Up Against The Stonewall

by Tom DeMott

(published in First of the Month)

The Ivy League is all about gate-keeping, but Columbia University's current administration specializes in stonewalling too. Pages of questions about Columbia's proposed expansion plan in West Harlem have been met with silence and subterfuge over the past year. Displacement of the community is at the heart of this heartless scheme and the concerns expressed by local residents and business owners at a day-long on campus camp-out in a tent city called "Bollingerville" (dishonoring the CU president) pushed a reluctant city press corps to consider the plan for what it is, a real estate grab with severe consequences for Harlem. An article in the May 4th Real Estate Weekly states: "While the development plans for Columbia University are more than 10 years away from completion, investors are jumping in now for the expected boom that will come with the influx of students". An E.R. Shipp column in the May 9th Daily News focused on the recent sale of the building where I live, which sits just on the south side of 125th Street (where the expansion bulldozers will start rolling). The seller originally bought this rent-regulated building for less than a million just ten years ago, but managed to get 5.25 million dollars for the property last summer. The building's current tenants will eventually pay for this act of speculation. We're all worried and so, as Shipp noted, are tenants at 3333 Broadway -- a complex of five towers which lies at the northern end of the expansion area precisely opposite our building. Rents were just deregulated there in March when the owner chose to take advantage of the potential new market and opt out of the Mitchell Lama subsidized housing program. Shipp quoted the elected representative of the tenants in 3333 Broadway: "Now it looks like Columbia will surround us and take away our food stores and community spirit and style," Carter says. "There's going to be nothing but a college and its conglomerate around us. That's a frightening, frightening thought."

So fear pervades. More politicians need to speak more directly and with greater specificity to the indispensable New Yorkers whose forced exile from the city they love would be a disaster. Shipp visited tent city and she noted its erection coincided with the release of a letter signed by over 50 faculty members embracing the Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC) campaign to support the bottom-up 197A land use development plan created for Community Board 9. Representatives from Columbia University's administration are making fewer visits to the Community Board this year because trips uptown to that 125th Street office have become losing propositions in terms of public relations credibility. The once regular monthly treks have trickled down to two appearances in the past half-year by the CU's Facilities Manager Warren Whitlock. This strategic retreat has coincided with demands from the CPC for specific responses to basic questions which must be answered if there's to be any hope for a compromise solution to the zoning change that Columbia is lobbying for. Whitlock, the only Afro-American on Columbia's advance staff for the expansion, came gagged to a March CB9 meeting, delivering a feeble letter from administrators which conspicuously avoided providing hard numbers on how much Columbia will benefit from the zoning change. (In order to bargain fairly, both sides need to know what the other is getting in real terms.) Whitlock actually stated he could only physically deliver the letter and that he was not authorized to speak. In April, he showed again, this time with his superior, Joe Ienusco. This time Whitlock was permitted to hold the mike, but his job was to parrot the words of his laryngitis-plagued counterpart who literally whispered the message that Whitlock then warbled word for word. This embarrassing, racially-inflected ventriloquism reflects the university's tin-eared effort to bamboozle a working class community with a large black and Latino population. The magic act was exposed this spring. It turns out that Columbia administrators signed an agreement with the state last summer asking it to condemn properties in the expansion area that it does not own, thereby evicting businesses and tenants who live in the residential buildings there. Columbia had already given $300,000 to the Empire State Development Corp (ESDC) as part of its effort to pursue the implementation of eminent domain. Documents attesting to these facts were uncovered by Columbia Spectator reporters and their reporting on April 15 blew the lid off Columbia's PR machine. The Administration has repeatedly claimed that eminent domain was a matter for the state, which Columbia had no control over, and that it was only a distant, unlikely option in any case. Their modus operandi has been to foster the illusion that Columbia is a kind a passive observer — rather than a powerful institution actively pursuing the eviction of seven buildings with long-time residents and numerous businesses with 40-year histories. The institution pretends to ask for "community input" and all the while engages in a politically connected campaign to level a residential neighborhood near the Hudson River, and expand its campus on the backs of Harlemites. This news of the pay-out to Empire State Development Corporation, combined with another revelation "that Columbia is shelling out millions in a lobbying effort second only to that promoting the Jets stadium" has dramatized the disparities between a moneyed Ivy League institution and an impoverished inner city neighborhood that continues to nourish a rich cultural tradition. Up until recently, local people were chiefly worried about displacement and eminent domain abuse, but the Columbia's plans to pursue biotech in West Harlem has raised a new set of concerns as indicated in the press release issued jointly by the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, the West Harlem Business Group, and the CPC on the day of the tent city protest: The decision by Columbia to place a biotech research center in the midst of a residential neighborhood is a concern that goes beyond the immediate Harlem community. Its proximity to the Hudson River and to an earthquake fault underlying 125th Street, recent biotech accidents, and the likelihood of military-related research in this age of extra vigilance due to bio-terrorist fears, heightens anxiety. To make matters worse, Columbia refuses to give any details beyond saying that laboratories operating at level three, ”the next to highest clearance available," will be installed there.

Columbia has been angling for some time for a share of the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants floating around to build top-security bio-defense laboratories. A 2003 article by Peg Bricken in The Scientist subtitled, "US universities ompeting for plum designations as bioterror research centers," noted:

Winning institutions will also be positioned for plenty of heat. New laboratories to experiment with the vilest organisms on the planet are bound to provoke strong reactions from the community.

Columbia University and the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center are leading a collaboration of 25 schools and research institutions and 10 state and federal agencies in such a regional effort spanning New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The dollars may be fewer on the regional bids, but preparations are fierce.

It was important for the West Harlem community to highlight this issue on the Columbia campus because the biotech center will take up over a third of the proposed expansion area. This high-tech displacement was summed up well by a local resident who took a vacation day and spent it at Bollingerville talking to students. "We don't have the elite connections and Columbia's resources, but we do have real neighborhoods where generations of families have been able to make our own history," said Hamidullah Al-Amin of the Coalition to Preserve Community. Al-Amin added: It's a great working class community. We want to show the students and people who are willing to talk to us, that there is something here worth preserving, that we are not second class citizens who can be tricked out of our homes and businesses.

This is not 1968. This is not about a small land grab (the gym) with big racial implications. It's about a big land grab, 18 acres worth with hectares of class and race consequences. So the community was moved to come to the Campus and Rev. Earl Kooperkamp led a chant of "Hell no, we won't go," though visions of hordes of neighborhood people storming Low Library or "liberating" Hamilton Hall are not in the cards. Still, the CPC and their allies are not playing. They're engaged in a populist uprising of a grander sort. This remarkably diverse group of people is demanding candor from power. The storm clouds are massing as Columbia pretends its expansion plan portends nothing but blue skies. If the West Harlem community keeps saying No in Thunder, Columbia's schemes will not pass.