SALON

Saturday, Jul 28, 2012 3:00 PM UTC

A university overtakes NYC

A plan to expand NYU calls for 6 million square feet of new construction in the heart of Greenwich Village

By

Topics: Next American City, Urbanism, New York, Education,

A university overtakes NYC
This article originally appeared on Next American City.

On Wednesday, the New York City Council voted unanimously 44-1 to approve a controversial expansion of New York University’s campus in Greenwich Village.

Next American City

The vote was largely a matter of course. The plan — dubbed NYU 2031— passed the zoning subcommittee last week with the blessing of Council president Christine Quinn and Councilperson Margaret Chin, whose district covers the area in question, after the University agreed to a 20 percent reduction in density from the original application. The plan calls for 6 million square feet of new construction — 1.9 million of which will be built between Houston, Third, Laguardia and Bleecker streets, in the heart of the Village. The new construction, which will occur over 20 years, includes classroom facilities, faculty housing, retail space, at least four new towers and a 300-foot hotel.

The title of the plan is meant to honor the University’s bicentennial, and it is indeed a poignant reminder of how much the University has changed since its founding in 1831. The expansion serves as the exclamation point on 20 years of growth that has transformed NYU from the local’s college to one of the largest private universities in the country— an evolution that has pulled NYU into the ranks of the US News and World Report elites, but at the cost of dramatically reconfiguring the character and built scale of Greenwich Village.

Wayne Conti, a longtime Village resident, is the owner of Mercer Books at the corner of Mercer and Bleecker streets. His store is adjacent the proposed Zipper building, a mixed-use facility that will house faculty and student residences, a university-affiliated hotel, classrooms, academic space, as well as retail space, including a new supermarket.

“They are going to build right up to the property line,” Wayne says, pointing concourse of trees that line Third Street between Laguardia and Mercer. “NYU used to be commuter school for middle class New Yorkers. Obviously things have changed.”

Since 1980, NYU has increased undergraduate enrollment by 47 percent, bringing the student population to 40,000, a size larger than many small towns. That increased enrollment has been met with significant facility expansion: 460,000 square feet of academic and administrative space between 1980 and 2006. The growth has generated jobs and revenue benefitting the city.

Yet for those who love the Village, its difficult to ignore how much of the growth has occurred at the expense of preserving the neighborhood’s cultural history.

In 2001, NYU tore down the interior of the historic Poe House in favor of a new law center. In 2010, the school renovated the Provincetown Playhouse, which housed the Provincetown Players, an amateur group of actors, writers and artists, to make room for a new research center for the law school. Other significant new construction includes the Kimmel Center, a behemoth student center that sits on the south side of Washington Square Park, and the new Catholic Student Center.

Covering square footage equal to the Empire State Building, the proposed NYU 2031 plan represents the most significant expansion to date — with a range of untoward consequences. Construction will be ongoing for at least two decades. New high-leasing retailers will threaten independent natives like Mercer Books. More towers will rise above a neighborhood that has always prided itself on being close to the street.

The plan has been met with mobilized opposition from local residents and various constituencies within NYU. In February, the Greenwich Village community board voted unanimously to oppose the rezoning proposal. Faculty across the university have organized in opposition under the organization of New York University Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (NYUFASP); 37 different departments, including the Stern business school, have passed resolutions opposing the plan.

In response to these critiques, the university has defended its position with traditional platitudes that the expansion is critical “in order to stay relevant and rigorous and to allow academic excellence to flourish” — a narrative that has been called into question by NYU faculty.

“The plan represents a profound clash between the world view of the faculty and the trustees,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a faculty organizer of NYUFASP and editor of While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York, a collection of pieces by New York writers protesting the expansion. “The trustees see this as a real estate opportunity. I am not sure what the business plan is, but whatever it is has nothing to do with meeting space needs. It has to do with raising the value of the land.”

While the opposition had pushed City Council to deny NYU’s application, the reality is that growth into the super blocks south of Washington Square Park was inevitable. NYU owns the land, and under the current agreement the university would have been able to build (not including the small patches of public land) without requiring the consent of the council within the decade. To the council’s credit, they used this as an opportunity to influence the content and scale of the expansion.

Moreover, the planning, in vacuum, is not so bad. It includes three acres of green space. An independent body, financed through the university, will manage maintenance. Furthermore, building vertically is fundamental to sustainable cities.

Yet there is a difference between measured, appropriate expansion – balancing the aspirations of the university with that of its neighbors – and the indiscriminate NYU-ification of the Village. The fracas resembles another recent battle over a university’s right to essentially swallow the neighborhood that surrounds it. That battle, over Columbia University’s expansion into West Harlem, ended in the courts, with Columbia’s right to seize private property using the state’s right of eminent domain upheld.

As I was speaking with Conti in his store, a man came in offering a box of CD’s. Wayne politely declined, explaining that he only sells records. Like Mercer Books, it’s reasonable to believe that the Village has a right to stay small. How to balance that right, along with a university’s desire to grow and the city’s need for sustainable development is a question that clearly not even New York’s best universities have been able to solve.

More Jake Scobey-Thal.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 15 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Next American City is a non-profit media organization dedicated to connecting cities and informing the people who work to improve them. NAC publishes a daily urban affairs news blog and a weekly series of long-form articles about urban affairs called Forefront, which is available by subscription.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations