Bracing for the Lion

The City

Bracing for the Lion

Willie Davis for The New York Times
Few pockets of the neighborhood will be unaffected by Columbia’s plan to transform 17 acres into a northern campus.



By TRYMAINE LEE
Published: July 22, 2007

Luisa Henriquez gazed softly from her living room window into the partly hollowed-out old factory across West 132nd Street.

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Willie Davis for The New York Times







LA-VERNA FOUNTAIN, Spokeswoman, Columbia University "It is a painful process. Part of the question for me is, what will this area be in the year 2030; what will this area be like 50 years from now?"



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LUISA HENRIQUEZ, a second-generation Manhattanville resident "Columbia should work around us. They say everything is for the students. What about us?"


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NICHOLAS SPRAYREGEN, President, Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage "They are
like the dumb horse in Central Park with the blinders on, self-imposed blinders. They can't do anything but move forward."




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Willie Davis for The New York Times


The construction workers who had been pounding away inside had left for the day, taking with them their gruff chatter and their clanging and banging. What remained for Ms. Henriquez, 54, were grainy memories of times past, when local folks toiled there for the Madame Alexander doll company before it transferred most of its work overseas.

Ms. Henriquez’s mother, who moved her family from the Dominican Republic to New York in 1966, was one of those workers. Back then, her mother’s voice unfurled from the windows of the burnt-orange factory like a sweet Dominican bachata, a salve of grocery lists, reminders and reprimands.

This new noise, brought on by the workers and their power tools, is no salve. It is a bugle sounded by the building’s owner, Columbia University, announcing a brand-new day in Manhattanville, a day that Ms. Henriquez says is a direct threat to her dreams. The university has been readying the location for some of its administrative staff, and neighbors say the noise is just one more signal that the school is pushing forward with its plan to use 17 acres of the neighborhood for a huge campus expansion.

“They want us out of here,” Ms. Henriquez said, her brown eyes moistening as she turned from the window. “They want it all.”

The expansion recently reached a milestone. Last month, after three years of work, Columbia completed the rezoning application that is a linchpin of the Manhattanville plan; the formal process of review will probably last till year’s end.

Columbia foresees a Manhattanville graced with grand educational institutions and infused with money and energy after many lackluster years. Some people, among them merchants who expect a boom in business, are eager for the change. But others in Manhattanville are unsure, and still others are strongly opposed, saying that the university is charging into Manhattanville just as the neighborhood begins to perk up, that they will be priced out of the revamped area and that other initiatives, like building affordable housing, are much more compelling.

Ms. Henriquez knows where she stands. “Columbia should work around us,” she said as she sat by the window that overlooks the factory. “They say everything is for the students, for the students. What about us?”
•
When Columbia officials look at Manhattanville’s ramshackle warehouses, garages and decaying factories, they see temples for teaching and research. Where car engines crank and roar from dozens of auto repair shops, the university envisions a new business school or a school of the arts.

Columbia, of course, expects to reap vast benefits for itself in this scene. The university says it offers only half the space per student that Harvard University does, and only a third of the space available at Princeton and Yale, and that the expansion will help it compete with those and other renowned educational institutions.

And the benefits will also spill over to others, the school argues. “Columbia wants to work on the kinds of issues that impact humanity, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” said La-Verna Fountain, a Columbia spokeswoman.

The project, which is scheduled to be completed in 2030, will also bring 6,000 jobs to Manhattanville and 1,200 construction jobs a year for two decades, according to Ms. Fountain. (Columbia already owns or controls more than two-thirds of its proposed 17-acre footprint, and to acquire the remaining land, it is negotiating with owners individually and, in the case of commercial spaces, may seek to acquire them through eminent domain if negotiations fail.)

Many businesses and residents, like Ms. Henriquez, would be relocated under the plan. But Columbia says they will be placed in situations equal to or better than the ones they leave.

Moreover, in a stroll through the neighborhood, Ms. Fountain pointed out certain structures that date from the area’s manufacturing heyday, like a 1927 Art Deco building on Broadway and 133rd Street owned by the Nash car company, that sit within the project footprint but will be reused rather than torn down.

“It is a painful process,” Ms. Fountain said of the expansion as she trekked through the dank valley of warehouses and auto shops between 12th Avenue and Broadway. “Part of the question for me is, what will this area be in the year 2030; what will this area be like 50 years from now?

“Sometimes we forget the bad parts. I think we always love the good old days; of course we do. But I think if we want to get ready for the future, we have to work together to create the bright new days.”
•
Manhattanville, bounded by the Hudson River on the west and St. Nicholas Avenue on the east, and running from about 123rd Street north to about 135th Street, is a poor- to-working-class neighborhood. The feel of the area is industrial and mechanical. The neighborhood sits under the colossal structure of the Riverside Drive viaduct, a steel backbone that hovers above 12th Avenue.

From most points in the neighborhood you can hear the menacing sounds of the No. 1 train, grumbling as it charges to and from 125th Street. That station’s elevators are frequently broken, so riders often trudge up and down its steep steps, like worker ants from a gritty colony.

Water is another hallmark of Manhattanville. Vicky Gholson, born and raised nearby, said it has always been the waterfront that has drawn people to the area, especially country folk with ties to the South.

“These days people know Manhattanville mostly for the housing projects,” said Ms. Gholson, an educator and member of Community Board 9. “But I know that place. I remember how the guys used to go fishing on the river. How as kids we would go down there and look across the river to New Jersey to see all the bright lights in Palisades Park. Even if we couldn’t go to that park, as a child you could fantasize.”
•
Despite Columbia’s long interest in Manhattanville, the neighborhood has had a generally low profile in the city, perhaps because of its industrial nature. But its history is long and textured.

For hundreds of years, the water that would draw Ms. Gholson and her friends was what attracted the American Indians who inhabited the area. They had carved out trade routes and trails — much of what we know today as 125th Street, Broadway and Old Broadway — and the future Manhattanville was ideal for them because of its direct access to the Hudson.

In 1806 the industrialist Jacob Schieffelin and a handful of mostly Quaker merchants established an official village in Manhattanville. Schieffelin is still an organic part of the neighborhood, buried under the front porch of the rectory of St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church, on 126th Street near Old Broadway. The rectory and the church look much as they did 100 years ago, but the congregation, like the local population, is mostly black and Hispanic, and the liturgy includes a Friday service known as the Hip-Hop(e) Mass.

In 1850 the Hudson River Railroad was extended to Manhattanville, making it the first northbound stop out of the city. Over the next several decades, the rail line, the waterfront, and the boom in industry drew to the area not only the city’s wealthy and enterprising, but also its roughnecks and dockworkers.

The Great Depression paralyzed the area, however, and in the 1940s and ’50s, Robert Moses took aim at the neighborhood for what was known as “slum clearance” — tearing down tenements to make room for moderate-income housing projects. The area had long been home to a mix of races and religions, but whites fled, and the Moses projects, Manhattanville Houses and Grant Houses, became largely minority.

In 1968, local tensions exploded when Columbia proposed building a gym in nearby Morningside Park. The dispute involved issues of race, class and town-gown relations; for example, a plan to have separate entrances and separate facilities for students and the public struck some as little more than Jim Crow segregation. Columbia students and concerned residents clashed with the university and the police, at times violently.
The gymnasium was never built, but as Ms. Fountain, the university spokeswoman, suggests, its shadow hangs over Columbia’s current plan.

“I think that’s a huge battle for us to overcome,” she said. “I can tell you that almost any discussion that I have with a reporter, every discussion I have with the community or with a student, it always points back to 1968.”
•
On a recent afternoon, Nicholas Sprayregen, president of Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage, sat in his office at Broadway near 131st Street, stewing over the university’s desire to take over his building. His father started the business in 1980, when the neighborhood was at its worst. Today, Tuck-It-Away has five locations in Manhattanville, most of which stand in the way of the university’s plan.

Mr. Sprayregen, who is white, likened the expansion to a form of “ethnic cleansing,” an attempt to rid the area of poor minorities to make way for a more affluent crowd. He said he is willing to fight the university at every turn, pointed out that his family business has been in the community for nearly 30 years, and said he plans on being around for another 30.

“Most of us are not against the university expanding; I welcome that, but they have this all-or-nothing attitude,” he said, leaning forward in his chair for emphasis. “They are like the dumb horse in Central Park with the blinders on, self-imposed blinders. They can’t do anything but move forward like a battering ram.”

Managers of other businesses nestled in or near the footprint are not so critical, among them John Stage, the owner of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, a two-year-old rib joint about a block west of Tuck-It-Away, on 131st Street.

“Columbia owns this building, so I’m between a rock and a hard place,” Mr. Stage said the other day as he sat at a table in the back and watched the staff hustle past with plates of brisket, ribs and chicken wings. “But Columbia has been very fair to me, and it has been a good customer, too.”

Mr. Stage said he started coming around the neighborhood about five years ago, when the area was still pretty “raw.” He has a 15-year lease with the university, and as is the case with other businesses, Columbia has promised to relocate him if it decides it needs the space.

“I have no fear,” Mr. Stage said. “I’m not going to worry at all. Business is very good right now.”

Evelyn Dominguez, who the other day could be found standing behind the counter of VNV Optical International and studying prescriptions from behind her mahogany Armani frames, is positively ecstatic about the plan.

“I think it will be really good for business,” said Ms. Dominguez, whose store is on Broadway, near 126th Street. “And any improvements to the area would be great. You know, so it won’t be so ghetto around here.”
•
At 125th Street and Riverside Drive, two pet chickens named Melissa and Tumba played peck or be pecked outside their home, the 125th Street Tire Corporation. The chickens flopped about with no regard for motor or man, just for their little games.

Nearby, on Old Broadway, a barrel-chested 42-year-old named Mustafa handed a man a few dollars to wash his car and mused upon the bad old days, when a stretch of Amsterdam Avenue was so drug-infested it was known as Cracksterdam.

According to him, the police have pressed hard on local drug dealers and the projects are kept much cleaner, and the grass is greener, than he can remember.

“But it is what it is,” he said, tossing a dirty rag to the guy who was scrubbing his vehicle. “This is still Cracksterdam, and we still call this Murderville.”

Local teenagers say that gangs control the projects, he added, with Grant Houses run by the Crips, and Manhattanville Houses by the Bloods.

Still, with crime much lower than it has been, outsiders now feel safe enough to move in. “They were scared of us before,” Mustafa said. “But now everybody wants a piece. You even see white people jogging through the projects now.”

He was joking a bit, but was deadly serious about one thing — the fear residents have of being kicked out of the only neighborhood many of them have ever known. Some have even sold their homes and left town, he said, especially the older folks, with many headed back down South.
•
In the middle of Manhattanville Houses, boys from Intermediate School 286, the Renaissance Military and Leadership Academy, gathered on a concrete field to play baseball. They’re an upstart team of middle school boys, without an official team name or fancy uniforms, but on this mild afternoon, mothers and sisters and other schoolchildren had filled the worn blue benches to watch the action.

Andrew Jarboe, one of the coaches and a teacher at the school, essentially agreed. “This is a neighborhood that has emerged from the crack epidemic of the ’90s; it pulled itself up from the ground,” Mr. Jarboe said as he kept his eye on a few of his more rambunctious players. “An institution like Columbia could do a lot of good here, especially for kids this age. But if the property gets gobbled up and people with more money start moving in, nobody around here will be able to afford anything.”

Mr. Jarboe remembers waiting at a nearby bus stop not long ago and striking up a conversation with two local women. As a double-decker tour bus pulled around the corner, he recalled, both women expressed the same sense of foreboding.

“They were just looking down at Harlem,” Mr. Jarboe said, “and one of the ladies says to me, ‘You know what they’re doing, right?’ I said uh, not really. She says to me, ‘They’re shopping for property.’ ”


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/nyregion/thecity/22manh.html