Columbia Builds a Company Town:

Morningside Heights' biggest landlord has a history that includes harassment, homelessness, and most recently, evictions.

BY ANNETTE FUENTES

Holed up in a dilapidated apartment at 130 Morningside Drive, the worst thing for five members of the Morningside Tenants Federation was the hot and muggy weather of that August 26 afternoon. They were camped out in apartment 3C where windows were tinned over, huge sections of the plaster walls were stripped naked to the lattice beneath, pipes ripped out and every porcelain fixture smashed beyond recognition. The damage had been done by vandals sent by the landlord, they say. In one room of the spacious and once-elegant apartment inexplicably sat a cobweb covered motorcycle. One of the squatters pointed at it and smiled explaining, "It's a fine old antique. It was a very good make." Just how or why that motorcycle got there is hard to say but then this is Columbia's building and territory and the bizarre, irrational, preposterous and of times indecent have ceased to surprise area residents. "They're not answerable to anyone:' Barbara Buoncristiano asserts from her post next to the venerable two-wheeler. She and four others took a crowbar to pry their way into 3C and stage a "symbolic squat" in the mostly vacant building that has come to symbolize Columbia's arrogant, and frequently destructive real estate practices. They were protesting their landlord's latest policy of evictions. "I came home this summer from visiting my father and found a 72-hour eviction notice on my door:' Buoncristiano states.

A full time doctoral candidate who had previously worked for 17 years as a university administrator, Buoncristiano now finds herself on the brink of being booted out of her home and neighborhood. She and her fellow squatters are some of the 40 tenants of Columbia University buildings that are in Housing Court, many battling to stay in their apartments. Some are employed by the university; others are no longer affiliated either as students or employees. But all object to their landlord's current campaign to clear out tenants who have built homes in Morningside Heights. "The mortal sins were committed in the 60's and 70's:' says Jane Hammond, of the Morningside Tenants Federation. "Now we're trying to prevent the last stab at turning the entire area into a Columbia dormitory:' Things are heating up again on Morningside Heights where Columbia University is the largest landlord, with 40 percent of all rental units. The latest round of legal actions, protests and organizing is focused on the affiliation clause contained in leases signed by Columbia tenants. It has been interpreted by the courts in several significant cases to grant Columbia the landlord almost superlegal status in dealing with rent controls. Many feel that as a nonprofit institution that is also powerfully connected, the university has been given carte blanche to conduct tenant relations with virtual impunity.

But for people like Hammond and Buoncristiano, hurling challenges at the ivory tower from the community below is nothing new though the particulars may have changed. They are students of history and know well the 25-year story of Columbia's stormy relationship to the community. The chapter they're presently helping to write is just one of many compiled by SRO dwellers, tenant organizers and lawyers, local politicians and planners who've felt or studied the impact of the institutional giant in their neighborhood. Separate yet enmeshed in the Heights, a nonprofit that claims the right to make a reasonable return on its residential properties, dedicated to education, yet oblivious to the rich opportunities right under its nose—Columbia is riddled with contradictions.

The university and its administrators have acted in ways that reflect indifference to public opinion. They account to no one for their policies. In the three months this article was researched, 13 requests for interviews with William Scott, head of Real Property Management and President Michael Sovern were rebuffed. Even when City Limits' concern for a balanced story was stressed, no response was provided, except some p.r. material. Above the law, above reproach, above the city. It seems that Columbia University would be king of Morningside Heights.

In the City of New York

Founded in 1754, Columbia University in the City of New York (the full legal name) was situated on what is now Rockefeller Center. In 1897, the university moved north to the highest point in the city, Morningside Heights, which covers 110th to 125th Streets, from Riverside to Morningside Drives. The area was fairly undeveloped, even countrified and ripe for receiving Columbia's imprint. At the turn of the century, the Broadway subway line was constructed with a stop at 116th St. expressly for the university.

Other institutions followed suit. Barnard College, Union Theological Seminary, Teachers College, Riverside Church and others settled in the area. Residential housing tended towards the spacious, elegant variety for middle and upper middle class people, according to a study by Professor Peter Marcuse of Columbia's Division of Urban Planning. Development was steady and prolific through the 1920's.

The first cracks in the facade appeared during the Depression, when families doubled up to save money and the sprawling six-and eight-room apartments were chopped up for single rental units. Thus was born the single-room-occupancy hotel (SRO). The housing shortage after WWII and the influx of large numbers of people, among them Puerto Ricans and blacks, changed the complexion of the Heights. As Marcuse notes, "By 1960, Morningside Heights looked very different from 1920."

Peering out from their iron-gated enclave, Columbia officials watched with more displeasure than academic interest in the social transformation unfolding before them. In 1947, Columbia and other institutions in the area formed Morningside Heights Inc. (MHI) led by David. Rockefeller. The organization's goal was "the task of improving the Morningside Heights community as an attractive residential, cultural and education area." Whether that purpose was accomplished appears open to interpretation. Marie Runyon, a Heights resident since the early 50's (see Runyon profile, p. 22) recalls with rancor the activities of MHI: "They were responsible for the demolition of all these blocks, from 125th to 123rd St; from Morningside Avenue through Broadway in the 50's. There were some slums, but much of it was good, solid housing."

People were promised spaces in new public housing projects to be erected on the cleared land, Runyon states. "They were told: 'If you have to move out you'll be able to come back: Nonsense. Flagrant lies. I have yet to find one person who lived here before."

Two new developments did go up in the next decade. General Grant Houses provided 2,000 families with low-rent public housing; Morningside Gardens was a middle income Title I development for 1,000 families. But the MHI had ulterior motives in its urban renewal efforts. "Grant was to be the first line of defense against the hoards of blacks who were going to take over Columbia University, Morningside Heights. They said it in almost those words. The Gardens were to be the second line of defense," Runyon says.

Columbia's tremendous influence in retooling the community was amplified through negotiations with the city for an urban renewal plan. Three main principles were laid out to the city's Housing and Redevelopment Board in a 1963 report from the MHI: no public housing between 110th and 123rd Streets; room must be available for institutional expansion; and no SRO hotels north of 110th St.

With the exception of a handful of SROs still remaining,' Columbia had its way. From 1959 to 1968, the university added 85 buildings to its housing stock; the neighborhood's 34 SRO hotels were whittled down to five by 1980 due to demolitions or conversions to dormitory use by Columbia or Morningside Heights Inc. Over 20 SROs were emptied by "relocation experts" hired by Columbia in the 1970's. Morningside Heights lost roughly 5,000 rental units from 1960-1980 and an estimated 15,000 people were displaced. Most were elderly, poor and minority. According to Marcuse, "At the one end, housing available to the university and its affiliates has sharply increased; more Columbia .people are now housed on Morningside Heights than ever before, and the neighborhood reflects their real or presumed tastes in facilities, stores, restaurants, services, more than at any time since WWII."

Columbia's expansionism met a brick wall in 1968 when plans to build a university gym in the city-owned Morningside Park triggered a wave of community opposition and the infamous student rebellions. For the first time, the university was forced to consider its neighbors and alter its agenda. The architectural firm of LM. Pei was hired to formulate a new plan. Their final report states, "The competition for housing. . . has been the root cause of most of the conflict between the institutions and surrounding community during the past decade." It recommends "a process of rebuilding trust in the community:' building new residential housing on campus and undertaking a joint housing venture with the community. None of those suggestions has yet been realized.

While the shortage of housing for Columbia's faculty, administrators, employees and students is and has been a real concern—the university's spokespeople say it is the only one—other factors weigh heavily in university real estate policy. A 1978 faculty senate report on academic affairs belied the university's other interests in the neighborhood. Called the Marcus report, it states, "outside the campus (it) is not attractive and life on Morningside Heights is not commodious or particularly entertaining. Shopping is terrible, decent restaurants few; astonishingly, there isn't a major bookstore, quality movie house or art gallery in the neighborhood. . . Columbia and its neighboring institutions are in a position to redesign their own neighborhood, for they largely own its property and can, within limits, determine its occupancy and uses." The problem is, the university more than once has lost sight of those limits.

The Wages of Sin

It would take a book to do justice to the saga of the SRO at 600 West 113th Street, says tenant George Ewing. The harassment, threats, fires, intimidation, flooding and resident resilience in the face of it all have made the building a legend on the Heights. Known as The Wages of Sin for a Biblical quotation that remains faintly visible on an exterior wall, the 285-unit building is one of the few SROs to survive conversion or erasure by Columbia.

Survival of the building as a mixed population residence more than six years since the university took title is owed mostly to the grit and steely will of Ewing, a Vietnam war veteran. In fact he makes frequent references to Vietnam when discussing the grisly happenings at the Wages of Sin. For him and 100 tenants, there was no question that they were locked in mortal combat with a powerful enemy. "I wonder what they thought of me?" Ewing ponders, "Some guy who will just stand around with a little rag-tag army of bag women and SRO people, throwing marshmallows at Columbia University. Throw them at their bulldozer and make it back up 400 blocks."

Ewing moved to the city and entered Columbia's School of General Studies in January 1979. "I went to the Housing Office and was told they didn't have any vacant apartments;' he recalls. Driven by necessity, Ewing scouted around the area and found 25 vacancies without trying. "The supers all told me I had to go through the Housing Office." It was the first of many deceptions and half truths Ewing would hear from Columbia officials at every level, from then — President William McGill to Ronald Golden, director of the Housing Division in the 70's.

Ewing got a room at 600 West 113th, an unsavory SRO where garbage was piled up outside first floor windows, because the manager, Harry Kay, "felt sorry for me and probably figured I'd just stay a couple of weeks. I was probably the last one he let in before they started clearing it out."

State Assemblyman Ed Sullivan, whose district includes the Heights, says that "Harry Kay told me that he was clearing out the building because Columbia would buy it when it was emptied to a certain level." He notes that during the winter of 1978-79 harassment and lack of repairs increased, the same time it turned out during which Columbia was negotiating to buy the building.

Tenants led by Ewing got an attorney and a preliminary injunction against the building's owner of record, Jerry Wartski in May 1979. That's when the next Columbia chicanery was revealed: since 1975, the university had been a primary mortgage holder of the Wages of Sin.

Larry Klein's voice still seethes with rage remembering that Columbia "denied any involvement. It was terribly deceptive-and-they persisted with a hands-off posture:' The director of the Mayor's Office on SRO Housing from 1978-80, Klein was an advocate for tenants at 600 W. 113th. "McGill was no better than the worst SRO slumlord. Even after confronted with proof, he took no steps to halt harassment."

McGill announced the university's intention to take control of 600 West 113th by fall of 1979, a plan that was accelerated when Kay attacked one of the tenants with a pipe in June.

Out of the fat and into the fire. Tenants saw conditions go from bad to worse when Columbia took title to their building in July. P & L Management was hired to relocate residents, offering them $200, but the tenants association took a vote and decided to stay.

"I spent lots of time at 600 West 113th St. There were terrible incidents:' recalls Klein. "They put elderly women on the top floor. Then the water tower on the roof broke and flooded their rooms. An elderly man was pushed through a window by the manager. It was violent harassment.

"There was no building maintenance and at times the only water available was streaming down the walls of the 12 floors from the burst water tank. Ceilings caved in and the plaster fell off in giant slabs. Elevator service was cut. Doors were left wide open and strangers roamed the halls. Heat was not turned on until December 1979. In the first year Columbia owned and managed the building, six elderly people died under adverse conditions, Ewing reports. About 14 others were institutionalized. "But that's just time catching up to people. You can't blame Columbia:' says Ewing with mock sincerity. "The only thing you can do is turn people's stomachs by painting the picture of what Columbia did. Why did they force people to live in these conditions when they already had nine toes in the grave?"

Harassment and negligent management succeeded in pushing half the tenants out of 600 West 113th St. by early 1980. Klein met with McGill and Golden and asked them to allow remaining tenants to stay and fill vacancies with students for a mixed population. No deal. In February 1980, the head of the state's Department of Social Services, Barbara Blum, met with McGill and Michael Sovern, nine months before he would be named McGill's successor. Blum went to complain about harassment at 600 W. 113th St. and ended up giving Columbia half a million dollars to fund a program to assist the homeless below 96th St. Ironic, says Klein, since "thousands of tenants were displaced due to (Columbia's) tactics:'

The residents of the Wages of Sin were much diminished in numbers but hardened in their resolve to stick. A mixture of Pakistani, African and American people, they conducted four rent strikes from 1979-1982 and survived an agonizingly slow three years of rehab work. Ewing calls it "death by renovations," during which time the city Buildings Department slapped Columbia with a violation for not having work permits.

But by January 1982, McGill was out and a new administration settled the rent strike of 10 residents who dropped their harassment charges. The campaign to remove SRO residents was finished. Things have been fairly quiet there ever since. Yet the human toll was great. Says Ewing, "There were a lot of casualties in this struggle, on both sides:'

Larry Klein remarks, "I've heard from shelter outreach workers who say they've run into former Columbia SRO tenants who are now homeless:'

Company Town

Which is all to say that the more things change the more they stay the same. Columbia is no longer voraciously acquiring residential properties like in the past. Instead the latest policy is to consolidate control over the apartments and tenants they already have, a move community activists fear will abet the gentrification of Morningside Heights. The tool? An affiliation clause in leases signed by Columbia tenants that requires them to notify the university if full time affiliation ceases and move in 30 days or be subject to eviction.

"It's a legal fiction," says Ken Schaeffer, a lawyer and aide to Assemblyman Sullivan, of the affiliation clause. But the fact is since 1983, Columbia has begun to strictly apply a regulation that they have previously ignored for over a decade. Eviction notices to long term residents who no longer are connected to the university are sending shock waves through the Heights.The affiliation clause was first inserted in leases in 1962, but, "it was loosely applied;' says Schaeffer. "In 1974, the Appellate Court created a false exemption to rent controls in Trustees of Columbia vs. Sperling." That decision has haunted Columbia tenants and others housed by nonprofit institutions ever since. It has also been interpreted wrongly by the lower courts, Schaeffer thinks, to allow Columbia to arbitrarily evict tenants whose affiliation may have lapsed 10 years ago with no action.

"I've got 40 people in housing court who all signed the agreement. Most have exceptions. Three or four are women whose husbands were affiliated but they were divorced 20 years ago and they kept the apartments;' explains Schaeffer.

The summer of 1985 saw a lot of activity from landlord and tenants when Columbia delivered 72-hour eviction notices to two black women, Marie Castro and Abeba Tesfaye, who similarly had lapsed affiliations but long histories as Columbia employees and in the community. Why were they singled out from all other tenants? Is the housing shortage in the Heights that desperate?

"A disproportionate share of those receiving the eviction notices are women and minorities;' says Barbara Buoncristiano. The Morningside Tenants Federation see women excluded in general from upper echelon positions at Columbia that would get priority in housing. Buoncristiano has filed a complaint with the state Division of Human Rights and is in a legal battle to keep her apartment of 18 years.

That leaves the question of Columbia's need for housing for its employees and students. In statements issued by the public information office, the university claims a desperate shortage which justifies their increased vigilance for lapses in affiliation though they cannot state a vacancy rate. "I want to know what kind of corporation it is that doesn't have figures on vacancy," says Jane Hammond skeptically. She and others in the MTF conducted their own survey and found roughly an eight percent availability of units. George Ewing reports at least 27 vacant units in his building each semester and then there's.130 Morningside Drive where 18 apartments have laid fallow for 25 years. And certainly with the university's abundant financial resources the possibility of new construction, as suggested by the LM. Pei report, is within reach.

What it boils down to, according to Sullivan, is a matter of power. "Columbia doesn't like restrictions. They want absolute control over the size of the apartment, the rent, when tenants leave. They're out of step with the community they live in:'

Sullivan sees another more far-reaching threat posed by Columbia's special status as nonprofit landlord: "They're part of the gang that wants to eliminate rent control completely. Columbia even hires the same lobbyist as the Rent Stabilization Association:'

Morningside Tenants Federation members fear that when many of the older residents in rent controlled apartments die, other non-Columbia residents on the Heights will be excluded. The company town syndrome spreads. The focus of their energies and that of Schaeffer and Sullivan will be continued litigation of evictions and state legislation to protect non-affiliates. "If a person has been in the community for at least 10 years their status outweighs Columbia's and they should have lease renewal rights;' says Sullivan. The legislation which he is co-sponsoring also contains a three-year statute of limitations on enforcing the affiliation clause.

"I've said to Columbia University innumerable times: why not join New York City?'" says Sullivan. "Because of their cloister mentality they're shortchanging students. If they would only give up their power play, the community could relate to them. But depriving old ladies of their homes is not the way to do it:'

This article was a supplament to the cover story in City Limits, January 1984 (pages 22-23)

Marie Runyon's History of Perseverance

BY PAT LAMIELL

Strips of gaily flowered oilcloth adorn the front door of Marie Runyon's apartment at 130 Morningside Drive. At eye level is a homey corn cob bouquet concealing a four-inch square sticker. "Boycott British,' says this piece" of agitprop from the Irish Republican Army, whose cause is only one of many that Runyon has supported through the years.

Seventy-year-old Runyon is best known, however, for her work on housing issues in Morningside Heights. She has plied both good manners and a steel will in her 25-year campaign to stop her landlord, Columbia University, from evicting her and tearing down her building. Former Columbia President William J. McGill once said of her, "She's a wonderful woman. I wish she were out of my sight."

McGill has come and gone, but Runyon is very much in residence with her two golden retrievers and collection of protest paraphernalia. Of eight university-owned apartment buildings slated in 1960 for demolition, Runyon's is the only one still standing. "I will live here until I die;' she said in a recent interview, "and I'm sure that's what they're waiting for."

Between telephone calls at the sunny offices of the Harlem Restoration Project, Runyon looked back at her varied careers as psychologist, nurse's aide, printer, door-to-door survey taker, journalist and state assemblywoman from Harlem.

Runyon has plenty to keep her busy as executive director of the Project, a privately-funded, nonprofit organization that helps Harlem families acquire apartments through the city's Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program and renovate them with labor provided by ex-offenders.

But she still makes time for the Morningside Tenants Federation's struggle against Columbia University's campaign to turn Morningside Heights into what she believes would be a ghetto of classrooms and student housing.

Runyon's account of the fight to keep her apartment begins in 1954. AB a 39-year-old divorcee, she moved with her young daughter Louise into a rent-controlled apartment at 130 Morningside Drive. In 1960, the trouble started. An electrical fire' prompted many tenants to leave. Later that year eviction notices were posted in her building and in five others with two buildings added later.

"We just laughed," recalled Runyon. Her smooth skin and white designer jeans belie perhaps two-thirds of her 70 years. "We knew damn well they couldn't evict us."

Angry tenants tore the signs down within an hour, but many residents, especially recent immigrants, moved out in fear. A whole building of Chinese people just disappeared overnight," said Runyon. "Most of the Hispanics moved to the Bronx."

In 1965, the College of Pharmacy sold the building to Columbia University. Runyon and her neighbors, prompted by deteriorating maintenance and worried that their days as Columbia tenants were numbered, organized to save their buildings. They formed the Morningside Six (for the six remaining buildings), which has evolved through the years into the Morningside Tenants Federation.

Runyon recalled that on Ground Hog Day in 1965 they picketed the University in 15 degree weather. In May of that year, they marched to the College of Pharmacy to deliver a document of protest signed in their blood. Borrowing dramatic tactics from antiwar protests of the day, they donned black veils and marched up Amsterdam Avenue to muffled drum beats in a mock funeral procession for Morningside Heights.

In 1975, Runyon and other Morningside tenants blocked traffic on Amsterdam Ave. with a string of rocking chairs. "We defended hearth and home like they did in the old West," said Runyon. "With rocking chairs and guns — minus the guns. We've always been a nonviolent group," she said.

Runyon was born in 1915 to a pharmacist in the mountains of Brevard, N.C. She attended high school and college in Kentucky and pursued graduate studies in psychology in North Carolina, Kentucky and Minnesota.

She became a nurse's aide and then a clinical psychologist in Minnesota and Connecticut. In 1946 she came to New York City, as have 50 many single young women, to seek her fortune. She got a job as a copy reader—the second female reader in the city for the New York Post. "I was a damn good copy reader," she said.

But she fell in love with her boss, Richard Runyon (distant cousin to author Damon Runyon), and after they married, "the copy room was no place for me," she said. She quit her job, gave birth to Louise in 1950, and divorced Runyon in 1953.

After my divorce, life was very grim, indeed:' she recalled. She and Louise moved out of the city for a while, then returned, lighting from place to place around New York. "My daughter once said, 'Mommy, where's my home?' — and that undid me," said Runyon. She took up residence at 130 Morningside, borrowed $1,000 from her sister for furniture so she could rent out some rooms, and determined to stay.

Staying has demanded some unconventional behavior. During one of her many appearances before the housing court to fend off eviction proceedings for nonpayment of rent, Runyon whipped out two pairs of white panties. "I explained to the judge 'that I had bought them both at the same time:' she said, obviously relishing the memory.

"One pair was stained red from washing them in the rusty tap water in my apartment. The other was still white. Nobody knew quite what to do when I flashed those underpants."

According to Runyan, the activism of the antiwar movement slowed the university's eviction campaign. Runyon herself assisted in the 1968 student strike and the occupation of Hamilton Hall and Low Library at Columbia. She was 53 years old that year. "I had a fake I.D. so I could come on and off campus," she confessed with a grin behind her silver wire-rimmed glasses.

Once the student protests dissipated, the university resumed its effort to vacate the remaining buildings. "What we endured was terrible," said Runyon. In 1975, she said, they sent "thugs" in to vandalize the building, breaking up plumbing pipes and knocking holes into walls.

"The university claimed it was vandals," Runyon said. ''Vandals, my clavicle! Nobody could have gone into that building except the tenants and the university. Our building is extremely well policed by the tenants," she said.

One by one, the buildings surrounding 130 Morningside Drive met the wrecking crane. In 1982, said Runyon, the university paved over the place where her neighbors used to live and put down a parking lot "which I can't even use," she smiled ruefully.

Runyon and four other families have held out in their 17-unit apartment building, and they continue to agitate. Last summer, the Morningside Tenants Federation staged a symbolic "squat." For every Columbia tenant evicted or driven out by harassment, they have vowed to reclaim another university-owned apartment.

Meanwhile, Runyon has been busy with other things. In 1974, she was elected State Assemblywoman from the 170th District, which included Harlem, and then lost a bid for reelection in 1976. "After my wounds healed a little bit from my defeat, I said, 'Well hell, what am I going to do now?' I decided to join my main interests—ex-offenders and housing."

Runyon founded the Harlem Restoration Project in 1977, and in 1982, she moved it into an abandoned Tastee Donut bakery at 461 W. 125th St. HRP is co-oping one apartment building of 15 units and is attempting to get two additional buildings, with a combined 42 units, into the Tenant Interim Lease program.

Currently, the organization has a staff of seven. Its annual budget has grown from a slender $15,000 to $200,000, almost all of it donated from private foundations. Runyon believes they must raise far more money if they are to make a dent in the housing needs of Harlem. "I want to raise a million dollars and do what should have been done a long time ago—rebuild Harlem." And if it doesn't happen in her lifetime? "Then I'll come back to haunt them:' she averred.