How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
NYU may consider building or purchasing space in a neighborhood that it has almost all but ignored recently: the Financial District.
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This month Lynne Brown, senior vice president for university relations and public affairs, reached out to both the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority to discuss a possible future in Lower Manhattan.
Though the talks are preliminary, a move to the Financial District would add a new dimension to NYU Plans 2031, the university's published outline to add six million square feet of space by its bicentennial in 2031.
According to NYU spokesman John Beckman, the remote locations currently being explored — Governors Island, Brooklyn, the Health Corridor on First Avenue and possibly Lower Manhattan — are intended to sustain half of the university's construction goal.
"We will have a conversation … to see if there are any opportunities where the timelines work and where there would be a fit for our academic needs," Beckman said.
Beckman stressed that any construction in the Financial District would complement the remote location strategy NYU is following and would not alleviate space constraints on the core campus.
Outspoken critics of the university's expansion plans, like Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, have encouraged NYU to build any additional facilities in Lower Manhattan.
However, students and faculty have not warmed to the idea. Over the past few years NYU has physically withdrawn from the Financial District — as the leases on its Cliff and Water Street residence halls ended — and focused its undergraduates near Washington Square and Union Square parks.
Community Board One chairperson Julie Menin has been courting the university to venture into Lower Manhattan, particularly as vacant commercial real estate sits on the market. Many landlords are worried that when One World Trade Center opens in 2013, the 2.6 million square feet of additional office space will dilute the market.
Menin believes that NYU would not have difficulty gaining approval for a large new space in the neighborhood.
"Tower 5 would be appropriate for [NYU] to take a portion of the tower as a tenant and have a developer build the tower," she said. "There are numerous stalled construction sites in the Financial District that would be appropriate as well."
Though Menin has tried to start the conversation with NYU, administrators are not aggressively pursuing downtown Manhattan, instead focusing their attention on Silver Towers — the site of a proposed 38-story university building.
"Any conversations about particular sites or details about programs would be immensely speculative at this point," Beckman said.
The School of Continuing and Professional Studies still has classrooms and administrative offices downtown in the Woolworth Building at 15 Barclay Street.
