Plan to convert Social Work building's retail space raises questions

The first floor of the School of Social Work may soon have its first tenants – but they’ll be students, not stores.

Some Morningside Heights representatives are outraged over a new plan to use part of the School of Social Work building for academic, not retail, purposes.

University officials have confirmed that they will give up trying to rent out the ground floor of the building, on Amsterdam Avenue between 121st Street and Morningside Drive, which has been empty since the building opened in 2004.

New York State Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell called the change another example of the University’s broken promises in a letter sent to University President Lee Bollinger on August 17.

“When planning this building, Columbia made a promise to the community that the space on the first floor would be used as a retail location as part of a plan to help revitalize the surrounding area,” O’Donnell wrote in the letter, which was also released to Spectator.

O’Donnell cites reports that the space remains empty because the rents Columbia is asking for are too high for the area.

The issue was first revived by Brad Taylor, chair of the parks committee for Community Board 9, which represents Morningside Heights.

“I called them to my committee meeting in June since the retail space is quite close to Morningside Park and I’ve been eager to see something happen there,” Taylor said. LaVerna Fountain, Columbia’s associate vice president for construction business services and communications, attended the meeting and confirmed the change in plans, citing the economic climate and location problems, according to Taylor.

The current website describing the Social Work building project says nothing about retail space, but outdated links show that the description of the building previously read, “It provides instructional spaces, administrative and faculty research offices as well as a street-level retail space.”

"After attempting to rent the ground floor space for retail purposes at competitive market rents for more than five years, the University has determined to utilize the available space to help meet some of the current academic space needs," spokesperson for Columbia facilities Dan Held said in an emailed statement on Friday.

This strikes neighborhood activists as a betrayal because the addition of retail space was part of a package of recommendations that came from drawn-out negotiations about the site of the new Social Work building in 2000 and 2001.

Originally located in McVickar Hall on 113th Street (now the Alumni Center), the School of Social Work had planned to expand to a vacant lot on the same block. Community opposition to that site grew so intense that elected officials and neighborhood activists formed a task force to discuss the project.

“Columbia decided to build it at 122nd and Amsterdam, and they built it in accordance to the framework that the community ironed out, and made presentations to the community board at that time indicating that this was going to be retail space,” Taylor said.

Assemblymember O’Donnell, who has been a frequent critic of Columbia’s community interaction, was a member of those discussions as a member of CB9.

“The truth is, there was no contract entered into, we don’t tie anyone’s hands to that degree," O'Donnell said in an interview. "This is not Cornell where they can go buy another mountainside. Every little change upsets a variety of different balances whether there’s a legal contract or not."

CB9 member Walter South said that the issue boils down to choosing the feel of the neighborhood.

“Look at the law school, how dead it is under that bridge. We like to have retail space, and practically every time we’ve dealt with Columbia we’ve insisted they have retail space on the ground floor to create some kind of street life,” he said.