It Riles a Village

mediafire film | harvard university |

I WENT to find my aunt Ruth in Judson Church among the disgruntled at a public hearing last month about New York University ’s latest proposal to expand its Greenwich Village campus. It was a couple of weeks before the local community board denounced the proposal outright. A light mist was falling. I climbed the church steps. Beyond the long tables, where children drew with crayons, a bobbing sea of homemade placards demanded, "Flowers Not Towers."

Paul Hoppe

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: March 22, 2012

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A Land-Use Battle

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I had been one of those children at the long tables years ago. This sort of meeting felt like home, in the neighborhood where I had grown up in a cheerful culture of endless protest at a time when N.Y.U. was not yet one of the biggest and most ambitious private universities in the country but still a modest school proudly catering to working New Yorkers like my mother and Ruth.

The storm over NYU 2031 , as this latest expansion proposal is called, has escalated into one of the city’s most acrimonious land-use battles. No wonder. The plan is so clearly oversize that it’s hard not to see it as a stalking horse for what school officials figure they can get permission from the city to build. The proposal envisions constructing some 2.5 million square feet (the rough equivalent of the Empire State Building) over the next 20 years on a pair of superblocks owned by the university below Washington Square Park. The blocks are now dominated by midcentury tower-in-the-park faculty residences called Washington Square Village and University Village.

Common sense and the billions of dollars that the project would cost suggest the university would be hard pressed to build half of what it’s outlining during the next decade or two. The question is which half of NYU 2031 ought to get a go-ahead, if either. The school, meanwhile, is expanding its satellite campus in Brooklyn and its medical center in Midtown. Universities in the city move their campuses from time to time. Columbia did it in the 1890s, quitting Midtown for Morningside Heights. N.Y.U.’s ultimate development may lie beyond the Village. In any case, this latest proposed expansion should not be the start of some new open-ended phase of growth in the neighborhood but the end of it.

What does N.Y.U. want? Urban universities, like hospitals, are engines of civic economies, and the best ones have to keep up with new technologies and expanding programs in a competitive marketplace: they need state-of-the-art facilities to attract top talent. The city has been banking a good part of its future on intellectual capital: Cornell’s prospective campus on Roosevelt Island, Columbia’s in Manhattanville. N.Y.U. contributes to the cultural lifeblood of the Village, adding, among other things, ethnic diversity to an area that celebrates its historic reputation as America’s bohemian capital but is increasingly home for the super rich. The school needs to upgrade and consolidate its core.

And what does the neighborhood need? Among other things, open space, green space. The debate over the development of the two superblocks has turned a fresh spotlight on the underrated urban virtues of Washington Square Village and University Village — examples of how tower-in-the-park architecture, descended from Le Corbusier and widely discredited, can benefit an old neighborhood of brownstones and low-rise loft buildings if the city is dense, healthy and vibrant enough. The task is balancing necessary development with a local ecosystem.

The most radical part of what N.Y.U. wants is to construct two tall, crescent-shaped towers, 400,000 square between them (the architecture is still notional) on the 1.5 acres of open space between the two apartment slabs of Washington Square Village. Beneath that open space, in lieu of the current parking garage, the university wants to dig several floors down to create 770,000 square feet of underground classrooms.

This would entail, among other things, demolishing the raised concrete garden by Hideo Sasaki from 1959 that is one of the country’s earliest parking garage roof structures, beloved by landscape historians, with its boxed crabapples, cherry and willow trees. I used to play in it as a boy. It’s a severe park but peaceful. The Village has notoriously few public refuges, aside from Washington Square Park. This is one of them, though most people don’t even realize it exists.

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