Dispute - The Manhattanville Project

Magazine

Dispute
The Manhattanville Project

By DAPHNE EVIATAR
Published: May 21, 2006

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."

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Brenda Ann Kenneally

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?

ollinger 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."

t 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/magazine/21wwln.essay.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1



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From: BFrappy24@aol.com
Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 20:58:35 EDT
Subject:
Re: letter Tom D sent to the Times Magazine
To: Reysmont@yahoo.com
CC:


Letter I sent to the Times Mag after their clever protectionism of the
university as they avoided a major story about gentrification, eminent
domain, and the future of a diverse city by placing the piece in their
"architectural supplement" and not even mentioning it on the cover.
I will look at the Metro piece when I get a chance.
Tom D



Tom DeMott
May 28, 2006

Editor
New York Times Magazine - Sunday, May 21, 2006
Re: Daphne Eviatar's article "The Manhattanvill Project"
Dear Editor,

The choice to report the struggle over development in West Harlem in
the context of disputes about architectural designs misses the essential
nature of the clash between the community and Columbia. It denies
the significance of Columbia's eviction of businesses and residents.

It diminishes that genteel institution's threat to
(1) use eminent domain
(2) place biodefense labs in a residential community
(3) wipe out actually existing manufacturing jobs in a minority neighborhood.

The piece treats Columbia President Bollinger as the final arbiter,
allowing him to place himself as the representative of (abstract)
universal goods that transcend the narrow lives of local residents.

The article's not-so-subtle implication is that Harlemites lack the
brains to comprehend what Columbia is up to.

An implication that reflects a foundational failure to appreciate Harlem's
tradition of local yet deeply worldly democratic politics.

The realstory here is all about Columbia's bottom line vs. Harlem's ongoing
imperative to make history-from-below. Our Coalition to Preserve
Community will do just that.

Tom DeMott
Coalition to Preserve Community


In a message dated 5/21/06 8:21:37 AM, Nick Sprayregen writes:
<< http://www.newyorkmetro.com/realestate/features/2016/17143/

Once again, the news media gets it all wrong. The issue obviously is
not the community opposing "progress" but merely that we vehemently oppose CU's
attempts to use ed and strong arm the community to get the entire area.

Really disappointing.

Nick.= >>