Live Team Coverage of NYU Move-In Day continues

Traffic is fucked (can I say that on the air?) on Third Avenue, basically. The avenue is ripped off on the south lanes from 13th Street down to 11th Street. Our advice: AVOID THIS AREA AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT.



Otherwise! Orderly enough....



Not a big fan of the Move-In Day catchphrase....



If you follow this, then you may amend it to: Stop. Drop. Go. File Police Report.

And, in case you were thinking of going, for some reason, to BB&B today...



AVOID THIS AREA AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Live team coverage of NYU Move-In Day starts NOW

Live team coverage of NYU Move-in day starts NOW

Here on Third Avenue and NYU earlier today, the Big Move In begins.... relatively calm so far...





...regardless, NYU officials are prepared for the worst .... with an all-terrain golf cart vehicle thing on stand-by.




Adding some stress to the day... workers have a chunk of Third Avenue shut down right in front of several key move-in zones...Great planning!



...and a smash-up at 14th Street and Third Avenue.... clogging up another key corrider....






My advice: Start drinking heavily.

Why Sunday might be a nice day to finally take that trip to, say, anywhere

The NYU residence halls open for move-in tomorrow.

Third Avenue Corridor Rezoning hearing could help bring an end to mega-dorms

From The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation...

Tomorrow, the City Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the proposed rezoning of the 3rd and 4th Avenue corridors, between 13th and 9th Streets. The rezoning proposal comes after years of efforts by GVSHP, neighbors, Community Board 3, and Councilmember Rosie Mendez to change the outdated and inadequate zoning for the area which encourages enormously out-of-scale hotel and dorm development, such as NYU’s 26-story dorm on East 12th Street. After the city refused to include a change in the zoning for these blocks in the 2008 East Village rezoning, late last year they relented and agreed to include this area in a separate zoning action, which will be heard tomorrow.

Though the proposed rezoning does not go as far as GVSHP and neighbors had urged, it is an improvement. While the current zoning has no height limits, the new zoning would impose an absolute height cap of 120 feet (less than half the height of the NYU dorm). The current zoning strongly encourages dorm and hotel development, while the new zoning will encourage residential development. The current zoning encourages tall, setback towers behind dead plazas, while the new zoning will not allow plazas and will instead require new construction to follow neighborhood context and come out to the streetwall. The new zoning also provides incentives for the retention and creation of affordable housing.

If the City Planning Commission approves the rezoning following tomorrow’s hearing, it then goes to the City Council. If approved there, the rezoning takes immediate effect, and more 26-story dorms would never again be allowed as-of-right. Given that the NYU 2031 expansion plan calls for the university to add up to 1.5 million square feet of space OUTSIDE of the Washington Square Park area in the East Village, Village, and Union Square, it is more important than ever that stricter zoning be put in place in areas such as this where we have seen so much overdevelopment by NYU and other universities in recent years.

HOW TO HELP:

• Send a letter to City Planning Chair Amanda Burden RIGHT AWAY urging passage of the proposed rezoning > >
• Testify in favor of the rezoning at tomorrow's hearing — Come to the City Planning Commission at 22 Reade Street (btw. Centre & B'way), Spector Hall (ground floor) at 10:30 am. Bring 12 copies of your testimony (no more than 3 minutes) and photo ID to enter the building. If planning to attend, please respond to this e-mail for additional details.

Noted

From the Post today:

For a group of NYU students this fall, the only room will be at the inn.

About 50 to 60 students returning to the Greenwich Village campus will be forced to check into a Manhattan hotel because the university has run out of dorm space.

But the young scholars can forget about raiding the minibar or dialing up room service. NYU officials say they'll limit the amenities to phone, cable and Internet service -- but, unlike the dorms, their rooms will get twice-a-week housekeeping.

Acronym alert! New community coalition forms in response to NYU expansion plans

Meet CAAN!

Following the suspension of the Community Task Force on NYU Development by Borough President Stringer, a dozen community groups have formed a new coalition to respond to NYU’s 20-year expansion plan, NYU 2031. The Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031 (CAAN) is composed of neighborhood, preservation, parents and building groups which are concerned about the detrimental impact NYU’s massive growth plans would have on our neighborhood.

CAAN is working to ensure that elected officials and the Community Board support the recommendations of the Community Task Force on NYU Development, which met for over four years with NYU. The Community Board and local elected officials have not yet taken a position on the NYU 2031 plan, but will ultimately take the votes which determine whether or not the NYU plan is approved and enacted.

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition

Revisiting Johnny Suede (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Sound Library closes on Orchard (BoweryBoogie)

A cop on stilts dancing to Michael Jackson (Slum Goddess)

Life and Yaffa ads from the 1980s (Ephemeral NY)

Looking at 'Who Killed Nancy' (Stupefaction)

NYC now has even more millionaires (Runnin' Scared)


Longtime East Village resident/activist/educator Rob Hollander offered up some advice to the travelblog GranTourismo. Among his tips:

Most important phrase to learn?
"NYU." N-Y-U – that's New York University, the expanding school that's taking over the neighbourhood. You'll see their purple flag everywhere. Not loved among the residents. Don't smile when you say it.

NYU's future ...rated T for Terrifying

Thanks to EV Grieve reader Lisa for this link from NY1.

See NYU's proposed future here.

(Fixed the links!)

NYU showcases John Penley's photos online

Last year, neighbor activist/photographer John Penley donated his extensive photo collection to the NYU Tamiment Library.... And now, the library has posted an online exhibit of his work from Tamiment's John Penley Photographs Collection ... such as the one above from 1994... a police assault vehicle evicting squatters on East 13th Street....

You can access the whole collection here.

Dumpster of the Day

Third Avenue at NYU. Full of dorm furniture!

NYU's "secondary displacement" effect on the East Village

Patrick Hedlund at DNAinfo also covered Monday night's CB3 Zoning Committee meeting in which NYU present their Invasion Expansion 2031 plan...

These points from the meeting are worth noting from his coverage:

The number of students living in the East Village, whether in NYU dormitories or rental apartments, has proved to be the most contentious aspect of the college's increased presence in the neighborhood.

Furthermore, committee members explained, the waves of upperclassmen that often choose to rent apartments in the East Village lead to the "secondary displacement" of longtime area tenants.

Previously on EV Grieve:
NYU's expansion plan for the East Village

NYU's expansion plan for the East Village

The NYU 2031 Expansion Plan World Tour made a stop last night at CB3's Zoning Committee meeting.

NYU Vice President for Government Relations and Community Engagement Alicia D. Hurley provided a rundown of the school's ambitious plans, which, of course, includes building up their Washington Square Park core area... harvesting Governors Island... and trading the College of Dentistry on First Avenue to New Jersey for two future fifth-round draft choices. (OK, kidding on the last one you know.)

Fine, fine... we've read this before... But what about the East Village?

Before going any further, I actually thought a few protesters might show up... like at NYU's first Open House on April 14. Nope, it was all civil... No pitchforks, no agitated NIMBYs...no one really. GVHSP Executive Director Andrew Berman was there and repeated his concerns about the whole expansion, particularly in the core area.

Hurley gave her presentation, as she has been doing a lot lately around town ... and the Zoning Committee asked a few questions. A few people in the small audience of 30 or so asked some questions. From a Board member: "There's still a blank page when it comes to this part of town."

Earlier, Hurley had said: "A lot of our growth won't be taking place in this area."

And, she admitted, "We understand that we have over saturated that Third Avenue corridor."

As NYU has already stated, the school wants to expand by 6 million square feet... roughly 3 million square feet will be taken up in downtown Brooklyn and Governors Island, as previously reported... and another 1.5 million to 2 million square feet or so will come from their Washington Square Park core area (the so-called superblocks...).

And NYU bought the Forbes Building on Fifth Avenue and 730 Broadway, the former (Nobody Beats) the Wiz store...those spaces provide the school with another 300,000 square feet... so still 700,000-plus square feet to go...somewhere in the larger neighborhood that Hurley showed as being between Canal and 18th Streets to the south and north... and Eighth Avenue and First Avenue to the west and east... As The Villager noted last week, "exactly where these locations would be is currently unknown, and would depend on what real estate becomes available."

With the new expansion plans, a board member asked if they'd be a need for NYU to come east of Third Avenue; another member said east of First Avenue... Hurley responded by shrugging her shoulders. She finally allowed, "We'll always be open to opportunities."

She said this meeting was about hearing from the board. This was all about having an open-minded conversation, that the board just couldn't "say no to NYU." Period. Does that mean no dorms? No administrative offices? What is the EV community willing to allow, if anything? She thought this approach worked better than NYU showing up with, say, four sites already in mind to use for expansion in the East Village.



Hurley also said that the NYU student growth rate was slowing considerably, to about .5 percent a year...which means about 3,000 more NYU students in the next 25 years.

And there were more numbers and what-ifs... She discussed the scale of dorm sites: 300 students were a minimum for a dorm, and that 175,000 square feet was necessary to accommodate that amount (roughly the size of the 12th Street dorm) ... However, a dorm that tall is improbable now courtesy of the East Village/LES rezoning. Board member David McWater figured such a space would require six typical lots put together...

Board member Barden Prisant is the CB3 representative who sits on the city's task force on NYU development that Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer formed to help avoid the neighborhood anger stemming from past growth. He suggested that the board brainstorm some talking points to arm him with for future NYU-related meetings. He suggested showing a unified front on the issue... so it appeared he wasn't merely expressing his opinion, rather that of the entire board.

So far, the East Village has been spared of any public expansion talk. Still, as Save the Lower East Side! noted last month: "Scarier still is their silence on the East Village. Looking at the fantasies-afar, you know it's going to pop up here, but they don't give a clue as to where."

More to come...

[Second photo is from the April 14 Open House via the GVSHP site]

Reminders tonight: Learn how NYU may really take over the East Village in the next 20 years

From the GVSHP website:

On Monday, May 10 there will be a public hearing on NYU’s 2031 Expansion Plan in Community Board 3’s Zoning Committee. As Community Board 3 covers the East Village, the hearing and discussion will focus on how the plan will impact the area east of 4th Avenue. The NYU 2031 expansion plan currently calls for the university to add between 1 and 1.5 million sq. ft. of space in the East Village and other areas near to but just outside of its Washington Square ‘core’ over the next 20 years. NYU’s recently-completed 26 story dorm on East 12th Street — the tallest building in the East Village — is 175,000 sq. ft., thus the proposed 1-1.5 million sq. ft. is the equivalent of roughly six to nine more of these. However, unlike the ‘core’ area where NYU has given a great deal of specifics about what they are proposing to build there, in the East Village and other areas outside of the ‘core’ NYU has not provided any details about how, when, or where this massive amount of space might be distributed over the next 20 years.

It's in the Cooper Union Foundation Building, 7 E. Seventh St., the Peter Cooper suite, 8th floor.

Live Chat Roulette in Tompkins Square Park

Two NYU students are currently in Tompkins Square Park looking for volunteers to play Live Chat Roulette.... It's for a class on human interactions or something, though I wasn't really paying attention when the students were talking to me...




And I hope that everyone who participates keeps it in their pants...unlike what happens on the Web some times (you pervs).

Critics dislike NYU 2031 even more than NYU 2010

As you may have heard, NYU held its first open house last night since formally unveiling its ambitious NYU 2031 invasion expansion plan. Before the event, Andrew Berman from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation spoke out against the plan. We weren't there. But a lot of other people were. So here's a listing of some of the coverage....

The official NYU news release. And here's the plan from NYU.

Protesters dampen 2031 open house (Washington Square News)

Critics Turn Out at Open House on N.Y.U. Expansion (The New York Times)

Anti-Expansion Greenwich Villagers Calmly Storm NYU's Gates (Curbed)

Meanwhile, Alex at Flaming Pablum posted two illustrations of the future campus that a reader found and were since removed, evidently, from NYU's Web site. Here's one of them:



Finally, some words about the NYU event from Save the Lower East Side!:

Scarier still is their silence on the East Village. Looking at the fantasies-afar, you know it's going to pop up here, but they don't give a clue as to where.

The vocal anger of East Villagers prompted the creation of this NYU Expansion Task Force and all these open house presentations. It's good to know that NYU is still so afraid of the East Village that they don't want to tell us where they are looking for East Village real estate.

Here comes NYU's superblocks

Lincoln Anderson has an in-depth piece in this week's issue of The Villager on NYU's expansion plans. To the story we go!:

After New York University’s NYU 2031 expansion plan was recently leaked — by an unknown source — to two local newspapers, one of the newspapers’ articles, and most of the subsequent media reports, focused on the university’s relatively far-off hopes to develop up to 1 million square feet of facilities on Governors Island. The Governors Island angle was admittedly the “sexy” urban planning story.

However, missing in the hyped-up coverage was the fact that N.Y.U. plans to start immediately on its expansion plans for its two South Village superblocks, part of its strategy of adding 1.5 million to 2 million square feet of space in its Washington Square-area campus “core.”

Read the whole article here.

And about that leak!

One thing related to NYU that isn't getting bigger

Anti-NYU letter of the week

From the new issue of The Villager:

Party out of bounds

To The Editor:
And now N.Y.U. states that it plans to expand by 40 percent. Obviously, most of that will have to be in the East Village, since there’s not much space left for their grand ambitions in the Village.

Why does N.Y.U. have to be bigger? What’s the point? So we can choke on their destructiveness to the local population?

God forbid they should get any part of Governors Island; do we have to kick out Bloomberg immediately to make sure that doesn’t happen? The people, the residents that is, need Governors Island for recreation! Those students can go to the Rockies or Europe or wherever they like for their time off.

The view of the Judson Church tower has been ruined by the ugly military-style dorms atop a “law school” for which N.Y.U. tore down the Poe House and allowed Washington Square to be overshadowed. East Village, watch out for buildings around Tompkins Square — soon your sun too will be overshadowed by N.Y.U. high-rises!

It’s a party school and that’s a big part of what residents have against this planned expansion. We in the East Village have seen blood on the sidewalk and students screaming at cops that their fathers are big shots. They’re here to drink themselves numb.
Martin Delarue

Help wanted: Consulting editor for The Local: East Village

As you may recall: NYTimes.com announced today a collaboration with New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to create a new Local community news and information Web site covering the East Village in New York City. The Local East Village site will be developed by N.Y.U.'s journalism faculty and students and is scheduled to launch later this fall.

The Local: East Village (LEV) is looking for a consulting editor to assist in the planning and development phase leading up to the launch of the site in summer 2010, and carrying over to the first few months of operation.

The consulting editor will work directly with the editor of LEV. Responsibilities include:

* planning future coverage of local issues;
* recruiting potential contributors from the East Village community;
* producing high quality journalism from and about the East Village to run on the site in late summer and fall

This is not a full time position but a part-time paid consulting gig that would begin May 1 and end October 31. Requirements for the position and the criteria for evaluating candidates are:

— Journalism background: You have at least three years professional experience as a reporter, news blogger or editor for a news organization or site.

— Local knowledge: You live in the East Village and have lived there for a minimum of three years (East River to Broadway, 14th to Houston Streets.) You know the neighborhood intimately.

— Web literacy: You have a good command of web journalism and are comfortable with its forms and requirements.

— Independence from NYU: You are not an employee of NYU, or in a consulting role for any other division of the University.

If you are interested in the position and would like to know more about the duties, expectations and rate of pay, send a resume and cover letter to Rich Jones, Editor of The Local: East Village via email and cc Jay Rosen.

Said one East Village observer to EV Grieve: "It's like the White Man hiring an Indian guide to take them into the forests."

Previously on EV Grieve:
After helping ruin the East Village, NYU turns its attention to covering it

For further reading:
New blog on block as N.Y.U., Times team to get hyper (The Villager)

Save the date: Learn how NYU will expand by 6 million square feet

Save the Lower East Side! has the date for when NYU will present its
2031 Expansion Plan...April 14. As STLES noted, the NYU campus will expand 6 million gross square feet within the next two decades. Hope you like the color violet. (Curbed has more on NYU's plans here, including the school's desire for taking over Governors Island.)