NYU Expands in Spite of Neighbors

A recently announced plan to demolish a building that houses a historic playhouse a block from Washington Square has turned neighbors against the largest land-owner in the Village and forced the university to alter its original plan. Still, critics of the plan remain unhappy.

The 167-year-old-year building, at 133-139 MacDougal Street, is owned by New York University’s law school. It’s on lease to the Steinhardt School of Education, which uses the playhouse within the building for student-run theater productions. NYU wants to tear down the building to create additional space for its expanding law school.

Andrew Berman, Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, said the building is historically important and treasured by the neighborhood.

“The building was the beating heart of bohemia in New York,” he said.

The structure became historically significant in 1912, when it was picked as the site for the Greenwich Village chapter of the Liberal Club, set up to rival the uptown chapter, after applicant W.E.B Dubois had been rejected there because he was black. The Club became a meeting point for many culturally significant writers and artists, among them E.E. Cummings and Upton Sinclair.

In 1918, space was carved out for the Provincetown Playhouse in a corner of the building. The Playhouse has a rich theatrical history, most notably as the home stage to Eugene O’Neill, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of, among others, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh.

When the university announced its plans for the building on April 30th many local residents and theater enthusiasts from all over the city turned out to complain at community board hearings, and angry letters to the editor began to turn up in The Villager, a community paper. A group of concerned citizens signed and sent a letter to John Sexton, the university’s president.

Two weeks later, NYU announced that instead of demolishing the building it would preserve the theater inside while building a taller structure around and above it. John Beckman, Vice President for NYU’s all university media relations, did not return phone calls but in an e-mail said the university’s position was spelled out in a May press release. In it, university officials said they were altering the original plans to preserve the playhouse’s original four walls, ceiling, and stage. Some of the original seats, which date back to the 1920s, will also be saved.

Originally, NYU had planned to erect an eight story building on the lot. However, the plans were scaled back so that the building will now stand only slightly taller than the old four story building, with a recessed penthouse that won’t be visible from the street. The press release also points out that the university has voluntarily decided to build a smaller structure than allowed for by existing zoning laws.

By Berman’s accounting, only six percent of the original building will remain intact. Not enough, he said.

“NYU is now 0 for 1,” Berman said, regarding the school’s record since enacting NYU Plans 2031.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, many complained. Only a year earlier, in March 2007, the school had unveiled its “NYU Plans 2031” diagram for expansion over the next 23 years. According to NYU’s expansion plans, the university is to favor renovation over demolition, and committed to soliciting community input before making any drastic changes to the neighborhood.

The expansion plan also calls for the school to locate some 3.5 million square feet of additional academic and residential space in Greenwich Village within the next 23 years, an ambitious goal in a neighborhood already known for its tight fit.

The university’s willingness to work with the community was hailed as a breakthrough by historical preservationists, including Berman. Now feelings have soured.

“My sense has been that NYU goes through the motions of responding to citizen concerns. They hold meetings, solicit input, and then do what they want,” said Livvie Mann, who lives and works in Greenwich Village.

The razing of the building at 133-139 MacDougal Street is the first major construction to be planned since the announcement and has dashed Berman’s hopes that the university would now mind its neighbors when making major construction decisions.

Neighbors say they have reasons to doubt NYU’s intentions. In 2001 the school grudgingly agreed to preserve the façade of the building at 85 W 3rd street, where Edgar Allen Poe had lived when he published “The Raven.” The school had planned to level the entire structure, but the plan was met with outrage. When construction finished residents discovered that the façade that NYU had promised to preserve was instead new construction fashioned to resemble Poe’s old house. Not a single brick had been preserved.

In many ways NYU’s growing pains resemble the troubles lately suffered by the city’s other great university, Columbia University. In its own search for greater space, Columbia has recently faced protests from Harlem residents over its planned expansion northward. Both universities exist in neighborhoods where residents are generally proud of the schools, but also tired of their expansionist policies.

“Inserting a monolithic institution into a multi-faceted, interesting, fragile, low-rise, historic, eccentric neighborhood can’t be done without destroying all the qualities that make it wonderful,” said Mann.