How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
While NYU's expansion efforts may have garnered more headlines, the university isn't the only school looking to expand in Greenwich Village.
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The New School is starting construction this summer on a 16-story building on Fifth Avenue between 13th and 14th streets that should be completed by fall 2013. The 365,000 square foot building includes academic space, an auditorium, a central university library and 608-bed dormitory.
"We need more facilities because we are a growing institution," James Murtha, executive vice president of the New School, explained. "Of equal importance, we needed additional types of facilities for our students. In this building we have some things that we haven't had before."
But he added that getting the facility approved proved a challenge for the university. Among the obstacles were space limitations and the concern of locale.
Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, was one of the lead organizers against the original proposal. He said in its earliest iterations the center was taller.
But now, Berman says, "All of those have changed. The building is now much smaller and shorter. We believe this has been a positive evolution."
Others in the community, including some neighboring businesses, view the expansion as an asset to the community.
"The New School project will be a further boon to an already thriving 14th Street neighborhood," a representative from the Union Square Partnership said. "The renaissance of the neighborhood has resulted in a retail vacancy rate of less than 3 percent and [use] of the area's subway station is in record number of visitors to the neighborhood. The New School plan will further add to that."
Erez Cohen, owner of Pita Joe's located next to the future site of the building, thought the new university center would be good for business.
"It would mean more people coming to this corner," he said.
Alicia Hurley, NYU vice president for government and community engagement, said there was not much overlap between the two schools' plans and they did not conflict.
"Generally, this is good — [it's] good for the city to have these stable entities thriving and [it's] good to have institutions working more closely with their communities," Hurley said.
