Columbia and New York University, two of the three biggest schools in the city, both have plans to expand significantly over the next 25 years into their surrounding neighborhoods.

 

NYU’s tentative plan requires the school, already the largest private university in the country, to acquire roughly 6 million more square feet of space in the city—on top of the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, which NYU purchased in 2008.

But NYU’s expansion plans continue to be fought by local preservationists.

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, has voiced numerous concerns about NYU’s unchecked growth in the Village.

“There’s a real danger that more and more of the Village will become a company town,” Berman said. “If it becomes just NYU, this really isn’t the Village anymore, for all intents and purposes we’d become the campus of the university rather than a vital urban neighborhood.”

Berman speaks highly of the value NYU brings to New York, but believes the university would be better integrated into the city through utilizing satellite campuses in other parts of the city. The university has had a satellite campus in the Bronx in the past, and the medical schools, located in East Midtown, already comprise what is essentially their own satellite campus.

“The beneficial effects of having more NYU in the Village are totally overkill, they’re totally wasted,” Berman said. “There are other parts of the city where adding that to the mix would be an incredible boon to those areas.”

Meanwhile, Columbia is moving forward with its own expansion plans. Its Morningside Heights campus will soon be extending into neighboring Manhattanville, an industrial section of West Harlem. But like NYU, Columbia continues to take heat from local activists who claim the university is displacing tenants, hurting small businesses and not showing enough concern for cultural preservation of the neighborhood it intends to take over.

Nellie Hester-Bailey, director of the Harlem Tenants Council, has made clear that she believes Columbia’s recent actions are an example of the university not cooperating with the community.

“They have never demonstrated good faith and good will towards the Harlem community,” Hester-Baily said.

She cited resentment over the school’s use of eminent domain laws and a lingering mistrust from clashes between Columbia and the Harlem community in the late 1960s when the university wanted to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park.

Elliot Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, agreed that the history of friction between Columbia and its neighbors dates back to the campus riots in 1968.

“The community rightly blew up, and in those years Columbia University saw itself as at war with the community,” Sclar said, adding that this sentiment no longer rings true for Columbia’s administration.

Eric Allison, founder of the graduate historic preservation program at the Pratt Institute, urged that a balance be struck between the schools and the neighborhoods that sustain them.

“The question is how much can you change the character of the neighborhood without losing what makes the neighborhood special,” Allison said. “You have to negotiate a balance between what’s good for the neighborhood and what’s good for the university, and the city as a whole.”