The first floor of the School of Social Work may soon have its first tenants—but they’ll be students, not stores.
Columbia will give up trying to rent out the ground floor of the building (located on Amsterdam Avenue between 121st Street and Morningside Drive), which has been empty since the building opened in 2004, University officials said. The 7,000 square feet will be converted to academic space.
The issue was first revived by Brad Taylor, chair of the parks committee for Community Board 9, which represents Morningside Heights and West Harlem.
“The retail space is quite close to Morningside Park, and I’ve been eager to see something happen there,” Taylor said.
La-Verna Fountain, Columbia’s associate vice president for construction business services and communications, attended a board meeting in June and confirmed the change in plans, citing the economic climate and problems with the location, Taylor said.
“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.
But that explanation is not enough for some Morningside Heights representatives, who are outraged over the new plan. In a letter sent to University President Lee Bollinger in August, New York State Assembly member Daniel O’Donnell called the switch another example of the University’s broken promises.
“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.
The current website describing the Social Work building project says nothing about retail space, but outdated links show that the description of the building previously read, “It provides instructional spaces, administrative and faculty research offices, as well as a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.”
The process of finding a tenant seems to have been rocky. A March 2006 press release announced that the space had been leased to Tony May, currently the co-owner of Italian restaurant SD26. That deal appears to have fallen through, and May could not be reached for comment.
“I’ve been here five years, and when we moved here, we thought maybe it would turn into a nice grocery store,” said Bill Fallon, who lives one block from the Social Work building on 123rd Street.
The University declined to comment on the asking rent or on whether the academic space would be used by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, which O’Donnell alleged in the letter.
Not all community representatives are complaining.
Savona Bailey-McClain, former chair of CB9’s waterfront and economic development committee, said she understood that the economy isn’t strong, and neither is foot traffic on Amsterdam.
“I run a small arts organization and deal with lots of small businesses in Harlem, and we all talk, and it’s just a bad time,” she said. “People can’t get loans from banks even if you have good credit. So to say there’s no retail there because of Columbia is just wrong.”
CB9 member Walter South said that the issue boils down to shaping the neighborhood feel.
“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.
This debate has a decade-long history. The addition of retail space was one of a package of recommendations that came from drawn-out negotiations about the site of the new Social Work building in 2000 and 2001.
Previously 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 new 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.
Assembly member O’Donnell, who has been a frequent critic of Columbia’s community interaction, was a member of those discussions as a member of CB9. He acknowledged that there was never written confirmation that the space would be retail.
“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, adding, “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.”
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