Supreme Court Clears The Way For NYU 2031 Expansion Plan
By Helen Holmes
Yesterday, the Appellate Division of New York’s Supreme Court gave NYU the all-clear to proceed with its divisive expansion plan, the costs of which having been estimated at up to $6 billion. In doing so, the judges reversed a ruling on a community lawsuit filed in 2012, which seeks to halt the university’s 1.91 million square foot Greenwich Village construction project altogether.
In the now-overturned January ruling (which New York City and NYU were able to reverse on Tuesday, less than a month after filing a joint appeal in September), Supreme Court Justice Donna Mills argued that three strips of Department of Transportation-owned land within NYU’s superblocks were “implied parkland,” given their decades-long use as such by the community.
The superblocks fall just shy of Washington Square Park, and comprise an area ringed by West 3rd Street, LaGuardia Place, Houston Street, and Mercer Street. Without approval from the state legislature, Mills ruled, the university’s use of the implied parkland in its expansion plan would be an illegal move in violation of the Public Trust Doctrine. Mills’s ruling froze expansion plans for months, up until yesterday.
Despite the fact that the disputed spaces currently function and have functioned in the Greenwich Village community as de facto parks, the Appellate Division judges found Mills’s ruling inadequate in deeming the land in question “formal” parkland. As a result, they determined that NYU is justified in using the spaces as construction staging sites, leaving the path to mobilizing the 2031 plan unblocked.
Explaining yesterday’s decision, the judges wrote, in part: “Petitioners have failed to meet their burden of showing that the City’s acts and declarations manifested a present, fixed, and unequivocal intent to dedicate any of the parcels at issue as public parkland. While the City has allowed for the long-term continuous use of parts of the parcels for park-like purposes, such use was not exclusive, as some of the parcels (like LaGuardia Park) have also been used as pedestrian thoroughfares. Further, any management of the parcels by the Department of Parks and Recreation was understood to be temporary and provisional, pursuant to revocable permits or licenses. Moreover, the parcels have been mapped as streets since they were acquired by the City, and the City has refused various requests to have the streets de-mapped and re-dedicated as parkland.”
“We are disappointed that the Appellate Division overturned the decision that would keep our precious Village parks — Mercer Playground, LaGuardia Park and LaGuardia Corner Gardens — protected from N.Y.U.’s unnecessary and ruinous expansion plan,” the group NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan said in a statement. “However, we will continue to seek justice in this matter and move on to New York State Court of Appeals.” Attorney Randy Mastro is representing the petitioners, who are comprised of many different activist groups within the Village community, on a pro-bono basis. In a statement of his own, he reiterated that the community plaintiffs would appeal. This case is definitely not over yet.
University representative John Beckman said that “the need for additional academic space is clear and has been reaffirmed by a faculty-led committee,” which divulged in March that in the past 10 years, NYU’s undergraduate population has swelled from 15,000 to 22,000 students. Nonetheless, opponents of NYU 2031 say that the plan’s inevitable erosion of a historic neighborhood, its astronomical price tag, and two decades of environmental disruption from a live construction site make it impossible to take lying down.
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