NYC universities expand campuses

Columbia is not the only school expanding around New York City. As the Manhattanville expansion moves forward, other universities are changing the dynamics of neighborhoods from Harlem down to Greenwich Village.

The City Planning Commission, which oversees New York’s land use and socioeconomic development, unanimously approved an expansion plan for Fordham University on April 22. Meanwhile, New York University and City College of New York are also involved in development projects.

Fordham University

Historically, Fordham’s operations have been focused on its Bronx campus, with the Upper West Side location serving mainly as a satellite for commuter students and for programs that rely on the resources of Lincoln Center. But this relationship may change.

The CPC’s approval of Fordham’s Lincoln Center expansion campaign, which began five years ago, marked a major victory for the school. Now, the New York City Council must schedule a vote within 50 days.

If the Council approves the project, academic facilities on the Lincoln Center campus will be upgraded, and additional dormitory space will be built, thus transitioning the campus from a primarily commuter to a more residential model.

“The Commission’s vote is very welcome,” Joseph McShane, president of Fordham, said in a statement, adding that the school is “pleased that their decision recognizes Fordham’s willingness to modify the plan in response to community concerns, and the importance of the Lincoln Center campus to the University, local community and to the city.”

Gaining CPC approval for the plan involved several concessions on Fordham’s part, which were made after Community Board 7 unanimously rejected the initial proposal in January.

The expansion will be 206,000 square feet smaller than the originally proposed three million square feet, the new Columbus Avenue sidewalks will be widened, 56 percent fewer parking spaces will be created in the rebuilding of an existing parking area, and the layout and size of new buildings will be altered to fit in better with the neighborhood.

While local officials praised Fordham’s willingness to compromise, “We are very disappointed that Fordham ... feels it necessary to build two overly tall residential buildings on its property,” CB7 chair Helen Rosenthal wrote in an e-mail. “These 50-60 story buildings are too tall for the neighborhood and will cast a half day shadow on the public school playground across the street. City Planning did not address these concerns and we are hoping that the City Council will.”

“The University has made significant changes in response to feedback from the community and at the request of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer,” wrote Robert Howe, director of communications for Fordham, in an e-mail. “We have been responsive on everything from reducing building heights to increasing glazing, to eliminating parking spaces. We certainly want to be, and have been, as accommodating to our immediate neighbors as possible without compromising our educational mission.”

New York University

The NYU expansion is known as “NYU Plans 2031,” but the planning has already begun in staggered phases, to mixed fanfare and criticism.

The project, launched in the spring of 2007 and led by the architectural firm SMWM, would add six million square feet of building space within a broad area around Washington Square, Union Square, and the East Village. Several components—including new science facilities and a new research center for NYU Law School—have begun construction, but much of the project is still in the planning stages.

“After more than a full year of community outreach and interactions, our planning team and university leadership are hard at work still, conducting the relevant and appropriate analyses that will drive the shape of the overall plan,” said Alicia Hurley, vice president of government affairs and community engagement at NYU.

According to its proponents, the need for expansion comes from a growing student body, hiring new faculty, advances in scientific research, and rising costs of off-campus housing in the city that have led more students to request housing in dormitories.

But some local groups and residents have urged NYU to consider alternate places to expand.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation has been particularly vocal. Members have held street protests, published op-eds in several newspapers, and are participating in a task force with elected officials, community groups, and local leaders.

The task force is intended to “establish principles that will serve both the university’s need to expand to meet its academic needs, and local residents’ desire for real input into development that directly affects their lives and their neighborhood,” according to a press release from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office.

“We don’t object to the university growing or it needing to expand,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of GVSHP, echoing the refrain of activists from Manhattanville. “But it’s in the best interest of the neighborhood for them to look at other locations—the neighborhood cannot accommodate their ongoing and rapidly accelerating expansion.”

In response to these objections, NYU officials have agreed to pursue available land outside of the already densely developed area of the Village, such as in Long Island City, Kips Bay, Governor’s Island, and Brooklyn.

“NYU is a vital ingredient, but it has to remain an ingredient—not an overwhelming presence,” Berman said of the university’s role in its downtown community.

But others report that administrators have worked hard to accommodate locals’ concerns.

“When they have a project that affects us, they generally let us know,” said Bob Gormley, district manager of Community Board 2. “They are willing to listen and sometimes modify their original concepts.”

In addition to CB2, Community Board 3 oversees a portion of the area in which NYU plans to expand, but CB3 officials did not respond to requests for comment.

City College of New York

Although CCNY’s expansion has not been free from dispute, construction has already begun and the plan will not be revised further.

The project is less invasive in terms of its impact on the surrounding neighborhood than those of Columbia, Fordham, and NYU, since it operates largely around existing infrastructure. A building on the main campus at 137th Street will be converted into a new architecture facility, and two buildings for scientific research will be constructed on the south campus.

Ellis Simon, director of public relations for CCNY, said the architecture building is expected to open around the time of the school’s commencement ceremony on May 28. Early construction work on the science buildings, including excavation and the installation of utility lines, began last fall.

“Expansion can be good, but we’d like to see CCNY engage the community more frequently and extensively,” Community Board 9 chair Pat Jones said. “They have presented their plans [to CB9], however, their presentation was made after substantially all of their final decisions had been made.”

“I am aware that there have been complaints and concerns voiced by people and certain community groups,” Simon said. “We have made great efforts to keep them apprised of our plans.”

Building in and around

The four expansions are linked superficially in that they each represent a university’s efforts to extend its reach and construct facilities to accommodate changing institutional needs. But in many vital respects, the similarities end there.

NYU differs fundamentally from Columbia, Fordham, and CCNY in that it has no distinct campus. Its buildings are interspersed within a wide area centered in Washington Square, extending into Union Square, the East Village, and north as far as midtown. Indeed, to the casual observer in Greenwich Village, it is difficult to tell which buildings belong to NYU without getting close enough to see the plaque by the door.

The school’s expansion is set to operate within that same framework.

“Our plan, unlike Columbia’s, is not a master plan that identifies an area that will be completely overhauled,” said Alicia Hurley, NYU’s vice president of government affairs and community engagement. “Our planning will focus on how to best approach the placement of six million square feet ... within our core campus, within our neighborhood, and in remote sites, including downtown Brooklyn and the Health Corridor on First Ave.”

But the notion that NYU’s new buildings would be seamlessly integrated into the existing neighborhood is one some locals and experts dispute.

“The pride of the university is the intermixture with the urban fabric, and that’s what they’ll continue to do,” said Hope Cohen, a CB7 member and deputy director of the Center for Rethinking Development at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that aims to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.” Cohen spoke in her capacity at the Manhattan Institute, not on behalf of CB7.

But that “intermixture” has its downsides, Cohen said. “Because of the nature of its campus being so dispersed and integrated into the greater city, residents of the neighborhoods ... confront on a daily basis the challenges of living with college students as their neighbors.”

Columbia’s expansion fits with its own traditional philosophy of constructing full, contained campuses. The University currently has two campuses—the central one in Morningside Heights and the Medical Center on 168th Street—and the Manhattanville campus would fall in between the two.

But many critics of the Columbia model remain.

“The Columbia plan creates a space. We don’t think it’s in the right place,” said Kent Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society, at a Rockefeller University panel about urban campus expansions in November 2007.

Land acquisition

The four university projects also differ on land acquisition and how this will tangibly impact their surrounding areas.

One of the most controversial aspects of Columbia’s project has been the displacement of residents and businesses in Manhattanville.

“Columbia by its own admission will displace over 5,000 local residents,” Harlem Tenants Council President Nellie Bailey said at a hearing about the project last December. She said she suspects even more could lose their homes due to what she perceives as the University’s “total disregard for the lives, livelihood, and rights of black and Latino working class people in West Harlem.”

While Columbia has promised not to use eminent domain to acquire residential properties, many local activists fear that lower and middle-income residents will be forced to leave the area as a result of gentrification and rising real estate prices.

In December 2008, the Empire State Development Corporation approved the use of state seizure of commercial properties through eminent domain, which would transfer ownership of unacquired land to the University if mutually agreeable deals cannot be reached. In doing so, the state eliminated Columbia’s last procedural obstacle to construction.

Two businesses that have refused to sell their land to Columbia—Nick Sprayregen’s Tuck-It-Away Storage and Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur’s gas stations—may be forced to relocate against their will.

“We look forward to having active leases as long as possible and are going to continue to work to relocate businesses in good standing to locations either in or near the project area,” Robert Kasdin, Columbia’s senior executive vice president, has said.

Columbia maintains that the expansion will benefit the community by revitalizing the area and creating jobs.

“Not only will our universities continue to attract creative minds with the determination to advance knowledge in service of humankind; they will remain a vibrant source of good, middle-income jobs for a diversity of people seeking to improve their lives here,” University President Lee Bollinger said after the City Council approved the Manhattanville plan in December 2007.

“Columbia is one of New York’s largest employers, and this project will generate tens of thousands of jobs,” Empire State Development Corporation spokesperson Warner Johnson has said.

Down in the Village, “NYU will also engage in extensive community outreach for new projects, work to minimize negative effects of construction including noise and dust, and develop a relocation policy for legal residential tenants displaced by University projects,” Borough President Stringer said in a January 2008 press release.

In addition to potential commercial displacement, neighborhood residents could be replaced by dorm-dwellers, Cohen said. “The university is actually competing on a huge scale with individual renters for apartments.”

Fordham’s proposal does not involve displacing residents or businesses, as new buildings would be confined to the footprint of the current campus, which occupies a “superblock”—like Columbia, but smaller—between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues and 60th and 62nd streets. CCNY’s proposal would not involve displacement, either.

Urban design

“Columbia, despite its other problems with town-gown issues, really does have a sense of what a campus can and should be and the role it plays in the larger urban fabric,” Cohen said of the University’s urban design, but called Fordham’s plan the opposite.

Fordham’s plan “has improved” since it was introduced five years ago, when Cohen was the chair of CB7, she said, adding, “From the time that I saw it, my advice to them has been to take the subway up to 116th Street and see how it’s done.”

The Fordham campus is walled in and above street level, accessible by stairs. As it was first proposed, the expansion called for enclosure of the school’s main quad and the construction of tall buildings along the edges of campus. That plan met with strong opposition.

Greg Monte, a spokesperson for State Assembly member Linda Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, testified to CB7 about the Fordham plan last December. “A fortress-like enclosure of the quadrangle is not reasonable,” Monte said, adding that such a design would “adversely impact the neighborhood, and is at odds with the original purpose of Lincoln Square.”

The concessions Fordham made between January’s CB7 hearings and April’s City Planning Commission vote were intended to ease such criticisms. Still, “Fordham’s neighbors continue to have serious concerns about the size and scale of the fortress-like design and the lack of open space in the current proposal,” Michael Groll, a member of activist group Fordham Neighbors United, said in a statement following the CPC vote on the revised plans.

To a large extent, NYU’s sprawled campus is inherently integrated into the surrounding cityscape. “Over the years they’ve built good buildings and bad buildings, and there’s been a lot of friction between NYU and the Village. It seems like they’ve evolved their idea of how to deal with the neighborhood and what kind of buildings will be acceptable,” Cohen said.

Columbia, for its part, has said that the Manhattanville project will maintain a significant component of public space. The ground level of many buildings will be rented out to local businesses as storefronts, and the campus will not be self-contained in the way the Fordham or even the Morningside Heights campuses are. All roads will remain open to vehicles and pedestrians, and sidewalks will be widened in many places.

Another point of contention in Fordham’s project has been its plan to build certain necessary infrastructure, such as heating sources above ground. Columbia is doing the opposite by building these elements in an underground “bathtub,” which has sparked its own dispute over perceived environmental risks.

“Common sense dictates that Columbia will only move forward in ways that are safe for the students, the faculty, and members of the surrounding community,” Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin has said, adding that environmental issues had been addressed in the planning process.

***

From these changing campuses across Manhattan, a new cityscape will develop new dynamics of New York City life. “To me it’s kind of fascinating,” Cohen said, noting that the universities’ approaches to expansion reflect their distinct “overall educational philosophies.”

Kim Kirschenbaum and Danny Ash contributed reporting to this article.