New York University is proposing the largest expansion in its history, with a new tower on Bleecker Street and three million square feet of new classrooms, dormitories and offices in the Greenwich Village area. The plans also call for creating a new engineering school inBrooklyn and a satellite campus on Governors Island, complete with dorms and faculty housing.
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The projects, which would expand N.Y.U.’s physical plant by 40 percent over the next 20 years, are aimed at accommodating a growing student body and competing for money and prestige with other universities. They will require approvals from city agencies and have already met with a skeptical response from some neighbors and preservationists. The city’s top economic development official, Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber, said that approval of the university’s plans was not guaranteed. “They’ve been deliberate and thoughtful,” Mr. Lieber said. “That doesn’t mean it’s all going to go exactly as they intended. There’s lots of opportunity for discussion here.”
The university has clashed repeatedly with its neighbors over much less ambitious expansion efforts of recent decades. N.Y.U. officials acknowledged on Monday that these earlier projects had been marked by piecemeal planning and undistinguished design and said they have made a concerted effort this time to conduct an open public process that is mindful of the neighborhood context, architectural quality and residents’ interests. “It’s clear that N.Y.U. had a history of moving forward without listening,” John E. Sexton, the university’s president, said in a telephone interview from Qatar, near N.Y.U.’s new campus in Abu Dhabi. “What this process has allowed us to do is take advantage of the wisdom that’s out there. There are some people just trying to make reputations attacking N.Y.U. But there’s a lot of wisdom in the community.”
Between 1991 and 2001, the number of students living in N.Y.U. housing tripled to 12,000, from 4,000, as the university raised its national profile. (In the early ’90s, 50 percent of its students came from the metropolitan area; now that figure has declined to 10 to 15 percent.) By 2031, N.Y.U. expects its total student body to grow to 46,500 students, up from the current 41,000.
By 2031, the university aims to have 240 academic square feet per student; it now has 160, according to its own study, compared to Columbia University’s 326, Harvard’s 673 and Yale’s 866. The plan calls for adding 6 million square feet of space — at a projected cost of about $1,000 a square foot — to N.Y.U.’s existing 15 million, development that quietly started in 2006 and already amounts to 787,000 square feet.
“For New York to be a great city, we need N.Y.U. to be a great university,” Mr. Sexton said. “We need the space to run our academic programs: to have the faculty that teach in these programs, to have the students who attend these programs, to create not only carriers of knowledge but ambassadors of New York for the future.” The university’s effort to enlist local support for the plan, to be formally introduced at a series of events in April, has yet to win over some key critics, who worry that N.Y.U.’s expansion will overwhelm its historic area. In its Washington Square neighborhood, the university will be creating the equivalent in square footage of a little more than the total floor area of the Empire State Building. “We’re deeply concerned,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “N.Y.U. seems to have worked on their P.R. machine quite a bit, but the reality of what they’re doing — which is taking over more and more of the neighborhood — doesn’t seem like it’s changed very much. They’ve given everybody the opportunity to say what they think and then they’ve largely ignored that feedback.”
In Brooklyn, N.Y.U. wants to build one million square feet of new space for a new engineering school at the downtown Metrotech complex, site of Polytechnic University. N.Y.U. became affiliated with Polytechnic in 2008 and will merge with the college in the next three to five years to start its own engineering school. On Governors Island, the university envisions an institute that would unite several academic disciplines around a subject like the urban future. “What does it mean in the 21st century to build a great city?” Mr. Sexton said. “Let’s be the lab and thinking space for it, the center in the world for thinking about cities.” N.Y.U.’s nursing school is to move uptown to the university’s “health corridor” along First Avenue in the East 20s and 30s to share a new space with the dental college (they merged about three years ago).
In most cases, N.Y.U.’s plans do not yet include specific information on what will be built where and when. The 2031 plan is a framework for growth over the next 20 years, not a building-by-building blueprint. “It’s different from a master plan that compels you to put certain things in certain places,” said Lynne P. Brown, a senior vice president at the university.
Several city officials said they would wait for more details before deciding whether to support the projects. “It is important for our higher education learning centers — Columbia, Fordham, N.Y.U. — to expand if we’re going to grow the New York economy, but they have got to incorporate community concerns and not be seen as running over these neighborhoods,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. “The rubber now hits the road when this campus plan is announced. The details will matter. It’s showtime now. Give me the whole story.” Mr. Stringer is leading a task force on N.Y.U.’s development that includes Council SpeakerChristine C. Quinn and Representative Jerrold Nadler. In the early stages of the plan’s formation, the university was also guided by four design firms: SMWM, Toshiko Mori, Grimshaw Architects and Olin Partnership. Ms. Mori and Grimshaw have stayed on to advise the university on developing its core neighborhood, N.Y.U. said, and other architects have become involved. Cooper, Robertson & Partners is working on a design for the Brooklyn site and, along with the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, on the Governor’s Island plan. Polshek Partnership Architects is working on the health corridor.
The university has held several “open house” meetings to give the public an opportunity to learn more about the plans and respond. Preservationists like Mr. Berman said they were troubled by N.Y.U.’s handling of the historic Provincetown Playhouse theater on MacDougal Street, which the university is turning into a research center for its law school. While the facade of the Provincetown Playhouse entrance was preserved, the rest of the building’s facade and part of a wall was destroyed; N.Y.U. said it was structurally unsound.
In addition, some are concerned about the university’s plans to build a fourth tower at the Silver Towers complex on Bleecker Street, which was designed by I. M. Pei, opened in 1966 and landmarked in 2008. But N.Y.U. said the plans for that superblock would leave all four corners with open space. “Everything we’re trying to do on the superblock is meant to have it be a more friendly place for the community,” Mr. Sexton said. The university’s plan for Governors Island must compete with other proposals that will be submitted to the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, a city-state partnership.
The 2031 plan also includes creating new theaters, costume shops and rehearsal studios for the Tisch School of the Arts in a building at Lafayette and East Fourth Street. Under the plan, half the new space will be in remote sites and half within walking distance of its Washington Square core. “We need to recognize our limitations on the Greenwich Village campus to meet our major academic plans,” Ms. Brown said. “You can’t look in these hills anymore.”
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