It used to be that the only reason to trek out to the area bounded by 125th and 133rd Streets between Broadway and the Hudson River was to get a car fixed or to pick up groceries at the Fairway supermarket.
Manhattanville, the historic name for the neighborhood known to others as West Harlem, is a semi-industrialized no-man’s-land of garages, auto mechanic shops and storage spaces lying in the shadows of the elevated portion of the West Side Highway. The neighborhood is soon to change.
Columbia University plans to build a 17-acre tree-lined campus, with classrooms, performance halls, laboratories and dormitory housing in the valley between Morningside Heights and West Harlem, bordered by the 12th Ave. highway viaduct and the elevated subway line running along Broadway.
This project is Columbia’s first major building campaign in 15 years. The project may also bring in a new era of residential and commercial development in Manhattanville, West Harlem to the north, and, to a lesser extent, Morningside Heights to the south, where Columbia is the major landowner and there are few properties available to the public.
Klara Madlin, owner of Klara Madlin Real Estate, said the Morningside Heights neighborhood “used to be like an undiscovered little gem that nobody knew about.”
One-bedroom apartments in the neighborhood that sold for $100,000 to $250,000 in 1998 are now listed from $400,000 to $500,000.
A mix of professionals, artists, educators and students, the area has been sought out by residents who have been priced out of downtown and are looking for more affordable environs. But there are few apartments to choose from and prices are continuing to rise, Madlin said.
Columbia University now owns approximately 6,000 apartments in the area. About 90 percent of those are occupied by people affiliated with the university. Columbia largely sat out the building market in 1980s, but in the last decade has begun constructing anew. From Lentfast Hall, a new 16-story residence for law students at 121st Street and Amsterdam Avenue to a 12-story building with faculty apartments and an elementary school on 110th Street and Broadway, Columbia is now more aggressively pushing its real estate boundaries, even venturing as far south as 103rd Street and Broadway where construction on a 13-story dormitory recently broke ground.
With space at a premium, private condo projects are selling out quickly, though development opportunities are hard to come by, said Veronica W. Hackett, co-founder of the Clarret Group. Clarret is jointly developing the $56 million Opus condominium at Broadway and 107th Street with Prudential Real Estate Investors. “There’s just a limited amount of development opportunities,” Hackett said.
Because there is limited stock being developed, buyers and renters are heading further and further north to Harlem, where Madlin said she’s seeing non-doorman, two bedroom co-ops on Riverside Drive in the 130s going for $350,000.
Columbia’s northward expansion will continue pushing prices in Manhattanville and West Harlem. “Wherever there’s a college you’re going to have bars and restaurants and bookstores,” said Madlin. “It will increase the market rates. It’s inevitable.”
Presently, a considerable portion of the housing stock in West Harlem is subsidized, and yet many of the leases entered into with the city are soon to expire and a good number of these properties may flip onto the market just as they did 20 years earlier on the Upper West Side, Madlin predicted.
Marvin Johnson, of Benjamin James Realty, said bargains abound in Harlem, but he sees another two-year period before prices rise to a level comparable with the area to the south.
“When I started doing this, buyers said ‘I don’t want to go north of 96th, and now they’re saying ‘I don’t want to go north of 125th.’ But they’re probably missing out because some of the nicer properties are in Hamilton Heights along Hamilton Terrace and Convent Avenue, Strivers Row and Sugar Hill.”
In the past year in Harlem, there’s been a bevy of condo activity, with properties going up at 135th and Broadway, 120th and Eighth Ave. (the Harriet Tubman), 118th and St. Nicholas Ave. (the Rosa Parks), and 146th St. and Convent Avenue.
Yet the area west of St. Nicholas Avenue, along Amsterdam and Broadway in the 140s and 150s is still marginal because of a persistent drug market, Johnson said.
Community residents are generally welcoming the new development and are also insisting that Columbia take their input into consideration.
“We would like to see a number of the jobs created from this project go to people within the community,” said Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chairman of Community Board 9, which represents residents in the immediate vicinity of the proposed project. Many are non-English speaking immigrants. Montblanc wants Columbia to guarantee them language training and to make accommodations to local businesses.
Next spring, the city and the state expect to begin a $12 million plan to rebuild the Harlem piers on the waterfront running alongside the site of Columbia’s proposed satellite campus. Residents need to have free access to the new park, insisted Montblanc.
“It’s not going to be a gated community. They’re not going to create a bunker in the middle of Manhattanville,” he said. “If we’re not able to work with Columbia then they’ll remember 1968 like it was the good old days.”
Relations with the surrounding community have been peaceful since 1968, when, under considerable pressure from residents and students, Columbia abandoned plans to build a gym in Morningside Park with separate entrances for the mostly white students of Columbia and the mostly black residents below.
Having learned from its mistakes, in the late 1980s Columbia worked closely with the community in its next large development project, the construction of a four-building hospital complex on 168th Street that succeeded on the premise of job creation and neighborhood uplift.
The Manhattanville project will be a similar boon to the neighborhood economy, bringing in $1 billion annually and creating 9,000 permanent new jobs, according to a university study.
“They’re selling it as something economically good for the city and the neighborhood,” said Robert McCaughey, chairman of the Barnard College history department and author of Stand, Columbia (Columbia University Press). “The key difference [from 1968] is this would be research facilities and that would mean jobs.”
With litigation regarding residential displacement a nonissue (since the area is comprised mostly of warehouses and automobile service stations), and the university already owning or controlling more than 40 percent of the 17 acres (and in talks to buy 32 percent more), many say the deal is as good as done.
But community activists still want to make sure the expansion is integrated into the existing community, and not closed off from it. . “Do they want to close certain streets and introduce gates and thus make the ability to penetrate the site more difficult?” asked one activist, who declined to be named. “That’s the critical issue: Is it a mixed-use community that has an institutional presence or does it become literally a satellite campus?”