The Ones Left Behind from The Uptowner on Vimeo.

Last month, Columbia University’s Board of Trustees announced that President Lee C. Bollinger had agreed to continue in his post  for at least five years.

“Looking at where Columbia stands in 2010, it’s clear from many perspectives why the Trustees feel so strongly about the importance of having Lee Bollinger continue as President,” Trustee Chair William V. Campbell announced via email.

For residents and businesses near the future 17-acre Manhattanville Campus, the decision brings a further reminder of the changes soon to come. The main site, north of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus,will stretch from 129th to 133rd Streets between Broadway and Twelfth Avenue. It also includes the north side of 125th Street, plus three properties on the east side of Broadway from 131st to 134th Streets.

“It is scary to think about the changes it’ll bring to the community,” said Xiomara Jimenez, who has lived in the neighborhood her whole life. “Most of us don’t have much to do with Columbia up here.”

Several businesses, including Floridita restaurant and Dinosaur BBQ, have already relocated in advance of Columbia’s arrival.  But as the new campus attracts a different demographic to an already gentrifying New York neighborhood, many business owners worry that their products and services won’t appeal to a new clientele.

Hear the staff and customers of Gloria’s Unisex Salon, on Broadway and 125^th Street, as they contemplate the future.

Floridita restaurant, on Broadway and 125th, has been closed for the last five months.

More than five months ago, Floridita closed its doors for temporary repairs. The Cuban restaurant on 125th Street and Broadway, a neighborhood institution for 34 years, was known for its student-friendly prices and its mouth-watering food.

“It was always busy,” said Elby Reinoso, part owner of the nearby barbershop. “Lots of people would go there to eat.”

Now the red and green building tells a different story. The metal shutters are down on the once-vibrant restaurant.  Noise and dust from construction next door force people to avoid the small block.  A black dusty awning pokes out of the building. The awning’s front, in fading letters, can be read from across the street: “Floridita Tapas.”

“The clientele was a mix of students, professors and locals,” said Benjamin Totushek, a Columbia student and member of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification. “It had a regulars vibe to it.”

Reinoso looked through his shop’s window at the empty restaurant as he finished a customer’s haircut. He said that commuters using the 125^th Street subway station, and neighbors don’t know where the restaurant disappeared to, or if it has a chance of reopening.

“I know he intends to reopen,” he said of the restaurant’s owner, Ramon Diaz. “I heard somewhere that it going to be around 12^th Avenue.”

But he was not sure.

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Two years of sporadic lease negotiations plagued Ramon Diaz’s relationship with Columbia University, which own the building. The location is also part of the contentious Manhattanville campus expansion plan.

Columbia students have been asking where the restaurant has disappeared to, said Totushek.

“Floridita has students’ attention,” he said. “There has been no talk of the expansion recently, except for Floridita.”

Initially, the university had cited temporary closure due to emergency kitchen repairs, according to the Columbia Spectator. The negotiations, by the time April arrived, were focused on the relocation.

“We were discussing my relocation, and how long it would take,” said Diaz, “but we had not agreed on anything at that time.”

After Diaz notified the university of a crack on the tile floor last October, school engineers deemed the building dangerous giving it another six months, Diaz said. His own engineers disagreed giving it longer than six months.

“My engineers agreed that I could withstand another six months in April,” he said. “We had taken action to secure the floor farther at this time.”

These negotiations came to a head on April 27, when university officials entered the restaurant and notified him that they would be closing his kitchen.

“Closing my kitchen is closing my restaurant,” Diaz said, agreeing to close under protest. The school allowed him to keep the kitchen open until 6 p.m. because of the amount of food he had on hand.

Soon after, Diaz was served with a default notice from the school’s attorneys stating that if he did not give them full access in the next 15 days, his lease would become null and void.

“I had never denied them access,” he said.

The restaurant was popular among students and neighbors. (photo by Paula Rogo)

As he dealt with negotiations, Diaz and his employees spent the next two weeks in limbo.

“You have to understand my frame of mind at that time,” Diaz said. “On April 27, they closed my business. It was coming into mid-May and I still have no business with 36 employees.”

On May 10, Columbia and Diaz arrived at an agreement covering the location, the space, and the rental and lease terms. Diaz said a non-disclosure agreement barred him from talking about the details of the lease. The university confirmed that he would be moving to a new location.

“Mr. Diaz has signed a new lease for an attractive relocation space on 125th Street,” Daniel Held, Columbia University Facilities’ director of communication, said via e-mail. Columbia declined to comment further on its lease with Diaz, citing a policy against commenting on its real estate negotiations.

Diaz is convinced that the school never intended to repair the Broadway location for his return.

“They just wanted to put me out of business,” he said. “They had not even ordered the necessary permits to do the work.”

The Columbia Spectator had reported that the two necessary building permits for the repairs were not ready by the time the restaurant was closed. Diaz also pointed out that the school began construction next door soon after his departure.
“They started on the sewer work at least two weeks after I was gone,” he said, alluding to the construction taking place next to the restaurant.

Robb Pair, president of Harlem Lofts Inc., doesn’t believe anything should get in the way of Columbia’s expansion, for the good of higher education.

But Totushek disagreed. “Columbia doesn’t believe in social capital,” he said. “They are destroying lots of social capital and it’s disgusting.”

Pair thinks that Diaz probably got a better deal from the new lease.

“I ate there twice,” he said. “It’s next to a gas station and I didn’t feel as if it was a place I would like to take my family.”

Though a number of locations have been named, the most likely relocation for the restaurant will be at 125^th and 12^th avenue by the Hudson River.

Map of possible Floridita locations (graphic by Paula Rogo)

“This location is much better,” Pair said. “I’d rather have dinner by the river.”

Other reports have cited the intersection of Old Broadway and West 125^th street as a possible location.

“As long as Columbia is respectful with the tenants,” Pair added, “and giving them a better situation than they had, then it is all around positive.”

Although a majority of the customers were neighbors and students, Pair doesn’t think the new location will affect business.

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Diaz says the closing of his restaurant has had consequences.

“In April 2010, I had a running business with 36 full-time employees and I was making a living out of this,” he said. “All of a sudden I see myself six months later, without that business, without those employees, many of whom are still collecting unemployment checks.”

A number of those employees had worked at the restaurant for more than 20 years, people like Connie Villavicencio who’d been there for 27 years.

“These are people in their late 40s and early 50s,” Diaz said. “They had spent their whole lives there.”

Although it has been a difficult period for Diaz, he does not hold a grudge against the school. He agrees that the deal, on paper, is good; his only dispute is that it did not have to be a difficult situation.

“Nobody would be unemployed, we wouldn’t be closed, and we would be given the opportunity to tell our customers that we were moving down the block, does that sound unreasonable?”

Columbia University's proposed expansion into Manhattanville. (Graphic by Lisa Waananen)

By The Uptowner Staff

Note: this story was updated on Dec. 4, 2009.

Harlem was rocked by a state court decision today forbidding Columbia University’s use of eminent domain to obtain land for its planned $6.28 billion campus expansion. The ruling overturned last year’s decision green lighting the property takeover, which would transform 17 acres of warehouses into tree-lined promenades, high-rise dormitories and glass-walled science facilities.

“I personally was surprised because this was depicted as Goliath, being Empire State Development Corporation and Columbia, against David,” said Patricia Jones, chair of Community Board 9. “How often does David win?” Community Board 9 has been vocal in its opposition against Columbia’s expansion plans.

Columbia aimed to extend its campus into a section bordered roughly by Broadway, Riverside Drive, 129th and 133rd Streets, adding up to 6.8 million square feet of new facilities in 16 buildings. It has spent the past several years buying land in Upper Manhattan from dozens of property owners. A few are still holding their ground.

Jose McKinney, 46, lives in a building at 133rd and Broadway. He’s been there since 1999, and said he’s not against the expansion because some landlords can’t pay taxes or take care of their buildings and plan to leave anyway. “If you don’t take care of your neighborhood, someone will come in and take care of it for you,” McKinney said. However, he didn’t like the idea of evicting businesses that don’t want to leave.

Yoisha Salazar, 37, a manager at Floridita, a restaurant at 126th and Broadway in the swath of land Columbia wanted, was relieved by the news. “I’m happy because we’re not going to lose our jobs,” she said.

Ramon Diaz, Floridita’s owner, said, “What I think the Appellate Division did was make themselves look good, throw a bone at the little guy.” Diaz, who has only five years left before he pays off his mortgage, said he thinks a higher Court of Appeals will eventually overturn the decision.

“Columbia is not a party in this litigation and the ESDC has issued a statement of its intent to appeal this matter,” wrote Victoria Benitez, senior public affairs officer at Columbia.

December has been a fateful month for Columbia University in each of the past few years. On Dec. 20, 2007, the New York City Council voted to rezone the planned expansion area from light manufacturing to mixed use, clearing the way for Columbia to proceed with the project. And one week before Christmas last year, the state approved eminent domain. A resounding victory for the university, the declaration was met by instant retaliation from a few Manhattanville property owners’ lawyers.

Nick Sprayregen, who owns several properties in the area, has been battling Columbia’s uptown conquest for years. His business is one of the petitioners in the case against the university, and he has declared the issue a “crusade,” going as far as accusing the university and New York State of collusion. “I feel unbelievable,” Sprayregen told The New York Times today. A call from The Uptowner to Sprayregen was not immediately returned.

According to ESDC, the expansion project is financed entirely by Columbia. It would create 14,000 construction jobs and 6,000 university jobs. The court decision today is not catastrophic to construction plans. The university owns 61 buildings in the zone and can build around the 6 buildings it doesn’t own.

The planned Jerome L. Greene Science Center, for example, is on land Columbia already owns.  “It will continue to move forward,” Benitez said.

Benitez said that site demolition and other pre-construction work has already been initiated. “This new academic building will focus on research that will unlock the mysteries of the human brain and lead to cures for neurodegenerative diseases,” she explained.

An owner of a nearby gas station was “practically in tears” as he rushed over to tell Diaz the news of the decision, Diaz said. “It’s been a very long process,” he said, “and people are tired.” Meetings that used to bring in 150 people now bring 40 or 50 people. More and more people have moved out or been evicted, but Diaz says he still has faith.

Reporting contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz, Cecile Dehesdin, Andrew Keshner, Tim Kiladze, Nate Rawlings, Shane Snow, Joshua Tapper and Lisa Waananen

This paved lot, just north of Inwood Hill Park, will be transformed into a park by Columbia University as part of its plans to build an athletic center. (Photo by Suzanne Weinstock)

Columbia University has proposed replacing a bare strip of Inwood’s shoreline with a waterfront park, complete with marshes and migrating birds. But some neighborhood residents are suspicious.

Columbia unveiled preliminary plans for a park at West 218^th Street at the October meeting of Community Board 12’s parks and recreation committee. The park comes hand in hand with a new athletic center in the school’s 26-acre Baker Athletic Complex.

Dan Held, from the Columbia facilities department, and project manager Ira Pinkus presented what would essentially be a .91-acre extension to Inwood Hill Park giving additional waterfront access. The site, just north of the park’s Indian Road entrance, is empty space bordered by fenced-off shoreline.

Mock-ups depicted a path leading down to a 190-foot, arc-shaped boardwalk wrapping around a freshwater marsh and a salt marsh, one of the last remaining in Manhattan. “The construction of a freshwater marsh in combination with the river’s salt water is an attractive environment for wildlife,” Columbia spokeswoman Victoria Benitez said in an email. Columbia is working to tie the park into local education programs, she added.

Pinkus said he expected the park to open in two years — including approximately six months of construction — although the spring planting of certain marsh plants could throw the timeline off slightly. The plans are too preliminary for even a ballpark budget, he said.

Some land ownership issues must also be resolved before construction can start, though Columbia is pushing for speedy answers, Pinkus said. The city may own a sliver of shoreline property.

Columbia’s presentation attracted a full house, and many residents were angry about more development in their neighborhood, where Columbia already has a number of facilities, including a football stadium.  Several audience members suggested that the university was trying to “buy them off” with a small park then would construct a monstrous building.

Pinkus said he had no knowledge of what building was planned for the site but said regulations required any building larger than 20,000 feet to provide public waterfront access.

The new park will have a view of Henry Hudson Bridge. (photo by Suzanne Weinstock)

“Columbia proposes to build a 47,000 square foot, five-story sports complex,” Martin Collins, community liaison for New York State Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, told The Streets Where We Live, an Inwood-focused blog. Collins said his comments were made as a private citizen and not as a representative for Espaillat; he declined to confirm the details.

“The university is in the very earliest stages of thinking about a new athletic center at the corner of Broadway and 218th Street,” Benitez said. “It is so early that it would be impossible to talk about because there is no other information.” She said that she is not familiar with the figures cited by Collins.

Committee chair Elizabeth Ritter kept the conversation largely confined to the park referring discussion of the building to the land use committee. She also suggested a future joint meeting of the two committees that has since been scheduled for Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. at the community board office.

Columbia is “trying to fulfill their legal obligation in a way that makes sense for them as an institution,” Ritter said after the meeting. “There was a fair amount of anti-university sentiment,” she said but added that overall, “it seemed like pretty good two-way dialogue.” Columbia representatives appeared willing to consider the community’s requests, Ritter said, and she appreciated that they came to the community board early enough in the process to incorporate its feedback.

Among the crowd’s suggestions: boat access and an additional pair of park enforcement patrol officers subsidized by the university. Pinkus and Held agreed to look into these but deemed several others unviable, including an elevated bridge over the marsh and unlimited hours of operations.

A local resident, 52-year-old legal administrator David Plump, said that he tentatively supported the plan but that he took  issue with Columbia’s actions elsewhere in the city,  like its use of eminent domain in Manhattanville. “The park might be a good idea if they could connect it to Inwood Hill Park as long as it’s not negative environmental impact,” Plump said. But he added, “I think we all have to reserve judgment,” because plans for the building on the site are still unknown.

“The community wants to have involvement,” Plump said, because residents do not want Columbia to “bulldoze the community literally and figuratively.”