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.”