[Image via NY Post]
"It's the purple octopus that ate Greenwich Village! New York University plans to add 6 million square feet of space by 2031 -- development that may include a 40-story residential tower, the tallest in the Village." (New York Post)
The purple octopus? Hmm. Not bad. How about:
How much if this is financed by debt on the backs of the students?
ReplyDeleteWe will see what happens as the depression deepens.
(It ain't gonna be pretty either way.)
NYU has single-handedly killed this neighborhood -- sucked the life out of its 24-hour-a-day streets and morphed a vibrant area into a roll-the-streets-up-at-the-end-of-class wasteland.
ReplyDeleteSure, NYU's presence has some positives, but it can't turn a once-vibrant neighborhood wholesale into a suburban campus.
Or can it?
Has anyone in the press really taken on this subject of the contemporary university as major real estate wheeler-dealer? It's a horrible trend among certain universities, the University of Pittsburgh has done it, too. What used to be a campus-area neighborhood around Pitt that attracted non-students with amenities like thrift stores, record stores, music dive bars, the movie theater that played Rocky Horror, and other mom and pop shops now mainly has chains like Panera, Chipolte, QDoba, American Apparel. It seems to slide comfortably under the heading of When the Hell Did We Accept the Businessman As a Good Idea Civic Life and Education??? along with Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Bush/Cheney.
ReplyDelete