The Lawsuit Over Columbia University’s 116th Street Closure

Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images

It’s an icy Thursday in February, the kind of day that feel As if it were in the figures, and Tina Ruyter just wants to go to the producers’ market. I meet the 67 -year -old man in his apartment on Morningsoide Drive and 116th, and we start to walk his usual route: West on the 116th Street until we reached the doors of Columbia University, how much we Let’s walk to the south on Amsterdam until 114th, then go back to Broadway until 116th. It has been almost a year since Columbia closed the part of 116 which crosses its campus, forcing everyone without a school identity document to do this kind of replay in a circuit. “I’m lucky because I’m in good health, but it’s a huge drawback,” said Ruyter, who has undergone hip surgery in January and is currently walking with a rod. “More important is the principle of the thing.”

The principle of the thing, as Ruyter sees, is based on the fact that the bridge has been open to pedestrians for as long as the street grid of Manhattan exists. This is also why she continued, joining a collective appeal Directed by Toby Golick, lawyer and friend who lives in her building. The case is based on an agreement that Columbia concluded in 1953, when the city closed the 116th section between Broadway and Amsterdam for cars and yield He at Columbia University for “$ 1,000 token payment”. In exchange, the university has agreed to grant access to the city and a “servitude on the proposed pedestrian walk” which would be built by the school. During the next 70 years, the walk in the campus was a particularly pleasant way to go to the grocery store 1 or to go shopping. Ruyter has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years and has used it regularly. Everyone did it.

Then Columbia began to close the gateway by intermittentness in response to Students Protestant against the war in Gaza and school investments in Israel. In April at university tackled The closures in an email to the student body, calling them a “warning stage”. The time spent and the doors have remained closed, and the security checks for students entering campus remained in place long after university called in nypd To stop the students and erase the camps. In what has been almost a year since, the inhabitants complain about being cut off in their own neighborhood while students complain about long lines to go to class. (A graduate student told me that she had stopped going to the campus because of the worries.) There was little explanation why the closures remain necessary. In a January update, the school wrote That the bridge would remain closed, because “our community continues to deal with a significant risk of disruption on the Morningsoid campus, including external demonstrators, threatening the feeling of security of the members of our community and creating the potential need to bring NYPD on campus. “”

“I am really very passionate about that, and I know it’s a bit crazy,” said Ruyter, a left -hander leaving only a few feet of space for strollers and wheelchairs. She used to cross the campus despite the objections of school security officers, but she felt bad about it because they were not those who did not do the rule. (“These poor guards. What do they do with an eccentric old lady like me?”, She says.)

The pursuit was then felt as a more direct way to record its disagreement. Ruyter is one of the four complainants of the collective appeal, which was filed on January 15. She is joined by Barbara Griffiths, 92 years old; Mary Allen, who is 86 years old; And Philippe Auffray, an elderly person taking care of his 97 -year -old mother. Everyone has the same complaint: the closure of the footbridge of the University of Columbia, beyond being a wild drawback, violates the agreement he concluded with the city in 1953 to keep it open. The closure had an impact on the elderly and disabled, according to the pursuit, “insofar as they had to limit or completely stop their activities in the neighborhood.” He continues to claim that the detour adds at least 15 minutes of additional walking, which, from my morning with Ruyter, sounds well.

Tina Ruyter standing outside the street, she could cross freely.
Photo: Clio Chang

Before the costume, Columbia agreed to give QR codes to the residents of two buildings on Morningsoide Drive – that Ruyter’s apartment included Ruyter’s apartment, but she saw him as half a measure that left aside the rest of the neighborhood. “They seem to think that it is a good thing for them to privatize and close the campus,” explains Ruyter. “I do not plan that they will open it unless they are forced to do so.” In a statement, a spokesperson for Columbia wrote that the university evaluated access to the campus “on a continuous basis” and that “the daily experiences of our neighbors weigh heavily on our decision-making”.

Setha Low, anthropologist at Cuny Graduate Center who studies public space, says that this type of closures – justified by amorphous claims on security – have become more common since the 1980s. “There has been a slow progression and the Universities have always been part of it, ”explains Low. And there is a lot of space to negotiate: Columbia is the city The largest private landownerActing both as an educational institution and a de facto real estate company (which also receives $ 182 million per year in tax of the city).

In some respects, Columbia’s refusal to unlock the mirrors of the gateway to broader trends across the city: the benches are removed; The doors are closed around what is supposed to be public places; The barriers are erect around public buildings. In New York Times investigation Public private spaces – lobbies, squares and parks which are supposed to be open to the public in exchange for the granting of developers more space – found that many developers were quietly reneeing at their end of the agreement. While the skyscrapers have developed, New Yorkers watched their public spaces continue to shrink. Why was school not going?

And Columbia is not the only one to move to close formerly public spaces in the rest of the city. Last year, NYU limited access to open areas previously on campus before the planned demonstrations. The school also fell an agreement which he had concluded in 2012 to keep the atrium of his center of Paulson opened to the public, citing a clause which stipulates that it can close the hall on a “temporary base” for ” security reasons ”. (Students and land use experts have questioning the legality of this interpretation.)

For her part, Ruyter says that she is sympathetic to the school’s desire to protect students, but where do you trace the line? The apparently permanent closure of a large street feels “completely disproportionate”, she says. “I think it’s a New York struggle to maintain our public space and our bridges,” said Low, referring to Columbia. “The city must fight it.” (Local politicians wrote a open letter In Columbia, last month, denouncing the closure: “It seems that Columbia tries to make its way in a new standard – that in which the public is definitively excluded from a space to which they are entitled to access.”)

Once we arrive at the producers’ market, Ruyter takes a miche of bread and prepares for a long time at home. As we separate, I look at that she returns to 114th Street. Ruyter refuses to use the QR code that Columbia gave the residents of his building. Again, this is the principle of the thing. “I do not want to give authority to people who have no legitimate authority to verify my comings and goings,” explains Ruyter.