Some surprising news out of NYU as the university's Greenwich Village expansion proposal begins to make its way through the City Planning Commission and City Council: NYU will reduce its construction plans by 17 to 19 percent. (Numbers vary depending on who you ask.) The Times has the full rundown on the reductions, which are apparently the product of borough president Scott Stringer's negotiations with the university as he works up to endorsing the project. NYU's original proposal outlined 2,275,000 square feet of new construction, a number the university now plans to reduce by 370,000 square feet.
The original plan for the university's two Village superblocks called for a public school topped by a dorm at the corner of Bleecker and LaGuardia Place; a zipper building at the corner of Mercer and Houston streets; and two "boomerang buildings," 14 and eight stories high, within the northern superblock.
The revised plan takes the dorm out of the Bleecker/LaGuardia dorm-and-school combo?what's left will be a city-operated, seven-story public school. The zipper building would be set back to allow more light for the neighbors. The boomerang buildings would be made a total of 85,000 square feet smaller. There's no suggestion of the publicly-accessible open space recently urged by Michael Kimmelman.
Not surprisingly, the reductions haven't placated NYU's opponents. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation's statement calls the changes "really just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." We're glad someone found a way to bring the Titanic into this!
· NYU Agrees to Scale Back Its Expansion in the Village [NYT]
· NYU's Greenwich Village Superblock Plans Officially Unveiled [Curbed]
· NYU 2031 coverage [Curbed]
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