Manhattanville: Eminent Domain, Columbia University, Tuck-it-Away

Manhattanville

Like much of upper Manhattan, 200 years ago, Manhattanville was a largely unpopulated wooded valley. By the 1920s Manhattanville was the transit hub of Manhattan. New York's first subway line, then known as the IRT, passed through 125th Street and Broadway with the first elevated subway platform in the world.

The Riverside Drive Viaduct, connects Manhattanville by linking Morningside Heights and Hamilton Heights with an elevated overpass, considered revolutionary engineering at the time. The Harlem River Piers were once Manhattan's only major port on the Hudson.

Today the #1 Broadway subway line becomes elevated for about 10 blocks around 125th Street. The 125th Street station is still elevated. As the train makes it''s way above ground around 118th Street, Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus can be seen from the east side of the train.

As the train pulls out of the 125th street station, Columbia's new Manhattanville campus construction site to the north is visable from the west side of the train.

While the area became a central location for shipping and transporting throughout the city, the neighborhood's businesses changed to reflect that particular industry. By the late 1940s many of the large brick and stone buildings in the area became storage facilities for all of the incoming goods. Tuck-It-Away Storage owned five buildings in the neighborhood.

Back in 2008 I started blogging about Columbia University's scheme to use eminent domain to expand its campus from the Morningside Heights neighborhood to nearby Manhattanville in West Harlem. The scheme or expansion plan actually started some 10 years earlier when Columbia started buying every building in the neighborhood not renewing leases and abandoning the buildings. Then commissioned a study to declare the neighborhood "blighted" the first step in the process of eminent domain use abuse by a well endowed prestigious private institution.

In 2009, a New York State appellate court ruled in favor of Nick Sprayregen, President of Tuck-It-Away, over Columbia University in a groundbreaking eminent domain decision. The efforts of the university to force Tuck-It-Away and other property owners out of Manhattanville for the purposes of its own private expansion were determined unconstitutional, setting a significant precedent for future eminent domain cases throughout the United State.

Unfortunately, victory was overturned by New York State's highest court in June 2010. In December 2010 The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal paving the way for Columbia University to expand it's campus into the Manhattanville section of West Harlem.

Although Tuck-it-Away is still there today, still located on the north east periphery of the Columbia site. Still doing business. It is only a matter of time before the buildings will be replaced.

During the next 15 years, a century from Manhattanville's last period of rapid renovation, most of these buildings will have been replaced with Renzo Piano's distinct glass and steel architecture. Phase 1 is expected to be completed by 2015. 

The new campus will utilize and convert some existing manufacturing plants in the Manhattanville industrial section including the old Studebaker plant. Open public roads and spaces through the Manhattanville campus will connect West Harlem to the Hudson river waterfront.

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