NYU and the Village
From The Peopling of NYC
"Guys who look like Jesus and girls who look like Janis Joplin lounge in lazy circles on the grass lawns of Washington Square Park, reading Allen Ginsberg aloud to one another in between hits off a joint. They have lots of philosophies about life and maybe a little motivation to enact them. It's hard to get to class with the sun so bright and the future so wide open. Their careers can wait. Make love after all, not money.
. . .Or at least that's the fantasy I have of NYU in the late 1960's when college was a sanctuary, where a young person hungry to understand his or her place in the world got fed. A stroll throught the park today prompts a sobering revision: trade the Ginsberg for a text on emerging economies, the joint for double-shot cappucinos, the philosophies for goals, and the love for strategic planning."
Source: Courtney E. Martin, NYU Alumni Magazine, Spring 2007
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The University of the City of New York was founded in 1831. In 1835, the nascent university (officially renamed New York University in 1896) moved to Greenwich Village, where it would remain, in at least some part, to this day.
The bulk of the university moved to the more spacious University Heights campus in the Bronx in 1894, establishing a downtown Arts and Sciences division, Washington Square College, in 1914. When financial crisis struck, in the 1960s and ’70s, the uptown campus was sold, and the whole of the university was moved back to the Village, causing the merger of University College and Washington Square College, the two undergraduate schools of Arts and Sciences, in 1973.
Since the ’80s, NYU has become an increasingly popular destination for college students. To meet the demand for housing and classroom space, the university launched a multi-billion dollar campaign to purchase and update old buildings (including some nightclubs) in the Village. Today, NYU owns most of the real estate surrounding Washington Square Park, and has large holdings near Union Square (where, in the ’90s, greater housing demands inspired the construction or purchase of six mostly-upperclassmen residence halls). In all, NYU has twenty-one undergraduate residence halls, many of which are converted apartment complexes and old hotels. Most of the university’s holdings are scattered across the area bounded by Houston Street to the south, Broadway to the east, 14th Street to the north, and Sixth Avenue/Avenue of the Americas) to the west. Some of these buildings have been built by NYU, while others have been converted by the university into academic and residential buildings. To help students get around, the university operates its own bus and trolley transit system.
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Though there is no enclosure to mark it as such, the central part of NYU’s Village campus has always been Washington Square Park. The university, as an institution, and its students see the area as their “quad,” using it as a site of recreation and seeing it as a symbol for the university itself. The commencement ceremony is held there every year for graduating seniors, and other, less significant events take place there. Even in 1922, when the presence in the area was fairly weak, NYU Chancellor Elmer Ellsworth Brown predicted that the park would be taken over by the university. It remains, however, a public space. Even so, the Square is very much dominated by the university, and is deeply tied to its image. The daily newspaper is called the Washington Square News and the literary journal is called the Washington Square Review. Students use the area to study, hang out, engage in some friendly games of chess with the locals, and occasionally score illegal substances.
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Students and faculty see their school as the model urban university, strongly attached to New York, embracing the city as pivotal, and central, to the academic experience. Greenwich Village is certainly the focus of that attachment to the city. Students are encouraged to explore the neighborhood and its assorted attractions, practically thrown into the cultural hotbed of Washington Square, where artists, musicians, and intellectuals of all kinds converge. Beyond the park is the rest of the Village, chock full of the kinds of places college students are wont to see. These include exotic sex shops and tattoo parlors, unique restaurants and sandwicheries, laid-back hooka bars and lounges, and storied jazz and comedy clubs. The many bars, only for those of age of course, are certainly also an attraction. Though there hasn’t generally been much in the way of real interaction between students and Village residents, students have been known to help out in the community, volunteering in the local public schools and tutoring neighborhood children.
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It hasn’t been all rainbows and unicorns between NYU and the Village, however. The university’s decades-long campaign to buy up buildings and convert or rebuild them has been seen by many as a hostile takeover. What used to be a neighborhood known for its low-rent, artist-friendly feel has become quite the opposite. NYU has evicted many tenants of buildings under its ownership with little notice and compensation. Others are perturbed by the damage done to the quaint townhouse and tenement composition of the neighborhood and the construction of towering, modern class and dormitory buildings. Yet others are upset by the demolishing of landmarks in the area, like the onetime home of poet Edgar Allan Poe. This last one, for certain, flies in the face of intuition. It would seem that an educational institution like NYU would value the preservation of such (seemingly) culturally significant places as this.
Greenwich Village, and Washington Square in particular, are absolutely central to the NYU experience. Physically speaking, the university cannot avoid the neighborhood and its many offerings, cultural and otherwise. Though there have certainly been skirmishes with the locals, ideologically speaking, NYU is all for involvement and exploration in the city at large and in the Village in particular. It is a valuable association, no doubt, and students certainly appreciate it.