Stop Columbia - a website of the Coalition to Preserve Community - fighting Columbia University's planned expansion into Manhattanville West Harlem - Columbia's History of Displacing Communities

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A brief timeline of Columbia's assault on its neighbors

1947 — Morningside Heights Inc. begins neighborhood removal

Columbia University joined with other neighborhood institutions to form Morningside Heights Inc (MHI) in 1947, a group initially led and funded in part by David Rockefeller, with the goal of removing what they called "undesirables" from the neighborhood. These "undesirables" were the low-income community residents living in apartment buildings and single-room-occupancy hotels in the neighborhood. Morningside Heights had long been home to a large working-class population—and students were among the beneficiaries of the affordable rents in the area. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, however, the low-income populations seeking housing in the area were increasingly black and Puerto Rican families, as was the case throughout New York City, as those populations grew. MHA was formed to reverse these trends and ensure that low-income minority populations stayed away from the area between 110th and 120th streets west of Morningside Park. With Columbia University leading the way, MHA purchased and emptied private housing stock, and pressured city agencies to do "slum-clearance" projects in the area. In many respects, these efforts at demographic change that began in the 1950s have continued in various forms ever since.

1949-1957: Making way for Morningside Gardens & Grant Houses

As a result of lobbying efforts of the Morningside Heights Inc, everything on the blocks bound by West 123rd Street, LaSalle Street, Tiemann Place, and West 125th street, spanning Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, and from Amsterdam Avenue to Morningside Avenue, was demolished using eminent domain laws and federal Title 1 Slum Clearance funds. On the 10 acres of the site closest to Columbia University, Morningside Gardens was constructed—a subsidized middle-income co-operative housing development, and on the rest of the site Grant Houses rose—a public housing development of the New York City Housing Authority. Demolition of the Morningside Gardens site began in 1954, and by 1957, both Morningside Gardens and General Grant Houses were ready for occupancy. The residents of the properties that were destroyed were almost all low-income families, and the goal was for the new developments to serve as a buffer between Columbia and the rest of Morningside Heights from the poorer neighborhoods above 125th street. The construction of Morningside Gardens in particular shifted a large tract of land just north of Columbia's campus from a low-income to a middle-income constituency. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the rest of Morningside Heights further gentrified and became a mostly wealthy neighborhood, Morningside Gardens ironically became some of the last housing in the neighborhood affordable even to the middle-class—until 2006, when this too ended. After decades of operating with a low-income mandate, the board of Morningside Gardens opted to abandon its rules keeping down the price of apartments. Now selling for market rate-prices, two bedroom apartments at Morningside Gardens sell for five-hundred-thousand dollars.

1960-1968: Columbia acquires over 100 Morningside Heights buildings, evicts thousands

In this time period, Columbia University shifted away from advocating for large government urban-renewal programs, and embarked on its first major attempt to privatize the neighborhood surrounding its campus as a way of displacing low-income and minority residents from the area. The University pressured the city to remove single-room-occupancy hotels and other low-income housing in the Morningside Heights area, preserve only middle and upper-income housing, and prevent the construction of any public housing above 110th street and west of Morningside Park. Columbia University began purchasing buildings in the area between 110th street and the northern edge of its campus with the primary goal of changing neighborhood demographics and removing low-income tenants. In eight years of building demolitions, evictions, and conversions, Morningside Heights institutions directly displaced 9500 people from the neighborhood—more than one-fourth of the non-institutionally housed residents of the area. Columbia University was responsible for 80% of the displacement. (see: pgs 28-35, Columbia and the Community: Past Policy and New Directions. By Marc Rauch, Bob Feldman, and Art Leaderman. A Report of the Columbia College Citizenship Council Committee for Research, 1968.)

1968: Columbia attempts to take part of Morningside Park

Columbia began construction of a private gymnasium for its students and faculty on a part of Morningside Park in 1968. The construction followed years of vocal opposition to the project, not only on the grounds that it privatized parkland that was once open to the public, but because the project had overty racist overtones. As a mostly white institution, Columbia was seen as robbing the mostly African-American community of Harlem of rare and valuable parkland, and Harlem residents worried that the gym would be the first of many attempts by the University to seize Harlem land for their purposes. In one of the most pivotal and effective uprisings ever on a U.S. campus, Harlem residents, joined by Columbia students, seized control over campus buidings and caused a shut-down of the university for the rest of the term. In response to the takeover, Columbia withdrew its plans to build any facilities in Morningside Park.

1980: Columbia begins removal of residents in 10 buildings between 121st & 122nd streets

In 1980, Columbia University acquired 501, 519, 527 West 121st Street, and 502, 506, 520, 524, 526, 530, and 540 West 122nd Street---apartment buildings housing a diverse mix of long time community residents. In 1967, while under the ownership of Teachers College (TC), the tenants of these buildings had received notices to vacate their homes within six months, as their buildings were slated for demolition. As apartments were emptied, remaining tenants successfully organized to resist evictions. TC abandoned its plans and began to negotiate with the Block Association which proposed to own and run the buildings as not for profit, low income co-ops, while in the interim, Block Association members would manage and run the buildings. Without warning, the 10 buildings were sold to Columbia in the early part of 1980. Over the next two decades, Columbia pursued a policy of removing all vacated units from rent-regulation, and converting them to housing exclusively for Columbia students. Within two decades, 60 percent of the apartments in the ten buildings had been converted to dormitory units.

1983 – Columbia uses a fire as means to evict tenants in a Riverside Drive building

A fire in 1983 caused extensive damage to 547 Riverside Drive, a 21 unit apartment building that Columbia University had purchased 16 years earlier. As was the case for most of Columbia's acquisitions, 547 Riverside Drive contained community residents who had lived in the building for many years before Columbia purchased the building, and rent laws protected the rights of these residents to remain indefinitely in their homes with modest rent increases. Columbia was able to acquire units for use as dormitories or faculty housing only when existing tenants moved away voluntarily. The fire, however, forced residents to temporarily evacuate the property for safety reasons, and Columbia tried to exploit the situation and use it as a means of permanently evacuating the building of its long-term tenants, who still occupied 13 of the building's 21 apartments. Only four apartments had been damaged by the fire, and it would have taken little to prepare the building for re-occupation by the rest of the tenants, who by law would have been allowed to continue with their previous rent-stabilized leases. Columbia, however, claimed that it was not obligated to make repairs to the building---not even what was minimally required to allow the majority of the units, which had suffered no fire-damage, to be re-occupied. Columbia allowed the fire department's temporary order preventing access to the property to stay in effect long after the property could have been fixed. Displaced tenants were placed in temporary housing situations for years as the building where their homes were received no repairs at all. Keeping tenants in short-term housing situations at scattered locations throughout Manhattan was one way that Columbia tried to harass tenants into signing away their rights to return to their homes. Though the building had been built to high standards and remained structurally sound after the four-apartment fire, Columbia even proposed demolition of the property at one point. Only through demolishing the building would Columbia free itself entirely from its obligations to the long-term tenants, and the university was willing to level 547 Riverside Drive and rebuild a structure of identical scale simply to keep these residents from being able to retain their right to their homes. As Morningside Heights had been dramatically upscaled in the years since the building's tenants moved in, for most residents, losing their rent-stabilized apartment at 547 Riverside Drive would assure that they would be unable to afford to remain in their community at all. (The saga of these tenants is the subject of the book: We Are Talking About Homes: A Great University Against Its Neighbors. By Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.)

1994 - Columbia demolishes the Audubon Ballroom, site of Malcolm X's assassination

Columbia began demolition of the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway between 165th and 166th streets in 1994, which the university had purchased in 1983. The Audubon Ballroom was considered by many to be vital historic landmark for many reasons, but most notably because it was the spot where Malcolm X was assassinated. Columbia commenced with its proposal to develop the site for use as medical school laboratories, and only agreed to retain a portion of the façade (while constructing a high-rise inside the footprint) and to install a small memorial to Malcolm X in the building. Columbia's unwillingness to consider repeated calls for the site to be preserved further substantiated arguments that Columbia has shown little regard for its neighboring communities of Harlem and Washington Heights, and even less for the importance of the area's resources and cultural sites to the African-American community. In 1992, students blockaded Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia to protest plans for the destruction of Audubon Hall; three students were suspended and 45 others were disciplined for their participation in the protest.

2001

Columbia University began construction of a School of Social Work and a Law School Dormitory in 2002 at Amsterdam Avenue between 121st and 122nd Streets---a site where Columbia had demolished six buildings in the 1960s and forcibly removed over 200 families.