Whatever Happened to the Carlyle Court Renovation?
Freshman year I practically won the housing lottery. By applying to NYU Show, an explorations floor geared to people who like TV, I secured myself a spot in Hayden Hall (people from the class of 2020 on know it as Lipton, but it will forever be Hayden to me). It had just been renovated the year before and no one had ever lived in my room before. My roommate and I also got sorted into a handicapped room that came with the biggest bathroom I’ve ever had. Hayden was across the street from the park and a block from the West Village, with a dining hall right downstairs to boot. Apartments in the building across the street went for $8 million. I was living in luxury.
So when it came time to choose where I wanted to live sophomore year, I was depressed. Hayden had absolutely ruined me and the idea of living anywhere else was making me upset. I did a lot of research on where to live next and finally settled on Carlyle Court. It wasn’t far from Palladium, it was across the street from Union Square and the subway, and from information I had found online (on sites that I have yet to be able to find again), Tower 2 was supposed to be renovated over the summer, so once again I would have a brand new room.
Long story short, that was definitely not how it worked out. It was clear upon setting one foot into my new, incredibly outdated room that Tower 2 had not been renovated that summer after all. I asked the RA at the resource desk about it and she gave an apathetic shrug saying “Yeah, NYU just felt like they didn’t have the extra room to close it down for the summer.”
This made sense to me at the time, but in hindsight might be one of the dumbest reasons I’ve heard. Carlyle is made up of three towers and only one would’ve been closed. Plus, as I got to know the RAs that worked there, I learned secondhand that Carlyle spent its summer primarily hosting state school students who are interning in Manhattan. The dorm allegedly wasn’t even really catering to NYU students anyway.
According to the New York Times, “the $49 million Carlyle Court complex on Union Square…was bought and renovated between 1987 and 1989” and it is incredibly obvious that the dorm hasn’t been updated since the late ’80s. NYU spending $49 million on Carlyle Court is like the financial-bad-decision-making equivalent of Dreamworks giving Michael Bay $150 million dollars each to make all the Transformers movies: an absolute gigantic waste of money that wasn’t truly wanted or needed for anyone.
Around early 2015, NYU finally seemed to realize that housing students in a dorm that hadn’t been updated since Bush was president (and I mean the first Bush) was bad for morale, and made plans to renovate Towers 1 and 2 in 2016, with 3 being renovated later on. By October of that year, those plans were being pushed back again. As of today, they have yet to be completed. In fact, in the past five years (which is as far back as NYU covers), the only repairs ever done to Carlyle were one to the facade and a repair to the roof, which was continuously extended and finished long after the originally proposed deadline.
Shonna Keogan, director of executive communications, told NYU Local that since Carlyle was “earmarked” in 2016, they have completed some changes to the dormitory, including “installing updated P-TAC (heating and cooling units), relocating administrative office space to make more room for students, and replacing cabinets in the dorm rooms.”
As for the rest of the renovations, the university is waiting for a summer to take them on.
“Given the short window of time in which they can take place, summer residence hall renovation projects are queued according to priority, and the installation of dorm room sprinklers at University Hall has taken precedence this summer and next,” Keogan continued. “We plan to resume the renovations of Carlyle Court in summer 2020.”
Will Carlyle ever actually renovate? Or will students be stuck in a dorm that grows more and more outdated with every passing year? At least for the next two years, that seems to be the case.
Additional reporting by Zoë Haylock.
