The colorful collage of banners and academic building signs around Fifth Avenue and 13th Street owes its multi-hued palette to the highly active leasing and refurbishing activity of the New School, which has been a player there since 2000.
But had it not been for the economic crisis, that streetscape would be getting even spiffier with the addition of a shiny new building.
Although the tumultuous expansion of nearby New York University has been the focus of local attention in recent years, the New School has also emerged as a transformative force in the Greenwich Village skyline. It proposed a gleaming glass-sheathed campus center to replace an outmoded three-story building at 65 Fifth Avenue on the southwest corner of 14th Street, a move greeted with skepticism from local residents.
As first presented at community meetings held between Decemeber 2007 and March 13, figures began circulating among activists that the building would rise 300 feet and be capped with a 50-foot utility tower, though a school spokeswoman claims those dimensions were never stated in any of its presentations, and that the school had presented several options of varying heights. But just after they introduced the initial plans and announced that they would begin the application process last summer, the economic meltdown seems to have shut the project down with no timetable for when it could be revived.
“Everything’s on hold,” said Caroline Oyama, a New School spokeswoman. “With the credit markets the way they are, we’re being very cautious. In this climate, nothing’s on the table, but if things change, we will come back again.
“The roller-coaster economy has put enormous pressure on every nonprofit in our city, including the New School,” she said.
Local politicians and activists had been gearing up for a battle with the New School, vowing a fight over the glossy building’s design.
When the flow of information about the project ceased after the school made several presentations to Community Board 2, according to activists and local politicians, the lack of outreach helped further galvanize opponents over what they considered to be the school’s imperious attitude. Opponents lumped the institution in with New York University and St. Vincent’s Hospital, which have been embroiled in their own development donnybrooks.
Oyama said that the school had been in constant dialogue with interested parties and has been considerate of its neighbors.
“The New School has generally been a low-key, good neighbor for many years, but they’re beginning to create some friction,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “NYU is the 800-pound gorilla down here, but this would be the largest building ever in the Village,” he said, adding that the New School’s design clashed with its surroundings.
For years, the New School expanded within existing buildings, due in part to its limited endowment, but that changed when the need for dormitories became acute.
The school’s aggressive acquisition and leasing program expanded the campus from 725,000 square feet in 1995 to 1.3 million square feet in 2005, according to a master plan presented in 2005. The master plan projected an increase to 1.8 million square feet in 2015 to accommodate a possible rise in enrollment from 6,068 undergraduates and 3,322 graduates to 15,000 students by 2012.
The school annoyed some locals in the 1980s, when it built a dorm at 135 East 12th Street that “a lot of people who live on the block hate,” due to its size and bland design, said Berman. But, “NYU just built a 26-story dorm on the same block, so they are probably focusing their hatred a little more on that these days.”
In 2001, the New School bought 118 West 13th Street for $21.5 million, converting it into a 180-bed dorm, and built another dorm to its specifications at 300 West 20th Street, which the school leased at first, then bought for $25 million in 2007, except for the ground-floor retail units, said Oyama. The school also houses students on four floors at 31 Union Square West at 16th Street, 5 West 8th Street and on 17 floors at 84 William Street in the Financial District.
In 2004, the school crossed the symbolic divide of 14th Street when it leased 194,000 square feet at 79 Fifth Avenue at 16th Street, which is used for classrooms and offices.
In its 2005 master plan, the school also proposed constructing a glass structure that would facilitate linking floor plates with 66-68 Fifth Avenue along with 70 Fifth Avenue and 2 West 13th Street, increasing the structure’s square footage from 60,000 to 166,000, but that has since been scrapped, said Oyama. The school renovated the existing buildings, creating a large open space on the ground floor, and also refurbished 72 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street.
The plan for 65 Fifth, unveiled earlier this year before Community Board 2, would require a zoning variance to evenly distribute air rights transferred from a neighboring property across two lots that lie in different zones, which would place the project before a public review. Under current zoning, the school could build a 31-story building on the eastern lot but would be limited to 16 stories on the west, said Brad Hoylman, board chair.
The initial presentation to Community Board 2 consisted of massings, or rough renderings of the project. The only stats provided were 300 feet with the 50-foot extension, and did not even include the number of stories, said Hoylman, who acknowledged the preliminary nature of the plans, but added that “putting something on 14th Street that looks like a transplant from a suburban office park is inappropriate.”
The school sent a letter to the board on October 1 signed by its president, Bob Kerrey, explaining that “building in this city at this time is costly and difficult” and that the New School is no exception to the vagaries of an uncertain future.
But before he knew about the letter, Hoylman said that there had “been radio silence from them since early summer. The community appreciated the early outreach, and there were high expectations that the public input process would be serious, but there has been a fair amount of frustration.”
Other Downtown schools expanded their real estate holdings and built new projects without causing much of a stir, mainly by building as-of-right. The School of Visual Arts expanded its presence in Chelsea, for example, and Baruch College built a heralded student center in the vein of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design for 65 Fifth Avenue, which is centered on quads, or gathering places, in the sky for space-strapped schools.
A goal of the New School’s building plan is to consolidate its programs that are scattered around Manhattan, including Parsons the New School for Design at 560-566 Seventh Avenue and Mannes College the New School for Music at 150 West 85th Street. The school floated the idea of selling the buildings, but these buildings are not on the market, said Oyama. The school doesn’t own the New School for Drama building at 151 Bank Street and has no plans to move the program.
“The reason that we’ve grown is because we’ve been fiscally prudent and there’s no sense taking on any undue risk now,” said Oyama.
Despite its efforts, growth at the New School will undoubtedly attract public scrutiny and ill will in a neighborhood famous for fighting development projects.
“They’re taking the whole place over,” said Paul Graziano, planning consultant to several City Council members, regarding the New School’s bailiwick. “They’re a different animal than NYU, but they still need to be taken down.”