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

The New York Sun

June 1, 2006 Edition > Section: Real Estate >

Columbia's Planned Expansion to Manhattanville
Draws Fire From Small Businesses, Community Board
BY JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN - Special to the Sun
June 1, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/33667

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 allencompassing 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 essentiallyasked for time out. "We knew Columbia's goals, and we knew the community's goals. We saw that these

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