Activists Call CU Agressive

From behind the pulpit at St. Mary's Church last night, Coalition to Preserve Community leader Tom Demott delivered some good news to an audience opposed to Columbia University's proposed expansion.

According to Philip van Buren, the lawyer representing the owners of the auto repair shops at 3251 Broadway, Columbia recently stated that the owners had until March 22 to agree to a relocation deal or they would be forced to leave the building. The same evening of the proposed deadline, Columbia changed its position on the matter and agreed to allow negotiations with the business owners to continue. Van Buren and several of the repair shop owners thanked the CPC for its support in the matter and for getting city councilman Robert Jackson, D-Harlem, involved in asking Columbia to continue negotiations.

Columbia "is feeling a need to assert dominance, which is why they laid down this deadline," van Buren said. "They dropped the deadline on us without any concern for these businesses."

This furthering of negotiations, taken as a victory among those in attendance, comes on the heels of a larger-scale victory for those in opposition to plans to temporarily house the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering at P.S. 36, an early childhood school on Morningside Drive. In late February, the New York City Department of Education decided not to combine the two schools.

Drawing encouragement from these two developments, members of the CPC and others in attendance turned their attention to President Lee Bollinger's early March radio interview on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. During the show, Bollinger discussed Columbia's proposed expansion and the relocation of tenants who would be directly displaced by the expansion.

"There's an amazing disconnect that this man has," Harlem Tenants' Council President Nellie Bailey said, of Bollinger's statement that within the next 15 years "it is absolutely certain that we [Columbia] can work with them [displaced tenants] to have a better life than they have now."

Bailey went on to disclose that Columbia had offered tenants in affordable housing apartments controlled by the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement and the West Harlem Group Assistance incorporations under the tenant interim lease program $5,000 as well as living expenses for relocation. Bailey called the proposal "a land grab."

The evening ended with a brief speech by Alan Rosner, a Brooklyn resident who has battled the Atlantic Yards development, which focused on the security issues surrounding new developments. Rosner warned that Columbia's plans to build science research centers on property considered part of a floodplain could have negative environmental impacts.