in the neighborhood, and contribute additional money for local parks and playgrounds. It also promised to use environmentally friendly construction and design.

The university also said it would create a community resource center to tell local residents about its construction plans, hiring for jobs and how to apply for the housing financed by the school.

“We want to be a good neighbor,” Mr. Bollinger said.

Columbia’s plan to expand its campus into 17 nearby acres has drawn criticism from many in the neighborhood because it would displace residents and businesses. The school already owns about two-thirds of the land required for the expansion and is negotiating with owners to acquire the rest.

Mr. Bollinger did not rule out the possibility of asking the city to acquire that property through eminent domain, but said that the school would prefer to use other means.

The university’s plan will be reviewed by the City Planning Commission (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/city_planning_commission/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the City Council and must be approved by both bodies before moving forward. Community Board 9, whose vote is advisory, has already voiced strong opposition to the plan.

Yesterday, some Harlem officials said the agreement by Columbia was a good-faith effort to begin discussions about the project and its impact.
City Councilman Robert Jackson, whose district is in Harlem, said: “I am pleased that Columbia has basically put forward this particular step to say, ‘we are willing to sit down and negotiate with anyone who is willing to do that.’”

[pianoman11686]

Columbia's $6 Billion Expansion Likely to Win Approval From NYC

By Brian Kladko

Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Columbia University's $6 billion expansion plan in Harlem may win approval from a New York City panel next week, five years after the school began an effort to double in size.

The city's Planning Commission is scheduled to vote Nov. 26 on the school's rezoning request, which has aroused opposition from some residents and business owners. Columbia wants to transform 17 acres north of its existing campus in New York City with academic buildings, research labs and dormitories.

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia all are pursuing major expansions, largely for research labs to attract federal money, professors and prestige. As Columbia seeks city approval, the commission will also rule on a competing plan by a community board that says the school would wipe out blue-collar jobs and homes.

``Columbia ultimately will get nearly everything it's asking for,'' said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow specializing in development at the Manhattan Institute, a New York nonprofit whose members analyze public issues. She said the neighborhood is underdeveloped, with good access to transportation, ``and New York needs Columbia. It's an important international university and a major employer.''

Columbia needlessly generated animosity in the neighborhood, Vitullo-Martin said in a telephone interview. The community board, some residents and business owners say the university must do more to preserve jobs and homes in the Manhattanville section of the western edge of Harlem.

Legal Challenge Possible

Even if Columbia gets the rezoning it seeks, some residents vow to continue fighting the university. Tom DeMott, a member of Coalition to Preserve Community, a group opposed to Columbia's plans, raised the possibility of lawsuits over environmental threats, or legal challenges to the possible use of eminent domain where the government has the right to acquire property.

``We have all kinds of things that we're prepared and willing to do to make this plan not go through if they don't compromise the way they should, and if the elected officials sell us out,'' DeMott said.

``Columbia has got a good case for its expansion,'' said the Reverend Earl Kooperkamp, rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church, near the expansion zone. ``However, the neighborhood is historically low-income -- a disempowered, disenfranchised neighborhood. We want to see what we can do to change that.''

Kooperkamp said the community board's plan treats Manhattanville like a multifaceted village. Columbia's plan, he said, envisions the area as a ``plantation.''

``It's one crop, one owner,'' he said.

Five Building

Columbia plans to begin construction of five buildings in about a year, assuming it gets zoning approval: a science center, new homes for the schools of business, arts and international affairs, and a 600-seat auditorium, said Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president of the school.

When the expansion is complete in 2030, the school expects to have 19,000 graduate students, a 27 percent increase, said Joseph A. Ienuso, executive vice president of facilities.

Columbia said it now has 326 square feet of buildings for each student, less than the amount of space at Harvard, Yale, Princeton University in New Jersey and some other schools.

``There's a growing recognition that the absence of space was beginning to threaten Columbia University's ability to remain a great global university,'' Kasdin said.

Columbia has won support from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. The city's Planning Department has recommended modifications to both Columbia's and the community board's plans, said Rachaele Raynoff, a department spokeswoman. The department's director, Amanda Burden, won't comment further on the issue until the Nov. 26 vote, Raynoff said.

City Council

Burden, an appointee of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also chairs the 13-member Planning Commission, whose recommendation will be forwarded to the City Council for final approval.

The mayor is also founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

University officials say the expansion depends on the construction of a vast basement, in some places seven stories deep. Kasdin said the subterranean space will contain unsightly infrastructure and services, such as energy plants, trash removal and deliveries.

``We can create an active street life that will benefit the university and surrounding communities,'' Kasdin said.

Columbia says it needs to raze most of the buildings in the development zone, now dominated by warehouses and auto repair shops. Two storage companies and a gas station have refused to sell their property to the school. Columbia has asked the state to consider whether the use of eminent domain would be appropriate for taking those properties, if necessary.

`Hammer to My Head'

``I'm not going to negotiate with a proverbial gun or hammer to my head,'' said Nick Sprayregen, 44, owner of Tuck-It-Away, a self-storage company. He said he is the largest property owner in the expansion zone, with five buildings there.

The community board, a 50-member body appointed by the borough president, objects to the height and bulk of Columbia's proposed buildings, said Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, the board's chairman. Columbia officials say the tallest buildings will be 260 feet, a bit shorter than the neighborhood's highest structures.

The board voted 32 to 2 against recommending Columbia's request to rezone the area from light manufacturing to mixed use. Reyes-Montblanc said some board members also expressed concern that excavation for the basement would result in noise, fumes and the scattering of rats and roaches, and had doubts about its long-term safety, he said.

The underground space symbolizes what some residents say will be the destruction of the neighborhood.

``Sure, things happen, the world changes and all the rest,'' said DeMott, the opponent of the expansion. ``But it doesn't have to be such a dramatic change, where everything is just swept away.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Kladko in Boston at bkladko@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: November 23, 2007 00:04 EST

Copyright 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a.53WtLZVBTs&refer=news#)

[Fahzee]

You gotta love the community opposition to the proposed height of Columbia new buildings, which are going to be "a bit shorter than the neighborhood's highest structures"

Also - I love that when ALL else fails, community groups try their best to inject cheap race-based attacks.

I've been to the south, I've seen what a "plantation" looks like, and something tells me that a new science center is nothing like a plantation.

[antinimby]

If the community was smart, they wouldn't be against taller buildings because that would just mean Columbia would have to take up more sites just to meet the same amount of space requirements, which means more people would have to be displaced.

Just stupidity on the part of those people that's all.

[investordude]

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/planning-panel-approves-columbia-expansion/

It looks like they did a lot to change Columbia's plan to require retail and residential on Broadway, ensuring the university integrates well with the neighborhood.

After looking at the proposed area, I support eminent domain. Although eminent domain was clearly not intended for things like building a Walmart, there's no serious doubt in my mind that it WAS intended for building schools and universities. There's a public purpose in expanding an Ivy League school.

[antinimby]

Columbia expansion wins key vote



November 26. 2007 (http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071126/FREE/71126004/1058) 3:46PM
By: Anne Michaud and Kira Bindrim

The City Planning Commission accepted Columbia's expansion plan, while making expected modifications to the proposal.

The City Planning Commission, as expected, approved Columbia University's controversial plan to rezone 17 acres in West Harlem for an arts, business and science campus with modifications to the university’s proposal – crossing the last hurdle before the plan moves to City Council.

10 of the Commission's 12 present members voted in favor of the expansion, with one against. One other abstained, citing a provision in the plan that would allow the university to use eminent domain to acquire land for the expansion.

But the Commission also announced a series of expected modifications, including the elimination of two proposed academic research buildings along Broadway, which will be replaced with university housing and academic facilities. However, the Commission remained mum on the question of eminent domain rather than deny community requests to block the mandate. It also ignored requests from community leaders that Columbia tie its expansion to goodies for the surrounding neighborhood.

Additional alterations include trimming the maximum height for two buildings, adding open space on 125th Street and creating a light manufacturing zone in the area west of Twelfth Avenue. Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden said the agency would also continue working with a competing land-use plan from Community Board 9 197-a.

Columbia’s proposal will now move to the City Council for a final vote, marking the culmination of more than four years of work by the university, which has been buying up land and properties in the neighborhood of the campus-to-be and now owns more than 70% of the area. The university wants to spend $7 billion to build as many as 18 towers with classrooms, offices, student housing and laboratory space, which will give it the facilities to compete with other world-class institutions.

Despite community opposition, there was little doubt that the university would get what it wanted, albeit with a few caveats. At the request of Borough President Scott Stringer, Columbia has agreed to endow a $20 million Manhattanville Neighborhood Preservation Fund, which, together with other measures, would preserve or create 1,139 housing units. The school will also provide $4 million to fund an anti-harassment legal assistance program to address indirect residential displacement, according to the Commission.

The West Harlem Local Development Corp., which is negotiating a community benefits agreement with Columbia, is said to be asking for another $100 million in housing funds.

After the City Council votes, the university must submit a general project plan to the Empire State Development Corp., which has the final say over whether properties can be taken by eminent domain, against an owner's will. http://www.crainsnewyork.com/images/diamond.gif

© 2007 Crain Communications, Inc.

[212]

... I can understand some of the opposition to this plan.

[Fahzee]

^ See - I agree with you there - I totally understand why individual owners who do not want to sell are upset by the threat of eminent domain. No one wants to be forced to do anything - ever.

That being said, *some* of the groups involved seem to use the threat of eminent domain as an argument (cover?) to negotiate for a stronger (and more lucrative) Community Benefit Agreement - which feels disingenuous, especially considering that the majority of people represented by the West Harlem Local Development Corp DO NOT stand to lose any property.

[212]

If Columbia can pull political strings and bigfoot its way into the neighborhood through eminent domain, then why shouldn't the neighborhood use its political power to extract concessions?

[Fahzee]

^ see - I don't totally see it that way. I think that Community Benefit Agreements are an important part of the process, but I really fail to see how the West Harlem Community will be "hurt" by this project.

Yes - there is eminent domain involved - and individual owners and residents who are displaced should be fully compensated. But Manhattanville is not a residential neighborhood. It's not a vibrant commercial neighborhood. it's not even Tribeca in the 70's. Walk through Manhattanville and count the number of people you see (and fairway/dinosaur bbq don't count). Even better - walk around on a weekend.

Hell - one of largest landholders is an MTA Bus Depot - and Harlem/Washington Heights as a whole have been (rightly) complaining for years about the excess number of bus depots in Northern Manhattan - the Columbia Expansion will remove the depot, and replace it with PARKLAND.

Furthermore - as far as I know, there is no luxury condo component of this plan - the only new residents will be for students and (possibly) professors. Therefore, I do not understand the request for "100 million in housing funds". Why should Columbia be forced to build (or at least fund) affordable housing?

[pricedout]

Tribeca is the 70s is certainly not Tribeca now. That's the point. Using eminent domain to obtain land and rights means a change, and possibly, major, in the future. Should you pay for that speculation? Absolutely, whether you are public or private you need to give back something for taking something.

[investordude]

Given that the rezoning is occuring before the land seizure, it sounds like they will pay these people the real value. If they wanted to rip them off, they would have taken the land first and then rezoned. One risk though is the owners acquire the capital to build on the lots themselves and propose their own development. The city should stipulate in the rezoning that you have to build university structures if possible.

[Fahzee]

^ agreed. and I'm pretty sure that's part of the deal - Columbia is rezoning in order to build educational facilities, NOT luxury condos and the like.

Will this "enrich" the University - undoubtedly, but not in the same way as a real estate developer becomes super rich.

Let me put it this way - if a hospital was building an additional campus/ multiple new facilities, and it involved taking property via eminent domain - would you expect the hospital to build AFFORDABLE HOUSING?

I think Columbia should agree to use local contractors & local workers. I also think that Columbia should do more for local education (laptop programs, major donations to the schools in the Manhattanville neighborhood, etc.). But Columbia is BARELY affecting the housing stock in the neighborhood - because there really isn't any housing stock. And what housing stock that is there, such as the Manhattanville Houses, are subsidized/affordable housing complexes that WILL NOT go up in price.

Look - I'm not against the concept of affordable housing in any way - I agree that it should be mandatory in new, for-profit developments. But I do not agree that Columbia should be forced into providing/financing affordable housing for their Manhattanville expansion.

[brianac]

Clubbed to Death

Modern-day Cotton Club faces some unsettling developments

by Erik Shilling
November 27th, 2007 4:46 PM
http://images.villagevoice.com/issues/0748/schilling.jpg
Not (quite) as white as the original
Elena Dahl

The Cotton Club isn't what it used to be—it isn't even where it used to be—but the current one is now older than the famous one at 142nd and Lenox, which closed in 1940. Also, people of color can go to the current one; several nights a week, crowds (of mostly tourists) show up at John Beatty's joint at 125th Street and Twelfth Avenue to listen to tunes and buy nostalgia.

At least, they can for now. Columbia University covets the club's land for expansion into Manhattanville above 125th. The odds may be against Beatty. Community Board 9 didn't declare the club historic in its 197(a) plan, which lays out the priorities for the West Harlem district, and Michael Novielli, a Columbia University spokesman, notes: "This Cotton Club on 125th Street and Twelfth Avenue should not be confused with the original—and historic—Cotton Club."

Beatty says Columbia first contacted him about a year ago to test his willingness to sell. He turned them down then, he says, and he'll turn them down again if they ask. "Under no circumstances will I sell," says Beatty, who already has a succession plan in place. "I want it to go down in history, go down through my family. That's the American way, right?"

He promises war: "What do you mean, 'not historic'? I'll have Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson. . . . They'll get a big fight, a big fight. Columbia's crazy."

When the school first approached Beatty, he says, its officials told him they were afraid he would sell out to a strip joint. "My theory," says Beatty, "is Columbia doesn't want any black folks in Harlem. But what Columbia doesn't understand is that 85 percent of my business is white." (Novielli won't comment, saying that it's Columbia's policy not to discuss current or future land deals.)

In the meantime, Beatty's planning for the future. "My grandson Tajh will take it over," he says. "My other grandson, Malik, will be his partner. He's 10." Tajh, 18, attends business college in Westchester and works at the Cotton Club on some weekends, while Malik buses plates and glasses on some nights.

On a recent Saturday night, the club showed no signs of slowing. A six-piece band played originals and old Motown hits to a packed house.

"Philly, Washington—is anyone here from New York?" singer Pam Cornelius asked, to laughter. (Probably no one but the 25 employees on hand are from the city; three tour buses are parked outside.)

Inside the reincarnated hot spot, Beatty was reminiscing. "I opened it when I was 40 years old," he said. "It was my dream." Now 70, Beatty opens up only when he's there, usually Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays. He'll open with as few as 30 reservations, and when there aren't 30, he keeps it closed. But when it's open, Beatty can be found sitting near the door by the memorabilia for sale: ashtrays for $5, T-shirts for $20, leather jackets for $150. Snapping it up are tourists from all over the world, like the Czechs and Japanese who came on a recent Monday for an evening of swing.

OK, so it's not the original Cotton Club. But pictures of Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington line the walls. On Saturday nights, waitresses, doormen, and Beatty himself don tuxedos, and coats are checked at the door. Cornelius and the six-piece band run through a menagerie of songs, heavy on the golden age of big bands. A buffet dinner of fried chicken, corn bread, and salad is served. "My type of business doesn't change," says Beatty. Unless the bulldozers show up.


Copyright 2007
The Village Voice. http://www.villagevoice.com/images/generic/x.gif

[Stroika]

It's always a sad story when people's dreams get derailed, and I hope this guy is given the chance to open a new establishment (a fake fake Cotton Club). However, that a cheesy music venue that dupes tourists into thinking it's the historic club it isn't should prevent a university from carrying out life-saving research seems both unacceptable and, thankfully, implausible.

Beatty's racist thinking and his threat to summon Al Sharpton -- one of the most divisive, negative and counter-productive forces in US public life for the last 35 years -- instantly strip him of any credibility. In my eyes, so does his conflation of primogeniture and "the American way."

I do hope Beatty can be accommodated by selling for enough money to buy a new venue, maybe closer to the real Cotton Club's location. But it will be a crying shame if one of the world's great education centers is kept from achieving the growth it needs by a kind-of-nutty-sounding guy and his tourist-trap fraud of a jazz club.

[lizbeth li]

I never cared for the main campus, it's much too grand, arrogant, and altogether too the same. The surrounding buidlings don't relate to this central quad either, in spite of a bridge over Amsterdam or whatever. Barnard tends to be another world, Teachers another one, etc. I don't think the new campus will make for anything more unified, it will merely make things much more disorganized. And about the square feet per kid -- this is really dumb, what counts are the use of space and not the space itself, that is, how well equiped the buidlings are. Given the science stuff tends to look like an industrial park anyway, and I imagine that's exactly what is mainly going to arise (grad students, cutting edge research), there is no reason in the world not to go UP and stay closer to the main quad. Columbia taking over so much land is also about urban removal, I would think, and that's where however full of it some objectors are ... there is probably also some truth in what they are saying. Given where the school is, it really needs to go uptown to expand, and it wants to do it now. There is also a question about whether the school needs to expand at all. Oh, by the way, someone above mentioned all the cutting edge research at Columbia -- besides an A-bomb, can you name anything???

[Hamilton]

^^^ Wow. That was one of the most misinformed comments on the expansion that I've seen here.

You tell Columbia to build up closer to its main campus, but the entire area around Columbia is surrounded by height-averse NIMBYs (that, honestly, seem to mirror your comments on several tall projects around the city). They got Columbia to leave a parking lot between 113th and 114th unbuilt to this day.

As far as research at Columbia, have you ever thought about the fact that you can't name any says more about your (understandable) lack of knowledge of modern science than about the lack of any research at Columbia?

Columbia's 600 active patents are used more than any other university's patents, bringing in $230 milllion per year in royalties. The university produced 175 patents and non-patentable inventions last year, including the most popular anti-glaucoma drug in use, as well as fertility and cancer drugs.

That's just biotech, and there are a lot of fields where advances aren't measurable in patents and such.

Why would the school care about urban removal, especially in this area? And removal of what? The projects will still be right there. If anything, Columbia's expansion will mean that it will have to interact MORE with the urban poor, not less.

[Fahzee]

^ lizbeth li wrote: "And about the square feet per kid -- this is really dumb, what counts are the use of space and not the space itself, that is, how well equiped the buidlings are".

I think you need to further define what you mean to say here. Certainly, in the abstract, most simplistic way, a newer microscope is better than an older microscope. But new equipment does not solve space problems. AND - new sciences labs do not replace older science labs - they compliment them. Columbia is adding new biotech facilities - these bio-tech classes are not replacing traditional biology, chemistry, physics, etc.

Also - you find Columbia's campus "too grand, arrogant"??? I don't even know where to begin with that. The majority of the campus is 5 to 6 story beaux arts buildings that wouldn't be out of place at any of the top schools in the country. Do you therefore dislike the look of every other college that's more than 100 years old?

I wouldn't call Columbia's campus perfect by any means, but it's by far the best looking campus in NYC (City college would be 2nd, IMHO).

[ablarc]

lizbeth li, go stand in the corner. :D

[lizbeth li]

First off I went to Columbia College and know it quite well. The main campus is not filled with Beaux Arts buildings, I don't know where you got this idea at all. Lowell and Butler libraries are grand neoclassical affairs, institutionally IMPORTANT but to my mind nothing special at all except big and cold (Columbia as an Ivy League school, by the way, suffers from the worst inferiority complex imaginable and grandeur is its hallmark in denial). All the other buildings are otherwise mainly of a piece, all the dorms and classrooms -- from Jay to Hamilton to Philosophy etc. -- and the style is kind of 1920's apartment house. Anyways, if you ever have seen the stats about space, how much Brown has or Harvard versus Columbia per pupil -- how it is "losing" out" and not "competitive" -- this is all a very big crock. The square feet deficit is utterly meagre, and Columbia lives or dies by NYC. Thus it was at the bottom of the Ivy League as NYC and the Upper West Side were near bankrupt and worse, and it has now advanced to mid-League given the city is hot. I could go on about this stuff for a long time, but I do contend that walking around the campus is conducive to a good undergrad college experience, and the main campus is exactly supposed to be all about this (including the horrid Ferris Booth and whatever they call New Dorm now).

[lizbeth li]

should read "not" conducive to a good experience, sorry.

[czsz]

Lizbeth, I graduated from Columbia in May. When was the last time you were on campus? Ferris Booth was demolished in the mid-90s and replaced by a new student center. New Hall has been named Carman since 1965.

True, the expansion won't directly serve undergrads. What it will do is ship quite a few science, business, and arts oriented grad students and professors to Manhattanville, freeing more space on the main campus for undergrads to use and have a "good experience" with. And yes, it's needed. The impossibility of reserving rooms for meetings, rehearsals, or performances puts a fairly natural limit on what Columbia can offer its undergraduate students, and the sciences desperately need new facilities. Your sardonic comment about the atomic bomb is undermined by the quickest Google search, but you actually make a good point: Columbia's science facilities were reasonably top-notch when the Manhattan Project was taking place. They aren't anymore. That's part of the reason Manhattanville is being developed as it is.

[lizbeth li]

I don't think I said Columbia couldn't build, I said I saw no reason it had to take 23 acres. A couple of tall towers would house whatever was needed. And if the problem is outdated labs and such, money could be spent on updating them rather than building more buildings. About "facilities" for meetings and such? C'mon, really, that the undergrad experience is wanting because of a dearth of facilities for meetings??? Yeah, I'm ironic. About Carmen, forgot it's name, knew it by it's other, and didn't realize Ferris was gone. So what? Both are and were, of course, horrible, and never in the slightest keeping with the rest of the main campus. Which is a thruway for the entire campus and will never be an undergrad kind of place, not like Harvard Yard or most of the other Ivies. And I am certain Columbia did achieve something in the last 50-years, I will not dispute it, if you will not dispute it is the most pumped up weirdly defensive supposedly elitist place imaginable, and I do read my Alumni Mag when I am taking a dump.

[lizbeth li]

Actually, if you saw the original plans for the area, Columbia should be given a bunch of Riverside Park along 116th. It would make infinitely more sense and bring the school to the water where it belongs. And displace mainly a bunch of squirrels.

[antinimby]

I don't think I said Columbia couldn't build, I said I saw no reason it had to take 23 acres. A couple of tall towers would house whatever was needed.My sentiments exactly. Instead of disrupting so many properties just to build a certain amount of space Columbia needed, they could just concentrated all of it in just a few taller towers instead.

Unfortunately, in this height obsessed city, tall is seen as an evil and so whole swaths of neighborhoods have to go under the plow instead.

[lizbeth li]

^^^ Wow. That was one of the most misinformed comments on the expansion that I've seen here.

You tell Columbia to build up closer to its main campus, but the entire area around Columbia is surrounded by height-averse NIMBYs (that, honestly, seem to mirror your comments on several tall projects around the city). They got Columbia to leave a parking lot between 113th and 114th unbuilt to this day.

As far as research at Columbia, have you ever thought about the fact that you can't name any says more about your (understandable) lack of knowledge of modern science than about the lack of any research at Columbia?

Columbia's 600 active patents are used more than any other university's patents, bringing in $230 milllion per year in royalties. The university produced 175 patents and non-patentable inventions last year, including the most popular anti-glaucoma drug in use, as well as fertility and cancer drugs.

That's just biotech, and there are a lot of fields where advances aren't measurable in patents and such.

Why would the school care about urban removal, especially in this area? And removal of what? The projects will still be right there. If anything, Columbia's expansion will mean that it will have to interact MORE with the urban poor, not less.

I missed this one and it is informed and deserves some response. I don't like huge buildings on top of one another downtown, blocking out and killing off architectually wonderful older buildings by sheer size and proximity. But I am not against tall within limits if it has enough room. I said, for instance, that I thought the Jersey skyline from the new Goldman headquarters was much nicer than the downtown one. Anyway, a couple or a few tall towers set off (not in the middle of the main quad obviously and I suggested even along the river at 116th) would not be terrible up there at all. I think I am consistent. About the patents or the neighborhood? Yes, indeed. Columbia is a fortress and doesn't interact with any neighborhood. You can't get into buildings without all sorts of ID, think medieval univsersity. Patents? You have the modern major university which is really a subsidiary of Merck and Pfizer and whatever, and to my mind half the drugs are bogus and insane, okay? And everyone and their mother must research and produce and produce and sell, and none of this is neutral academic anymore at all. So, what you are REALLY building is not a university at all, you are building an industrial park, or like Silicone Valley (or mental hospitals too now) is one big CAMPUS. Well, I come to things with a humanities background, great books if you remember them, contemporary civilization and all that, and you can learn under a tree also (but there are no nice places, nice trees. really, to read up there, you know???). Progress? I can see the people in "Manhattanville" thinking it is all about MONEY and nothing else, and if this is all it's about then how does Columbia parade that it is this GREAT UNIVERSITY needing special rights, including not being taxed, of course. Again, I see nothing wrong in housing a BUSINESS in some big towers and forget the "campus" and dislocating a whole neighborhood.

[Fahzee]

lizbeth li - I don't think you know architecture as well as you think you do. You are correct in assuming that Butler & Low have Neoclassical elements (I assume the columns tipped you off), but the majority of the "1920's apartment buildings", as you put it, are in fact beaux artes.

They were, after all, designed by the architecture firm of McKim, Mead & White - no strangers to the beaux artes movement

Are these the best examples of Beaux artes?- no, not by a long shot, but it doesn't make their symmetry and design any less appealing.

Moving on to your more recent points: I'm not a Columbia grad, so I can't speak to the "inferiority complex" that you mention - I've always assumed it was a good school. And while I do agree with you in part, that the campus fails to "interact with the neighborhood" - I do not understand your point about needing ID cards to get into buildings.

Perhaps college was a few years back for you - but nowadays ID cards for buildings, especially for schools in urban areas, are the norm, not the exception.

Also - if you find fault with idea of Columbia holding patents, you should really find fault with the entire American University System, as there are few academic research institutions that do not hold patents - license fees from the patents go towards things like financial aid, endowed professorships, and (yes) expansion projects.

I'm happy that Columbia isn't building a few towers, because the plan for the Manhattanville campus is simply better. If you prefer a "neighborhood" of parking lots, bus depots, and storage facilities, I suggest you move to any number of the rust belt cities that would kill for a project like this.

Edit: Rereading my final sentence, I realize that it comes of a bit harsh - I mean "you" as in the universal sense of the word.

[ablarc]

Columbia should be given a bunch of Riverside Park along 116th. It would make infinitely more sense and bring the school to the water where it belongs.
Very interesting idea, and one that would give me a thrill if implemented --but it's pissing into the wind.

[pianoman11686]

Fahzee's right: every college these days requires ID cards to access most buildings.

And lizbeth, I disagree strongly with your alternative proposal to build a few towers to house most of the expansion. The premier educational institutions in the US have acres of land to distribute their (mainly horizontal) facilities; if Columbia has the opportunity to expand its footprint, it should do so. Just for starters, consider how much more difficult it would be to move all that expensive, heavy lab equipment 20 or 30 floors up.

Whether square footage per student truly matters is irrelevant here, I think. In the end, it comes down to just another statistic in college rankings. Not as important as students per classroom, but important nonetheless to many applicants.

I like your idea about Riverside Park, though. I think it'd be amazing for Columbia to utilize all the space between Morningside and Riverside Parks - in essence becoming somewhat enclosed, but then again taking part fully in what is a great part of upper Manhattan. I think there's a lot of potential with their expansion plans. I recently went up to Harvard, and it struck me how much better integrated Cambridge was with the school than either Columbia or NYU.

The canvas is much the same: a busy main street in Broadway, subway access, proximity to the river and 10 minutes away from the main business district. All they need is to make the area as pedestrian friendly as possible, and build it out completely. When in Cambridge, you notice every space is utilized (few if any parking lots), and the streets are narrow and well-traversed, but you don't feel cramped. That's what Columbia should be going for here.

[Hamilton]

I don't think I said Columbia couldn't build, I said I saw no reason it had to take 23 acres. A couple of tall towers would house whatever was needed. And if the problem is outdated labs and such, money could be spent on updating them rather than building more buildings. About "facilities" for meetings and such? C'mon, really, that the undergrad experience is wanting because of a dearth of facilities for meetings??? Yeah, I'm ironic. About Carmen, forgot it's name, knew it by it's other, and didn't realize Ferris was gone. So what? Both are and were, of course, horrible, and never in the slightest keeping with the rest of the main campus. Which is a thruway for the entire campus and will never be an undergrad kind of place, not like Harvard Yard or most of the other Ivies. And I am certain Columbia did achieve something in the last 50-years, I will not dispute it, if you will not dispute it is the most pumped up weirdly defensive supposedly elitist place imaginable, and I do read my Alumni Mag when I am taking a dump.
Crazy...I think your posts mostly speak for themselves, though I doubt you really went to college at all in the first place.
Let me put on my Sherlock Holmes cap for a minute:
--I would imagine from your user name, that you're a woman....
--but Columbia's only been co-ed since the 80's
--yet Carman Hall hasn't been a "New Hall" on the campus since 1965

All of which would rule out the possibility of you attending what was then an all-boys Columbia College.


Whether or not you're just pulling all of our legs, here are some questions, just for fun: You're Columbia's president, and decide to upgrade all the labs instead of build new ones. Where should the scientists conduct their research while their old labs are being upgraded?

--You have a horrible, life-threatening flu, or multiple-drug-resistant pneumonia, but you think modern pharmaceuticals, including retrovirals and new antibiotics, are a joke. What do you do to get better? Homeopathy?

[investordude]

What's with the attack on Ms. Li, Hamilton? The personal invective seems way out of proportion to whatever disagreements you have - I don't think there's a reason to doubt she went to Columbia.

My own take is that it would be better for Columbia to build tall too, within limits. One limit is I'm not sure the city will allow them to build tall because NIMBYs would stop it. Another is that laboratory buildings sometimes need fairly precise specifications that may be inconsisten with a high rise. For example, some experiments might require isolation from vibration, which may be difficult to engineer in tall buildings that need some ability to sway with the wind.

But sure, to the extent Columbia can build tall, that's preferable to eminent domain.

[Hamilton]

I don't think that it's unreasonable to assume that (presumably) a woman who claims to have gone to Columbia College in the 1960's, when the college didn't allow women, and who gets several facts wrong about the university (Lowell Library??), is lying.

All in all, her posts are flamboyant and outlandish, which makes me think that the user may be a troll.

Though I'll admit that I too wish Columbia could build taller and yes, even build down in the bowels of Riverside Park.

Anyway, I edited above to make my point clearer. Sorry if I was too uncivil.

[investordude]

It's just plain common sense that an urban campus needs ID cards to enter buildings. Campuses in nice rural areas may not need this, but clearly any place in Manhattan a college needs security. (If they wave the campus ID cards, can someone let me know where they put the sorority)

[lizbeth li]

I'm a guy. Why am I posting as a woman? Who cares, I seem to also be Chinese here, this is the Internet and you guys all brandish avatars of rock stars, Jesus. Anyways, I graduated in 1966, lived there some until 1968 and saw the whole Morningside Heights gym fiasco go down and there is nothing about the place since then that strikes me as neighborhood friendly, so for instance I live now in Providence (and have a doctorate from Brown) and you can get into all the buildings here (except dorms) without an ID. I am not saying Columbia can do this, understand, the place is different, but then too it is not neighborhood friendly either. What else? I called Low Library, Lowell (in honor of Robert, I suppose), so great sleuthing. I know Mckim White also did Low, but I am not certain about the other buildings at all, and they are different actually, the more recent ones not as nice. To call them Beaux Arts and, say, the Ansonia Hotel Beaux Arts on another thread here (which I just got off of before posting here at that point) is merely insane, of course. These buildings are pretty remarkable for their drabness. John Jay Hall, the biggest, is just exactly any apartment house. If they have "elements" of Beaux Arts then I probably also have elements of Lizbeth Li, though I am straight. Whatever, I'm glad people liked my idea of going to the river, thought the idea of moving equipment up flights nutso (there are elevators) and can imagine all sorts of space underground for vibrationless science -- hell, this is also the point, science buildings look AWFUL because of their needs, and no one needs millions of them, put half the stuff underground for all I care. About not liking all the wonders of science in the university, I don't particularly, but this is a topic that isn't about architecture, however I suggest for profit stuff makes university labs different in regards to eminent domain and tax benefits, which has much to do with building. I'll look up more about all those main campus buildings and how Beaux Artsy they are, which I really doubt. I'm sorry if I'm a little nuts right now, my mother just died.

[Optimus Prime]

The buildings on 116 between Columbia and Riverside are almost all residential. Columbia owns most if not all of them, but that doesn't mean it can do whatever it wants to them. There are probably people living there who are not faculty or students and many of them may be in rent stabilized or rent controlled apartments. Some of the buildings may be co-ops as well, not sure about that. But in any case, Columbia building anything on that stretch is probably a pipe dream.

The older campus buildings (the red ones anyway) are definitely Beaux Arts. As Fahzee said, maybe not the best of Beaux Arts, but that's what they are.

Everything new they've built is basically crap. All of the stuff they built in the 50s and 60s across the street (SIPA, Law, some parts of Barnard) is brutalist concrete slab, and everything they built in the 90s/00s (Warren, the Student Center, Uris) is postmodern junk that supposedly tries to mesh old with new and manages to accomplish neither. The Student Center in particular annoys me to no end. What an ugly piece of junk, and a complete waste of valuable space.

[lizbeth li]

Correct me if I am wrong here but some quick research reveals that the term is one like "romantic" and can mean many different things; that is, the movement copied from the past in general and what kind of Beaux arts is to the point. So, if you have the Ansonia, you are in some odd French Renaissance world and this is Beaux Arts; but Columbia is neoclassical Beaux Arts and quite a different guy. The style is all aboutl America's MIGHT and coming of age (think Teddy Roosevelt, think Rome and colonialism), which is why I don't much like it for a University, which to my mind is more Gothic and soaring gracefully to some Godhead. Columbia IS BRUTAL, Stalinesque, by design, exactly my feel. I am almost certain too that the later buildings of the main campus (most of them really) were thought far inferior to the few original ones (like Philosophy). Anyways, I never pretended to be more than an amateur about architecture, but I also think I have taste. Columbia's grand monumentalism is not humanist at all.

[czsz]

Lizbeth, have you ever read the history of the campus? Easy as it might seem to connect neoclassical monumentalism to the prevading spirit of turn-of-the-century Manifest Destiny jingoism, that wasn't the intention when the grounds were designed. Then, everything south of 116th was still open land, and the assumption was that it would be filled with brownstones. Low Library was designed to embrace the city, its plaza opening onto the street and its stairs sweeping people up into the school. Its classicism was meant to evoke Greece more than Rome; it was meant to be a civic space in the tradition of the agora.

Only in the 1930s was the vista from Low onto the city closed off by Butler Library, and only in the 1950s was 116th closed to traffic. The development of Columbia's campus into a space fully enclosed from the city was a slow, haphazard development, not a bid to erect a monumental cloister.

Still - what is so terrible about the cloister? Oxford and Cambridge are nothing but a chain of sheltered little spaces. Harvard, which you have spoken of reverently, borrows from this with its house system. At least Columbia students aren't divided from one another, and the campus really is open to whoever can find the front gate. At the same time, the agora of Low still functions well; it's a far better (and more active) gathering place than Harvard Yard (having attended both Columbia and Harvard, I can tell you that Harvard, lacking a campus focal point, feels dead, and dispersed...and there is certainly little of similar architectural distinction at Harvard, or, in my opinion, at Brown).

[lizbeth li]

Low Library got its inspiration from the Pantheon which is Roman and not Greek. If you think Butler Greek (it is a squat pile of macho shit in my opinion), delicately soaring, you are crazy. The unbelievable sameness of the Columbia facades or all buidlings is immensely BORING, monolithic, fascistic, hardly the effect of the city beautiful (whatever the philosophy) and cannot compare to the diversity of Harvard Yard (Beaux Arts here, Richardsonian there, federalist over there). Brown's main green like Harvard Yard is human-sized and there are also very interesting building combos (more federalist, italianate gothic, arts and craft, etc.), and the surrounding area is spectacular and can be seen from the campus downhill (First Baptist Church, First Unitarian Church, John Brown's House, etc.). Whatever, you like Columbia, students much prefer Brown, and not for its academics but its style. I'll say this as well, there is something American about both campuses which is true and felt. If you are wandering around Columbia and pretending to be a Roman (or a Greek) while madmen are getting patents in bipolar medicines ... oh, well, I suppose Columbia is a better place to go nuts and maybe burn the place down.

[antinimby]

Another is that laboratory buildings sometimes need fairly precise specifications that may be inconsisten with a high rise. For example, some experiments might require isolation from vibration, which may be difficult to engineer in tall buildings that need some ability to sway with the wind.Well obviously. That's common sense so let's give the planners at Columbia the benefit of a doubt to at least know that.

I think we are talking more about their other functions that can be built up higher such as offices and student housing. For example, instead five or six squat 10-story dormitory buildings uprooting that many separate sites, they should be allowed to consolidate them into say, two or three 20-story buildings instead.

In addition to less neighborhood disturbance, you have buildings that are more likely to be thinner and attractive instead of squat and hulking. Unfortunately with one-size fits all zoning and height limits that we have, you can't do that sort of smart and common sense planning. Everything's got to be this number of stories or less regardless if it doesn't make sense.

Everything new they've built is basically crap. All of the stuff they built in the 50s and 60s across the street (SIPA, Law, some parts of Barnard) is brutalist concrete slab, and everything they built in the 90s/00s (Warren, the Student Center, Uris) is postmodern junk that supposedly tries to mesh old with new and manages to accomplish neither. The Student Center in particular annoys me to no end. What an ugly piece of junk, and a complete waste of valuable space.Sadly, that is also the same story for the rest of the city in the past 50 years.

[ablarc]

I think we are talking more about their other functions that can be built up higher such as offices and student housing. For example, instead five or six squat 10-story dormitory buildings uprooting that many separate sites, they should be allowed to consolidate them into say, two or three 20-story buildings instead.
Tell it to the "Community." ;)

True most places; not true here. Place is a pig sty and needs to be taken over at street level by continuous upgraded streetwall. Almost nothing here of value to anyone. Car repair? Pshaw. Where's londonlawyer to complain about the filthy, disgusting pieces of crap?

In addition to less neighborhood disturbance...
Hardly any neighborhood to disturb.

you have buildings that are more likely to be thinner and attractive instead of squat and hulking.
Most places this is good; here you need a blanket takeover if you want to avert a forty-year transition.

one-size fits all
Ironically in this case, this describes your prescription.

[antinimby]

I'm not so sure about the misconception that the neighborhood is entirely made up of auto repair shops and of no value.

I would rather see that Cotton Club there instead of a Student Services building for example.

Would make for a more interesting and diverse neighborhood, wouldn't you say? ;)

[ablarc]

I'm not so sure about the misconception that the neighborhood is entirely made up of auto repair shops and of no value.
Of course not; there's other stuff too --most of it junk.

I would rather see that Cotton Club there instead of a Student Services building for example. Would make for a more interesting and diverse neighborhood, wouldn't you say?
You can have both; saying it's either/or is strawmanship.

Anyway, it's telling that "Cotton Club" is the best example you can pick. Phony-baloney tourist trap.

No, this place really needs to be redone. Park Slope it ain't.

[investordude]

yeah, I think its preferable to keep the Cotton Club than seize it from an unwilling owner. Given this project is going to last until 2030, I think they can wait this guy out and negotiate with his grandkids, who my guess is may feel less passionately about the club.

[ablarc]

How about a Student Services Building with Cotton Club on the ground floor? :)

[antinimby]

You can call it phony baloney tourist trap but it at least gives the neighborhood some character. A student services building or a student counseling center will have none.

Besides, large scale, singular redevelopment projects have lots of potential to turn out wrong. I'm all for redeveloping the area but in a piece meal manner with other types of thriving businesses included in the area. I just don't think one large campus neigborhood will turn out well in the long run.

[lizbeth li]

I'm not sure anyone here has actually been to Manhattanville, both pro and con, and I fault the con's much more in their removal ignorance. How many people live there? How many businesses are there? How many are employed? What tax will the city lose? I don't see anyone asking for the destruction of the place knowing anything -- good community people that you are!!!

[ablarc]

^ Nonsense.

[investordude]

Well, I don't live in that part of Manhattanville (which would be hard since its mostly industrial). I have no idea if the Cotton Club is good or bad. But its this guy's property. Why have an unncecesary fight? If the guy wants to keep his club open, and this isn't going to finish until 2030, then build around him and then negotiate with his kids - who I imagine would be happy to trade in the club for a lifetime of riches. That beats eminent domain, which can and should only be a last resort.

[ablarc]

^ Total agreement. I'd go so far as to offer him much improved digs on the ground floor of a brand-new Columbia building --complete with "authentic" retro touches.

Antinimby, while you were posting #223, #222 went up. I agree with you about small-increment footprints, but this is not the place for gradualism, which will cause withering on the vine. Build most of those small-increment footprints at once.

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/lucds/mn9profile.pdf

Page 2, land use map.

[ablarc]

Yes. What's being discussed is that trapezoid between 125th Street and 133rd Street. Nary a smidgen of mustard yellow to be seen.

No one actually lives there; it's a business district that people from elsewhere approach on wheels.

Not much of an asset as it is to anyone --including the folks who live adjacent.

[lizbeth li]

It's nonsense to ask the questions I asked? And the Cotton Club, which sounds a little dubious certainly, is not the only issue, unless you guys want a straw dog -- all builders and made up minds here. Again, how many people do live in the area -- and how many fancier people live in a few apartments right near Columbia which can be torn down and made into towers? Is anyone even asking these questions? or am I a complete no one from this discussion the only one? And back to the claim that the "city beautiful" was just that and end of discussion, it had nothing to do with imperialism, why it was beautiful right? The movement was very much out of the panic about immigrants and leveling slum neighborhoods to "improve" life, sound familiar? All those temperance workers and do gooders behind Seth Low, your liberal of the day. Someone once shook his stump of an arm at me when I was politicking for McGovern and screamed, "Demorcrats get into WAR!!!" "City Beautiful" is such an abominable cliche that I reject the whole concept outright.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Again, how many people do live in the areaLook at the map.

[lizbeth li]

What map? Don't get all pro on me, frankly. I've followed the thread here for pages and saw no map of population, never heard it mentioned, and do claim that the people wanting to tear things down have to make their case, not vice verser. You look at the map and tell me how many wonderful neighbors you want to displace. But I don't think you will around here, this place is really like a million other web sites, a little coterie of the same people talking to one another with all the same minds, beautiful and wonderful and wow, with maybe some design problems but not many about building and building and building, which I assume is also, bottom line, in some of your material interests. In fact, I would like disclosure -- you want me to look at a map? well, what is your work? I told you where I went to school, etc. who are you guys who pontificate to one another (with exceptions, certainly).

[lofter1]

Don't get all pro on me ...

Yeah, Zip.

Come on, let's keep the discussion at the "I'm just spouting off with nothing to back me up" level :cool:

Disclosure: I'm a RE Investment billionaire who could eat you all for brunch. :cool: :cool:

[lizbeth li]

I always knew you were a billionaire, I sensed it immediately and your use of the dash confirmed my opinion. I also think you were are Godwin from the Law, who postulated that any Internet discussion in X number of posts would always include Nazis. Humor is essential.

[ZippyTheChimp]

What map?The land use map will give you an overview of population distribution. Residential is only permitted in the three yellow-tan colors. Not much, is it. There are no schools, libraries, playgrounds, or community services. The area is dominated by an MTA garage.

Ii provided the map as a discussion aid.

I don't know if you were including me within the "this place like a million other websites" characterization, but I haven't given any opinion on this project, and frequently argue with "the little coterie." Others can speak for themselves.

I will offer one opinion. Your posts seem dated. When was the last time you were in Manhattanville?

[lizbeth li]

is that no one here has been in Manhattanville much or at all. I never said I was at all. I never went up there as a student, it was unknown and dangerous territory, and if I have driven along Broadway a bit, that's it. I absolutely agree that my take on Columbia is out of date -- it is not on lower Manhattan at all -- but much of this discussion has been about the main campus and that has hardly changed (I realize now there is a new hated postmodern student building where the hated Ferris was, and Carmen is the new name of a building ... whatever) -- I mean the whole problem is that the school needs room TO change.

[lofter1]

I always knew you were a billionaire ... your use of the dash confirmed my opinion.

A dashing billionaire?

Compliment accepted :cool:

[Optimus Prime]

Columbia's EIS says there are 160 residential units in the expansion area, and they will directly displace 135 of them. They estimated there are 298 residents in those units. If you want to be conservative about it, estimate maybe 400.

[DarrylStrawberry]

...this is the Internet and you guys all brandish avatars of rock stars, Jesus.


I can't wait to see your avatar lizbeth....;)

[BrooklynRider]

I'm sorry if I'm a little nuts right now, my mother just died.

Wow! That was an eye opening closing line. Sorry to hear this. Hope you are hanging in there.

[lizbeth li]

Wow! That was an eye opening closing line. Sorry to hear this. Hope you are hanging in there.

Thank you, it's been coming forever and was finally good. She got buried by Schwartz Brothers on Queens Blvd., which is now entirely run by Italians. Not much on architecture. But my mother now overlooks the skyline from the Hungarian Cemetery off the BQE.

[investordude]

Not that I can tell what really happenned here:

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=76518

The interesting question here is eminent domain, but its not obvious what took place in the city council hearing with regards to it. I think 1 curiosity about the opponents to the project is there counterproductive behavior - waving "Bollinger dollars" in the air just makes them seem like weirdos and cranks, which they may be - but the eminent domain question deserves a serious analysis so I hope it got one. (I favor eminent domain for the public purpose of higher education if its necessary though).

[antinimby]

Good news for the Cotton Club but what's with all this fascination nowadays to turn everything into parkland and open space?

Like everything else in life, too much of a good thing can actually turn into a bad thing.

[ablarc]

Good news for the Cotton Club but what's with all this fascination nowadays to turn everything into parkland and open space?
Hope they at least build them a new and better looking building with several stories on top.

[investordude]

http://www.observer.com/2007/columbia-interested-sprayregen-swap

It looks to me like they are going to strike a bargain and avoid eminent domain. I'm puzzled about why the number of affordable apartments the landowner wants to build after the swap is any of their business though - sounds like something he can subsequently work out with the city without Columbia's involvement.

[czsz]

Hope they at least build them a new and better looking building with several stories on top.

I think this was the previous offer that the Cotton Club rejected, on the grounds that a temporary removal might become a permanent one.

[ablarc]

^ They could build them a new and better building somewhere else. No interruption in business.

[Tectonic]

Its sad Dinosaur Barbecue gotta move though :(

[Fahzee]

From the NY Observor.........
HARLEM ASKS COLUMBIA FOR $247 MILLION

by Matthew Schuerman (http://nyobserver.com/node/36045) | December 18, 2007
In light of tomorrow’s expected City Council vote on Columbia University’s expansion plan (http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/28603), the Harlem group that is negotiating a community benefits agreement is trying to finalize beforehand a set of pledges for the school to make on issues such as affordable housing, education and job training.
The agreement, according to a source familiar with the negotiations, is all set except for one crucial element: the numbers were left blank. The source said that the group, the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, has gone into these negotiations asking for a total of $247 million in benefits. Columbia has not offered much more than the $32.5 million pact (http://nyobserver.com/2007/columbia-throws-33m-nabe) it made with Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer in September, according to the source.
One new element that apparently both sides agree on: a public laboratory school, for pre-K through 8th grade, that would be affiliated with Teachers College, which is separate from, yet related to, Columbia, and supported by the university. This would come in addition to the high school for which Columbia will donate land that has already opened in temporary space.
Oh, and one other thing: the name has changed from a “community benefits agreement” to a “community partnership agreement.”

[RandySavage]

Pure extortion.

[pianoman11686]

December 19, 2007, 5:57 pm

City Council Approves Columbia Expansion Plan

By Sewell Chan

After an unusually lengthy debate, the New York City Council cleared the way this afternoon for a 17-acre campus expansion by Columbia University, the largest in its history. The 35 to 5 vote, with 6 members abstaining, followed a hectic day of committee meetings, was the final significant step in a rezoning process that pitted the university and its supporters against a coalition that included the local community board and some property owners and residents.

The expansion, encompassing the area between 125th and 133rd Streets, from Broadway west to the Hudson River, would mark the greatest change in Columbia’s footprint since the 1890s, when it moved from Midtown to Morningside Heights. The university intends to build new academic and residential buildings, including space for its arts and business schools and advanced scientific research labs.

The $7 billion expansion, which will occur over the next 25 years, will be the largest development project in Manhattan in recent memory. Columbia has said it intends to extend its campus onto only 17 acres, which are bounded roughly by Broadway on the east, the Hudson River on the west, West 125 th Street on the south and West 133rd Street on the north.

While the rezoning of the area from light manufacturing to mixed-use removes the university’s last hurdle to expand, some elements of the plan remain to be settled - including whether the university will seek to use eminent domain to remove commercial property owners who have so far refused to sell their land to Columbia. The university owns about 75 percent of the property in the area. The expansion has been bitterly opposed by many in West Harlem, who have objected to the potential use of eminent domain, and out of fear that the residents of some of the last working class neighborhoods in Manhattan, which lie to the north of the expansion area, will be displaced by students and administrators who earn far more than the typical neighborhood resident.

But Columbia officials said the expansion was necessary if the institution, cramped for space, was to remain competitive with its Ivy League peers, several of which are either in the midst of expanding or are considering expanding.

”Columbia has only a fraction of the space enjoyed by our leading peers across the country,” said Lee C. Bollinger, president of the university.

Columbia completed a draft environmental impact statement for the project in June, but the criticism had begun much earlier.

The expansion plan was sharply criticized at a public hearing in October and was one focus of a student hunger strike in November. As part of the real estate boom, colleges and universities have been erecting new buildings around the city, straining town-gown relations.

The City Planning Commission endorsed the expansion on Nov. 26 after a contentious debate.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/20/nyregion/1120-met-webCOLUMBIAmap.gif

Copyright 2007 The New York Times (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/city-council-approves-columbia-expansion-plan/index.html?hp)