By Andrew Berman
Volume 80, Number 20 | October 14 – 20, 2010
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933
Talking Point
N.Y.U. growth plan adds up to one massive impact
Earlier this month, New York University submitted its application to the Landmarks Preservation Commission to build a 400-foot-tall hotel and residence on Bleecker St. in the landmarked Silver Towers complex. This is the beginning of N.Y.U.’s long, multistage approval process for its massive 20-year expansion plan. “NYU 2031,” as it is called, would add 3 million square feet of space in Greenwich Village, the East Village and environs (roughly doubling N.Y.U.’s rate of growth compared to the last several decades), and would be far and away the biggest development plan to hit the Village in decades — possibly ever.
N.Y.U. also says it plans to add another 3 million square feet of space outside of the Village, but this is mostly expansions of its medical facilities and its newly acquired engineering school, which are already located outside of the Village, respectively, on the East Side and in Downtown Brooklyn.
Almost 2 million of the 3 million square feet of space N.Y.U. is seeking to add in the Village would be shoved into nine blocks to the southeast of Washington Square, but would require extensive public approvals to be built. For this reason, we are getting a great deal of detail about what the 2 million square feet would look like. The other 1 million-plus square feet of space will be developed opportunistically by N.Y.U. throughout the Village, East Village, Noho and Union Square without necessarily requiring public approvals, and thus N.Y.U. is supplying no information about what it would look like.
However, to give a sense of the magnitude of these figures, N.Y.U.’s new 26-story mega-dorm on E. 12th St. — the tallest building in the East Village — is 175,000 square feet. Thus, the 3 million square feet of space N.Y.U. wishes to add to the neighborhood is the equivalent of 17 more of these.
N.Y.U. is seeking public approvals to build:
• The tallest building ever erected in the Village, the aforementioned 399-foot-tall Bleecker St. hotel and residence.
• A massive, nearly 1-million-square-foot building, about 200 feet high, replacing the one-story Coles Gym on Mercer St. between Bleecker and Houston Sts., which would include (among other uses) a 1,400-bed dorm — more than twice the number of beds in the school’s E. 12th St. mega-dorm. This would be one of the largest buildings ever built in the Village, if not the largest.
• Two enormous, curving buildings on the open space between the slabs of Washington Square Village, one slightly shorter than the existing buildings and one slightly taller.
• A series of buildings about which N.Y.U. has provided little detail that would replace the few remaining lower-scale buildings between Eighth, Fourth and Mercer Sts., east of the park.
Perhaps as important as what N.Y.U. is proposing to build are the public approvals it would need in order to be able to do so:
• Unprecedented landmarks approvals allowing high-rise construction on open space within a landmarked complex.
• A lifting of longstanding zoning protections requiring the maintenance of open space in one of the most open-space-starved areas of New York City.
• A change in zoning in the neighborhood from residential to commercial, allowing the development of hotels and large-scale, regional, retail uses.
• The transfer to N.Y.U. of six pieces of publicly owned land, much of which is currently used for parks or recreational space.
• The lifting of deed restrictions on formerly publicly owned land that currently restrict N.Y.U.’s ability to build during the next 11 years.
All of these proposed developments will require advisory votes from Community Board 2 and Borough President Stringer, but must receive the approval of both the City Planning Commission and the City Council in order to be built.
While the votes of the community board and borough president are only advisory, they play an important role in influencing the process; final disapproval of the N.Y.U. plan is highly unlikely without rejection first by the board and borough president.
While a majority of members of the City Planning Commission are appointed by the mayor (the remainder are appointed by the five borough presidents and the public advocate), the City Council’s vote will largely come down to two people — the local councilmember, Margaret Chin, who represents the affected area, and the Council speaker, Christine Quinn, who coincidentally represents the adjacent district.
On land-use issues, the Council typically defers to the wishes of the affected councilmember — in this case, Chin. However, sometimes on land-use issues considered to be of broader citywide significance, the Council may go its own way, against the wishes of the local councilmember. The Council speaker is generally key in determining whether or not this is the case. That’s why these two elected officials, who represent much of the Village, will likely determine whether or not the N.Y.U. plan goes forward.
Many individual community board members have expressed strong reservations about the N.Y.U. plan. But neither the full community board, nor any of the other elected officials who will vote on the plan, have yet staked out positions on it. That means regardless of what we might hope or believe they will do, as of right now, we do not know, and can take nothing for granted.
Fortunately, for those government officials who see N.Y.U.’s growth as a boon to the city, this is not a choice between preserving the Village and encouraging needed economic development. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031 have been calling on N.Y.U. to pursue other locations for its massive expansion plan, such as the Financial District, which is easily connected by mass transit to the Village and able to absorb this type of development. Lower Manhattan community leaders have echoed this call, and have urged N.Y.U. to consider their neighborhood for the new developments proposed for the Village, saying they would be welcomed and contextual there.
Getting N.Y.U. to consider the Financial District or other satellite locations is vital to the Village’s future. N.Y.U.’s 20-year expansion plan, as massive as it is, is only slated to absorb the university’s growth for the next two decades. After that, if it does not consider alternate locations, N.Y.U. will come back seeking another 3 million square feet of space in our neighborhood, or more — tearing down and building up more and more, with more open space and low-rise buildings replaced by larger new ones for N.Y.U. And this pattern will only continue.
So what’s at stake with the process that is starting now is not just the next 20 years, but the entire future of the Village.
Berman is executive director, Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation, and a founding member, Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031 (CAAN 2031).
