NYU Is Purple Village Eater

Gargantuan Expansion Planned Over Objections

It is most encouraging that New York Univeristy has realized the expansion of its Greenwich Village campus so far has been “marked by piecemeal planning and undistinguished design,” as Times reporter Robin Pogrebin put it (3/24/10) -- to which I and many other Village residents would add, “to say the least.”  And it is gratifying to read that NYU’s president, John E. Sexton, understands his institution has had “a history of moving forward without listening,” and that it now senses “there’s a lot of wisdom in the community.”

But NYU’s dawning awareness that it lives within a vibrant, historically rich, unusually well-educated and accomplished community is less than reassuring in view of its voracious appetite for Greenwich Village real estate, property and housing stock, which will apparently continue unabated, part of the school’s plans to grow by “40 percent over the next 20 years.” 

What still seems lost on the University, and on the city’s development officials, is that NYU  is not merely changing the face of Greenwich Village. It is engulfing large parts of it and in the process transforming one of the country’s – indeed the world’s – great urban treasures into a monolithic university campus. The one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater (NYU’s ubiquitous color is purple) is almost certain to destroy the very thing that drew good students and top faculty to what was until recently a middling institution. Lost will be not just “the wisdom of the community” but the community itself. 

Examples, you ask? NYU's new student center, a fatuous decorated box looming over Washington Square Park and blocking part of the once-stunning view down Fifth Avenue through White’s elegant arch. The school’s destruction of the historic Provincetown Playhouse to build a research center for its law school. The school’s fraudulent rescue of the Poe House: after demolishing it and absorbing the space into its new law school edifice, it built a remote resemblance of the house’s façade into the bulding’s own façade, but half a block away. That’s how NYU bends to community, cultural and historical concerns. 

And the future? One example: The Forbes building on Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street, which will become NYU property in five years. Local restaurants, bars and businesses that benefited from the patronage of Forbes people will have to look to students, faculty and administrators for cultural and economic sustenance. They'll lose affluent adults and gain students and modestly paid academics.

Of course, New York must continually reinvent itself or become a museum, a Colonial Williamsburg on the Hudson, As urban planners and scholars from Jane Jacobs to Paul Goldberger have pointed out. Healthy reinvention, however, demands not destruction but a kind of assimilation: The new kid on the block doesn’t evict everybody and replace them with his friends but works to fit in. Greenwich Village, after all, has quite successfully reinvented itself a few times already on its own -- another reason why it is so loved. 

“For New York to be a great city,” President Sexton intoned, “we need NYU to be a great university.” That statement is precisely backward. New York is already is a great city -- by many accounts, the planet’s greatest. It already has Columbia, Fordham, and the world’s richest array of first-rate specialty and secondary schools.

NYU needs New York a lot more than New York needs NYU.