Oh, who owns New York?
Oh, who owns New York?
Why, we own New York!
Why, we own New York!
Who?
C-O-L-U-M-B-l-A
—Columbia College marching song
Although Columbia does own a good $200 million worth of Manhattan real estate—including the land under Rockefeller Center—the boast is not literally true. But to many of the university's neighbors on Morningside Heights, Columbia is about as popular as a slum landlord. Last week 150 demonstrators, including many sympathetic students, clashed with police while trying to block construction of a new university gymnasium on park land that some residents of nearby Harlem wish to protect. Thirteen protesters were arrested. The confrontation was the latest in a long series of emotional disputes involving Columbia and Morningside Heights, a neighborhood whose residents are a mixture of Negroes, Puerto Ricans and white intellectuals attracted by low rents, the university and such varied institutions as Union Theological Seminary and the Juilliard School of Music. In an effort to enlarge its cramped 28.5-acre campus, Columbia since 1963 has acquired nearly $30 million worth of property on the Heights, including 73 low-rent apartment buildings and houses and nearly 20 cheap "S.R.O." (single-room occupancy) hotels, some littered with prostitutes and dope peddlers. By cleaning up the worst of the rooming houses, Columbia has helped cut down the Heights' horrifying crime rate. Nonetheless, its real estate acquisitions have been attacked at various times by no fewer than 70 neighborhood organizations, many of which accuse the university of a "racist" plot to displace poor Negroes with middle-income whites in the buildings that it has bought.
Separate but Unequal. Resentment at the university's land-buying policies spilled over into the gymnasium dispute. Columbia got the city's permission to put up a $9,500,000 building in Morningside Park, long a bottle-strewn, crime-ridden buffer between the campus and Harlem. The university plans to devote the ground floor to a free community gymnasium and swimming pool, use upper floors of the building for its own athletic programs. Although this would be the only such public facility in the neighborhood, well-organized protesters called the project "a land grab" and "a desecration of a public park," termed the facilities "separate but unequal." The university did not help matters much by publishing architects' sketches showing an expensive entrance facing the campus, with only a small servicelike door facing toward Harlem, giving critics a chance to scoff at its "backdoor generosity."