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Angry Lower East Side Residents Blast Massive Cooper Union Construction Plan

By A. Kronstadt

Cooper wants to demolish two of its existing buildings and erect much larger buildings in their place. The school has also worked out a deal with hotel and nightclub developer Ian Schrager for a large piece of Cooper Union owned land, now occupied by the parking lot on Astor Place between Cooper Square and Lafayette street, on which Schrager’s organization is planning to build a 20-story hotel. It is the hotel project that has gotten the most attention citywide; Schrager’s hotel has been written up as a trend-setting project by in the real estate friendly press, including a send up in the Sunday New York Times magazine of May 20. The irregularly shaped building is projected to include a vast number of railroad-berth sized rooms in the Japanese style combined with entertainment space including night spots and possibly a multiscreen movie theater. One of the few speakers at the May 29 meeting who was friendly to the project compared the architecture of the hotel to that of the fanciful, and mostly unfinished, projects of Fernando Gaudi which are landmarks in Barcelona, Spain. The same speaker said “they hated the Eiffel Tower, too.” A succession of other speakers described the silvery, undulating hotel tower with its dozens of little portholes as an “aluminum cheese” and “something out of a Fred Flintstone cartoon.”

The most significant criticism at the meeting was focused not on the architectural features of the project but on the impact it would have on the neighborhood. Most people in the Lower East Side live in tenements five or six stories in height, and supply of light, a major comfort factor in the inner city, will be drastically curtailed by the intrusion of the much taller Cooper buildings and the Schrager hotel. Astor Place, now a central location where everyone in the neighborhood passes at some time during the day, would change from a light-flooded area to a dark cavernous region hemmed in by the fifteen-story, largely commercial building to be constructed on the site of the present Engineering Building, to the north, and the 20-story Schrager Hotel on the southwest side. The eight-story building which is to replace Cooper’s current two-story Hewitt Building and become its new Main Academic Building would become the dominant structure in the area, obscuring the Byzantine dome of St. George’s Roman Catholic Church, a beacon for the area’s Ukrainian community. The Ukrainians, an ethnic mainstay in the area since the first half of the twentieth century, are further insulted by Cooper Union’s proposal to “demap” Taras Shevchenko Place, a small street behind Cooper’s present Hewitt building, named after the Ukrainian poet and intellectual hero of that name. Since the eight-story classroom building that Cooper wishes to build after demolishing the Hewitt building has to be five feet wider than the Hewitt building, to accommodate a loading dock, it must usurp one of Taras Shevchenko Place’s narrow sidewalks entirely. The small street would then, for all intents and purposes, become part of the Cooper Union campus--closed to traffic and perhaps subjected to a nightly curfew, blocking pedestrians from passing between Sixth and Seventh streets. Representatives of the Ukrainian community felt patronized when, invited to a meeting with Cooper officials about the subject of Taras Shevchenko Place, they were handed brochures containing a biography of “Tara” [sic] Shevchenko, cribbed from an encyclopedia by Cooper public relations people.

The project also includes altering of traffic patterns which will divert automobiles and tour buses onto already overloaded residential side streets (see previous article). There had even been some discussion of “demapping” Astor Place, as well as Shevchenko Place, and making that now busy thoroughfare between the East and West Villages into a huge doormat for the Schrager hotel.

The neighborhood’s tradition of kitchen table political organizing has come alive again, and this time the usually conservative Ukrainian community is joining in. Outside the May 29 meeting, a group of older people in Ukrainian folk outfits carried signs reading “Taras Shevchenko--suppressed twice, once by the Czar and again by Cooper Union.” Sergei Kashovsky of the Save Taras Shevchenko Place Committee warned “I see years and years of construction. I see cranes larger than buildings and trucks the size of houses moving down streets. Endless construction until there is no neighborhood left.” Anna Savin, a representative of the Coalition to Save the East Village, had this to say: “Cooper Union has not taken into account the survival of the East Village and the Ukrainian community. They are rearranging our whole neighborhood for the sake of their 890 students. At the very beginning of the meeting, Ronnie Denes, Vice-President for External Affairs at Cooper Union had said on her school’s behalf “Let me make it perfectly clear that we are not trying to enlarge the school.” This statement seemed aimed at deflecting criticism that has been leveled at New York University, a few blocks to the west, which has locked horns with West Village activists over construction projects intended to expand its student body. Questions then flew back from the audience about the purpose of the massive construction project that would benefit only the current number of students.

On the site of the present Engineering Building Cooper is proposing a building consisting of two towers, 8 and 15 stories, respectively,dedicated primarily to commercial space. Cooper is planning to rent this space to “emerging high-tech, new media, and design firms.” The Main Academic Building itself would have a ground floor devoted to commercial storefronts. Ms. Denes contended that Cooper needed to exploit its real estate assets, because the school “has been operating at a deficit for 14 years,” and without the money that the new construction is supposed to bring in, “the institution could be out of business in 5 years.” The same justification was offered in regard to the Schrager hotel. The site of the proposed twenty-story hotel is being leased to Schrager for 99 years, in exchange for which Cooper is to receive 95 million dollars, up front. So, the neighborhood is expected to bear with a huge construction project for the sake of an organization which, except for the fact that it qualifies as an educational institution, is behaving like an ordinary real estate holding company. Cooper officials clearly have their eyes on the bottom line.

If the turnout on May 29 is any indication, Cooper Union is facing a hard battle from a neighborhood which has successfully blocked projects as far back as the fifties, when community opposition stopped Robert Moses from replacing the blocks of tenements with higher-rent apartment developments. The Cooper project has not yet reached the stage of being voted on by Community Boards 2 and 3, whose approval is merely advisory. The CB 2 and 3 meetings are slated for July and August, and the main hearings before the City Council will take place next year at the earliest. With community residents fighting them at every step, it remains to be seen how much of their large scale plan will be approved and how much damage will be done to the neighborhood. Keep posted on this situation at the Shadow web site.

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