by New York University made an announcement this week. The school pledged $6 million over four years to the Washington Square Park Conservancy, the nonprofit steward of the nine-and-three-quarter-acre square at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The university’s own headline chose a gambler’s verb: “Doubles Down.” The money is real. The park needs care, and the Conservancy has paid for horticulture crews and free programming there for years. NYU students treat the park as their quad because it is one. A school without a campus was handed a campus by geography, and the students love the ground they borrow. Grant all of that. The gift is generous, and the park will be cleaner for it.
The gift also belongs in a longer ledger. Washington Square Park belongs to the City of New York. It is run by NYC Parks, the same agency that answers, however slowly, to every resident of the five boroughs. Local leaders founded the Conservancy in 2012, on the heels of the city’s $30 million capital renovation, to keep a rebuilt park alive. In 2025 the organization reached a milestone its founders had chased for years: a formal license agreement with NYC Parks that made it the park’s official nonprofit partner. The largest private research university in the United States has been writing checks into that account for years, and this week it doubled them. A public square now depends on a private university for a growing share of its upkeep, and the university says so with pride.
Anyone who watches NYU long enough learns to ask a harder question. Is the school trying to buy the park? No deed transfer is on the table, and none has to be. NYU has spent forty years demonstrating that there are two ways to take ground in Greenwich Village. The first is purchase. The second is stewardship, and it leaves fewer fingerprints. The record of the first method explains the second.
The Facade Method
Edgar Allan Poe lived at 85 West Third Street in 1845 and 1846. “The Raven” had just made him famous, and it failed to make him solvent. NYU owned the building. The school wanted the site for a law school expansion, and the little house stood in the way. Scholars petitioned. E.L. Doctorow wrote to The New York Times asking why the university could not build “around, above and behind” the little house, since architects had managed that elsewhere with inconvenient historic structures. NYU’s spokesman answered the literary argument with a joke about whether Poe had written anything of value on the premises. The Landmarks Preservation Commission declined to hold a hearing. The house came down in 2001 to make way for Furman Hall, a $98 million project.
What followed is the part worth memorizing. NYU agreed to preserve the facade of the Poe house. Then it moved the facade half a block from where the house had stood and rebuilt it in new brick, because there were not enough original bricks to face a single wall. Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation delivered the verdict that has aged into a diagnosis of the whole institution: “It looks tacked on. It’s a facade, literally and figuratively.” Poe’s house became a mask pinned to nine stories of law school. I have walked past it on my way through the neighborhood. There is a wall, and behind the wall there is no house.
The Provincetown Playhouse got the same treatment nine years later. I wrote about it here in 2010, when the theater reopened after NYU’s renovation. The Playhouse at 133 MacDougal Street was the cradle of Eugene O’Neill’s earliest plays and a hearthstone for Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edward Albee, John Guare, and Sam Shepard. The wooden benches seated about 140 people, and they were said to be the most uncomfortable in the world. When NYU bought the building in 1984, it promised to preserve the theater’s four walls. During construction, a wall the school had promised to keep came down anyway, and the neighbors who caught it at the deed had to drag the university back to its own word. The finished room kept the name and the address. Almost nothing else survived the work. Even the historic seat rows, the one remaining promise, went to the dumpster. A theater, I wrote then, is “not just an address and four walls.” NYU spent $2 million and produced an ordinary black box with a famous nameplate, and the provenance of the American theater’s most important small stage now survives mainly in photographs.
The Vote and the Warning
The expansion appetite scaled up from there. In 2012 the university pushed its NYU 2031 plan, four new buildings on the superblocks south of the park, with a square footage the press compared to the Empire State Building. The local community board voted unanimously against it. Preservationists and tenant associations fought it through seven months of hearings, and a large slice of NYU’s own faculty joined them. The school had a genuine case, and it deserves to be granted. NYU then had less than half as many square feet per student as many urban universities, as its supporters in the tabloids never tired of repeating, and its classrooms were cramped. The need was real. The question was who would pay for satisfying it, and with whose neighborhood. Assemblywoman Deborah Glick called the plan a disgraceful land grab. I wrote about that plan here in March of 2012, and my prediction was blunt: NYU would win. “You can bet your house on it,” I wrote, and I meant the words as a warning about what happens to houses in that neighborhood.
The City Council approved the plan four months later, 44 to 1. Charles Barron cast the only no. The university trimmed the project’s density by about a quarter in negotiation, called the haircut a compromise, and broke ground. The crown of the buildout, the mixed-use tower at 181 Mercer Street, cost a reported $1.2 billion. Eleven community groups sued the city over the alienation of public park strips woven into the superblocks, and the courts spent years sorting out how much of the neighborhood’s open space the city could hand to a tax-exempt landlord. The pattern held. The school asked for everything, gave back a slice, and kept the deed.
Follow the Exemption
The money explains the appetite. NYU is a nonprofit, and every parcel it absorbs leaves the city’s property tax base. The New York Times calculated in 2023 that the university’s property tax savings ran to $145 million in a single year, a figure exceeded among private landowners only by Columbia. NYU holds roughly 150 properties across the city by one watchdog count, most of them clustered around the square, and it makes no voluntary payment in lieu of taxes to New York. MIT paid Cambridge about $84 million in fiscal 2020 in voluntary taxes and fees. Yale sends New Haven $13 million a year against an estimated liability more than seven times larger. NYU’s own fact sheet lists an endowment of $7.14 billion, a Washington Square budget of $4.3 billion a year, and an enrollment of 60,525 students. It rejects more than nine of every ten applicants.
The arithmetic here is short. Six million dollars over four years is $1.5 million a year. That is roughly one percent of the property taxes the city forgoes on NYU’s portfolio in the same twelve months. The university is rebating a rounding error on its exemption and taking a steward’s seat in exchange. State Senator John Liu and then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani introduced the bills in 2023. Their legislation would strip the exemption from universities whose tax bills exceed $100 million and route the money to CUNY, a public system that educates nearly three times NYU’s enrollment on austerity budgets. The Citizens Budget Commission counts the foregone revenue as nearly doubled between 2014 and 2023, tracking the universities’ buying sprees. The bills sit in Albany. The exemption, written when no one imagined a private school becoming one of the city’s biggest landlords, remains in the state constitution.
The Ground Remembers Its Owners
The park has answered this question before. Its answer is written in the ground. The eastern two-thirds of the square served as the city’s potter’s field from 1797 to 1825, a burial ground for the poor and the unknown, filled by the dead of the yellow fever years. An estimated 20,000 people lie beneath the lawns. The city bought that parcel for $4,500, and in 1827 it declared the combined land a public square. Workers digging for the renovation in 2009 uncovered the sandstone headstone of James Jackson, a 28-year-old Irish watchman who died of fever in September 1799. His stone sits in the Park House window today. The poorest New Yorkers of the young republic paid for this ground in the only currency they had, and the city has held it in common for 199 years.
Robert Moses posed the square’s greatest modern threat. The public beat him. The City Planning Board and Parks Commissioner Moses approved a four-lane, partially sunken roadway through the middle of Washington Square Park in 1952. Shirley Hayes, a Village mother of four, organized the opposition. She gathered 4,000 petition signatures in a month. Jane Jacobs championed the cause. Eleanor Roosevelt, then living on Washington Square Park West, crowded into City Hall with the busloads of supporters. The coalition’s allies included Norman Redlich, a New York University law professor, because in those days the university still produced the resistance instead of the blueprint. A ribbon-tying ceremony on November 1, 1958 opened a trial closure, and in August 1959 the Board of Estimate closed the park to vehicles for good. Moses, who almost never lost, lost to the neighbors. The square stayed whole because the people who used it refused to let it be converted into infrastructure for somebody else’s convenience.
The Danger in the Gift
That history is the standard for measuring NYU’s $6 million. The dangers are concrete, and they have names. The first danger is fiscal. A tax-exempt corporation that removes land from the public rolls and then funds public space in sips trains the city to depend on private money, and dependence is a leash. The second danger is governmental. The Conservancy now holds an official license from the city, and its largest benefactor is a closed institution whose trustees answer to donors and bond markets rather than to any electorate. When the steward’s calendar, staff, and priorities are underwritten by one interested party, the public will that closed the park to Moses has no seat at the table where the decisions get drafted. The third danger is the oldest one. The facade method scales. A university that preserved Poe’s house as a mask and the Playhouse as a nameplate can preserve a park as a brand. The arch goes in the brochure, the quad goes in the prospectus, and the public enters on the benefactor’s terms.
Enclosure is no longer hypothetical. It runs alongside the money. Washington Square Park closes each night at midnight, and since 2021 the police have dragged metal barricades across its entrances to enforce the curfew, including a hundred-foot gap at the Arch. In May of this year, Community Board 2’s parks committee voted to ask the Parks Department for designs that could replace the barricades, permanent gates among them. The committee met inside NYU’s Gould Welcome Center on West Fourth Street. The Washington Square Association put the question to the neighborhood in September, and 331 neighbors answered. A majority opposed the gates. They said their fear plainly: gates “change who the park belongs to.” Several raised the dread example of Gramercy Park, Manhattan’s famous locked square. Nobody at NYU has proposed gates. That is the point. The question of who enters a park comes after the question of who pays for it. The paying has started.
The trade deserves a straight answer. Is the conversion of historic places in the name of restoration and renewal worth the loss? The Village’s record answers no, and the arithmetic is not close. Restoration, as NYU practices it, keeps the skin and calls the transaction rescue. Preservation costs more and yields less square footage, which is precisely why a real estate portfolio with a bursar will never choose it voluntarily. Losses in this neighborhood have been permanent, one facade and one wall at a time, while the savings that justified them were trivial against a $7 billion endowment. The public pays in provenance, in tax revenue, and in the slow conversion of common ground into an amenity of a private institution. NYU keeps collecting.
The park has survived a potter’s field, a parade ground, Robert Moses, and the automobile. It will survive this week’s press release too, if the city remembers who holds the deed. James Jackson’s headstone keeps its place in the Park House window. You can read his name from the sidewalk.
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